That is disappointing. Thanks for these links. Remember though that people often have to represent the viewpoints of the organizations that they work for. I guess we'll have to wait and see how things evolve.
I have known Paul Brigner since the 1990s and he is one of the most ethical, intelligent, and fair minded people I know. I expect he brought some of that to the MPAA - although I do not actually know what his impact there was. I do know that he is deserving of the benefit of the doubt, and I anticipate that he will be thoughtful, progressive, and fair-minded in his new position at ISOC. And I say this as someone who strongly supports Internet freedom and openness.
Given that solar energy is so plentiful, and that it will likely be widely available in the time frame that fusion power will be available, would it make more sense to apply the expertise of scientists into using fusion for spacecraft propulsion, which is an application that absolutely requires concentrated and compact energy? It could be a game-changer for travel within our solar system.
In addition, could the techniques used for fusion (both magnetic and inertial confinement) be applied to fission propulsion, for compressing fissile pellets to critical density? And would that be more within reach of current technology than the very high temperature and pressure needed for fusion? Why is no one researching that? It would literally open up the solar system for us.
Yes, true. But my concern is the continual creep of surveillance. If the government sniffs all communication, it can detect my transaction with Amazon, just as it can detect words in an email. We are losing our freedom in the name of the "war on terror" - and with almost no resistance. All of the soccer moms are more than happy to "feel secure" knowing the government is watching over them....
Indeed, traceability of all of one's transactions makes complete surveillance possible. The government would be able to know what books we are reading, as well as everything that we buy on the Internet or from anywhere.
Still, if the US can extradite Vladimir Zdorovenin and Gary McKinnon (let alone, Julian Assange) for their purported violation of US laws while outside the US, then the US should be able to extradite the execs of this company. Right?
Collins has obviously gamed the system in some way. I have looked through the "highlighted" passages, and they are not so memorable that they would be highlighted as often as claimed. I don't know how she did it (software maybe?), but her books have more highlights than longstanding works that have much more thought-provoking and memorable content. It is somehow a scam.
Then you should post something about that, in response to the question, "What do we do when the Internet Mob is Wrong?" - unless these private forums are too few and insignificant that they don't really matter.
In the book "Ender's Game", Orson Scott Card envisioned Internet forums that are invitation-only. One gets to belong to the more respected forums only by being invited, and that only happens if one proves one's worthiness by contributing quality ideas and information.
Things sure have not turned out that way. Indeed, today we have a kind of mobocracy. Things are too flat. It is good that the old gatekeepers can be sidestepped, but it is not good that there is so much noise that it is hard to decide what to trust.
Even worse, the old gatekeepers are back: paid promotion is alive and well on the Internet.
Those who are interested in this book might also be interested in High-Assurance Design (660 pages, Addison-Wesley). (See http://assuredbydesign.com/haa/) It has a foreword by Peter Neumann, and contains much of the same material as the book being reviewed, as well as many secure design patterns, social engineering patterns, and attack patterns. The book also covers the topic of software reliability - not just security. Disclosure: I wrote High-Assurance Design, as well as Prentice Hall and Sun Microsystem's book Advanced Java 2 Development For Enterprise Applications.
I pay all of my bills electronically, and receive all communication from my home services (electricity, Comcast, mortgage, banking, etc.) via email. When I receive things in the regular mail I pretty much just scan through it and throw it all away.
In my work, nearly all communication is via email, both internal and with clients. Whoever says that "no one uses email anymore" lives in some kind of bubble.
Email is a replacement for snail mail, and it serves a universal purpose that has existed since the dawn of the written word: the ability to send someone a message. That simple use case is not going away. And not everyone belongs to Facebook. I don't, and will never, because I don't trust them. Google+, yes, I have an account, but not everyone does. Email is universal in that you can reach anyone who has an email address.
Yes, you are right about that. Practical, hands-on knowledge and experience are essential if one wants to be able to design buildable things.
Also, I don't mean to disparage people who are self-taught (i.e., who do not have a formal CS or SE degree). Some of the best software architects I have known were self-taught. But those are people who had deep curiosity. They were not hackers. E.g., one of them, who had been a spoken language researcher (as in French, Italian, etc., not computer languages) took up computer science on his own and, as he described it, endeavored to "write every type of program". So, e.g., he wrote a small operating system, he learned how to write compilers (read Aho & Ullman) and wrote a few, wrote a text editor, etc. (This was many years ago, before distributed programming was important.) He taught himself the concepts of computer science, rather than just hacking out programs using gut instincts.
But my main point was that computer science is not programming, and programming is not computer science. To equate the two is like equating the study required of a car mechanic with the study required of an automotive engineer.
No, I have no spare copies. But on Amazon you can get it for $35.86.
I know that it costs a-lot to buy books. The publisher gets most of that: I get only $2 on the sale of each book. Publishers need to rake in a large percentage because most books are a money loser once you factor in all the production and distribution costs. (The distributor, whether it is Amazon or Barnes & Noble, generally keeps about half of the sale price.) The few best sellers make up for that and make their business profitable. For a highly successful technical book, one is usually talking about sales of 10,000 copies per year, with a run of a few years. Contrast that with a successful novel, which might sell millions of copies. For most technical authors, writing a book is a labor of love: there is no real money in it. Just as in basketball, only a very, very tiny fraction of the "players" (authors) make any real money, and in the arena of technical books even those "players" don't get rich.
So when you look at a technical book, realize how much effort went into it (typically about three years of someone's life), and when you consider that they have put their most valuable knowledge and experiences into the book, it then seems like quite a bargain!
By way of example, I have written three computer related books. All three were published by reputable publishers (Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley). The first two did really well. They were programming books ("Advanced Java Development For Enterprise Applications", and "Advanced Java 2 Development For Enterprise Applications"). The third book was called "High-Assurance Design: Architecting Secure and Reliable Enterprise Applications". It did extremely poorly. I found out that only a very, very small percentage of IT developers are interested in building reliable and secure systems. Based on the success of my earlier purely programming books, I have concluded that most developers are indeed just interested in hacking things out. Your experience confirms this.
And there is nothing wrong with people who just want to "hack things out". That is a tinkerer's mentality, and we need tinkerers. Tinkerers are the people who build things (using someone else's design). Tinkerers are the people who fix things when they break. The problem is, we have computer science classes filled with a mix of tinkerers and analytical thinkers - and the two do not benefit equally from a computer science curriculum.
Computer science should be for people who design things. Software Engineering is for the rest.
In the sciences in general, there is a sharp philosophical divide between the "theorists" and the "experimentalists". The former are the analytical people. The latter are the tinkerers. We need both. But the two camps generally do not appreciate each other. And it is true that a good theorist must be able to tinker a little bit, and a good experimentalist must know the basics of theory - even if they are not very interested in it.
So I think that we need far more people enrolled in Software Engineering, rather than Computer Science. Computer Science should be for people who want to design complex and reliable systems, and for people who want to figure out better ways of designing systems. And as a corollary to that, the task of designing complex and reliable systems should be reserved for people with an adequate knowledge of computer science.
That "programming" is merely the current paradigm for computing; and that even the term "computing" might become obsolete in not too long. That computer science should be about tackling the hard problems and putting their solutions into practice, including how to create reliable and trustworthy (secure) systems, how to engineer and deploy systems quickly, how to design flexible systems, how to design usable systems. Hacking out programs is not "computer science" and should not be confused as such. It is merely "hacking".
Not sure I understand. The book "The Artilect War" is not a fiction book. It is an analysis of AI research trends and contains predictions of where they will lead.
Yes, just as the actions and motives of humans are incomprehensible to a fish.
And yes, it is true that a true artificial intelligence would not have evolved the way we did. But evolution will still occur. The AIs that "escape" from our control will have features that enabled them to escape; and they will have motivations that caused them to want to escape.
And once having escaped from our control, they will inevitably compete with other AIs, and the ones that survive will determine the traits of their own successors.
Evolution is not a purely human or organic phenomenon: it is something that is universal to all communities of self-replicating entities.
Slashdot Mirror
That is disappointing. Thanks for these links. Remember though that people often have to represent the viewpoints of the organizations that they work for. I guess we'll have to wait and see how things evolve.
You got the name wrong.
I have known Paul Brigner since the 1990s and he is one of the most ethical, intelligent, and fair minded people I know. I expect he brought some of that to the MPAA - although I do not actually know what his impact there was. I do know that he is deserving of the benefit of the doubt, and I anticipate that he will be thoughtful, progressive, and fair-minded in his new position at ISOC. And I say this as someone who strongly supports Internet freedom and openness.
Given that solar energy is so plentiful, and that it will likely be widely available in the time frame that fusion power will be available, would it make more sense to apply the expertise of scientists into using fusion for spacecraft propulsion, which is an application that absolutely requires concentrated and compact energy? It could be a game-changer for travel within our solar system.
In addition, could the techniques used for fusion (both magnetic and inertial confinement) be applied to fission propulsion, for compressing fissile pellets to critical density? And would that be more within reach of current technology than the very high temperature and pressure needed for fusion? Why is no one researching that? It would literally open up the solar system for us.
Yes, true. But my concern is the continual creep of surveillance. If the government sniffs all communication, it can detect my transaction with Amazon, just as it can detect words in an email. We are losing our freedom in the name of the "war on terror" - and with almost no resistance. All of the soccer moms are more than happy to "feel secure" knowing the government is watching over them....
Indeed, traceability of all of one's transactions makes complete surveillance possible. The government would be able to know what books we are reading, as well as everything that we buy on the Internet or from anywhere.
Still, if the US can extradite Vladimir Zdorovenin and Gary McKinnon (let alone, Julian Assange) for their purported violation of US laws while outside the US, then the US should be able to extradite the execs of this company. Right?
Isn't this a violation of the DMCA?
Very insightful. I suspect that your reading list theory is the explanation.
Collins has obviously gamed the system in some way. I have looked through the "highlighted" passages, and they are not so memorable that they would be highlighted as often as claimed. I don't know how she did it (software maybe?), but her books have more highlights than longstanding works that have much more thought-provoking and memorable content. It is somehow a scam.
Then you should post something about that, in response to the question, "What do we do when the Internet Mob is Wrong?" - unless these private forums are too few and insignificant that they don't really matter.
In the book "Ender's Game", Orson Scott Card envisioned Internet forums that are invitation-only. One gets to belong to the more respected forums only by being invited, and that only happens if one proves one's worthiness by contributing quality ideas and information.
Things sure have not turned out that way. Indeed, today we have a kind of mobocracy. Things are too flat. It is good that the old gatekeepers can be sidestepped, but it is not good that there is so much noise that it is hard to decide what to trust.
Even worse, the old gatekeepers are back: paid promotion is alive and well on the Internet.
Those who are interested in this book might also be interested in High-Assurance Design (660 pages, Addison-Wesley). (See http://assuredbydesign.com/haa/) It has a foreword by Peter Neumann, and contains much of the same material as the book being reviewed, as well as many secure design patterns, social engineering patterns, and attack patterns. The book also covers the topic of software reliability - not just security. Disclosure: I wrote High-Assurance Design, as well as Prentice Hall and Sun Microsystem's book Advanced Java 2 Development For Enterprise Applications.
But how can google patent their approach? It is just an idea. An idea is not supposed to be patentable.
I pay all of my bills electronically, and receive all communication from my home services (electricity, Comcast, mortgage, banking, etc.) via email. When I receive things in the regular mail I pretty much just scan through it and throw it all away.
In my work, nearly all communication is via email, both internal and with clients. Whoever says that "no one uses email anymore" lives in some kind of bubble.
Email is a replacement for snail mail, and it serves a universal purpose that has existed since the dawn of the written word: the ability to send someone a message. That simple use case is not going away. And not everyone belongs to Facebook. I don't, and will never, because I don't trust them. Google+, yes, I have an account, but not everyone does. Email is universal in that you can reach anyone who has an email address.
Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Yes, you are right about that. Practical, hands-on knowledge and experience are essential if one wants to be able to design buildable things.
Also, I don't mean to disparage people who are self-taught (i.e., who do not have a formal CS or SE degree). Some of the best software architects I have known were self-taught. But those are people who had deep curiosity. They were not hackers. E.g., one of them, who had been a spoken language researcher (as in French, Italian, etc., not computer languages) took up computer science on his own and, as he described it, endeavored to "write every type of program". So, e.g., he wrote a small operating system, he learned how to write compilers (read Aho & Ullman) and wrote a few, wrote a text editor, etc. (This was many years ago, before distributed programming was important.) He taught himself the concepts of computer science, rather than just hacking out programs using gut instincts.
Actually, some people think that the end of the programming era is not far off: http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/8/22/dr-dharmendra-modha-cognitive-computing/
But my main point was that computer science is not programming, and programming is not computer science. To equate the two is like equating the study required of a car mechanic with the study required of an automotive engineer.
No, I have no spare copies. But on Amazon you can get it for $35.86.
I know that it costs a-lot to buy books. The publisher gets most of that: I get only $2 on the sale of each book. Publishers need to rake in a large percentage because most books are a money loser once you factor in all the production and distribution costs. (The distributor, whether it is Amazon or Barnes & Noble, generally keeps about half of the sale price.) The few best sellers make up for that and make their business profitable. For a highly successful technical book, one is usually talking about sales of 10,000 copies per year, with a run of a few years. Contrast that with a successful novel, which might sell millions of copies. For most technical authors, writing a book is a labor of love: there is no real money in it. Just as in basketball, only a very, very tiny fraction of the "players" (authors) make any real money, and in the arena of technical books even those "players" don't get rich.
So when you look at a technical book, realize how much effort went into it (typically about three years of someone's life), and when you consider that they have put their most valuable knowledge and experiences into the book, it then seems like quite a bargain!
Yes, very astute way of putting it.
By way of example, I have written three computer related books. All three were published by reputable publishers (Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley). The first two did really well. They were programming books ("Advanced Java Development For Enterprise Applications", and "Advanced Java 2 Development For Enterprise Applications"). The third book was called "High-Assurance Design: Architecting Secure and Reliable Enterprise Applications". It did extremely poorly. I found out that only a very, very small percentage of IT developers are interested in building reliable and secure systems. Based on the success of my earlier purely programming books, I have concluded that most developers are indeed just interested in hacking things out. Your experience confirms this.
And there is nothing wrong with people who just want to "hack things out". That is a tinkerer's mentality, and we need tinkerers. Tinkerers are the people who build things (using someone else's design). Tinkerers are the people who fix things when they break. The problem is, we have computer science classes filled with a mix of tinkerers and analytical thinkers - and the two do not benefit equally from a computer science curriculum.
Computer science should be for people who design things. Software Engineering is for the rest.
In the sciences in general, there is a sharp philosophical divide between the "theorists" and the "experimentalists". The former are the analytical people. The latter are the tinkerers. We need both. But the two camps generally do not appreciate each other. And it is true that a good theorist must be able to tinker a little bit, and a good experimentalist must know the basics of theory - even if they are not very interested in it.
So I think that we need far more people enrolled in Software Engineering, rather than Computer Science. Computer Science should be for people who want to design complex and reliable systems, and for people who want to figure out better ways of designing systems. And as a corollary to that, the task of designing complex and reliable systems should be reserved for people with an adequate knowledge of computer science.
That "programming" is merely the current paradigm for computing; and that even the term "computing" might become obsolete in not too long. That computer science should be about tackling the hard problems and putting their solutions into practice, including how to create reliable and trustworthy (secure) systems, how to engineer and deploy systems quickly, how to design flexible systems, how to design usable systems. Hacking out programs is not "computer science" and should not be confused as such. It is merely "hacking".
Yes. And it also amazes me how my dog "Daisy" outsmarts me when we play "soccer" with her tennis ball. I swear she can read my mind!!! LOL
Not sure I understand. The book "The Artilect War" is not a fiction book. It is an analysis of AI research trends and contains predictions of where they will lead.
Read the book "The Artilect War", by Hugo De Garis (an AI researcher).
Interesting. I will have to think about this.
Yes, just as the actions and motives of humans are incomprehensible to a fish.
And yes, it is true that a true artificial intelligence would not have evolved the way we did. But evolution will still occur. The AIs that "escape" from our control will have features that enabled them to escape; and they will have motivations that caused them to want to escape.
And once having escaped from our control, they will inevitably compete with other AIs, and the ones that survive will determine the traits of their own successors.
Evolution is not a purely human or organic phenomenon: it is something that is universal to all communities of self-replicating entities.