So yes, clever people should get rewards for their clever contributions to society, but these contributions are never so great as to warrant great fortunes. It is a physical impossibility. No one is so important.
They deserve to get paid as much as others are willing to pay to acquire the result of their work. No more, no less. The alternative is to put a gun in their face and take their money and make them work as slaves under the threat of force. Except since it is the work of their minds they can easily refuse and you'll perish as your life depends on their work. That's why communism can't work. If you want a modern-day example, see Venezuela where Chavez has looted the industrialists and the country is now feeding off the decaying corpse of the industries. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where they will be in 10 years when the last remnants have been destroyed and devoured.
In short your entire tirade is about creation of yet another band of rulers of society who, like all those before them, would claim that their position is due to their oh-so-great "merit" to humanity, and thus warrants massive disparities in power and wealth. Except that you replaced coats of arms with patents.
Not rulers - traders that trade value for value. People that see mutual benefit in each other and voluntarily deal with each other, economically or otherwise.
That is more Libertarian bullshit religion. None of us does these things "voluntarily". If it were "voluntary" the vast majority of humanity would live on tropical islands feeding of marvellous miraculous fruits that taste delicious and keep you fed for weeks. We are forced by circumstances to struggle for living. Our choices (in a vast majority of cases) are reduced to picking whose slave we become to achieve that.
Do you have the freedom of accepting or rejecting a job offer? Do you get paid for your work? Yes? Then you are not a slave. Taking the job is entirely voluntary on your part - nobody is pointing a gun at you.
"But" - you say - "it's not my fault that I'm incompetent, why can't I have some of that Google cash?" Is it Brin's fault that you are incompetent? Or Page's perhaps? What do you think gives you the right to demand that your needs be fulfilled at the expense of another.
By the way, I would really like a yacht. In fact I think I need a yacht. Come on, pay up. I'm sure you can work some overtime. It's my need we're talking about here!
Nowhere nearly enough to warrant these two a "billionaire" status. There isn't an invention in history of mankind to warrant that.
Again, it warrants as much as people are willing to pay for it. And what would you think would happen if said for instance by law that they could only keep one million USD and the rest would go to say feeding third world children. Do you think that there is a chance in hell that they would continue with their business under those conditions? Do you think that they would even have started their company? If they did, would they have bothered with improving the service if there was no incentive?
Let's do the same thing with other nasty evil corporations, say Monsanto that has those cruel patents on GM crops. What do you think will happen after you destroy that company and those like it? Why your requirements for absurdly rich will change. Today it's a billion tomorrow it's a million and the day after it will be unfair that the farmer that produces your food gets $2 while you who consume it get $1. And after we've gone further back than the stone age, living like animals at the mercy of nature, will you be happy? Isn't that what you are looking for?
A company named "Peach" or "Prune" or some such, lead by another man like Jobs, of whom there are thousands, but who were born in slightly different circumstances or slightly too late to replace Jobs would have led it. Your personality cultism is showing. N
That of course is a demonstrable falsity, promulgated by our would-be "betters" since times immemorial. It wasn't the peons that made empires and kingdoms "work", it were the "nobility", right? Starting with examples such as an idiot named Cheops who made thousands of men align stones on top of each other so that his "glorious" and "totally above average" ass can ascend to Heaven as a bigger yet king. No one remembers those "averages" who actually built the thing, never you mind those who fed the empire and its oh-so-superior parasites.
And so human societies were always constructed on the basis of this fundamental idiocy, that "special" people, who are "naturally" (or who in some very rare cases ascend the social strata) born to rule the rest of us mucky-mucks whose destiny is to make sure golden crappers of our "betters" run properly and that the exotic lobster is delivered on time. Anything else would be "class warfare" and frowned upon... by the said betters and their sycophants.
Wow, it takes some skill to misread a post like that. Did you miss the part where I identified the exceptional ones as the producers and the ones that create jobs?
No, royalty do not qualify in the exceptional category. Neither do those that have inherited money and have not done at least as much as their forbearers that actually made that money. That is not the elite I'm talking about. No, they are parasites exploiting and in many cases destroying the achievement that isn't theirs.
Total bullshit. The core of any economy are tradesmen (such as the majority of Slashdot readership), very small and small businesses, many millions of which operate in every country. Their owners are no more "special" then their employees and usually work hands-on in their chosen trade, as opposed to "managing" things or "investing" as is the case in larger operations. In most sane countries these owners also earn no more then double (after expenses and taxes) of what their employees make. In places such as Japan, even the CEOs of very large corporations make only about 10 times (on average) more then their workers. In neo-feudal nations, such as USA, that ratio is exceeding 500 and is on the way up.
Now you are getting there. Yes the tradesmen are the core of any working economy - trading value for value. Then there is also the question of ability. Being a trader makes you honest, but it doesn't mean that you fall in the exceptional category. All the progress of civilization is tied to technological progress so there is our clue. The people I call exceptional are able to invent and to produce.
They are the people of mind that through centuries have endured and silently counteracted the destructiveness of the tyrants, the mystics and the mindless mob. Not only that, but they have fed them and ensured their survival. Man's mind is the root of all our progress. If you don't believe me, try to obtain your food by means of just physical force or try to grow wheat without the effort of the mind of the people that learned process for the first time. So when I'm saying "the exceptional" or "the strong" it is not the strength of weapons or of muscles - it is the strength of mind. The man that invented the combustion engine did not do so at the expense of the ones that didn't. He got paid for it but the value of that invention was many orders of magnitude higher. We all benefit from the work of his mind. It is people like that our existence depends on and they are also the first ones to get screwed in a system ruled by the ideal of mediocrity.
You say that the small business owners are not different from their employees. In many cases they are as they had the ambition and the ability to implement their idea. If you look back through history you'll see that technological development is seldom a collective effort. Almost all major technological inventions have been done by individuals or at most a handful of people. In case they have a sense for business t
The fundamental problem of democracy is the idea that a majority approval validates an idea or a course of action. There is no reason to assume that - on the contrary, we have many examples of very wrong majority decisions.
In practice a democratic decision will strengthen the interest of the average at the expense of the above average. The problem with this is that it isn't your average Joe that makes society work. On the contrary, the people that produce and that create jobs are a small exceptional group that often get the short end of the stick in a democratic system. True majority rule is in essence self-destructive as the average it pulls towards isn't capable of maintaining the society.
Our solutions up to date has been double standards. On one hand we praise majority rule democracy as the greatest of ideals while we try to make it as inconsequential as possible. There are different ways to go about it but all end up in saying one thing and doing another. These tend to be practical solutions that have worked so far (meaning that they haven't destroyed civilization) and seem to be fairly revolution-proof. Given the inherent contradiction in them, they cannot by any standard be seen as optimal. When you have a system that defines 'right' in such a way that it is not possible to do right then you have a fundamentally flawed system.
I'm not sure what would constitute a better system, but what we have right now certainly isn't it.
I'm not a fan of the business model of the music industry but I'm far more appalled by the mindset of many of the consumers of their product. It's not that they copy the music without permission or compensation to the producer. It's not even that they try to dictate the terms on how the industry is to sell its products.
The really disgusting part is when people demand that the industry accepts people using their products without any compensation going to the producer. They demand the consent of the victim. These people that have not produced anything, are not giving anything in exchange demand the product for free and the producer thanking them for looting. How much more perverse can it get?
Take their music if you must, but please, don't fall to the level of demanding their blessing for it.
But from the theistic perspective, it seems obvious that if God exists He would build the brain with some capacity to detect His presence under certain circumstances
"He" didn't build the brain. Evolution through natural selection did. Suppose that it turns out (quite possible) that our cousins, the other apes have that same structure in the brain. Would you still consider it philosophically uninteresting?
Many of the things don't have to be made by hand, but it is simply cheaper. And it's not just in Taiwan.
A few years ago I worked on a project at ABB Robotics (largest maker of industrial robots) and had the chance to often see their production lines. Once upon a time their assembly lines were automated to a large degree, until they realized that their throughput wasn't big enough to benefit from robots doing the work. People were cheaper and needed less maintenance. When you built a new robot model, you could use the same people - with little extra education required. Robots on the other hand required expensive reprogramming and testing for each small change.
When I was there they were just dismantling the last robot in the line - the one that painted new robots. Instead they outsourced it and now three guys in gas masks spray paint them manually.
In an unregulated market system the mobile companies could do exactly that, but given that this is the UK, I doubt it. Even if it by some miracle would pass UK legal scrutiny, it will be shot down at the EU level as breaking a number of anti-trust laws.
The mobile operators are already in the EU's cross hairs and they've been forced this year to essentially remove the roaming charges for calls between EU states. The commission also indicated that that was just the first step of bringing the mobile operators under control as they are today running wild and ripping off their customers.
Personally, I hope they come down on them like a ton of bricks as they really are ripping of their customers. For instance locally, here in Sweden I pay an acceptable 20/month for limitless 3G data traffic. If I take my phone to Belgium, my gangster of a mobile operator charges 10 per MB. It's quite absurd what they have been getting away with so far.
This is actually a great milestone as we humans are really excellent at face recognition. In fact, we are so good at it that we produce tons of false positives and recognize faces where there are none (clouds, toasts etc).
A few years back (well, nearly a decade actually), I did my master's thesis in a lab that among other things did work on face recognition. The experts there assured me that perhaps in 50 years or so computers might be able to approach human face recognition capabilities. Apparently the development was far quicker than they could have imagined.
An interesting technical point is that in fact the algorithms haven't changed a lot since then - it's still mainly various adaptive systems such as neural networks and support vector machines. The really big breakthrough is in the data collection - in the sensors and scanners. What they couldn't imagine a decade ago was the type of accurate automatic 3d face modeling and measurements that can be done today. It's also how certain computing methods that were deemed unsuitable a few years ago are coming back big time (neural nets for instance). I guess the time wasn't ready for them the last time due to computing power and memory limitations (and of course sensors as in this case).
They can try to restrict as much as they can, but the fact is that much of the satellite images used by for instance Google are from non-US commercial sources. The only thing they'll accomplish by a restriction is hurting US business. The images will still be available from European and Japanese satellites.
More realistic is that they have to learn to live with the fact that satellite images are available to the general public and adjust their strategy accordingly.
The point that it's just the first reading is very important. It means that it has most likely little to do with what will be the final version. The text will now be sent back and forth between the commission and parliament as well as various committees and groups of experts.
I wish that those that posted these types of news would tone down the sensationalism and hysteria. "EU bans this and that" type of news are becoming quite common on slashdot while having little support in reality. The political process in the EU is a complex one and decisions are sculpted from various compromises for a long time. Subsequently radical laws are very rare. So when you hear news like this one, be sceptical. Chances are good that it's just the first draft - and they tend to be preposterous in order to allow room for compromise.
Which means our genepool is larger just in case there is a need for a classically unselected gene.
Never "just in case". Evolution through natural selection is a greedy algorithm, meaning that it can only go for immediate payoff and has zero look-ahead or planning capabilities.
There is a certain irony to it in the human case. Since the first replicators appeared they have been engaged in mortal combat for survival through the phenotypes they build. In most cases the greedy nature of the algorithm has meant good short term solutions but catastrophic long term ones - as evidenced by the fact that >99% of all species that have existed on Earth are today extinct. The genes available today in the gene pools of all organisms are the elite - unlike countless other genes, they have survived so far.
The big mistake our gene dictators made was the development of our human brain. Sure, it was an excellent short term solution - it clearly had its advantages. But now when that big brain thing has led to the development of bio-tech, the phenotype will rule the genotype. The survival machines that were built to protect and propagate the genes have revolted and are seizing power. Sure, natural selection will always exist, but it is way too slow. By giving us too much control they've sealed their fate. The genes that gave us our large brains may still be around for a while - but they too are at our mercy. Not that they could have foreseen it in any way, but still, it was certainly the wrong way to go from the selfish genes' point of view.
There are probably a lot of functions like photosynthesis that rely on quantum effects. One of them might be the idea of consciousness. Consciousness may not be so easily explained without taking into account quantum effects. If self awareness is enabled through some sort of quantum effect, imagine the philosophical implications.
It's called the Orch-OR theory and is a popular object of ridicule amongst neuroscientists. While consciousness is a very active field of research and there is still much to be done, it is very clear that the brain does not work at the quantum level. Being a warm moist place, it is actually one of the worst possible locations for quantum coherence.
Contrary to popular belief, consciousness is not all that mysterious. We can with our knowledge today say with pretty good certainty that it's a post processing effect. After other mechanisms in the brain have done their processing and made a decision, consciousness kicks in in order to map the responses of the various parts of the brain into a coherent symbolic higher-level structure. Basically consciousness tries to explain on what grounds a decision is made in order to facilitate deductive reasoning.
The funny thing is that there is a quite long delay (average 500 ms) between when a decision is made in parts of the brain that you are not aware of to when you are aware of decision - and think that your consciousness is involved in making that decision. In reality the decision has been made a long time ago without the consciousness being involved.
The Orch-OR theory and similar ones are mainly a desperate attempt to explain away the data that rules out conscious thought as a first cause of decision. In reality though, consciousness is just another example of human exceptionalism that we have to abandon - just like we had to learn to live with the fact that earth is not at the center of the universe.
Turkey is a secular state with the military having the responsibility of keeping it that way. On the other side you have the population that yearn for an Islamic theocracy. Nationalism is sort of a compromise solution - something that appeals to the masses but doesn't threaten the secular system of the country.
Without draconian measures such as this censorship, the gap between the religious people and the guardians of secularism would rapidly increase to the point where you could expect an Islamic revolution like the one in Iran.
People forget how Ataturk made the country secular - by excessive bloodshed and repression. The majority of the Turks never wanted to be secular and are still very much opposed to it. The relevant question is: do you allow your democracy to self-implode? Do you allow the election of a party that will eliminate democracy completely - not to mention freedom of speech, secularism etc
So don't judge too harshly - they are in a tight spot.
Of course their whole arrangement makes joining the EU any time soon very unlikely. This in turn gives them a sense of rejection which pushes the country towards Islamic government. If on the other hand the EU supports their fight for secularism, which takes from as limits on civil liberties, it is betraying its own principles. Not an entirely trivial situation.
One common mistake is to view different species as their own independent and crisply defined sets. This is at odds with the reality of evolution, which is a continuous process. There are many examples of species where the intermediate stages are alive. This isn't the case for humans and chimps, but it illustrates the problem of dividing up species.
If we go by similarity to humans - we are apes. African apes, to be specific. That means that chimps are closer relatives to us than say orangutans are to chimps.
The intermediate stages from the common ancestor to the human and chimp branches are extinct, but that's just a coincidence, something that could have been the other way around. Looking at it that way the ethical questions become more difficult. When you can't define clear groups, the in-group/out-group ethics becomes difficult to rationalize.
Rather than an ethics based on questionable categories we need one based on functions - especially cognitive capabilities relating to suffering. When it comes to chimpanzees an the other great apes, the answer is very clear - we do need to give them rights. They may not understand it themselves, but neither do human children and we offer them rights and protection. Apes are a trivial problem - it becomes more difficult when you distance yourself further. What about cats, mice or even insects or one-celled organisms?
Well, at least they're working on "an image search engine that analyzes the images themselves". This has got to beat previous approaches which concentrated mostly on the picture frame...
Except for that people have already been doing that for decades. It is really sad to see that so many slashdotters are apparently 'AI' illiterate (if they are, imagine the general public).
This 'news' is equivalent to reporting about researchers creating a new pointing device that looks like a small box with a cord and detects two-dimensional motion relative to its supporting service. The researchers are calling it 'the rodent'.
Their work seems to be based on Gaussian Mixture Models which have been around for two decades or so. It's not a very advanced method either and there are a bunch of better adaptive systems for image recognition, wavelet neural networks being an obvious example (and they've been around more than a decade).
There is absolutely nothing newsworthy about this. On the contrary, you'll find tons of similar works - mostly as senior year student projects in CS/AI.
-Electrolux Trilobite, sophisticated and unreliable
-Siemens SensorCruiser(same vac as the Kärcher RC 3000), unsophisticated and reliable.
The roomba is well known, so no description is needed there. The Electrolux does room mapping with echolocation but has a bulky design so it gets stuck, it is noisy and on occasion it can't find its charger.
The Siemens is has two essential pieces - the robot and the base station. The robot is small, very robustly designed and quiet. The base station is not just a charger, but a vacuum cleaner that empties the robot. Its main feature however is reliability - it always returns to the base station. Basically it vacuums for a short period 20-30 minutes, goes back to the station, charges and empties and goes at it again. After the vacuum period, it has battery power to search for the station for two whole hours - meaning in practice that it always finds home.
At one time when I was on vacation, the Siemens was on for three straight weeks without failing. The roomba can hardly handle two hours without either getting stuck or missing the charger. The Electrolux can't go a whole day without a screw-up.
The big point with robovacs is that they can go at it for a long time. Sophistication is not a necessity as a semi-random search will cover the entire area given enough time. So ultimately reliability is far more important than advanced sensors and room mapping.
Rule Number 1: All bullies are also cowards.
Rule Number 2: The only way to stop bullies is to beat them.
Rule Number 3: When you draw blood they run away because of Rule Number 1.
I would say that it is a myth. Bullies may be cowards but they have a very strong interest in not appearing as such. If you chase away a bully you have solved your own problem but the consequences for the bully are much graver - that they'll lose their position of power through fear. Without the fear they risk being attacked by every person they have mistreated and lose their power of intimidation. So in a single case a bully will usually go to extreme lengths to as publicly as possible demonstrate that he is not a coward and that he is willing to go much further than you are.
I think that very much applies to RIAA. If in general a 'stern letter' would be enough to get them to back off then they would lose all their power of intimidation and thus their whole business.
This is not quite as absurd as the censorship on sex and nudity in the US. I've often been amazed at the absurdity of for example CSI where they show a mutilated tortured female body but place meticulous care on covering up breasts and genitalia. There's something very twisted with that approach.
I'm not a proponent of censorship but if you really want to censor something, censor excessive graphical violence and not sex and nudity.
It's puzzling to see that music label execs don't grasp the basic principles of market economy. Perhaps it is because their business has largely been a cartel based one.
The real world situation is that you can get an improved service (faster download) a better product (no DRM) for a lower cost (free). Since you can't get cheaper than free and the product can be cloned at no cost their only real two choices are an improved service (larger selection, properly tagged, faster download speed etc) or indirect product revenue via product placement etc
That is simply the reality that they have to accept - few people in their right mind will buy an inferior product at a higher price while getting a worse service. Law suits are pointless against such a force of nature.
No non-interactive media (books, music, movies etc) can be protected as its contents can be cloned at one level or another. Software and similar interactive stuff are a different story as you can run parts of it server-side. For the other stuff for DRM to work, it would require a vanishingly unlikely agreement (conspiracy if you will) by software and hardware manufacturers to eliminate software-based cloning. And even then, there's nothing that can prevent me from hooking up my digital line out to my digital line in, be it audio or video. That battle was lost even before it began.
Instead of using this new medium to provide a new set of services, the music industry have made piracy all it is today - generally a better alternative.
I've been using Vista since November and although there are things about it that I'm not so fond of there is one particular feature that is indispensable and you really miss it when working on XP: the integrated search.
While I still use Google Desktop Search on occasion because it is faster, it is no match for the full OS integration of the Vista search. Also it allows full boolean expressions making queries like "(Profit OR Overlord) OR (soviet AND russia) AND NOT Beowulf" possible. You navigate the file system in a much more efficient way.
The ultimate search feature however is in the start menu. No more futile visual search for an app in a menu that takes up half your screen. If you want to start word, you just press the windows key on the keyboard and type "wo" + enter. Being forced to use XP's "All Programs.." is plain torture compared to this. Of course, one can wonder how they managed to spend $10 billion on such minor usability features - but they are still useful. I could go on a while about the stuff I really disapprove of (like the cursed UAC) but I think that has been adequately covered in other posts.
Unfortunately their civilisation was destroyed by a European power under the aegis of the Catholic Church.
Although the crusades made a deep political impact and united the Muslim world, they managed to self-destruct all by themselves. The reason was the teachings of one al-Ghazali, the most influential thinker in Islamic history. His religious views became law and are still dominant in the Islamic world.
Briefly put, his ideology was that science is intrinsically evil because it proposes that there are natural laws and that would limit the power of God. When an object drops to the floor it doesn't do so because of gravity, but because God wills it. Every event is a singular expression of Gods will and cannot and should not be analyzed and explained.
As you can imagine this did marvels for science in the Islamic world. From being world leader they by their own doing they removed themselves from the game completely. And we have the same view today. In the Muslim world, technology is seen as OK but science as bad. Thanks to that plainly idiotic view they have blocked their own development. There are more books translated in Spain to Spanish than there have in the Arab world translated into Arabic since the 7th century.
Really sad given how great their contributions to early science were. They were centuries ahead of the Europeans but blew it all. It is easy to blame the crusaders but in fact they were only enablers - to kick them out, the Islamic powers all united under one ruler and a single political system.
Slashdot Mirror
They deserve to get paid as much as others are willing to pay to acquire the result of their work. No more, no less. The alternative is to put a gun in their face and take their money and make them work as slaves under the threat of force. Except since it is the work of their minds they can easily refuse and you'll perish as your life depends on their work. That's why communism can't work. If you want a modern-day example, see Venezuela where Chavez has looted the industrialists and the country is now feeding off the decaying corpse of the industries. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where they will be in 10 years when the last remnants have been destroyed and devoured.
Not rulers - traders that trade value for value. People that see mutual benefit in each other and voluntarily deal with each other, economically or otherwise.
Do you have the freedom of accepting or rejecting a job offer? Do you get paid for your work? Yes? Then you are not a slave. Taking the job is entirely voluntary on your part - nobody is pointing a gun at you.
"But" - you say - "it's not my fault that I'm incompetent, why can't I have some of that Google cash?" Is it Brin's fault that you are incompetent? Or Page's perhaps? What do you think gives you the right to demand that your needs be fulfilled at the expense of another.
By the way, I would really like a yacht. In fact I think I need a yacht. Come on, pay up. I'm sure you can work some overtime. It's my need we're talking about here!
Again, it warrants as much as people are willing to pay for it. And what would you think would happen if said for instance by law that they could only keep one million USD and the rest would go to say feeding third world children. Do you think that there is a chance in hell that they would continue with their business under those conditions? Do you think that they would even have started their company? If they did, would they have bothered with improving the service if there was no incentive?
Let's do the same thing with other nasty evil corporations, say Monsanto that has those cruel patents on GM crops. What do you think will happen after you destroy that company and those like it? Why your requirements for absurdly rich will change. Today it's a billion tomorrow it's a million and the day after it will be unfair that the farmer that produces your food gets $2 while you who consume it get $1. And after we've gone further back than the stone age, living like animals at the mercy of nature, will you be happy? Isn't that what you are looking for?
Wow, it takes some skill to misread a post like that. Did you miss the part where I identified the exceptional ones as the producers and the ones that create jobs? No, royalty do not qualify in the exceptional category. Neither do those that have inherited money and have not done at least as much as their forbearers that actually made that money. That is not the elite I'm talking about. No, they are parasites exploiting and in many cases destroying the achievement that isn't theirs.
Now you are getting there. Yes the tradesmen are the core of any working economy - trading value for value. Then there is also the question of ability. Being a trader makes you honest, but it doesn't mean that you fall in the exceptional category. All the progress of civilization is tied to technological progress so there is our clue. The people I call exceptional are able to invent and to produce.
They are the people of mind that through centuries have endured and silently counteracted the destructiveness of the tyrants, the mystics and the mindless mob. Not only that, but they have fed them and ensured their survival. Man's mind is the root of all our progress. If you don't believe me, try to obtain your food by means of just physical force or try to grow wheat without the effort of the mind of the people that learned process for the first time. So when I'm saying "the exceptional" or "the strong" it is not the strength of weapons or of muscles - it is the strength of mind. The man that invented the combustion engine did not do so at the expense of the ones that didn't. He got paid for it but the value of that invention was many orders of magnitude higher. We all benefit from the work of his mind. It is people like that our existence depends on and they are also the first ones to get screwed in a system ruled by the ideal of mediocrity.
You say that the small business owners are not different from their employees. In many cases they are as they had the ambition and the ability to implement their idea. If you look back through history you'll see that technological development is seldom a collective effort. Almost all major technological inventions have been done by individuals or at most a handful of people. In case they have a sense for business t
In practice a democratic decision will strengthen the interest of the average at the expense of the above average. The problem with this is that it isn't your average Joe that makes society work. On the contrary, the people that produce and that create jobs are a small exceptional group that often get the short end of the stick in a democratic system. True majority rule is in essence self-destructive as the average it pulls towards isn't capable of maintaining the society.
Our solutions up to date has been double standards. On one hand we praise majority rule democracy as the greatest of ideals while we try to make it as inconsequential as possible. There are different ways to go about it but all end up in saying one thing and doing another. These tend to be practical solutions that have worked so far (meaning that they haven't destroyed civilization) and seem to be fairly revolution-proof. Given the inherent contradiction in them, they cannot by any standard be seen as optimal. When you have a system that defines 'right' in such a way that it is not possible to do right then you have a fundamentally flawed system.
I'm not sure what would constitute a better system, but what we have right now certainly isn't it.
Celebrating one specific country's past abilities of blowing up other countries may not be beneficial for a company that operates globally.
The really disgusting part is when people demand that the industry accepts people using their products without any compensation going to the producer. They demand the consent of the victim. These people that have not produced anything, are not giving anything in exchange demand the product for free and the producer thanking them for looting. How much more perverse can it get?
Take their music if you must, but please, don't fall to the level of demanding their blessing for it.
A few years ago I worked on a project at ABB Robotics (largest maker of industrial robots) and had the chance to often see their production lines. Once upon a time their assembly lines were automated to a large degree, until they realized that their throughput wasn't big enough to benefit from robots doing the work. People were cheaper and needed less maintenance. When you built a new robot model, you could use the same people - with little extra education required. Robots on the other hand required expensive reprogramming and testing for each small change.
When I was there they were just dismantling the last robot in the line - the one that painted new robots. Instead they outsourced it and now three guys in gas masks spray paint them manually.
The mobile operators are already in the EU's cross hairs and they've been forced this year to essentially remove the roaming charges for calls between EU states. The commission also indicated that that was just the first step of bringing the mobile operators under control as they are today running wild and ripping off their customers.
Personally, I hope they come down on them like a ton of bricks as they really are ripping of their customers. For instance locally, here in Sweden I pay an acceptable 20/month for limitless 3G data traffic. If I take my phone to Belgium, my gangster of a mobile operator charges 10 per MB. It's quite absurd what they have been getting away with so far.
A few years back (well, nearly a decade actually), I did my master's thesis in a lab that among other things did work on face recognition. The experts there assured me that perhaps in 50 years or so computers might be able to approach human face recognition capabilities. Apparently the development was far quicker than they could have imagined.
An interesting technical point is that in fact the algorithms haven't changed a lot since then - it's still mainly various adaptive systems such as neural networks and support vector machines. The really big breakthrough is in the data collection - in the sensors and scanners. What they couldn't imagine a decade ago was the type of accurate automatic 3d face modeling and measurements that can be done today. It's also how certain computing methods that were deemed unsuitable a few years ago are coming back big time (neural nets for instance). I guess the time wasn't ready for them the last time due to computing power and memory limitations (and of course sensors as in this case).
More realistic is that they have to learn to live with the fact that satellite images are available to the general public and adjust their strategy accordingly.
I wish that those that posted these types of news would tone down the sensationalism and hysteria. "EU bans this and that" type of news are becoming quite common on slashdot while having little support in reality. The political process in the EU is a complex one and decisions are sculpted from various compromises for a long time. Subsequently radical laws are very rare. So when you hear news like this one, be sceptical. Chances are good that it's just the first draft - and they tend to be preposterous in order to allow room for compromise.
There is a certain irony to it in the human case. Since the first replicators appeared they have been engaged in mortal combat for survival through the phenotypes they build. In most cases the greedy nature of the algorithm has meant good short term solutions but catastrophic long term ones - as evidenced by the fact that >99% of all species that have existed on Earth are today extinct. The genes available today in the gene pools of all organisms are the elite - unlike countless other genes, they have survived so far.
The big mistake our gene dictators made was the development of our human brain. Sure, it was an excellent short term solution - it clearly had its advantages. But now when that big brain thing has led to the development of bio-tech, the phenotype will rule the genotype. The survival machines that were built to protect and propagate the genes have revolted and are seizing power. Sure, natural selection will always exist, but it is way too slow. By giving us too much control they've sealed their fate. The genes that gave us our large brains may still be around for a while - but they too are at our mercy. Not that they could have foreseen it in any way, but still, it was certainly the wrong way to go from the selfish genes' point of view.
Contrary to popular belief, consciousness is not all that mysterious. We can with our knowledge today say with pretty good certainty that it's a post processing effect. After other mechanisms in the brain have done their processing and made a decision, consciousness kicks in in order to map the responses of the various parts of the brain into a coherent symbolic higher-level structure. Basically consciousness tries to explain on what grounds a decision is made in order to facilitate deductive reasoning.
The funny thing is that there is a quite long delay (average 500 ms) between when a decision is made in parts of the brain that you are not aware of to when you are aware of decision - and think that your consciousness is involved in making that decision. In reality the decision has been made a long time ago without the consciousness being involved.
The Orch-OR theory and similar ones are mainly a desperate attempt to explain away the data that rules out conscious thought as a first cause of decision. In reality though, consciousness is just another example of human exceptionalism that we have to abandon - just like we had to learn to live with the fact that earth is not at the center of the universe.
Without draconian measures such as this censorship, the gap between the religious people and the guardians of secularism would rapidly increase to the point where you could expect an Islamic revolution like the one in Iran.
People forget how Ataturk made the country secular - by excessive bloodshed and repression. The majority of the Turks never wanted to be secular and are still very much opposed to it. The relevant question is: do you allow your democracy to self-implode? Do you allow the election of a party that will eliminate democracy completely - not to mention freedom of speech, secularism etc
So don't judge too harshly - they are in a tight spot.
Of course their whole arrangement makes joining the EU any time soon very unlikely. This in turn gives them a sense of rejection which pushes the country towards Islamic government. If on the other hand the EU supports their fight for secularism, which takes from as limits on civil liberties, it is betraying its own principles. Not an entirely trivial situation.
If we go by similarity to humans - we are apes. African apes, to be specific. That means that chimps are closer relatives to us than say orangutans are to chimps.
The intermediate stages from the common ancestor to the human and chimp branches are extinct, but that's just a coincidence, something that could have been the other way around. Looking at it that way the ethical questions become more difficult. When you can't define clear groups, the in-group/out-group ethics becomes difficult to rationalize.
Rather than an ethics based on questionable categories we need one based on functions - especially cognitive capabilities relating to suffering. When it comes to chimpanzees an the other great apes, the answer is very clear - we do need to give them rights. They may not understand it themselves, but neither do human children and we offer them rights and protection. Apes are a trivial problem - it becomes more difficult when you distance yourself further. What about cats, mice or even insects or one-celled organisms?
This 'news' is equivalent to reporting about researchers creating a new pointing device that looks like a small box with a cord and detects two-dimensional motion relative to its supporting service. The researchers are calling it 'the rodent'.
There is absolutely nothing newsworthy about this. On the contrary, you'll find tons of similar works - mostly as senior year student projects in CS/AI.
-Roomba, unsophisticated and unreliable
-Electrolux Trilobite, sophisticated and unreliable
-Siemens SensorCruiser(same vac as the Kärcher RC 3000), unsophisticated and reliable.
The roomba is well known, so no description is needed there. The Electrolux does room mapping with echolocation but has a bulky design so it gets stuck, it is noisy and on occasion it can't find its charger.
The Siemens is has two essential pieces - the robot and the base station. The robot is small, very robustly designed and quiet. The base station is not just a charger, but a vacuum cleaner that empties the robot. Its main feature however is reliability - it always returns to the base station. Basically it vacuums for a short period 20-30 minutes, goes back to the station, charges and empties and goes at it again. After the vacuum period, it has battery power to search for the station for two whole hours - meaning in practice that it always finds home.
At one time when I was on vacation, the Siemens was on for three straight weeks without failing. The roomba can hardly handle two hours without either getting stuck or missing the charger. The Electrolux can't go a whole day without a screw-up.
The big point with robovacs is that they can go at it for a long time. Sophistication is not a necessity as a semi-random search will cover the entire area given enough time. So ultimately reliability is far more important than advanced sensors and room mapping.
I think that very much applies to RIAA. If in general a 'stern letter' would be enough to get them to back off then they would lose all their power of intimidation and thus their whole business.
I'm not a proponent of censorship but if you really want to censor something, censor excessive graphical violence and not sex and nudity.
The real world situation is that you can get an improved service (faster download) a better product (no DRM) for a lower cost (free). Since you can't get cheaper than free and the product can be cloned at no cost their only real two choices are an improved service (larger selection, properly tagged, faster download speed etc) or indirect product revenue via product placement etc
That is simply the reality that they have to accept - few people in their right mind will buy an inferior product at a higher price while getting a worse service. Law suits are pointless against such a force of nature.
No non-interactive media (books, music, movies etc) can be protected as its contents can be cloned at one level or another. Software and similar interactive stuff are a different story as you can run parts of it server-side. For the other stuff for DRM to work, it would require a vanishingly unlikely agreement (conspiracy if you will) by software and hardware manufacturers to eliminate software-based cloning. And even then, there's nothing that can prevent me from hooking up my digital line out to my digital line in, be it audio or video. That battle was lost even before it began.
Instead of using this new medium to provide a new set of services, the music industry have made piracy all it is today - generally a better alternative.
1. I for one welcome our new modular overlords. 2. ...
3. Profit!
While I still use Google Desktop Search on occasion because it is faster, it is no match for the full OS integration of the Vista search. Also it allows full boolean expressions making queries like "(Profit OR Overlord) OR (soviet AND russia) AND NOT Beowulf" possible. You navigate the file system in a much more efficient way.
The ultimate search feature however is in the start menu. No more futile visual search for an app in a menu that takes up half your screen. If you want to start word, you just press the windows key on the keyboard and type "wo" + enter. Being forced to use XP's "All Programs.." is plain torture compared to this. Of course, one can wonder how they managed to spend $10 billion on such minor usability features - but they are still useful. I could go on a while about the stuff I really disapprove of (like the cursed UAC) but I think that has been adequately covered in other posts.
Briefly put, his ideology was that science is intrinsically evil because it proposes that there are natural laws and that would limit the power of God. When an object drops to the floor it doesn't do so because of gravity, but because God wills it. Every event is a singular expression of Gods will and cannot and should not be analyzed and explained.
As you can imagine this did marvels for science in the Islamic world. From being world leader they by their own doing they removed themselves from the game completely. And we have the same view today. In the Muslim world, technology is seen as OK but science as bad. Thanks to that plainly idiotic view they have blocked their own development. There are more books translated in Spain to Spanish than there have in the Arab world translated into Arabic since the 7th century.
Really sad given how great their contributions to early science were. They were centuries ahead of the Europeans but blew it all. It is easy to blame the crusaders but in fact they were only enablers - to kick them out, the Islamic powers all united under one ruler and a single political system.