When we get there. We have 2/3 of people out of work. We should really think of a new economic system, because the current cannot handle such situations in a way which is healthy for most humans. And you cannot train all these humans to become knowledge workers. Statistics show that only 1/3 of the population is capable of performing complex logic required for research in natural sciences, computer science, mathematics, and analytical social sciences. One part of them could be "nurses" who pamper old people or kids or other people in need.
But this is a general problem. If you can replace a plumber by a machine and a butcher or a doctor with a robot able to operate more accurately then these jobs will be lost. Not only in the US but everywhere on the globe. Even if it may take more time in developing countries.
I would agree with your assessment on the topic of what is important for humans in life. Yes it is families and friends. In short other humans who care about each other. I do not live in the US right now, so I will not comment on their lifestyle. I live in Germany. And there we have right now two tendencies in our society. First the wave of exaggerated individualism, which also is linked to the concept of consuming as much as you can in short "I am what I own". On the other hand people are largely upset because they cannot live in families or other social groups anymore, because the economic system forces them to split up parents. And because they are so unhappy about this development, they try other concepts. For example the concept of family as a one or two parents + kids construct is widened to be a n-parents + m-kids relationship. Even though it is not a state supported structure, it is a concept used by parents. Also many parents send their kids to nursery and kindergarden not only so the parents can go to work, but to give the kids the chance to have contact with a lot of kids of their age. Something which existed in my youth in a different way, we just met at the playground or I walked over to my friends place. A thing which is not so easy anymore, as the distances grew.
The funny thing is. Germans want to live in an egalitarian society, however they elected a neo-liberal party for the government.
You really think so? I guess you never lived in a developing country. They are not all poor there are "first world" communities close to "third world" communities. Society concepts are also in the move. And they are in many cases progressive transformations (but there are exceptions). Beside many other effects, this means that "so called creative" jobs are also offered in India or South Africa or Brasilia. The only jobs which are cannot be offshored are services and construction. For example doctors or teachers or plumbers are required to be where they are needed. Their job cannot be shipped around the world as long as there are houses to fix, children to teach and patients to be cured.
Also in a few years. India will have more "creative people" to work on their "intellectual property" that they will literally outsmart the so called West (including the US, EU, Australia, and Canada). Therefore it would be wise not to grab on our property right now like hell and alienate everyone on the globe. It would be more wise to start sharing and establish a culture of sharing. Yes ok that will not work very well for the "content industry", but there are bigger things on stake than the "content industry".
BTW: In the early days of the US, the US had no copyright law. That allowed US-publishers to print European books without paying anything. But now when you have a lot of "intellectual property" in the US, there is such law. India is doing quite the same. Hopefully they will be not so greedy and establish copyright rules like Western Countries are doing right now.
You already have slums in the US. They will grow automatically in the same way the developing countries get stronger. However, there is one option to get out of this. We should start to be cooperative. Competition is only leading to egoism. And egoism is not helping in future (actually it is not helping today, but we will feel the effects of that philosophy in future). We have really big problems on this globe for example we have to move away from dangerous and unsustainable technologies and processes. We have to change our transportation system our energy system our food production so we can feed 7 or more billion people without destroying the biosphere. Therefore we need cooperative concepts.
I do not like to be told what I can buy and what not. And I do not shop as Walmart as I do not shop as Aldi or any other discounter which treats their personnel badly. But there is a big difference between Walmart and Apple. Walmart is a store, and I can go to any other store I want when the products from Walmart are not satisfactory. But when I have an iPhone, I can only go to Apple to buy apps. And with iTunes I can only shop at iTunes-Music-Store. This is like Ford having a discounter and you can only drive to the Ford-discounter with your new vehicle, but not to Walmart or any street market.
And its not because of porn. The iPhone has still a browser. So you could still surf to pron sites if you want. It is the attitude which drives me to free phones. Steve does not want Java on the phone and Steve does not like flash on the iPhone (ok flash sucks, but it should be my decission), Steve does not like cartoons on the iPhone, because some could be offended by them, and Steve does not want other app-stores for the iPhone. Steve's phone has iTunes build in, but you cannot easily interface that thing with other music stores. In short the iPhone is dongle ware. I will never buy dongle ware again.
Cars are expensive to build (in matter of resources). Cars are not very energy efficient only a fraction of the energy is used for motion the rest converted into heat. Furthermore a cars weight is approx 1.5 t to 2 t (1500-2000kg) and these 1500 kg are used to move around 80-150 kg. On top of that, the average speed of a car in a city is 15-25 km/h (depends on the study) which also achievable with a bike. Furthermore cars tend to stay unused most of their time. For example people drive to their job in the morning 1-2 hours and the same time back, which accumulates to 4 hours. And the other 20 hours a day they are parked somewhere. Most people have a garage at home for the car and at work there is also a parking lot and you need a lot of roads for them. This results in an average use of land area in a city of 50% for cars. The rest is for parks, houses, railroads, planes etc.
As we are going to run out of resources (oil, lithium, copper, and many more) it might be sensible to develop a more resource efficient people mover and if possible a way to reduce the need of using public transportation systems. For example: Many bankers and traders use their car to get to the city then they use an elevator to get to their office. While the boss is on level 12 the other are on level 10 and normally they do not see each other in person for days. Instead they use this awkward piece of equipment called phone to communicate. So why have all these people to use any transportation device to get from the suburbs to the city center when they easily could just stay there and work in distributed offices just together with their coworkers. And definitely outside the city center. And they could still talk to the boss on phone. Ok nobody would need bank towers anymore. But think of it. No bank towers no fear from terrorists in planes.
But instead of being reasonable we build flying cars for the troops. So they can fight abroad for... what was it again? Never mind.
We have many different national parliaments which dance the lobbyist dance. The EU-parliament was a powerless people distractor which was used to dump used politicians and to play democracy without affecting anything. Recently, the governments in the EU decided that they need a new treaty and accidentally they gave the parliament some power. They are allowed to say NO to transnational policies in the EU and between the EU and other states. And now you have a horde of angry politicians which have been left out of their cage:-) I hope it will last forever. However, I think the lobbyists will spend billions (British billions) to turn the tide.
Well it is about the money. And IMHO think the money should not go to the content corporations nor to the money corporations. It shall go back to the people.
1. It is not called racketeering it is called capitalism. The same things are happening in other places as well.
2. As long as people are frightened by terrorists, various diseases, house prices, jobs and each other, they will not have enough time or capacity to do that. Even more the TV is keeping their brains off. So they will not rise until we run out of oil.
We do not have the money to buy all these products, tools, licenses, objects, and services. We make them. We sell them. We provide them. But we do not have the money to buy them all. And that's why some things like music or movies or books or programs are used without paying. It is quite simple. We (as in the people in the world) have in percentage less money than the upper 10% or 5%. Most money is owned buy the big guys. And with most I mean around 80% (depends on the study can be up to 85%) of the money and resources belong to those guys. And in recent years (the last 2 decades) this difference got bigger. So in relation we have less, while they have more. This has nothing to do with envy. Not a bit. It is foremost a fact. As these are all official figures (use google if you do not believe me). And it is not a wonder that their share increases, because they got an average return of 6% while the economy growth is only 3% (worldwide). So there is a slight discrepancy and therefore they get richer and we become less and less of the share, but shall buy all the products and services. So in the end some of us, think copying music and movies and books and programs is not so bad.
The US wants something thing, does not work. The treaty has to be accepted by the people (e.g. the parliaments) and for example the EU-parliament wanted to see the documents. They wanted even to have a seat at the table. And when the EU-parliament says no to the treaty. Then there is no treaty at least in Europe. Its actually nice here too. We have general health care;-). So when the US wants to shoot themselves in the foot. They can do it, but I won't let them shoot in my foot too. At least that's what the EU-parliament said to the already leaked documents.
Well they can do it. but before the treaty is worth anything it has to go to many different parliaments. For example the EU-parliament. And when they get the document for reading and it is a different one that was released, then they will say NO (again). They'll do it they said NO to SWIFT, which made many governments in Europe very angry, but they are only the executive. So the treaty is gone. And I assume that the same thing would happen to ACTA. They already said that they will say no on the basis which is public already.
It's how we motivate adults at work so why not kids in school?
First. Money is not the primary motivator to do good work. Yes money is important to pay your bills. But it is not the main drive to do good work. People work better when they are respected. And this is mainly accomplished by treating them right. Of course when the pay is too low they feel mistreated and so their performance goes down. But stress can also be a cause of bad performance.
And Second. School performance is a fragile thing. He did not test if they knew 5 years later anything from their courses. So he could easily motivated them to learn to learn for exams and not for life. Even though, if you only do something because you are paid for, then you become a real jerk. Humans are normally social beings and therefore training them to work only when they get a direct personal benefit, is suboptimal. Instead of treating them like employees you should wok with their curiosity. BTW: There are countries which are really good at that. Like Finland or Sweden.
If it turns out to be a better use of resources and we turn out students who do better in school then it can't be all bad.
Ah yes and here is another error. The most kids learn at school is techniques and social behavior (if the school is any good). The amount of knowledge is rather small compared to the time they spent in school. And I do not want that my kids only learn, do only something when you get paid for.
He should also check if the kids develop social skills, like sharing and helping. I doubt that paying kids to be good at school is a great idea in that dimension. In addition, in most cases it help when you help their parents so they can care for them. This can be done by state money or nursery and kindergarden (and later with whole day schools). A very effective way to bring kids to learn things is, to work with their curiosity.
If the USA would be a country like Afganistan or Italy without nuclear weapons I wouldn't care and hope that some day they will understand that religion is not a good source to find out how the universe come into existence, but a possible good source for ethics and mental stability (as long as you do not become a fanatic). The real problem is that there are so many religios fanatics running around in the US believing in all kinds of things including Armageddon. And now think one of those crazy guys becomes president and pushes the button... This possibility frightens me most. Therefore it is very good to hear that the US is reducing their nuclear potential. Even though they will still be able to fry everyone on this planet. But at least not six times.
In ID4.2 humans discover, that the aliens were mad at them because they thought humans had shot down that craft in the 1960s. One surviving alien tell the US president (it must be the US president, because the USA is so big that it is nearly impossible that the surviving alien could be in any other country. Especially it could not be in Russia or China). I tells the president, that a out of earth atmosphere secret nuke test destroyed the alien craft 40 years ago. After some research it is clear that there were two tests one from Russia and one form the US. So these two superpowers put together all their resources and build a ship, which they send to the alien planet. So we could talk with the alien overlords. After some setbacks this works, Will Smith has sex with an alien (which do look good, only their biological clone worriers look horrible) and we all make peace.
In ID4.3 either the Vogons blow us up or the aliens decided that we stink, as Will Smith (WS) brought tripper to their planet and now everyone is going to die (on their planet). But WS is send to the aliens with an antidote and we all life long an prosper OR WS fakes an vogonic rerouting document and they blow up the alien planet instead or Vogonsphere (which would be no big loss, as a lot of bad poetry will become history). Thinking of that... maybe R. Emmerich is not from Germany, but from Vogonsphere.
We have rule based reasoning systems now for 40 years and we also have neural nets and other probabilistic systems as well. We even have systems which can work with time. And no wonder there have been hundreds when not thousands attempts to combine these three techniques. They have also a paper on the Church language http://www.mit.edu/~ndg/papers/churchUAI08_rev2.pdf
It is definitely nice, but it is not new and it is not the unified theory of thought (or AI). They don't know really how humans think. Nobody really knows. And honestly it is not really important as long as these machines are able to help me finding my data faster or got the the supermarket and by some stuff. A major problem in AI is, that something called I is present in humans it allows them to understand the world, computer systems do not have such an understanding. Which is no wonder, as we don't know what this I is. All rule sets and probabilistic trainings cannot answer the question. One thing can be said about this I, it is very subjective and it is not completely described as the knowledge of self existence and the ability to differentiate between I and the rest of the world. It is assumed that children learn this concept in their first year. The problem with that is, that they cannot be asked when and how they came up with this idea of I.
To make a long story short: We (humans) do not know enough about knowledge and decision processes that we can model them as effective as the processes work in human. And the MIT developed something others had build before. Maybe their language is a little bit better, than others. However, I doubt that, the AI community is not screaming loudly. And as long as other researchers are not running around telling us the MIT approach is the best since sliced bread, I wont buy it.
Today many people store data on their private machine using classic file systems and they use databases to store files and to tag them. In future tags or other kinds of attributes will become more important in information storage and retrieval. Therefor we need databases capable of managing such information. RDMS are very good at storing such information and to work with sets and subsets. And tags and attributes of objects/files/entities are nothing more than markers that show to which sets objects belong. So I doubt that SQL databases will go away.
Furthermore, objects in OOP languages are very restrictive. If you look for example at objects (called individuals) in OWL, you can see that data objects can have properties and relationships to other objects which cannot be expressed that easily in OOP language style. Therefor using DBs which are limited by the object model of OOP languages will not suffice.
Social networks allow me to stay in contact with my friends in a better and easier way than by phone. If I would not have such sites, I would have to call them or send them mails. And because modern economy forces people to move often, you cannot visit your friends every weekend, because they live in another country or state or continent. And I have not given them my data under agreement A and then they change it and then they could sell it or give my data to people I do not want to.
Ubuntu is not for nerds only. It is for all people. And even when the few geeks o this globe are shocked by using kb = 1000 b, the other 6 Giga people do understand the new way better.
It's the change. People do not like change. That's why the US is still using gallons instead of liters. Or people in the UK are so pissed on using kilogram and liter as units. They still by pounds and drink pints.
The old way to define a kilobyte was introduced to make life easier for programmers, but nowadays the size of storage is going up in GB and TB and maybe to PB very soon. And most people using computers are not geeks, they are normal people which understand kilo,mega,giga etc. in the SI way. And why should computer technicians use the prefixes differently than any other science? Just because RAM is packed in base-2 units? That makes no sense. In 10 years nobody will care any longer about kibi.
In the old days when there was not much computational power available and the storage sizes where small, clever geeks decided that using base-2 to define kilo, mega etc. is good enough for the user. However, that deviated from the correct definition on base-10. The first to switch this where the HDD manufacturers, because it made their drives look bigger. But honestly it was still the right move. The advantage of using the correct SI definition is, that it is metric. And the metric system is definitely easier than something on base-2. Especially for normal humans.
Slashdot Mirror
When we get there. We have 2/3 of people out of work. We should really think of a new economic system, because the current cannot handle such situations in a way which is healthy for most humans. And you cannot train all these humans to become knowledge workers. Statistics show that only 1/3 of the population is capable of performing complex logic required for research in natural sciences, computer science, mathematics, and analytical social sciences. One part of them could be "nurses" who pamper old people or kids or other people in need.
But this is a general problem. If you can replace a plumber by a machine and a butcher or a doctor with a robot able to operate more accurately then these jobs will be lost. Not only in the US but everywhere on the globe. Even if it may take more time in developing countries.
I would agree with your assessment on the topic of what is important for humans in life. Yes it is families and friends. In short other humans who care about each other. I do not live in the US right now, so I will not comment on their lifestyle. I live in Germany. And there we have right now two tendencies in our society. First the wave of exaggerated individualism, which also is linked to the concept of consuming as much as you can in short "I am what I own". On the other hand people are largely upset because they cannot live in families or other social groups anymore, because the economic system forces them to split up parents. And because they are so unhappy about this development, they try other concepts. For example the concept of family as a one or two parents + kids construct is widened to be a n-parents + m-kids relationship. Even though it is not a state supported structure, it is a concept used by parents. Also many parents send their kids to nursery and kindergarden not only so the parents can go to work, but to give the kids the chance to have contact with a lot of kids of their age. Something which existed in my youth in a different way, we just met at the playground or I walked over to my friends place. A thing which is not so easy anymore, as the distances grew. The funny thing is. Germans want to live in an egalitarian society, however they elected a neo-liberal party for the government.
You really think so? I guess you never lived in a developing country. They are not all poor there are "first world" communities close to "third world" communities. Society concepts are also in the move. And they are in many cases progressive transformations (but there are exceptions). Beside many other effects, this means that "so called creative" jobs are also offered in India or South Africa or Brasilia. The only jobs which are cannot be offshored are services and construction. For example doctors or teachers or plumbers are required to be where they are needed. Their job cannot be shipped around the world as long as there are houses to fix, children to teach and patients to be cured.
Also in a few years. India will have more "creative people" to work on their "intellectual property" that they will literally outsmart the so called West (including the US, EU, Australia, and Canada). Therefore it would be wise not to grab on our property right now like hell and alienate everyone on the globe. It would be more wise to start sharing and establish a culture of sharing. Yes ok that will not work very well for the "content industry", but there are bigger things on stake than the "content industry".
BTW: In the early days of the US, the US had no copyright law. That allowed US-publishers to print European books without paying anything. But now when you have a lot of "intellectual property" in the US, there is such law. India is doing quite the same. Hopefully they will be not so greedy and establish copyright rules like Western Countries are doing right now.
You already have slums in the US. They will grow automatically in the same way the developing countries get stronger. However, there is one option to get out of this. We should start to be cooperative. Competition is only leading to egoism. And egoism is not helping in future (actually it is not helping today, but we will feel the effects of that philosophy in future). We have really big problems on this globe for example we have to move away from dangerous and unsustainable technologies and processes. We have to change our transportation system our energy system our food production so we can feed 7 or more billion people without destroying the biosphere. Therefore we need cooperative concepts.
I do not like to be told what I can buy and what not. And I do not shop as Walmart as I do not shop as Aldi or any other discounter which treats their personnel badly. But there is a big difference between Walmart and Apple. Walmart is a store, and I can go to any other store I want when the products from Walmart are not satisfactory. But when I have an iPhone, I can only go to Apple to buy apps. And with iTunes I can only shop at iTunes-Music-Store. This is like Ford having a discounter and you can only drive to the Ford-discounter with your new vehicle, but not to Walmart or any street market.
And its not because of porn. The iPhone has still a browser. So you could still surf to pron sites if you want. It is the attitude which drives me to free phones. Steve does not want Java on the phone and Steve does not like flash on the iPhone (ok flash sucks, but it should be my decission), Steve does not like cartoons on the iPhone, because some could be offended by them, and Steve does not want other app-stores for the iPhone. Steve's phone has iTunes build in, but you cannot easily interface that thing with other music stores. In short the iPhone is dongle ware. I will never buy dongle ware again.
Cars are expensive to build (in matter of resources). Cars are not very energy efficient only a fraction of the energy is used for motion the rest converted into heat. Furthermore a cars weight is approx 1.5 t to 2 t (1500-2000kg) and these 1500 kg are used to move around 80-150 kg. On top of that, the average speed of a car in a city is 15-25 km/h (depends on the study) which also achievable with a bike. Furthermore cars tend to stay unused most of their time. For example people drive to their job in the morning 1-2 hours and the same time back, which accumulates to 4 hours. And the other 20 hours a day they are parked somewhere. Most people have a garage at home for the car and at work there is also a parking lot and you need a lot of roads for them. This results in an average use of land area in a city of 50% for cars. The rest is for parks, houses, railroads, planes etc.
As we are going to run out of resources (oil, lithium, copper, and many more) it might be sensible to develop a more resource efficient people mover and if possible a way to reduce the need of using public transportation systems. For example: Many bankers and traders use their car to get to the city then they use an elevator to get to their office. While the boss is on level 12 the other are on level 10 and normally they do not see each other in person for days. Instead they use this awkward piece of equipment called phone to communicate. So why have all these people to use any transportation device to get from the suburbs to the city center when they easily could just stay there and work in distributed offices just together with their coworkers. And definitely outside the city center. And they could still talk to the boss on phone. Ok nobody would need bank towers anymore. But think of it. No bank towers no fear from terrorists in planes.
But instead of being reasonable we build flying cars for the troops. So they can fight abroad for ... what was it again? Never mind.
We have many different national parliaments which dance the lobbyist dance. The EU-parliament was a powerless people distractor which was used to dump used politicians and to play democracy without affecting anything. Recently, the governments in the EU decided that they need a new treaty and accidentally they gave the parliament some power. They are allowed to say NO to transnational policies in the EU and between the EU and other states. And now you have a horde of angry politicians which have been left out of their cage :-) I hope it will last forever. However, I think the lobbyists will spend billions (British billions) to turn the tide.
Well it is about the money. And IMHO think the money should not go to the content corporations nor to the money corporations. It shall go back to the people.
Let me answer your questions:
1. It is not called racketeering it is called capitalism. The same things are happening in other places as well.
2. As long as people are frightened by terrorists, various diseases, house prices, jobs and each other, they will not have enough time or capacity to do that. Even more the TV is keeping their brains off. So they will not rise until we run out of oil.
3. When the oil runs out (same as 2)
They are not smoking anything. They snort. And even more they want all your money.
We do not have the money to buy all these products, tools, licenses, objects, and services. We make them. We sell them. We provide them. But we do not have the money to buy them all. And that's why some things like music or movies or books or programs are used without paying. It is quite simple. We (as in the people in the world) have in percentage less money than the upper 10% or 5%. Most money is owned buy the big guys. And with most I mean around 80% (depends on the study can be up to 85%) of the money and resources belong to those guys. And in recent years (the last 2 decades) this difference got bigger. So in relation we have less, while they have more. This has nothing to do with envy. Not a bit. It is foremost a fact. As these are all official figures (use google if you do not believe me). And it is not a wonder that their share increases, because they got an average return of 6% while the economy growth is only 3% (worldwide). So there is a slight discrepancy and therefore they get richer and we become less and less of the share, but shall buy all the products and services. So in the end some of us, think copying music and movies and books and programs is not so bad.
The US wants something thing, does not work. The treaty has to be accepted by the people (e.g. the parliaments) and for example the EU-parliament wanted to see the documents. They wanted even to have a seat at the table. And when the EU-parliament says no to the treaty. Then there is no treaty at least in Europe. Its actually nice here too. We have general health care ;-). So when the US wants to shoot themselves in the foot. They can do it, but I won't let them shoot in my foot too. At least that's what the EU-parliament said to the already leaked documents.
Well they can do it. but before the treaty is worth anything it has to go to many different parliaments. For example the EU-parliament. And when they get the document for reading and it is a different one that was released, then they will say NO (again). They'll do it they said NO to SWIFT, which made many governments in Europe very angry, but they are only the executive. So the treaty is gone. And I assume that the same thing would happen to ACTA. They already said that they will say no on the basis which is public already.
Maybe I like the cover color and finish?
It's how we motivate adults at work so why not kids in school? First. Money is not the primary motivator to do good work. Yes money is important to pay your bills. But it is not the main drive to do good work. People work better when they are respected. And this is mainly accomplished by treating them right. Of course when the pay is too low they feel mistreated and so their performance goes down. But stress can also be a cause of bad performance. And Second. School performance is a fragile thing. He did not test if they knew 5 years later anything from their courses. So he could easily motivated them to learn to learn for exams and not for life. Even though, if you only do something because you are paid for, then you become a real jerk. Humans are normally social beings and therefore training them to work only when they get a direct personal benefit, is suboptimal. Instead of treating them like employees you should wok with their curiosity. BTW: There are countries which are really good at that. Like Finland or Sweden. If it turns out to be a better use of resources and we turn out students who do better in school then it can't be all bad. Ah yes and here is another error. The most kids learn at school is techniques and social behavior (if the school is any good). The amount of knowledge is rather small compared to the time they spent in school. And I do not want that my kids only learn, do only something when you get paid for.
He should also check if the kids develop social skills, like sharing and helping. I doubt that paying kids to be good at school is a great idea in that dimension. In addition, in most cases it help when you help their parents so they can care for them. This can be done by state money or nursery and kindergarden (and later with whole day schools). A very effective way to bring kids to learn things is, to work with their curiosity.
If the USA would be a country like Afganistan or Italy without nuclear weapons I wouldn't care and hope that some day they will understand that religion is not a good source to find out how the universe come into existence, but a possible good source for ethics and mental stability (as long as you do not become a fanatic). The real problem is that there are so many religios fanatics running around in the US believing in all kinds of things including Armageddon. And now think one of those crazy guys becomes president and pushes the button... This possibility frightens me most. Therefore it is very good to hear that the US is reducing their nuclear potential. Even though they will still be able to fry everyone on this planet. But at least not six times.
In ID4.2 humans discover, that the aliens were mad at them because they thought humans had shot down that craft in the 1960s. One surviving alien tell the US president (it must be the US president, because the USA is so big that it is nearly impossible that the surviving alien could be in any other country. Especially it could not be in Russia or China). I tells the president, that a out of earth atmosphere secret nuke test destroyed the alien craft 40 years ago. After some research it is clear that there were two tests one from Russia and one form the US. So these two superpowers put together all their resources and build a ship, which they send to the alien planet. So we could talk with the alien overlords. After some setbacks this works, Will Smith has sex with an alien (which do look good, only their biological clone worriers look horrible) and we all make peace.
In ID4.3 either the Vogons blow us up or the aliens decided that we stink, as Will Smith (WS) brought tripper to their planet and now everyone is going to die (on their planet). But WS is send to the aliens with an antidote and we all life long an prosper OR WS fakes an vogonic rerouting document and they blow up the alien planet instead or Vogonsphere (which would be no big loss, as a lot of bad poetry will become history). Thinking of that... maybe R. Emmerich is not from Germany, but from Vogonsphere.
We have rule based reasoning systems now for 40 years and we also have neural nets and other probabilistic systems as well. We even have systems which can work with time. And no wonder there have been hundreds when not thousands attempts to combine these three techniques. They have also a paper on the Church language http://www.mit.edu/~ndg/papers/churchUAI08_rev2.pdf
It is definitely nice, but it is not new and it is not the unified theory of thought (or AI). They don't know really how humans think. Nobody really knows. And honestly it is not really important as long as these machines are able to help me finding my data faster or got the the supermarket and by some stuff. A major problem in AI is, that something called I is present in humans it allows them to understand the world, computer systems do not have such an understanding. Which is no wonder, as we don't know what this I is. All rule sets and probabilistic trainings cannot answer the question. One thing can be said about this I, it is very subjective and it is not completely described as the knowledge of self existence and the ability to differentiate between I and the rest of the world. It is assumed that children learn this concept in their first year. The problem with that is, that they cannot be asked when and how they came up with this idea of I.
To make a long story short: We (humans) do not know enough about knowledge and decision processes that we can model them as effective as the processes work in human. And the MIT developed something others had build before. Maybe their language is a little bit better, than others. However, I doubt that, the AI community is not screaming loudly. And as long as other researchers are not running around telling us the MIT approach is the best since sliced bread, I wont buy it.
Today many people store data on their private machine using classic file systems and they use databases to store files and to tag them. In future tags or other kinds of attributes will become more important in information storage and retrieval. Therefor we need databases capable of managing such information. RDMS are very good at storing such information and to work with sets and subsets. And tags and attributes of objects/files/entities are nothing more than markers that show to which sets objects belong. So I doubt that SQL databases will go away.
Furthermore, objects in OOP languages are very restrictive. If you look for example at objects (called individuals) in OWL, you can see that data objects can have properties and relationships to other objects which cannot be expressed that easily in OOP language style. Therefor using DBs which are limited by the object model of OOP languages will not suffice.
Social networks allow me to stay in contact with my friends in a better and easier way than by phone. If I would not have such sites, I would have to call them or send them mails. And because modern economy forces people to move often, you cannot visit your friends every weekend, because they live in another country or state or continent. And I have not given them my data under agreement A and then they change it and then they could sell it or give my data to people I do not want to.
Ubuntu is not for nerds only. It is for all people. And even when the few geeks o this globe are shocked by using kb = 1000 b, the other 6 Giga people do understand the new way better.
It's the change. People do not like change. That's why the US is still using gallons instead of liters. Or people in the UK are so pissed on using kilogram and liter as units. They still by pounds and drink pints.
The old way to define a kilobyte was introduced to make life easier for programmers, but nowadays the size of storage is going up in GB and TB and maybe to PB very soon. And most people using computers are not geeks, they are normal people which understand kilo,mega,giga etc. in the SI way. And why should computer technicians use the prefixes differently than any other science? Just because RAM is packed in base-2 units? That makes no sense. In 10 years nobody will care any longer about kibi.
In the old days when there was not much computational power available and the storage sizes where small, clever geeks decided that using base-2 to define kilo, mega etc. is good enough for the user. However, that deviated from the correct definition on base-10. The first to switch this where the HDD manufacturers, because it made their drives look bigger. But honestly it was still the right move. The advantage of using the correct SI definition is, that it is metric. And the metric system is definitely easier than something on base-2. Especially for normal humans.