If the law is changed all the works on those image banks will lose their copyright and Mr. Gates will be able to turn a profit on them, while all the creative people learn a hard lesson in capitalism.
Thats no reason to question the sincerity of a man on a mission to relieve poverty while dressed in a $10,000 Armani suit.
I always wondered what a Billion dollar Bill looks like.
The whole Olympic torch relay really summed it up, armed guards protecting the torch from protesters around the world showing the true face of authority in China, a group of thugs prepared to put down anyone or anything that gets in their way. Meanwhile our companies undermine what little democracy and freedom we have remaining with outsourcing and business policies that validate the way the Chinese government conducts it's affairs. This whole Olympics is a farce, but I doubt you will see America or anyone else for that matter boycott it, as they should.
Politicians carry on about saving the face of the Chinese Government as being a way for them to change which is bullshit. Everything they do is covered by a thin veneer of politeness that covers systemic brutality and oppression. "Sure you can protest at the Olympics" if you apply in person, 5 days in advance and if you are a foreigner you have to apply in Chinese. Any vestige of Left is long gone and replaced by the deception of the worldwide criminal plutocracy, where owning the game IS the game. Meanwhile the Chinese government rely on politeness to manipulate the whole world while they mock our rapidly dwindling freedom.
How long will it take before people realize that the GPL is holding Linux back? It's the greatest single strategic weakness of the beloved-by-socialist-wanna-be-programmers.
What? Are you dressed up as old king troll? People and especially companies take if they can get away with it. BSD lets Microsoft (and who ever else) get away with taking code, the GPL does not. You have to catch up before you can overtake and finally the Open Source community is positioned to overtake. You wanna play then you have to pay by code, that's not socialist that's leveling the playing field. It's those provisions that make companies like IBM take the GPL seriously and construct legal guidelines and codes of conduct to inter-operate properly.
The BSD style licensed projects get more momentum and make forward progress. Meanwhile, GPL-style projects fork and fork and fork and fork endlessly
People don't talk about FreeBSD they talk about Linux, it's called brand awareness. Tell a windows zealot they use a BSD license and they'd go "a what?", they don't think of BSD as Open Source. But they know what Linux is and respect it, even if they don't like it, because they perceive the GPL as a threat to the Microsoft hegemony.
That's not a criticism of BSD projects, there are great projects under BSD licenses and people put things under those licenses for their own reasons. The difference is the GPL promotes a new type of business model to function. Who cares if there is a forked project, that's a strength that allows business adaptations to flourish or die without ramifications.
Apache isn't in danger from Microsoft because Apache is still free...Like get over yourself copyleft freaks, free.
Even if I partially agree with you about the purist GPL approach I can't get over the "free, as in you work for free" part of the BSD license, why would Microsoft write compression libraries if they can get them for free or fix the flaws and return them to the community. I don't know about the Apache license, but I do know for certain that Microsoft has *never* done anything unless it is to *their* advantage, they don't give a fork about OSS except how they can use it to benefit themselves.
Any biological intelligence does exactly the same as described: gather data (try to assess external universe model), find correlations (build internal universe model), act according to internal needs (act upon internal universe model) and repeat.
The model you describe could also be called 'Instinct' and whether intelligence can be 'implemented' or it has to reach some sort of criticality before the 'Intelligence effect' takes a hold in a biological system is what we are yet to ascertain. i.e Is 'Intelligence' is an effect of 'Instinct' operating for some time period because the same model can describe the behavior of a Venus fly trap and I don't believe it is accurate to describe it's behavior as intelligence.
This chain of processing is done by all brains from the fruit fly to humans. Everything else is a consequential result from this process.
Surely the count of the behavioral loops operating in parallel on the internal model is important relative to the complexity of the being. The question is whether the difference is ten's or thousands of loops operating at once and if the capability to spawn new loops and the conflict generated is a contributing factor. Moreover it could be the capability to resolve the conflicts generated that are responsible for spawning the "Intelligence effect".
For example a single bee and a fruit fly may be very similar individually and operate on instinct, but a collective hive of bees has capabilities that make it act very differently, there are internal conflicts that happen and are resolved but the important thing is the processes operate in parallel making the hive act as one - if on separate but tightly controlled models.
Feedback loops are a natural result of action to fulfill internal needs according an internal model - that is always incomplete or wrong, see Goedel - upon the external universe.
What about uncertainty. The model can use the loops to deal with incomplete or wrong, but uncertainty must surely be handled differently and perhaps it's a consequence of dealing with uncertainty that more brain capacity was developed leading to reasoning and problem solving (ECC?) on the model perhaps leading to higher functions like awareness (I am) and self awareness (I am I). The eventual freeing of brain capacity, the capability to have and refine multiple models (or think) and so on until the baby Einstien could develop a theory of relativity.
I also think the question of Artificial Awareness, which is generally bundled into Artificial Intelligence, is certainly a lot different even in biological intelligences. The "skynet" scenario maybe a possibility if it is like a hive of bees, long before it is self aware or even intelligent - just acting on instinct.
Personally I've always been skeptical that Artificial Intelligence is a possibility by design, certainly with our current generation of technology. So perhaps the article posits that Google has stumbled upon 'Artificial Instinct'? I don't know anything about Google's code behavior internally other than they continue to add more processing power like a living being does as it grows. However as Google is big enough to have a engineer of this caliber on board that has observed the behavior it would also be interesting to find out if Google's systems are generating any internal conflict and attempts to resolve it - maybe we can ask him about his observations on Slashdot. It's certainly interesting to be living in a time where the capacity of our computer systems globally are at a complexity, growing daily, where questions like this arise. Maybe A.I is here already just so slow and ponderous that we aren't even aware of it, but it begs the question of if there is a model for intelligence we don't recognise.
They're cool enough to do in front of other people, no matter how bad you are, and you have something to show off to your friends. It's a win-win scenario.
Absolutely. I have been doing martial arts for about 20 years and I find it the best of many excercises I've done. It's the perfect exercise for geeks *because* it can be done alone and has the same type of intense technical component that geeks would love. You would be surprised how many other I.T people train martial arts AND are good at it, I just love it. I have met world champion judo practitioners who are also professional IT people. They each have a different emphasis like grappling, punching or kicking and eventually weapons. Go for something like karate or kung-fu to begin with and if you like that explore what other schools have to offer. Grappling, whilst confronting, gets you fit fast so does kick boxing - but it hurts too (good pain - good pain). Most schools are great and it helps you with your social skills and builds confidence in yourself, especially handy if you are negotiating contracts or mixing it up with sales people.
When I am lucky enough to play, field sports like soccer, hockey, football are completely addictive but you can hurt yourself real bad with ballistic contacts - but they are soooo much fun. The running builds an iron will that you can apply to your work by keeping you patient and the team sports build the team building skills you can use to get on well with people at work.
Bike riding is good, but it can get a little old when you have to deal with car drivers or in the rain. Keep you ass on the seat, make sure your knees are fully extended at the end of the pedals travel and smile when you are going up hills. Awesome aerobics excercise, drills your legs - good if you want to be lean.
I have also done weights on and off, but having a workout partner that you can trust, who will not get distracted and has a safety mindset will multiply the gains you both can get because you can attempt heavier weights. The absolute focus gained from doing weights is exactly the same focus I use when coding and visa-versa. Having a coder's focus makes you fearsome in the gym - not everybody can achieve the focus of a programmer, conversely I also think that weights help train this focus. Weights is extremely hard work, anyone who tells you its boring isn't doing it right. Weights will give you the quickest bang for buck if you do it right and are persistent, three months of good solid weights training and you won't know yourself, after a year you will never look back.
Finally, I am lucky enough to be able to walk to a beach, swimming in a pool is one thing, but challenging the ocean by body surfing is an extremely intense workout, lungs scream for breath, your muscles feel like they are vibrating. I can catch most of the waves a board rider can now and coming down the face of a big wave you have caught by your own swimming has got to be one of the biggest rushes ever, when you get spun by the wave at the end and spat out - all tension just disappears.
I was told early on in life that I had a heart murmur and unless I wanted to become a statistic I really had no choice but to have a lifestyle that incorporated physical activity. I have been fit enough for the doctors not to be able to tell it's there but when I get lazy (we all do) it is still there - it's a big incentive to keep going.
Of course nutrition is also important, so learning how to cook and being a good cook is a critical component but it's not that hard, just avoid processed food and pretty soon you will automatically pick up the right food to eat from the supermarket - lots of vegetables fruit and meat, pick a few recipes and practise on yourself - later you can impress your friends with your culinary skills.
The good thing about this is I.T is one of the few professions where you can incorporate these activities into your day. Just remember to shower before going back to the office and wear deodorant!!!
Just don't blow out your knees trying to do your kata
Your instructor didn't show you how to stretch your knees? it was the first thing I learned about martial arts and have never looked back.
1. Stand up straight, place feet together
2. Bend knees slightly
3. cup hands on top of your kneecaps (let your hands warm up your kneecaps a bit from contact)
4. With both knees together gently make small circles parallel to the floor in one direction and then in another direction
5. Over time increase the diameter of the circles
6. do it every day (more than once a day is ok too)
This works to improve your knees over time, hope this help
Scary, isn't it? Unless we carefully condense the steam even geothermal energy doesn't solve global warming. And at present, we don't.
Perhaps we could whack a turbine on it, condense most of the steam and convert some of that energy into electricity. We would have to beware of the consequences of geo-solidification freezing molten magma under the crust and reducing the gravity of the earth.
Reducing the earth's spin would be bad, people would get taller though, so it can't all be that bad.
My point was more that patents expire and someone with money would be screaming bloody murder if they were actively being prevented from using a technology by a 'big energy' patent holder. I doubt that they are degrading them on purpose
You won't find any disagreement from me there, but I doubt that an entire device has to be patented, or even disclosed, only disparate parts or processes.
What I'm saying is if you developed a disruptive technology that provided such a significant business advantage that by releasing it you would loose that advantage, then disrupting the income stream of another industry would be counterproductive until the market conditions were advantageous. You yield the maximum return on your investment by first using it to your advantage and when the market conditions were appropriate, maybe decades later, releasing a product.
Even then, the product may simply be "not available" or priced out of the market's reach until the market is "ready".
Certainly with respect to oil or coal companies, but I'd expect technology companies in the ilk of Texas Instruments or Westinghouse, for example, to retain an advantage gained by producing a product for themselves that provided a long term benefit - especially with respect to energy. It's hard to believe companies like that would be beholden to anyone and certainly not beyond their means to achieve it.
You could probably get a decent idea of it by sifting through court records to find cases involving the oil and coal industry and solar patents.
Wouldn't it make sense to try it as an experiment to gather hard data on how different types of asteroid react and as an excercise in examining the logistical problems and actual effect from a practical perspective?
It may make sense to have a gun, but if you don't know *which* gun to use...
In fact, the fact that there was nobody in the department that could identify what he did, and the police had to go to outside people seems to scream that he's innocent of all of the charges.
The evidence at hand is proving his point, otherwise the organisational control systems in place would have stopped him from doing this at all. It's going to be an interesting court case.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats no reason to question the sincerity of a man on a mission to relieve poverty while dressed in a $10,000 Armani suit.
I always wondered what a Billion dollar Bill looks like.
That's a synonym for Open Source, Mr Gates.
What about a big T for Totalitarian state.
The whole Olympic torch relay really summed it up, armed guards protecting the torch from protesters around the world showing the true face of authority in China, a group of thugs prepared to put down anyone or anything that gets in their way. Meanwhile our companies undermine what little democracy and freedom we have remaining with outsourcing and business policies that validate the way the Chinese government conducts it's affairs. This whole Olympics is a farce, but I doubt you will see America or anyone else for that matter boycott it, as they should.
Politicians carry on about saving the face of the Chinese Government as being a way for them to change which is bullshit. Everything they do is covered by a thin veneer of politeness that covers systemic brutality and oppression. "Sure you can protest at the Olympics" if you apply in person, 5 days in advance and if you are a foreigner you have to apply in Chinese. Any vestige of Left is long gone and replaced by the deception of the worldwide criminal plutocracy, where owning the game IS the game. Meanwhile the Chinese government rely on politeness to manipulate the whole world while they mock our rapidly dwindling freedom.
I don't mind if they make a black hole, as long as they don't drop it. I think that would be bad.
Whitespace is one of the technologies it would seem.
What? Are you dressed up as old king troll? People and especially companies take if they can get away with it. BSD lets Microsoft (and who ever else) get away with taking code, the GPL does not. You have to catch up before you can overtake and finally the Open Source community is positioned to overtake. You wanna play then you have to pay by code, that's not socialist that's leveling the playing field. It's those provisions that make companies like IBM take the GPL seriously and construct legal guidelines and codes of conduct to inter-operate properly.
People don't talk about FreeBSD they talk about Linux, it's called brand awareness. Tell a windows zealot they use a BSD license and they'd go "a what?", they don't think of BSD as Open Source. But they know what Linux is and respect it, even if they don't like it, because they perceive the GPL as a threat to the Microsoft hegemony.
That's not a criticism of BSD projects, there are great projects under BSD licenses and people put things under those licenses for their own reasons. The difference is the GPL promotes a new type of business model to function. Who cares if there is a forked project, that's a strength that allows business adaptations to flourish or die without ramifications.
Even if I partially agree with you about the purist GPL approach I can't get over the "free, as in you work for free" part of the BSD license, why would Microsoft write compression libraries if they can get them for free or fix the flaws and return them to the community. I don't know about the Apache license, but I do know for certain that Microsoft has *never* done anything unless it is to *their* advantage, they don't give a fork about OSS except how they can use it to benefit themselves.
BOFH from DHS : I have an excellent way to reduce our IT spending...
The model you describe could also be called 'Instinct' and whether intelligence can be 'implemented' or it has to reach some sort of criticality before the 'Intelligence effect' takes a hold in a biological system is what we are yet to ascertain. i.e Is 'Intelligence' is an effect of 'Instinct' operating for some time period because the same model can describe the behavior of a Venus fly trap and I don't believe it is accurate to describe it's behavior as intelligence.
Surely the count of the behavioral loops operating in parallel on the internal model is important relative to the complexity of the being. The question is whether the difference is ten's or thousands of loops operating at once and if the capability to spawn new loops and the conflict generated is a contributing factor. Moreover it could be the capability to resolve the conflicts generated that are responsible for spawning the "Intelligence effect".
For example a single bee and a fruit fly may be very similar individually and operate on instinct, but a collective hive of bees has capabilities that make it act very differently, there are internal conflicts that happen and are resolved but the important thing is the processes operate in parallel making the hive act as one - if on separate but tightly controlled models.
What about uncertainty. The model can use the loops to deal with incomplete or wrong, but uncertainty must surely be handled differently and perhaps it's a consequence of dealing with uncertainty that more brain capacity was developed leading to reasoning and problem solving (ECC?) on the model perhaps leading to higher functions like awareness (I am) and self awareness (I am I). The eventual freeing of brain capacity, the capability to have and refine multiple models (or think) and so on until the baby Einstien could develop a theory of relativity.
I also think the question of Artificial Awareness, which is generally bundled into Artificial Intelligence, is certainly a lot different even in biological intelligences. The "skynet" scenario maybe a possibility if it is like a hive of bees, long before it is self aware or even intelligent - just acting on instinct.
Personally I've always been skeptical that Artificial Intelligence is a possibility by design, certainly with our current generation of technology. So perhaps the article posits that Google has stumbled upon 'Artificial Instinct'? I don't know anything about Google's code behavior internally other than they continue to add more processing power like a living being does as it grows. However as Google is big enough to have a engineer of this caliber on board that has observed the behavior it would also be interesting to find out if Google's systems are generating any internal conflict and attempts to resolve it - maybe we can ask him about his observations on Slashdot. It's certainly interesting to be living in a time where the capacity of our computer systems globally are at a complexity, growing daily, where questions like this arise. Maybe A.I is here already just so slow and ponderous that we aren't even aware of it, but it begs the question of if there is a model for intelligence we don't recognise.
Thank you for such a thought inspiring post.
Holy shit dood, no wonder your pissed off, guess it's a good thing that I hated kata.
Absolutely. I have been doing martial arts for about 20 years and I find it the best of many excercises I've done. It's the perfect exercise for geeks *because* it can be done alone and has the same type of intense technical component that geeks would love. You would be surprised how many other I.T people train martial arts AND are good at it, I just love it. I have met world champion judo practitioners who are also professional IT people. They each have a different emphasis like grappling, punching or kicking and eventually weapons. Go for something like karate or kung-fu to begin with and if you like that explore what other schools have to offer. Grappling, whilst confronting, gets you fit fast so does kick boxing - but it hurts too (good pain - good pain). Most schools are great and it helps you with your social skills and builds confidence in yourself, especially handy if you are negotiating contracts or mixing it up with sales people.
When I am lucky enough to play, field sports like soccer, hockey, football are completely addictive but you can hurt yourself real bad with ballistic contacts - but they are soooo much fun. The running builds an iron will that you can apply to your work by keeping you patient and the team sports build the team building skills you can use to get on well with people at work.
Bike riding is good, but it can get a little old when you have to deal with car drivers or in the rain. Keep you ass on the seat, make sure your knees are fully extended at the end of the pedals travel and smile when you are going up hills. Awesome aerobics excercise, drills your legs - good if you want to be lean.
I have also done weights on and off, but having a workout partner that you can trust, who will not get distracted and has a safety mindset will multiply the gains you both can get because you can attempt heavier weights. The absolute focus gained from doing weights is exactly the same focus I use when coding and visa-versa. Having a coder's focus makes you fearsome in the gym - not everybody can achieve the focus of a programmer, conversely I also think that weights help train this focus. Weights is extremely hard work, anyone who tells you its boring isn't doing it right. Weights will give you the quickest bang for buck if you do it right and are persistent, three months of good solid weights training and you won't know yourself, after a year you will never look back.
Finally, I am lucky enough to be able to walk to a beach, swimming in a pool is one thing, but challenging the ocean by body surfing is an extremely intense workout, lungs scream for breath, your muscles feel like they are vibrating. I can catch most of the waves a board rider can now and coming down the face of a big wave you have caught by your own swimming has got to be one of the biggest rushes ever, when you get spun by the wave at the end and spat out - all tension just disappears.
I was told early on in life that I had a heart murmur and unless I wanted to become a statistic I really had no choice but to have a lifestyle that incorporated physical activity. I have been fit enough for the doctors not to be able to tell it's there but when I get lazy (we all do) it is still there - it's a big incentive to keep going.
Of course nutrition is also important, so learning how to cook and being a good cook is a critical component but it's not that hard, just avoid processed food and pretty soon you will automatically pick up the right food to eat from the supermarket - lots of vegetables fruit and meat, pick a few recipes and practise on yourself - later you can impress your friends with your culinary skills.
The good thing about this is I.T is one of the few professions where you can incorporate these activities into your day. Just remember to shower before going back to the office and wear deodorant!!!
Hope this helps.
Your instructor didn't show you how to stretch your knees? it was the first thing I learned about martial arts and have never looked back.
1. Stand up straight, place feet together 2. Bend knees slightly 3. cup hands on top of your kneecaps (let your hands warm up your kneecaps a bit from contact) 4. With both knees together gently make small circles parallel to the floor in one direction and then in another direction 5. Over time increase the diameter of the circles6. do it every day (more than once a day is ok too)
This works to improve your knees over time, hope this help
winks and flicks to next excuse card.
Lucky old geyser!
Perhaps we could whack a turbine on it, condense most of the steam and convert some of that energy into electricity. We would have to beware of the consequences of geo-solidification freezing molten magma under the crust and reducing the gravity of the earth.
Reducing the earth's spin would be bad, people would get taller though, so it can't all be that bad.
maybe the newklear sockpuppets are moderating today.
The oil industry will need a cheap form of electricity to extract all that expensive oil. Awesome.
At a conservative estimate, my scientist friend Karl, told me it's around 1Kw per square metre.
MOD PARENT UP!!
Herein lies the problem with all our "systems". It's everywhere, and is the linchpin stopping our society from moving forward.
indeed.
tl;dr
You won't find any disagreement from me there, but I doubt that an entire device has to be patented, or even disclosed, only disparate parts or processes.
What I'm saying is if you developed a disruptive technology that provided such a significant business advantage that by releasing it you would loose that advantage, then disrupting the income stream of another industry would be counterproductive until the market conditions were advantageous. You yield the maximum return on your investment by first using it to your advantage and when the market conditions were appropriate, maybe decades later, releasing a product.
Even then, the product may simply be "not available" or priced out of the market's reach until the market is "ready".
Certainly with respect to oil or coal companies, but I'd expect technology companies in the ilk of Texas Instruments or Westinghouse, for example, to retain an advantage gained by producing a product for themselves that provided a long term benefit - especially with respect to energy. It's hard to believe companies like that would be beholden to anyone and certainly not beyond their means to achieve it.
Now that sounds like a full time job.
I wonder how many efficient battery and solar cell designs are owned by the oil and coal industry.
Just sayin'
No, I'm Bruce Perens.
Wouldn't it make sense to try it as an experiment to gather hard data on how different types of asteroid react and as an excercise in examining the logistical problems and actual effect from a practical perspective?
It may make sense to have a gun, but if you don't know *which* gun to use...
The evidence at hand is proving his point, otherwise the organisational control systems in place would have stopped him from doing this at all. It's going to be an interesting court case.