Obvious you were quite functional during that period. I just wonder if you were not experiencing some other medical condition that radically altered your socialization when you decided to get up a live out of your car for a time
So I live in Silicon Valley and spend $[too much] / month for an apartment with a view of the ocean.
If I gave that up to live in my car, (which I won't,) I would be fine. Giving up my "home" to live in a car puts an extra $[meal at fancy restaurant] in my pocket a day, which is almost as much as I spend in groceries a week. I can shower at work, which plenty of people who bike do. There's plenty of places for me to park overnight. An entire work-friendly wardrobe can fit into my trunk, and I can power a laptop from my cigarette lighter. For the money I could save by living in my car, I could stay in a nice hotel every weekend.
It's not that I'm trying to promote the lifestyle; however, please realize that many people go through phases where they get tired of their possessions and just want to simplify or try something different.
You have to realize that in most cases of homelessness, there are other factors. What I mean is that the situation isn't one of "Person lost their job, exhausted their savings, and was thrown out on the street." That is extremely rare. Not losing one's job and running out of money is rare, but that the immediate follow up is "and thrown out on the street."
I've met the failed homeless businessman. He's an interesting case because he's clearly capable of earning an income; and had in the past. It was very clear to me that he would rather live with the consequences of his career choice instead of getting a day job.
If you can reach friends and family, can't you ask for help? Maybe I grew up in an environment where homelessness was not an option because I'm sure that I could chill on someone's couch until I worked my way back into an apartment. If you can't reach anybody on the internet who is willing or able to help you out while you're living under a bridge, perhaps you should re-evaluate your ongoing communications with those people. I realize that not everybody will be able to work up a western-union order for bus fair in a week or a cross-country plane ticket in a month to help their friend, you'd have to be pretty low on my list of acquaintances for me to not help you out, and I make sure I hang out with people that would do the same for me. This is really sad, while yes, its good that they can stay in contact, this is a case of communication without value.
After living in the San Francisco Bay area for the last four years; what I've learned is that in many cases, homelessness is a lifestyle choice. The homeless in this area often have a very nice lifestyle and very rarely go hungry. Given that the alternative is a full-time job where they just don't "fit in," being creative in how one archives food, shelter, and clothing can result in a more satisfying career.
For example, a friend-of-a-friend is an older electrical engineer who lives in an old school bus. He picks up a contract every other year or so; yet he gets to keep most of his time to himself. There is so much wasted food in their area that he never goes hungry.
That being said, the homeless that I've experienced have fully worn out their welcome on all of their friends' couches. There's an unspoken agreement that comes about where you realize that, in order to stay friends, you do need to be able to fiend for yourselves yet lend a shower for a job interview.
If I can't remove the propaganda, I won't watch it at all, and I won't let my kid watch it.
You would be surprised how jarring it is once you've freed yourself from it...
Reminds me of what happened when I got back from Burning Man last year. I felt like spending money; so I went out and bought a big-ass TV... Then, once it was set up in my living room; I realized how ugly all the logos are, so I spent an hour covering up every corporate logo in sight.
When we _all_ know that it was an American who did that.
Al Gore.
Vint Cerf openly credits Al Gore for securing early funding for what ended up as the Internet. So, jokes aside, Al Gore deserves a lot of credit for the internet.
There's no need for horse-drawn carriages either, given that cars are a quicker and more energy efficient means of conveyance, but there are always a few hapless romantics who like to see the world as it once was.
They run in downtown Devner, CO. It's kind of touristy; but they're also a bit more pedestrian-friendly then aggressive taxis.
By the way, if you want a vehicle that can automatically take you home when you're blitzed at the bar; a horse is a lot better then a car!
When I was in school, my fraternity had a problem with a brother who played Everquest all the time. He didn't go to class, flunked out, didn't pay his house bill, mooched off of us for free weed, ect, ect, ect. We used our connections to campus networking and blocked Everquest's port.
While it "solve the problem" of our brother's addition; it really didn't solve the problem with our brother. He still mooched our weed, didn't pay his bills, and flunked out of school; so we eventually had to kick him out of the fraternity house.
Install ESX as a hypervisor, and then create a VM for you and another for your partner. ESX lets you dedicate PCI devices to a specific VM, so you can dedicate one graphics card and USB card for you; and another pair of cards for your partner.
I got my first dose of Nitrous when I was 12, and I am literally hooked for life! As soon as it hit, I remember thinking, "damn, I need to get some of this stuff for when I'm not at the dentist!" Of course this comment is a bit tongue-in-cheek; but seriously, I don't like the idea of giving kids nitrous unless it's to cut some serious pain. The stuff is just too fun!
Hopefully, by the end, your 'friend' will realize just how easy Ubuntu can be to use and start down a long path of exploration with a new operating system.
Long path??? I want an operating system that lets me implement exactly what I want with the least amount of effort possible!
A change like that in a population doesn't necessarily have to be "evolutionary" yet. Just by allowing more people with "negative" traits to survive we're changing what the population as a whole looks like.
So, a few weeks ago the same thoughts went through my head... Then I learned that I need some serious plastic surgery in order to sleep correctly.
Because of my bias, I no longer agree with you.
Furthermore: Do you brush your teeth? Our dental hygiene is now so good that some people who had extra teeth to compensate for rotting ones falling out now have to get the extras pulled.
Do you cut your hair? Wear clothes? Plan on living over the age of 25? The human race is now an animal that uses its knowledge to survive and evolve. We haven't relied on our genes since Adam and Eve realized that they were naked and had to quickly find clothes*.
What bugs me on an almost daily basis is that I feel very young, and in my career; I'm very young. On the other hand, if I was born prior to civilization; I'd most likely be dying of "old age."
*It's too bad the fundamentalist Christians are so anti-evolution, because it distracts people from the true value of the Adam and Eve story. The themes explored in the Adam and Eve story effectively are our ancestors communicating to us that we're no longer "natural" like the animals.
The article doesn't seem to make any mention of removing that information when they become adults. I can see where this is going... get a database of them now, when less people are likely to complain, and then you still have the info when they are adults. Instant (well sorta) database of all your citizens.
Which is concerning... Will some 40-year-old professional be held back by the fact that he stood up to some teacher's BS?
It streamlines the bureaucratic process for them, because all they need is *one* reason.
Well, there's another way to solve such a problem... It's called "at will employment," which basically means the employee or employer can terminate employment at any time for any reason.
However simply replacing it with a glass structure is not necessarily the right thing to do. One key aspect of the monument was its permanence and impenetratibility.
You do realize that it was held up with cables and cement for most of the 20th century? If it wasn't held up by the hands of man, it wouldn't have been there for me to see with my own eyes.
The view of driving by the man is something that can't be reproduced in a mere photograph.
If you think that simply converting all voice mail to text is going to solve the problem, you're missing out. I would think that a jog-wheel to allow me to speed up the voice mails, along with some audio or visual cues to let me know when the message ends would be much more efficient than speech-to-text while maintaining all the meta-information. Just get rid of those stupid menus completely. Since it's trivial to speed up a person's voice without altering the pitch using DSP you'd still be able to understand the message at 10x speed (or more) and still keep the subtler message intact.
I took a look at Google's interface, and there's a play button. What they essentially let you do is skim through 20 "dude, call me back." messages and then listen to the important ones.
I'm currently having a similar problem with Vauxhall (GM) after having the misfortune to be given an Insignia as a company car. The software for the in car systems has a vareity of problems, for example the traffic warning system can't be turned off. You press the button to turn it off and it says "TP Deactivated" yet it continues to make useless traffic annoucments all the way to work when all I want is to listen to my music. A co-worker's Insignia is has the exact same problem and he can't disable the traffic annoucments so it's clearly a software issue. When I told GM they refused to accept that there's a software problem and told me to take it to my dealer to get it fixed. Needless to say the dealer said they can't do anything becuase it's a software problem.
Isn't that covered by a lemon law?
I'm not sure if they are national or statewide; but I remember that the Lemon Law in MA would essentially entitle you to a refund. From what I understand, if you take a car back to a dealer for the same problem three times; you are entitled to some form of a refund.
The market for proprietary software and the community for open source software does function pretty good for weeding out the crapware.
The problem is that far too much software is sold with contracts that basically say "we're not responsible if this doesn't work." No other industry can do that. The car industry has a "lemon law" that essentially forces them to refund money when a car doesn't work. The same needs to apply to software.
What was the name of this airport and are their any reports on this incident.
Worcester Airport, either 1997 or 1998. The lead investigator told his side of the story at the Microsoft Security Summit in Boston in 2004.
From what I understand, the story didn't hit the newspapers until 6-7 months after the incident because it really was a case where anyone with a modem could find the airport's phone number and type in the command to bring it down. They had to wait until they fixed the system.
Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what's public information at this point. I approached the lead investigator at the Microsoft Security Summit in 2004, and he was surprised that I knew anything about the story. As I've gotten back in touch with people involved, they tend to be surprised that I know their side of the story.
My point, however, is that the government handles airport hackings in strange ways. They knew that a hacker was coming into the Worcester airport computer, yet they did very little to stop him until he caused damage. Furthermore, they seem to paint a picture of the hackers as terrorists trying to inflict damage; when sometimes they're just curious teenagers who go to church on Sundays and get good grades in school.
In the case of the Worcester airport, the hacker was trying to figure out what kind of computer system he was using. Can we say the same about this incident? Did a script kiddie find out that he can control a vast network of computers? Did the hacker fully comprehend what he broke into? For all we know, some airport computer could have a static IP and VNC without password protection. It's a prime target for anyone in the world who's board enough to write a script to check every possible IP for unprotected VNC.
I have connections to someone who accidentally hacked an airport in the 1990s. Back then, the thing that board teenagers did was run programs that would find phone numbers answered by modems.
Anyway, as the story goes, this teenager came across a phone number, answered by a modem, that behaved very differently then any other phone number. There was NO password or security whatsoever. The interface was very foreign; however, this board teenager spent a few months hacking at the system, trying to learn what it did and how to operate it.
As the story goes, he eventually came across some form of a manual, and decided to test the reboot command. A few days later, when the feds showed up at his door, he found out that he was responsible for bringing an airport down for an entire afternoon.
The irony of the matter is that the board teenager was a well-meaning, curious, upstanding teenager. He had no malicious intentions whatsoever.
Once you accept the fact that sentient AI is inevitable, the next step, of super-intelligent AIs, is just as inevitable.
Which is what makes movies like "The Matrix" really scary. One way of interpreting being contained in "The Matrix" is that it's the ultimate form of corporate slavery. How will we have livelihoods after super-intelligent AIs? Will we just be plugged into the Matrix?
The difference between this and all the various... religions
Ommission for emphasis
So I assume that you agree that transhumanism has many similarities to other religions?Do you agree that transhumanism requires such a high level of faith that it could, be in essence, a religion of its own?
I'm a big fan of transhumanism; but I'm also a big skeptic.
The sad part is that it seems like it's all wishful thinking on Kurzweil's part who's really scared of dying. So my bet is that his outlandish and baseless predictions are so popular because it fills a void in the "don't worry you won't really die" department that religions used to fill. So the whole Singularity thing really is a secular techno-cult of some sort, and Kurzweil is the guru and prophet.
Religion is the exact word. It's funny, because I sometimes bump into Ben, (the article's author,) at a Sunday afternoon AI meetup. I sometimes joke that it's the church for people who play God; and few people seem to get it.
2008: Intel reproduces Nikola Tesla's 1894 implementation and Prof. John Boys group's 1988's experiments by wirelessly powering a light bulb with 75% efficiency. wikipedia.org (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transmission)
Tesla might have had the right ideas; but in order to make them work, he would have had to build on top of lots of technology that didn't exist at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Obvious you were quite functional during that period. I just wonder if you were not experiencing some other medical condition that radically altered your socialization when you decided to get up a live out of your car for a time
So I live in Silicon Valley and spend $[too much] / month for an apartment with a view of the ocean.
If I gave that up to live in my car, (which I won't,) I would be fine. Giving up my "home" to live in a car puts an extra $[meal at fancy restaurant] in my pocket a day, which is almost as much as I spend in groceries a week. I can shower at work, which plenty of people who bike do. There's plenty of places for me to park overnight. An entire work-friendly wardrobe can fit into my trunk, and I can power a laptop from my cigarette lighter. For the money I could save by living in my car, I could stay in a nice hotel every weekend.
It's not that I'm trying to promote the lifestyle; however, please realize that many people go through phases where they get tired of their possessions and just want to simplify or try something different.
You have to realize that in most cases of homelessness, there are other factors. What I mean is that the situation isn't one of "Person lost their job, exhausted their savings, and was thrown out on the street." That is extremely rare. Not losing one's job and running out of money is rare, but that the immediate follow up is "and thrown out on the street."
I've met the failed homeless businessman. He's an interesting case because he's clearly capable of earning an income; and had in the past. It was very clear to me that he would rather live with the consequences of his career choice instead of getting a day job.
If you can reach friends and family, can't you ask for help? Maybe I grew up in an environment where homelessness was not an option because I'm sure that I could chill on someone's couch until I worked my way back into an apartment. If you can't reach anybody on the internet who is willing or able to help you out while you're living under a bridge, perhaps you should re-evaluate your ongoing communications with those people. I realize that not everybody will be able to work up a western-union order for bus fair in a week or a cross-country plane ticket in a month to help their friend, you'd have to be pretty low on my list of acquaintances for me to not help you out, and I make sure I hang out with people that would do the same for me. This is really sad, while yes, its good that they can stay in contact, this is a case of communication without value.
After living in the San Francisco Bay area for the last four years; what I've learned is that in many cases, homelessness is a lifestyle choice. The homeless in this area often have a very nice lifestyle and very rarely go hungry. Given that the alternative is a full-time job where they just don't "fit in," being creative in how one archives food, shelter, and clothing can result in a more satisfying career.
For example, a friend-of-a-friend is an older electrical engineer who lives in an old school bus. He picks up a contract every other year or so; yet he gets to keep most of his time to himself. There is so much wasted food in their area that he never goes hungry.
That being said, the homeless that I've experienced have fully worn out their welcome on all of their friends' couches. There's an unspoken agreement that comes about where you realize that, in order to stay friends, you do need to be able to fiend for yourselves yet lend a shower for a job interview.
If I can't remove the propaganda, I won't watch it at all, and I won't let my kid watch it. You would be surprised how jarring it is once you've freed yourself from it...
Reminds me of what happened when I got back from Burning Man last year. I felt like spending money; so I went out and bought a big-ass TV... Then, once it was set up in my living room; I realized how ugly all the logos are, so I spent an hour covering up every corporate logo in sight.
When we _all_ know that it was an American who did that. Al Gore.
Vint Cerf openly credits Al Gore for securing early funding for what ended up as the Internet. So, jokes aside, Al Gore deserves a lot of credit for the internet.
There's no need for horse-drawn carriages either, given that cars are a quicker and more energy efficient means of conveyance, but there are always a few hapless romantics who like to see the world as it once was.
They run in downtown Devner, CO. It's kind of touristy; but they're also a bit more pedestrian-friendly then aggressive taxis.
By the way, if you want a vehicle that can automatically take you home when you're blitzed at the bar; a horse is a lot better then a car!
When I was in school, my fraternity had a problem with a brother who played Everquest all the time. He didn't go to class, flunked out, didn't pay his house bill, mooched off of us for free weed, ect, ect, ect. We used our connections to campus networking and blocked Everquest's port.
While it "solve the problem" of our brother's addition; it really didn't solve the problem with our brother. He still mooched our weed, didn't pay his bills, and flunked out of school; so we eventually had to kick him out of the fraternity house.
Install ESX as a hypervisor, and then create a VM for you and another for your partner. ESX lets you dedicate PCI devices to a specific VM, so you can dedicate one graphics card and USB card for you; and another pair of cards for your partner.
I got my first dose of Nitrous when I was 12, and I am literally hooked for life! As soon as it hit, I remember thinking, "damn, I need to get some of this stuff for when I'm not at the dentist!" Of course this comment is a bit tongue-in-cheek; but seriously, I don't like the idea of giving kids nitrous unless it's to cut some serious pain. The stuff is just too fun!
Hopefully, by the end, your 'friend' will realize just how easy Ubuntu can be to use and start down a long path of exploration with a new operating system.
Long path??? I want an operating system that lets me implement exactly what I want with the least amount of effort possible!
A change like that in a population doesn't necessarily have to be "evolutionary" yet. Just by allowing more people with "negative" traits to survive we're changing what the population as a whole looks like.
So, a few weeks ago the same thoughts went through my head... Then I learned that I need some serious plastic surgery in order to sleep correctly.
Because of my bias, I no longer agree with you.
Furthermore: Do you brush your teeth? Our dental hygiene is now so good that some people who had extra teeth to compensate for rotting ones falling out now have to get the extras pulled.
Do you cut your hair? Wear clothes? Plan on living over the age of 25? The human race is now an animal that uses its knowledge to survive and evolve. We haven't relied on our genes since Adam and Eve realized that they were naked and had to quickly find clothes*.
What bugs me on an almost daily basis is that I feel very young, and in my career; I'm very young. On the other hand, if I was born prior to civilization; I'd most likely be dying of "old age."
*It's too bad the fundamentalist Christians are so anti-evolution, because it distracts people from the true value of the Adam and Eve story. The themes explored in the Adam and Eve story effectively are our ancestors communicating to us that we're no longer "natural" like the animals.
So unless you are in a coffin this is not a risk.
What about on a plane?
The article doesn't seem to make any mention of removing that information when they become adults. I can see where this is going... get a database of them now, when less people are likely to complain, and then you still have the info when they are adults. Instant (well sorta) database of all your citizens.
Which is concerning... Will some 40-year-old professional be held back by the fact that he stood up to some teacher's BS?
It streamlines the bureaucratic process for them, because all they need is *one* reason.
Well, there's another way to solve such a problem... It's called "at will employment," which basically means the employee or employer can terminate employment at any time for any reason.
However simply replacing it with a glass structure is not necessarily the right thing to do. One key aspect of the monument was its permanence and impenetratibility.
You do realize that it was held up with cables and cement for most of the 20th century? If it wasn't held up by the hands of man, it wouldn't have been there for me to see with my own eyes.
The view of driving by the man is something that can't be reproduced in a mere photograph.
If you think that simply converting all voice mail to text is going to solve the problem, you're missing out. I would think that a jog-wheel to allow me to speed up the voice mails, along with some audio or visual cues to let me know when the message ends would be much more efficient than speech-to-text while maintaining all the meta-information. Just get rid of those stupid menus completely. Since it's trivial to speed up a person's voice without altering the pitch using DSP you'd still be able to understand the message at 10x speed (or more) and still keep the subtler message intact.
I took a look at Google's interface, and there's a play button. What they essentially let you do is skim through 20 "dude, call me back." messages and then listen to the important ones.
I'm currently having a similar problem with Vauxhall (GM) after having the misfortune to be given an Insignia as a company car. The software for the in car systems has a vareity of problems, for example the traffic warning system can't be turned off. You press the button to turn it off and it says "TP Deactivated" yet it continues to make useless traffic annoucments all the way to work when all I want is to listen to my music. A co-worker's Insignia is has the exact same problem and he can't disable the traffic annoucments so it's clearly a software issue. When I told GM they refused to accept that there's a software problem and told me to take it to my dealer to get it fixed. Needless to say the dealer said they can't do anything becuase it's a software problem.
Isn't that covered by a lemon law?
I'm not sure if they are national or statewide; but I remember that the Lemon Law in MA would essentially entitle you to a refund. From what I understand, if you take a car back to a dealer for the same problem three times; you are entitled to some form of a refund.
The market for proprietary software and the community for open source software does function pretty good for weeding out the crapware.
The problem is that far too much software is sold with contracts that basically say "we're not responsible if this doesn't work." No other industry can do that. The car industry has a "lemon law" that essentially forces them to refund money when a car doesn't work. The same needs to apply to software.
If this is it then I say connecting a computer to a modem without dialback is one of the dumbest things you can do.
Never underestimate what lazy contractors / employees can do. I worked with a guy who ignored my, "you're open to SQL injection" statement.
Anyway, dialbacks weren't common back in the late 90s. Some of my friends used to war dial and then trade numbers.
To put it bluntly: My hobby dial-up BBS had better security then some of these systems, and I was a teenager.
What was the name of this airport and are their any reports on this incident.
Worcester Airport, either 1997 or 1998. The lead investigator told his side of the story at the Microsoft Security Summit in Boston in 2004.
From what I understand, the story didn't hit the newspapers until 6-7 months after the incident because it really was a case where anyone with a modem could find the airport's phone number and type in the command to bring it down. They had to wait until they fixed the system.
Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what's public information at this point. I approached the lead investigator at the Microsoft Security Summit in 2004, and he was surprised that I knew anything about the story. As I've gotten back in touch with people involved, they tend to be surprised that I know their side of the story.
My point, however, is that the government handles airport hackings in strange ways. They knew that a hacker was coming into the Worcester airport computer, yet they did very little to stop him until he caused damage. Furthermore, they seem to paint a picture of the hackers as terrorists trying to inflict damage; when sometimes they're just curious teenagers who go to church on Sundays and get good grades in school.
In the case of the Worcester airport, the hacker was trying to figure out what kind of computer system he was using. Can we say the same about this incident? Did a script kiddie find out that he can control a vast network of computers? Did the hacker fully comprehend what he broke into? For all we know, some airport computer could have a static IP and VNC without password protection. It's a prime target for anyone in the world who's board enough to write a script to check every possible IP for unprotected VNC.
I have connections to someone who accidentally hacked an airport in the 1990s. Back then, the thing that board teenagers did was run programs that would find phone numbers answered by modems.
Anyway, as the story goes, this teenager came across a phone number, answered by a modem, that behaved very differently then any other phone number. There was NO password or security whatsoever. The interface was very foreign; however, this board teenager spent a few months hacking at the system, trying to learn what it did and how to operate it.
As the story goes, he eventually came across some form of a manual, and decided to test the reboot command. A few days later, when the feds showed up at his door, he found out that he was responsible for bringing an airport down for an entire afternoon.
The irony of the matter is that the board teenager was a well-meaning, curious, upstanding teenager. He had no malicious intentions whatsoever.
Once you accept the fact that sentient AI is inevitable, the next step, of super-intelligent AIs, is just as inevitable.
Which is what makes movies like "The Matrix" really scary. One way of interpreting being contained in "The Matrix" is that it's the ultimate form of corporate slavery. How will we have livelihoods after super-intelligent AIs? Will we just be plugged into the Matrix?
The difference between this and all the various ... religions
Ommission for emphasis
So I assume that you agree that transhumanism has many similarities to other religions?Do you agree that transhumanism requires such a high level of faith that it could, be in essence, a religion of its own?
I'm a big fan of transhumanism; but I'm also a big skeptic.
The sad part is that it seems like it's all wishful thinking on Kurzweil's part who's really scared of dying. So my bet is that his outlandish and baseless predictions are so popular because it fills a void in the "don't worry you won't really die" department that religions used to fill. So the whole Singularity thing really is a secular techno-cult of some sort, and Kurzweil is the guru and prophet.
Religion is the exact word. It's funny, because I sometimes bump into Ben, (the article's author,) at a Sunday afternoon AI meetup. I sometimes joke that it's the church for people who play God; and few people seem to get it.
2008: Intel reproduces Nikola Tesla's 1894 implementation and Prof. John Boys group's 1988's experiments by wirelessly powering a light bulb with 75% efficiency. wikipedia.org (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transmission)
Tesla might have had the right ideas; but in order to make them work, he would have had to build on top of lots of technology that didn't exist at the time.