This seems so obvious I am amazed any government is able to see it. After all you would think anything nature does would be considered prior art. But then I am not a bureaucrat. Thank Ghod...
But why limit this to human genes? The only reason I can think of is because religous groups have lobbied for this; only I can't remember hearing about any such group doing that other than, possibly, the Catholic Church.
My point is that it wouldn't matter to them. Some might even think that they are changing the world. Others won't care. All that is important from their standpoint is that they get to do what they want. Are you or I any different, even if we don't want the same things?
Like I said, there is no-one holding a gun to their head. They do what they do because they like to do it. I find no contradiction in this.
What happened to my formatting? It looked OK when I did a preview, but all the HTML tags were stripped out when I clicked submit and now the post looks like crap. Dang!
From the last paragraph of the article: They don't spend their money and they don't give it away. Their wealth is typically tied-up in equities they can't easily sell. So how do these people express their success? By doing it all over again. These people don't have hobbies. They don't read books or paint or travel. They do this. They have nothing else to do. There is no way out. Cringley makes it sound like these are 'poor little rich folk' trapped by their own success. That is a load of crap, these people do what they do because they like to do it. They get a kick out of it. Many of them would do much the same things if they didn't get half the money out of the effort simply because it is 'what they do'. Hell, most of us are no different. There was a time in my life when I thought I was going to be a mechanic forever, because that is all I was good at (that or become a rock star and die at 25, leaving a bunch of crying groupies and a horribly bloated corpse). But then I found computers. Now, if I was a mechanic, I would go home and program in my spare time. I don't have a vocation, I have an advocation. I love what I do, and making a good living from it is just gravy. The thing is that people who really like what they do is that they tend to be good at it. They read books and magazines about it. They pay attention to it and take notice when things are done well or badly -- and then use that knowledge to improve themselves. If the Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs are good and/or lucky at what they do then they win. If they are bad and/or unlucky they loose. This is the rule of the game they play and they play it with their eyes open. If anyone here wants to bitch because "I didn't get the lucky show-biz break..." you can go ahead. But I think it is all just whining of the worst kind. If you don't like what you are doing or where you are doing it then move on. Find something you really like to do. The best part is that chances are you will probably be great at it. But don't complain because someone else found their personal contentment in playing a game where stocks and power are the counters. Or, like Bob Cringely, consider them trapped in a life of bondage to their jobs. Jack
I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. de Garis over a year ago at a party thrown by an acquaintance of mine who had interviewed de Garis for a documentary on Nanotechnology and AI. I found Dr. de Garis intelligent, personable and amusing.
At the time he was rather pessimistic about the Robokoneko project, but mostly because of the cultural problems he was dealing with as a Britisher in Japan. However he claimed that the artificial neuron work was proceding well, even though they were doing it all with simulators. He predicted then that, before 2000, they would be creating silicon versions. From the information in the links it would seem that his prediction has come true. Only they are using FPGA chips instead of going to a foundry for CAM specific VLSI.
It is interesting to note that Dr. de Garis has made incredible progress by following a path the mainstream AI community has largely discounted -- that of modeling real neurons and real brain structures. I wonder what will come out of his next collaborative development at Starlab in Brussels? From his statements to me I would certainly hope he would find the living and working arrangements more congenial.
I do find it very interesting that he will be working with Lernout and Hauspie (developers of Voice Recognition software). The spin-offs from that may be more important than the original research!
Ghod, but it seems like I have been following this story for a long time. With all this hype it seems certain whatever Transmeta comes up with will be something of an anticlimax. But I also expect there will be lots of meat, just perhaps different meat than many hope for.
Still this long buildup of suspense seems almost calculated to create more buzz. Of course Transmeta says differently -- the article quotes Ditzel as saying "It's not a ploy! We're sort of enjoying all the speculation, but we try to ignore things and hope it goes away."
Right. I believe that. Uh huhh.
Still it is beginning to seem like there is a hard core of the faithfull who wait with bated breath, hoping for a silicon messiah to come out of Transmeta and lead us to the promised land where Wintel fades away and Open Source reigns forever. Methinks such folk should scale back their expectations a bit. After all its only ones and zeros. Tiny little switches on a hunk of silicon. I will be cool, but not immediately world-changing.
But, with any luck, My prediction is one hundred percent wrong...
I read a different article about this during my lunch today. In that article they stated that the gene therapy was only intended for alzheimers patients. Of course none of this precludes using it for other purposes in the future, but at the speed new therapies are generally approved I will probably be in the current target group myself before I will get access to the therapy.
I want something now that would restore me to the level of intellectual and learning ability I had when I was 25. At the time I didn't put it to good use, but now (mhmm hmm years later) I think I could really use some extra brain cycles, plus I would have the wisdom to utilize them in a somewhat more constructive manner.
Seriously, I am wondering why they want to restrict this to alzheimers patients. There is no doubt that our intellectual capacity lessens over time and that we peak in our early twenties. It doesn't mean we get stupid, but we certainly do take a little longer to make connections between things or learn something new. To be able to gain both the wisdom of age and the mental vigor of youth would be truly wonderful!
And besides the above, how far are we from being able to pump up cerebral functioning to new levels? The gene therapy mentioned in the article merely revives new cells. Is there something that could add more? Or that could make the ones we have more effective? Dang it, I wanna be a genius instead of merely bright...
Jack
Moderation, Reputation Managers and Slashdot
on
Moderation Ideas
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· Score: 2
Slashdot was mentioned as one of the shining examples of 'Reputation Managers' by Jakob Nielson in his latest Alertbox column on USEIT.COM. In the article Nielson is basically saying that Reputation Management systems are up and coming ways of adding important value to the web. Only thing is, he has one rather pithy comment about useability on/. (he is, after all, a usability guru). Quote: "Unfortunately, the ability to filter out poorly rated comments is not turned on by default, so only diligent users who study the slightly confused user interface will discover this useful feature."
Personally I don't find the/. system that difficult to understand, but I do remember having some difficulty finding documentation on how to use the moderation/scoring/karma features. I know there is some stuff in the FAQ and all that, but a more formal set of documentation might be in order.
I know, I know. Documentation is always the last thing a programmer gets around to writing. But look at it this way, with/. being a continual work-in-progress there is little chance any one will get around to doing some simple 'man pages' for/. anytime soon unless it is made a priority.
Perhaps we users should take this task on for ourselves. No, I am not volunteering, or at least not to do all the work...
Not that I am suggesting that this is Cmdr Taco's main motivation (or that it even occurred to him), but this seems like a 'yet another reason' why the mainstream media will pay attention to/. and we who post here. Being as online rights are a hotbutton topic right now it seems reasonable to assume that the 'Real Journalists'(tm) who read/. looking for tips, story ideas and carefully thought out views will find much to mine in this new feature area.
Of course they will find lots of less stimulating intellectual fare as well...
Myself, I intend to head the other way. Being a basically antisocial type I intend to make a million copies of myself, convert them all into extra-solar probes, and go out to explore a little. When I get done (several billion years in the future) all of me can have a little get-together somewhere nice and re-integrate.
I have always wanted to see the Horsehead Nebula up close...
No reason to get excited yet. Nanotech has a long way to go to get to practicality. According to the discussions I have had with people who should know there are still major problems to be solved.
Like getting rid of waste heat and chemicals. Like getting fuel to the motors in the first place. Like control systems, power transfer, actuators and sensors.
Of more interest in the article was the mention of the Japanese effort that uses less atoms (58) and spins when light is shone on it. Chemical reaction based nanotech is the most likely posibility in the near term because we can build on biological systems we already understand (the example in the article used ATP). But long term I would think truly useful nanotech would be powered by photons or electron transfers or something like that.
OK, I'll buy what you are saying. In fact I can imagine this 'shape' better by thinking of it as a 'cyclic directed graph' made up of nodes and edges than I can from the picture in the article.
But I am thinking of this in programming terms because cyclic directed graphs are a data structure I understand (somewhat). It isn't something I could easily describe to a non-programmer, even using a white board. The thing is, this view of the web is nothing new! As a data structure the web has always been, was even designed to be, a 'network' (read 'cyclic directed graph').
So now we are back where we started. We haven't learned anything new from the article other than the fact that the average number of links between any two 'nodes' is 19. A number that is meaningless because it is perturbed by the large number of sites that link many pages to a single home page (all pages one or two clicks away). For purposes of developing new search and crawling algolrithms it would have been more useful to show the number of links out versus links within a site.
The power-law connection means it's possible to figure out the shape of the World Wide Web, even if you can't precisely map out every site and page on the network.
To figure a shape to the web I would think you would first have to decide how many dimensions it has. Perhaps by assigning a dimension to each method of getting to a page, or perhaps by counting each hyperlink into a page as a separate dimension. Either way it could get pretty hairy pretty quick.
For example, is a hyperlink on a search engine different in some way from a hyperlink on a personal page? How about a web directory? Bookmarks?
But even if you only assume two or three dimensions, why 'clicks wide'? Seems more like 'clicks deep' to me. I always think of clicking on a hyperlink as 'drilling down'. Showing my age again I guess...
Jack
Sorry about the links...
on
Smart Dust
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· Score: 1
That is what I get for not checking them, and assuming the/. discussion code would handle it the way I expect. They were:
We live Science Fiction...
on
Smart Dust
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· Score: 1
Cell phones, satellite communications, the Internet, the Space Shuttle, mass murders supposedly caused by overuse of video games... Hell, look at what I do for a living! Computer programming as a vocation was SF fifty years ago.
Vernor Vinge was right all along (not that I ever doubted him). The real problem with writing SF these days is not that your ideas and predictions are too far out, but that they are probably not far enough. Some, like Greg Egan, make up for this by going all out and creating new physics and related cosmologies. Others descend into psuedo-science and write fantasies set on spaceships. (You know what I am talking about, no need to include a link to some trekkie site.)
The point is simple, there is nothing in this 'Smart Dust' - or any other new technology - that should surprise anyone who has been paying attention the last ten years. It is all going to happen, and probably sooner than anyone expects. Those of us who are mentally flexible enough to handle the changes are the new elite. Everyone else will be (or are now) left spinning in the shockwave.
The real reason I see for anonymous cowards is for people who don't want to jump through the hoop of login. Most people are lazy more than they are concerned about their privacy. I've never read any articles on NY Times because they make you register. I used slashdot for almost a year before I registered, but before that I made some informative post as AC - most of which I included my name at the bottom of the post.
This is a valid point. Although a long time reader I too didn't 'join'/. until I wrote a feature that was posted here! But it wasn't only laziness on my part...
The thing is, I tend to avoid giving out personal information about myself to anyone I don't know personally, which includes web sites and grocery stores that want demographic information in return for a 'card' that gives me the special deals I used to get from anonymous coupons.
I know that I can simply lie when I fill out the forms, but I refuse to take that easy way out. Which leaves me with a choice of either telling more that I want the world to know or remaining anonymous. Either way I am uncomfortable with the results.
I certainly feel that AC posts are important and that the ability should be kept. It doesn't matter to me whether the poster is lazy, trying to spoof or attempting to hide. I think those are all valid reasons to avoid giving out your identity. What I don't agree with is having an AC post 'inherit' your karma to put the post up a point. All AC posts should be equal and any points, if any, should be awarded on the basis of content - not source.
Jack (who also would put his true name on AC posts)
Slashdot Mirror
DUH!!!
This seems so obvious I am amazed any government is able to see it. After all you would think anything nature does would be considered prior art. But then I am not a bureaucrat. Thank Ghod...
But why limit this to human genes? The only reason I can think of is because religous groups have lobbied for this; only I can't remember hearing about any such group doing that other than, possibly, the Catholic Church.
Jack
My point is that it wouldn't matter to them. Some might even think that they are changing the world. Others won't care. All that is important from their standpoint is that they get to do what they want. Are you or I any different, even if we don't want the same things?
Like I said, there is no-one holding a gun to their head. They do what they do because they like to do it. I find no contradiction in this.
What happened to my formatting? It looked OK when I did a preview, but all the HTML tags were stripped out when I clicked submit and now the post looks like crap. Dang!
Jack
From the last paragraph of the article: They don't spend their money and they don't give it away. Their wealth is typically tied-up in equities they can't easily sell. So how do these people express their success? By doing it all over again. These people don't have hobbies. They don't read books or paint or travel. They do this. They have nothing else to do. There is no way out. Cringley makes it sound like these are 'poor little rich folk' trapped by their own success. That is a load of crap, these people do what they do because they like to do it. They get a kick out of it. Many of them would do much the same things if they didn't get half the money out of the effort simply because it is 'what they do'. Hell, most of us are no different. There was a time in my life when I thought I was going to be a mechanic forever, because that is all I was good at (that or become a rock star and die at 25, leaving a bunch of crying groupies and a horribly bloated corpse). But then I found computers. Now, if I was a mechanic, I would go home and program in my spare time. I don't have a vocation, I have an advocation. I love what I do, and making a good living from it is just gravy. The thing is that people who really like what they do is that they tend to be good at it. They read books and magazines about it. They pay attention to it and take notice when things are done well or badly -- and then use that knowledge to improve themselves. If the Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs are good and/or lucky at what they do then they win. If they are bad and/or unlucky they loose. This is the rule of the game they play and they play it with their eyes open. If anyone here wants to bitch because "I didn't get the lucky show-biz break..." you can go ahead. But I think it is all just whining of the worst kind. If you don't like what you are doing or where you are doing it then move on. Find something you really like to do. The best part is that chances are you will probably be great at it. But don't complain because someone else found their personal contentment in playing a game where stocks and power are the counters. Or, like Bob Cringely, consider them trapped in a life of bondage to their jobs. Jack
I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. de Garis over a year ago at a party thrown by an acquaintance of mine who had interviewed de Garis for a documentary on Nanotechnology and AI. I found Dr. de Garis intelligent, personable and amusing.
At the time he was rather pessimistic about the Robokoneko project, but mostly because of the cultural problems he was dealing with as a Britisher in Japan. However he claimed that the artificial neuron work was proceding well, even though they were doing it all with simulators. He predicted then that, before 2000, they would be creating silicon versions. From the information in the links it would seem that his prediction has come true. Only they are using FPGA chips instead of going to a foundry for CAM specific VLSI.
It is interesting to note that Dr. de Garis has made incredible progress by following a path the mainstream AI community has largely discounted -- that of modeling real neurons and real brain structures. I wonder what will come out of his next collaborative development at Starlab in Brussels? From his statements to me I would certainly hope he would find the living and working arrangements more congenial.
I do find it very interesting that he will be working with Lernout and Hauspie (developers of Voice Recognition software). The spin-offs from that may be more important than the original research!
Jack
Ghod, but it seems like I have been following this story for a long time. With all this hype it seems certain whatever Transmeta comes up with will be something of an anticlimax. But I also expect there will be lots of meat, just perhaps different meat than many hope for.
Still this long buildup of suspense seems almost calculated to create more buzz. Of course Transmeta says differently -- the article quotes Ditzel as saying "It's not a ploy! We're sort of enjoying all the speculation, but we try to ignore things and hope it goes away."
Right. I believe that. Uh huhh.
Still it is beginning to seem like there is a hard core of the faithfull who wait with bated breath, hoping for a silicon messiah to come out of Transmeta and lead us to the promised land where Wintel fades away and Open Source reigns forever. Methinks such folk should scale back their expectations a bit. After all its only ones and zeros. Tiny little switches on a hunk of silicon. I will be cool, but not immediately world-changing.
But, with any luck, My prediction is one hundred percent wrong...
Jack
I read a different article about this during my lunch today. In that article they stated that the gene therapy was only intended for alzheimers patients. Of course none of this precludes using it for other purposes in the future, but at the speed new therapies are generally approved I will probably be in the current target group myself before I will get access to the therapy.
Jack
I want something now that would restore me to the level of intellectual and learning ability I had when I was 25. At the time I didn't put it to good use, but now (mhmm hmm years later) I think I could really use some extra brain cycles, plus I would have the wisdom to utilize them in a somewhat more constructive manner.
Seriously, I am wondering why they want to restrict this to alzheimers patients. There is no doubt that our intellectual capacity lessens over time and that we peak in our early twenties. It doesn't mean we get stupid, but we certainly do take a little longer to make connections between things or learn something new. To be able to gain both the wisdom of age and the mental vigor of youth would be truly wonderful!
And besides the above, how far are we from being able to pump up cerebral functioning to new levels? The gene therapy mentioned in the article merely revives new cells. Is there something that could add more? Or that could make the ones we have more effective? Dang it, I wanna be a genius instead of merely bright...
Jack
Slashdot was mentioned as one of the shining examples of 'Reputation Managers' by Jakob Nielson in his latest Alertbox column on USEIT.COM. In the article Nielson is basically saying that Reputation Management systems are up and coming ways of adding important value to the web. Only thing is, he has one rather pithy comment about useability on /. (he is, after all, a usability guru). Quote: "Unfortunately, the ability to filter out poorly rated comments is not turned on by default, so only diligent users who study the slightly confused user interface will discover this useful feature."
Personally I don't find the /. system that difficult to understand, but I do remember having some difficulty finding documentation on how to use the moderation/scoring/karma features. I know there is some stuff in the FAQ and all that, but a more formal set of documentation might be in order.
I know, I know. Documentation is always the last thing a programmer gets around to writing. But look at it this way, with /. being a continual work-in-progress there is little chance any one will get around to doing some simple 'man pages' for /. anytime soon unless it is made a priority.
Perhaps we users should take this task on for ourselves. No, I am not volunteering, or at least not to do all the work...
Jack
You are surprised by this.
What? No hands showing?
Jack
Not that I am suggesting that this is Cmdr Taco's main motivation (or that it even occurred to him), but this seems like a 'yet another reason' why the mainstream media will pay attention to /. and we who post here. Being as online rights are a hotbutton topic right now it seems reasonable to assume that the 'Real Journalists'(tm) who read /. looking for tips, story ideas and carefully thought out views will find much to mine in this new feature area.
Of course they will find lots of less stimulating intellectual fare as well...
Jack
Myself, I intend to head the other way. Being a basically antisocial type I intend to make a million copies of myself, convert them all into extra-solar probes, and go out to explore a little. When I get done (several billion years in the future) all of me can have a little get-together somewhere nice and re-integrate.
I have always wanted to see the Horsehead Nebula up close...
Jack
No reason to get excited yet. Nanotech has a long way to go to get to practicality. According to the discussions I have had with people who should know there are still major problems to be solved.
Like getting rid of waste heat and chemicals. Like getting fuel to the motors in the first place. Like control systems, power transfer, actuators and sensors.
Of more interest in the article was the mention of the Japanese effort that uses less atoms (58) and spins when light is shone on it. Chemical reaction based nanotech is the most likely posibility in the near term because we can build on biological systems we already understand (the example in the article used ATP). But long term I would think truly useful nanotech would be powered by photons or electron transfers or something like that.
Jack
OK, I'll buy what you are saying. In fact I can imagine this 'shape' better by thinking of it as a 'cyclic directed graph' made up of nodes and edges than I can from the picture in the article.
But I am thinking of this in programming terms because cyclic directed graphs are a data structure I understand (somewhat). It isn't something I could easily describe to a non-programmer, even using a white board. The thing is, this view of the web is nothing new! As a data structure the web has always been, was even designed to be, a 'network' (read 'cyclic directed graph').
So now we are back where we started. We haven't learned anything new from the article other than the fact that the average number of links between any two 'nodes' is 19. A number that is meaningless because it is perturbed by the large number of sites that link many pages to a single home page (all pages one or two clicks away). For purposes of developing new search and crawling algolrithms it would have been more useful to show the number of links out versus links within a site.
Jack
Hmmm...
To figure a shape to the web I would think you would first have to decide how many dimensions it has. Perhaps by assigning a dimension to each method of getting to a page, or perhaps by counting each hyperlink into a page as a separate dimension. Either way it could get pretty hairy pretty quick.
For example, is a hyperlink on a search engine different in some way from a hyperlink on a personal page? How about a web directory? Bookmarks?
But even if you only assume two or three dimensions, why 'clicks wide'? Seems more like 'clicks deep' to me. I always think of clicking on a hyperlink as 'drilling down'. Showing my age again I guess...
Jack
That is what I get for not checking them, and assuming the /. discussion code would handle it the way I expect. They were:
Jack
Cell phones, satellite communications, the Internet, the Space Shuttle, mass murders supposedly caused by overuse of video games... Hell, look at what I do for a living! Computer programming as a vocation was SF fifty years ago.
Vernor Vinge was right all along (not that I ever doubted him). The real problem with writing SF these days is not that your ideas and predictions are too far out, but that they are probably not far enough. Some, like Greg Egan, make up for this by going all out and creating new physics and related cosmologies. Others descend into psuedo-science and write fantasies set on spaceships. (You know what I am talking about, no need to include a link to some trekkie site.)
The point is simple, there is nothing in this 'Smart Dust' - or any other new technology - that should surprise anyone who has been paying attention the last ten years. It is all going to happen, and probably sooner than anyone expects. Those of us who are mentally flexible enough to handle the changes are the new elite. Everyone else will be (or are now) left spinning in the shockwave.
Jack
This is a valid point. Although a long time reader I too didn't 'join' /. until I wrote a feature that was posted here! But it wasn't only laziness on my part...
The thing is, I tend to avoid giving out personal information about myself to anyone I don't know personally, which includes web sites and grocery stores that want demographic information in return for a 'card' that gives me the special deals I used to get from anonymous coupons.
I know that I can simply lie when I fill out the forms, but I refuse to take that easy way out. Which leaves me with a choice of either telling more that I want the world to know or remaining anonymous. Either way I am uncomfortable with the results.
I certainly feel that AC posts are important and that the ability should be kept. It doesn't matter to me whether the poster is lazy, trying to spoof or attempting to hide. I think those are all valid reasons to avoid giving out your identity. What I don't agree with is having an AC post 'inherit' your karma to put the post up a point. All AC posts should be equal and any points, if any, should be awarded on the basis of content - not source.
Jack (who also would put his true name on AC posts)