To use a book analogy, I'm not sure how far you'd get if you carefully took 1% of a book's content, taking pains to retain the essential meaning of the work.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not denying that there is a limit, I'm simply proclaiming a healthy skepticism about our ability to predict it. I believe there's life yet to be wrung out of the current manufacturing process.
when people speak of "hitting the limit of Moore's Law" or "the end of Moore's Law" they are almost always referring to a physical limitatation to the trend of increasing transistor density and switching speeds
True, but these same people keep underestimating this limitation. In particular, I still have the PopSci article stating that there is simply no way to push clock speeds any faster without melting the substrate. The article is talking about the '486DX2/66MHz.
To borrow a phrase, "You keep saying 'limit of Moore's Law'. I do not think it means what you think it means."
I fail to understand what is so wrong with this as (at least) the first half of the definition. My full definition is "Crap I don't want and didn't ask for." Regardless of the message's intent (viagra, pr0n, "vote for me") I count it as SPAM.
Mailing lists are not. I asked to be on those.
Mail from friends and family is not. The relationship is implicit permission.
Mail from companies I do business with* are not. The relationship is implicit permission.
Most everything else, pretty much, tends to be. This, without respect for how the beltway nitwits define it in CAN-SPAM.
*- My phone company, sure. The botique I bought a trinket from on vacation 3 years ago, not so much. And I request of all businesses that they NOT sell my address, and reserve the right to give Hell to those that do anyway.
...not to mention the obvious distinction that one is made from paper and the other from electrical bits. Two different mediums with two different mechanisms for copying. The first is time consuming, laborious, and incomplete (no hard cover or bind), whilst the latter is quite easy and exact...
And?
Copyright law (ideally) speaks to who may use published information and how, not how you go about implementing the "how". What you're saying is that our rights should be curtailed because the tools have become better or more efficient.
in France there is a "tax on the private copy". When you buy a blank CD or DVD, you pay a tax that goes directly in the SCPP's pocket.
And in the US we have the "DAT tax", which was extended to cover blank cassettes, Blank VHS tapes, and music (not data) CD-R. This is a royalty that goes to the labels, artists, producers, etc. regardless of what you record on the blank media, was lobbied for by the MPAA/RIAA, and is meant to ensure that IP owners get paid for at-home copying. So we're good to go, right?
Just because it has that "ox" in it doesn't mean that it's directly related to Oxygen.
But the word "oxidation" is stemmed from "oxygen", and based on the original definition he would be (mostly) right. It's true that the def has been expanded beyond the original meaning, but (to split your hair even further) the most common examples outside of a laboratory (read: "naturally occurring") are still driven by oxygen.
All he's really guilty of is making a safe assumption.
then it is protected as it contains a creative selection of votes.
If you want to go that route, then I'll concede that the voting database is protected, but it should be protected in the name of the compilers... which means that the database is ours, and Diebold is violating our rights by witholding property from its rightful owners.
Unless you're suggesting that Diebold is making a creatively selected compilation of the votes cast, which would be poll fraud.
Either way, Diebold doesn't seem to be playing on the level.
Why yes, it is your original creation and you have a full right to protect it, but oh wait... you have to respect the rights of the person who wrote the format you are now using to store your work in.
My understanding is that statements of fact are not protectable under copyright. A database that has a collection of facts may be copyrightable as there is some original, creative thought in the selection of facts compiled (a single quote is public domain; a database of quotes is copyrightable as a collection even though the underlying data is not). As for whether or not the Diebold database is protectable would seem to be, is a log of votes a compilation, or a recording of a single factual event? And even if one were to argue that it is a compilation, wouldn't the IP rights go to those doing the compiling (the voters), not the DB admins (Diebold)?
Quoth Taco: I imagine those tech support calls are hysterical;)
Dear God, forgive me, I can't help myself...
customer: I wish to complain about this iMac what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique. Apple: Oh yes, the, uh, the Intel iMac...What's,uh...What's wrong with it? customer: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it! Apple: No, no, it's, uh... it's resting. customer: Look, matey, I know a dead computer when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now. Apple: No no, it's not dead, it's resting! Remarkable computer, the Intel Macintosh, idd'nit? Beautiful GUI! customer: The GUI don't enter into it. It's brickified. Apple: Nononono, resting! customer: Alright, then, if it's resting, I'll boot it up! (shouts) HELLO, COMPUTER! (presses power button) Hello, computer, I've got some nice software for you... Apple: There! It came on! customer: No, it didn't! Do you see anything on that screen? Apple: Well... customer: (picks up mouse and bangs repeatedly on the desk. Throws it up in the air and watches it plummet to the floor.) Now that's what I call brickefied. Bricked. Embrickened. Pick one. Apple: No, no... it's just stunned.STUNNED?? It's not stunned! It's passed on! This iMac is no more! It has ceased to be! It's kicked the bit bucket! It's duo core processor is now history! THIS IS AN EX-COMPUTER! Apple: Well, I guess I'd better replace it, then. (looks about) Sorry, sir, we're right out of Intel iMacs. customer: I see. I get the picture. Apple: We've got this nice Windows machine, though...
everybody cross-leases dark fiber to everybody else.
At one of my previous jobs, we had popped for the whole menu of auto-whizbang-failover magic. Redundant routers, redundant switches, redundant connections from separate providers. Protected to the nuts against outages.
Imagine our surprise when early the first spring after installing all of this, our connection went down. Both T's out. We were more than a little perplexed - the way the odds were explained to us, God himself would've had to smite most of the southeast US to make this happen.
It turns out that it wasn't God, and there was no smiting involved. Instead, over certain stretches, provider #2 was leasing fiber from provider #1, and one of these stretches ran under the edge of a farmer's field in Georgia. Come spring, the farmer comes out with his backhoe, and... well, you know.
For as long as I was there, we were guaranteed at least a half a day of outage somewhere around the beginning of spring. Every time, the problem was eventually reported to us as "A fiber cut in Georgia..." They never would tell us if it was the same farmer every time.
I want from my users the same thing DMV wants from license-holders: basic safe driving skills.
Meaning: to drive a car, you do not have to be a licensed mechanic. You don't have to know what a throttle linkage is or why it's important. What you do have to know are the controls that you use to interface with the vehichle. Seatbelts, steering wheel, pedals, mirrors, whatforth and whatnot. You have to know what they're called, what they do, and what you're supposed to do to them to get a desired result.
Similarly, I don't expect my computer users to speak binary, swap hard drives, debug code, or get the green golf ball joke. What I do expext is that the user is at least passably familiar with the controls, both physical and logical. Keyboard. Mouse. Floppy drive. CD-ROM. Monitor.
I expect them to know that the little 'x' closes the application and the little '_' minimizes the application. I'd like them to understand while Windows is the operating system, it is not the correct answer to the question "What program were you running?" I'd like them to understand, at least in a conceptual way, what a network is and why this means that I cannot "download the internet for them."
I don't expect them to understand the mechanical differences between laser printing and inkjet printing, or even what toner is. "I need ink" is fine, just please, please tell me for what model printer.
I would love to know why this one user can't be bothered to read all ten words in a dialog box before clicking "OK", downloading an evil Active-X and hosing his machine, but he'll take the time to completely document a BSoD. I doubt this is a computer issue, though.
All I'm really looking for is basic competence. A comfort level somewhat warmer than cold hatred and sheer terror. The presence of mind and self-awareness to answer the question "What were you doing right before your term paper got ROT13ed?" The gumption to just tell me up front that they won't follow my phone directions, rather than making me walk across the building to press 2 buttons for them. At least don't expect me to believe the "it wouldn't do that for me" lie. No, YOU wouldn't do that for me.
One day a year, I want it to be legal for each IT person to shoot one BSoD-documenting user as an example.
Oh, not fatally, you sick freak! I'm not evil or anything. I'll settle for flesh wounds.
You misunderstand - what they don't say is that if they manage to spawn enough meetings about meetings about meetings, the whole of boardroom culture will fold in on itself like a mobius strip, thus trapping all of middle management forever in the September^W Meeting that Never Ended.
We have pretty decent tools of getting answers. What would really be a jump in human development is if we could get a machine to ask useful quesions.
That's the ultimate goal of AI. Not making a machine that thinks so much, but a machine that dreams of electric sheep... so to speak. If we can make a computer wonder "whyforth art thou, butterfly?" then we come that much closer to understanding ourselves. That's the philosophical take, anyway. The geekier take is more along the lines of "How cool is that?"
But I digress. So you make a computer that thinks, feels, dreams, learns and grows. How do you prove it? How do you prove that you do?
In the deepest levels of philosophical proof, we can self certify. That is, I know that I exist. I think, therefore I am. We can be certain that something else exists. Something external to my own awareness of myself is feeding me information through my senses.
What I cannot do is ever be certain of what that something else is. I know what my senses feed to me, but it may be a lie. I may be a collection of inputs being fed artificial data in a lab. I may be delusional. I may be some sliver of a larger psyche, only allowed to experience what it lets me.
YOU may be nothing more than a figment of my imagination.
Oh, I don't believe that. It's far more convenient to accept on face value that you are real, and that you, too, "think therefore you are". Not because I can tap into your mind and share your existance, but because you seem to communicate back in the same manner that I communicate out, so you're probably wired pretty much the same way, and are probably as real as I.
Enter Mr. Turing. Based on the above, he proposed that if I cannot be any more certain of your existance than the above, then that is the most certain I can ever be that a computer is "intelligent". That's the most, but probably far, far less.
He suggested that, since we can never be certain that a machine thinks, then we have to accept on face value that if it seems to think, then it probably is. The only tool we have available to us is communication. Conversation. No restrictions, no guidelines, just a test subject and two locked doors. If the test subject cannot determine where the computer is based on the conversation, then that computer is at least a good candidate.
Worth the benefit of the doubt, anyway, that it thinks, therefore it is.
On another note, and related to TFA, I distinctly remember a google-driven version of Eliza floating around at some point, but for the life of me I cannot come up with a link. Anybody want to field that?
Good, it costs YOU money. YOUR bandwidth and YOUR server don't cost ME money.
Make a law, and it does.
Sorry, but the free market requires that you maintain the items you own. Running a server requires paying for securing that server from attacks -- including e-mail spam attacks. Laws won't stop them. Again, the free market works.
Are you really this obtuse, or are you just playing the part up?
Yes, I have to pay for my server and my connectivity. My doing so is NOT an invitation for you to use it for your purposes, NOR is it an obligation to accept your attempts at such. To wit, I own a building. That building is made of nice, flat surfaces called "walls". Some fuckwit... say, you... comes along with spraypaint and uses my walls as his advertisment without my consent. "Free market", you say? "My obligation to maintain", you say? "Vandalism and graffiti", I say, which happen to be illegal. In short, buy a fucking billboard and leave me and mine out of your business model.
The CD-R / CD-RW industry has said from the beginning that the product lifespan of these discs is between 50 and 200 years. The problem with this is that this media has not been around nearly so long, which means that these "studies" are based on the same WAGs that give our new researcher his 2 to 5 years, they're just reaching different conclusions. Only time will tell.
Slashdot Mirror
The story is from AP France, after all. Why wouldn't their unit of measure take serving size into account?
Oh, oh!! Tinfoil edition GLH! I can't wait for that infomercial!
Ah! Reincarnation, God's recycling program.
Of course Pro-Bono. Amateur-Bono can't hit the high notes.
Um, didn't you just describe Cliffs Notes?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not denying that there is a limit, I'm simply proclaiming a healthy skepticism about our ability to predict it. I believe there's life yet to be wrung out of the current manufacturing process.
True, but these same people keep underestimating this limitation. In particular, I still have the PopSci article stating that there is simply no way to push clock speeds any faster without melting the substrate. The article is talking about the '486DX2/66MHz.
To borrow a phrase, "You keep saying 'limit of Moore's Law'. I do not think it means what you think it means."
I fail to understand what is so wrong with this as (at least) the first half of the definition. My full definition is "Crap I don't want and didn't ask for." Regardless of the message's intent (viagra, pr0n, "vote for me") I count it as SPAM.
Mailing lists are not. I asked to be on those.
Mail from friends and family is not. The relationship is implicit permission.
Mail from companies I do business with* are not. The relationship is implicit permission.
Most everything else, pretty much, tends to be. This, without respect for how the beltway nitwits define it in CAN-SPAM. *- My phone company, sure. The botique I bought a trinket from on vacation 3 years ago, not so much. And I request of all businesses that they NOT sell my address, and reserve the right to give Hell to those that do anyway.
And?
Copyright law (ideally) speaks to who may use published information and how, not how you go about implementing the "how". What you're saying is that our rights should be curtailed because the tools have become better or more efficient.
Say you don't believe this.
And in the US we have the "DAT tax", which was extended to cover blank cassettes, Blank VHS tapes, and music (not data) CD-R. This is a royalty that goes to the labels, artists, producers, etc. regardless of what you record on the blank media, was lobbied for by the MPAA/RIAA, and is meant to ensure that IP owners get paid for at-home copying. So we're good to go, right?
She told me it was empty, maybe next time.
Now if she'd just return my calls...
But the word "oxidation" is stemmed from "oxygen", and based on the original definition he would be (mostly) right. It's true that the def has been expanded beyond the original meaning, but (to split your hair even further) the most common examples outside of a laboratory (read: "naturally occurring") are still driven by oxygen.
All he's really guilty of is making a safe assumption.
If you want to go that route, then I'll concede that the voting database is protected, but it should be protected in the name of the compilers... which means that the database is ours, and Diebold is violating our rights by witholding property from its rightful owners.
Unless you're suggesting that Diebold is making a creatively selected compilation of the votes cast, which would be poll fraud.
Either way, Diebold doesn't seem to be playing on the level.
Used CDs have already been a target of the RIAA. At least, a target of Garth Brooks, and a carrot drawing the RIAA's desire to double-dip royalties.6 14-9999_1b14usedcds.html
http://www.planetgarth.com/gbnews/garth049.shtml
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20020
My understanding is that statements of fact are not protectable under copyright. A database that has a collection of facts may be copyrightable as there is some original, creative thought in the selection of facts compiled (a single quote is public domain; a database of quotes is copyrightable as a collection even though the underlying data is not). As for whether or not the Diebold database is protectable would seem to be, is a log of votes a compilation, or a recording of a single factual event? And even if one were to argue that it is a compilation, wouldn't the IP rights go to those doing the compiling (the voters), not the DB admins (Diebold)?
This is the funniest comment I've seen in weeks!
Dear God, forgive me, I can't help myself...
customer: I wish to complain about this iMac what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
Apple: Oh yes, the, uh, the Intel iMac...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
customer: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
Apple: No, no, it's, uh... it's resting.
customer: Look, matey, I know a dead computer when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Apple: No no, it's not dead, it's resting! Remarkable computer, the Intel Macintosh, idd'nit? Beautiful GUI!
customer: The GUI don't enter into it. It's brickified.
Apple: Nononono, resting!
customer: Alright, then, if it's resting, I'll boot it up! (shouts) HELLO, COMPUTER! (presses power button) Hello, computer, I've got some nice software for you...
Apple: There! It came on!
customer: No, it didn't! Do you see anything on that screen?
Apple: Well...
customer: (picks up mouse and bangs repeatedly on the desk. Throws it up in the air and watches it plummet to the floor.) Now that's what I call brickefied. Bricked. Embrickened. Pick one.
Apple: No, no... it's just stunned.STUNNED?? It's not stunned! It's passed on! This iMac is no more! It has ceased to be! It's kicked the bit bucket! It's duo core processor is now history! THIS IS AN EX-COMPUTER!
Apple: Well, I guess I'd better replace it, then. (looks about) Sorry, sir, we're right out of Intel iMacs.
customer: I see. I get the picture.
Apple: We've got this nice Windows machine, though...
At one of my previous jobs, we had popped for the whole menu of auto-whizbang-failover magic. Redundant routers, redundant switches, redundant connections from separate providers. Protected to the nuts against outages.
Imagine our surprise when early the first spring after installing all of this, our connection went down. Both T's out. We were more than a little perplexed - the way the odds were explained to us, God himself would've had to smite most of the southeast US to make this happen.
It turns out that it wasn't God, and there was no smiting involved. Instead, over certain stretches, provider #2 was leasing fiber from provider #1, and one of these stretches ran under the edge of a farmer's field in Georgia. Come spring, the farmer comes out with his backhoe, and... well, you know.
For as long as I was there, we were guaranteed at least a half a day of outage somewhere around the beginning of spring. Every time, the problem was eventually reported to us as "A fiber cut in Georgia..." They never would tell us if it was the same farmer every time.
Meaning: to drive a car, you do not have to be a licensed mechanic. You don't have to know what a throttle linkage is or why it's important. What you do have to know are the controls that you use to interface with the vehichle. Seatbelts, steering wheel, pedals, mirrors, whatforth and whatnot. You have to know what they're called, what they do, and what you're supposed to do to them to get a desired result.
Similarly, I don't expect my computer users to speak binary, swap hard drives, debug code, or get the green golf ball joke. What I do expext is that the user is at least passably familiar with the controls, both physical and logical. Keyboard. Mouse. Floppy drive. CD-ROM. Monitor.
I expect them to know that the little 'x' closes the application and the little '_' minimizes the application. I'd like them to understand while Windows is the operating system, it is not the correct answer to the question "What program were you running?" I'd like them to understand, at least in a conceptual way, what a network is and why this means that I cannot "download the internet for them."
I don't expect them to understand the mechanical differences between laser printing and inkjet printing, or even what toner is. "I need ink" is fine, just please, please tell me for what model printer.
I would love to know why this one user can't be bothered to read all ten words in a dialog box before clicking "OK", downloading an evil Active-X and hosing his machine, but he'll take the time to completely document a BSoD. I doubt this is a computer issue, though.
All I'm really looking for is basic competence. A comfort level somewhat warmer than cold hatred and sheer terror. The presence of mind and self-awareness to answer the question "What were you doing right before your term paper got ROT13ed?" The gumption to just tell me up front that they won't follow my phone directions, rather than making me walk across the building to press 2 buttons for them. At least don't expect me to believe the "it wouldn't do that for me" lie. No, YOU wouldn't do that for me.
One day a year, I want it to be legal for each IT person to shoot one BSoD-documenting user as an example.
Oh, not fatally, you sick freak! I'm not evil or anything. I'll settle for flesh wounds.
You misunderstand - what they don't say is that if they manage to spawn enough meetings about meetings about meetings, the whole of boardroom culture will fold in on itself like a mobius strip, thus trapping all of middle management forever in the September^W Meeting that Never Ended.
That's the ultimate goal of AI. Not making a machine that thinks so much, but a machine that dreams of electric sheep... so to speak. If we can make a computer wonder "whyforth art thou, butterfly?" then we come that much closer to understanding ourselves. That's the philosophical take, anyway. The geekier take is more along the lines of "How cool is that?"
But I digress. So you make a computer that thinks, feels, dreams, learns and grows. How do you prove it? How do you prove that you do?
In the deepest levels of philosophical proof, we can self certify. That is, I know that I exist. I think, therefore I am. We can be certain that something else exists. Something external to my own awareness of myself is feeding me information through my senses.
What I cannot do is ever be certain of what that something else is. I know what my senses feed to me, but it may be a lie. I may be a collection of inputs being fed artificial data in a lab. I may be delusional. I may be some sliver of a larger psyche, only allowed to experience what it lets me.
YOU may be nothing more than a figment of my imagination.
Oh, I don't believe that. It's far more convenient to accept on face value that you are real, and that you, too, "think therefore you are". Not because I can tap into your mind and share your existance, but because you seem to communicate back in the same manner that I communicate out, so you're probably wired pretty much the same way, and are probably as real as I.
Enter Mr. Turing. Based on the above, he proposed that if I cannot be any more certain of your existance than the above, then that is the most certain I can ever be that a computer is "intelligent". That's the most, but probably far, far less.
He suggested that, since we can never be certain that a machine thinks, then we have to accept on face value that if it seems to think, then it probably is. The only tool we have available to us is communication. Conversation. No restrictions, no guidelines, just a test subject and two locked doors. If the test subject cannot determine where the computer is based on the conversation, then that computer is at least a good candidate.
Worth the benefit of the doubt, anyway, that it thinks, therefore it is.
On another note, and related to TFA, I distinctly remember a google-driven version of Eliza floating around at some point, but for the life of me I cannot come up with a link. Anybody want to field that?
Are you really this obtuse, or are you just playing the part up?
Yes, I have to pay for my server and my connectivity. My doing so is NOT an invitation for you to use it for your purposes, NOR is it an obligation to accept your attempts at such. To wit, I own a building. That building is made of nice, flat surfaces called "walls". Some fuckwit... say, you... comes along with spraypaint and uses my walls as his advertisment without my consent. "Free market", you say? "My obligation to maintain", you say? "Vandalism and graffiti", I say, which happen to be illegal. In short, buy a fucking billboard and leave me and mine out of your business model.
The CD-R / CD-RW industry has said from the beginning that the product lifespan of these discs is between 50 and 200 years. The problem with this is that this media has not been around nearly so long, which means that these "studies" are based on the same WAGs that give our new researcher his 2 to 5 years, they're just reaching different conclusions. Only time will tell.
C'mon, baby, lemme finger your profile! Uh, click your mouse? Cable your box? Integrity check your data jack!
Wait! Where ya goin'? Oh, come on, work with me here!
*grumbles* Dammit, why dress in anime if you're not into geeks?
Oh, shit, I'm sorry.... did you need that back?