I certainly appreciate that a lexer/parser generator can save me months of work. And as I mentioned in my original post, I'm using one. When I did my Google search for parser generators, I found several, and I chose the one that was public domain over BSD and GPL ones because the license makes it easy to use. I was unable to judge merit having not used any of them before, but ANTLR did not look markedly inferior to the alternatives. (Some lexer/parser generators, including ANTLR, require distributing a runtime with your application, not just the output code; thus the license is relevant. Bison/Flex was not an option as we are not using C).
I think you are overestimating my aversion to BSD code. Like I said, the situation where using BSD code would save me months of work has not yet come up (because there is more public domain code out there than you might think), and in that situation I would use it. Also, if our project had already incorporated some BSD code and therefore had precedent (approval from management/legal, a CREDITS file or equivalent to put the attribution in) I would be more comfortable.
The FOSS devs say "excuse me, you need to acknowledge us in your package", and your company says "oops, sorry. administrative oversight".
You left out the part where they fire me for exposing them to liability. And also the fact that I am not the kind of person who thinks violating the BSD license is fine just because there are no consequences. If I add some BSD code to this project, I want to ensure the license is followed. But I can't ensure that.
And you must admit that it's possible things could get uglier. For example, an IP holding company could buy the copyright to the code and start suing. I'll grant that's far-fetched, but stranger things have happened. The law is not something you want to mess around with just because you don't see how anything bad could possibly happen.
If there was a piece of BSD code that would save me months of work, I would probably use it. That situation hasn't yet occurred. But I would clear it with management first (and they'd probably send me to legal). I'm not going to go around copy-and-pasting such code willy-nilly. Public domain, on the other hand, is hassle free.
There are really no foolproof solutions; SSL's users can't judge the authenticity of certificates so asking them to verify anything isn't an option. Usable yet bulletproof security is still an unreachable holy grail. But I'd like to point out that you can still trust your SSL connection to Amazon as long as you really do trust all the people with certs in your trusted root list.
And I'd also like to point out that unless you manually verify the SSH keys using a seperate secure channel during your first connection to a host, SSH is vulnerable to attack at that time. Sure, SSH tells you you're insecure, but when you ignore it that doesn't help anything. And I'll wager *very* few people actually check their SSH keys properly.
SSL enables you to securely connect to anyone with a cert you trust on a moment's notice without a separate secure channel to enable key exchange; SSH doesn't replace that and neither do VPNs.
You have a good point. Also, organizations that pre-load their own root certs on their computers get the power to intercept SSL connections made from those computers. I never really thought about it before, but that means if I'm doing online banking at work, the IT department could read it all. Theoretically.
The protocol is not insecure; In order to enable the proxy to decrypt the SSL session, one of the endpoints must cooperate. It could work the same way with any of the protocols you mention.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for the awesomeness that is SQLite, and especially for putting it in the public domain. It's been the perfect base for the C# application I'm writing at work (via the equally excellent and also public domain System.Data.SQLite wrapper). The public domain license means I can use it without worrying about maintaining lists of attributions (such as required with the BSD license, and which, as a lowly developer, I can't guarantee will remain with my code forever, inevitably causing legal problems down the road).
In the future, I see many more C# applications using SQLite, especially after Microsoft releases C# 3.0. SQLite combined with C# 3.0's language-integrated query features will be killer.
As a developer on an internal project, I am reluctant to use even BSD licensed code. I have no problem with giving credit where credit is due, I just can't personally guarantee that it will happen. At the moment we don't have formal user documentation or any other good place to put the attribution required such that it will stick around. There's no possible way I can guarantee, when I put something in, that it will remain in the future. The code I'm writing, though it is internal for now, could end up anywhere in a few years. If anyone forgets to copy all the correct attributions when moving the code around, all of a sudden bam! You're illegal.
That's why I only use public domain code, of which a surprising amount exists. At the moment, I'm using SQLite and ANTLR (though v3 is moving to BSD...).
The wireless hype in the headline is just typical Slashdot summary sensationalism; don't blame the report for the deficiencies of Slashdot's editors. But of course the report does mention WiFi; what kind of report would it be if it ignored the most common technology in current municipal broadband deployments? I don't know what "business as usual" you're accusing them of; are you insinuating that this report was bought by supporters of WiFi over other municipal broadband possibilities? If so, they forgot to edit out sections like this:
Wireless offers a short-term cost advantage over wires. But we shouldn't think that wireless is a substitute for wires. As Jim Snider of the New America Foundation writes, "For a point to point link, the capacity of a single fiber optic cable is greater than the entire capacity of the radio spectrum...
And:
Households and businesses in cities that are touting low cost city-wide wireless are learning there are often additional hardware costs. Although Wi-Fi is installed in most laptops, and Wi-Fi cards are widely available for desktop computers, many users will require additional equipment to connect to outdoor wireless from the interior of their homes or businesses.
WiFi is hardly portrayed as a panacea, and other technologies are given equal time. I just don't see any systematic bias there.
The fact that the report doesn't go into detail about technical problems with WiFi deployment doesn't make it "vague". The report's major purpose is not to advocate any particular technology for Internet access, so a critique of Wi-Fi's problems is not directly relevant. This report is not a blueprint for constructing municipal WiFi; it is an advocacy piece for a policy of public ownership of infrastructure.
That said, overall the report is rather cautious about WiFi. It does in fact quote a 90-95% coverage rate (i.e. 5-10% no coverage, is that consistent with your experience?) and notes that mesh network solutions are proprietary. It also notes that WiMAX is really more suitable (though constrained by spectrum ownership issues) and really sounds much more optimistic overall about fiber.
The "hand-waving" and "analogies" you complain about are necessary evils because this document isn't aimed at Slashdotters. It is for city council members who care nothing of bandwidth and latency, spectrum and interference. But there's plenty of facts and hard data in there, especially in the case studies at the end.
P.S. You don't have to convince me that wide-area WiFi deployment is a bad idea, municipal or otherwise. It's obviously a terrible idea. You need far too many routers, mesh networking is a mess, it'll be obsolete in no time (WiMAX, other 4G), and as you say interference is impossible to avoid. Plus if there was already a commercial WiFi provider in my area, I'd never advocate pulling the carpet from under them with a tax-funded WiFi deployment. OTOH, municipal fiber vs. entrenched telecom monopolies makes all kinds of sense.
The article may be vague, but the report is quite specific and detailed. There are many case studies of publicly-owned communication infrastructures, some offering telephone services. There is also debunking of industry-funded studies claiming failures of projects which are actually succeeding.
As I read the report, I found myself constantly nodding my head. It sounds like it was written by a Slashdotter (but then edited for clarity). This report lays down in plain language every single good reason why communications infrastructure, including both wireless and fiber, should be publicly owned (not necessarily publicly operated). Every public official from city council members up to Congress needs to read and understand this report before they make policy decisions on these issues.
If only it was that easy. The real problem is that Word must without fail remain 100.0% compatible with every previous version, down to the pixel. The feature sets of WMF and SVG are not identical, and a converter with true 100% compatibility is not something anyone is going to whip up in a few days. It may not even be feasible. And after conversion, even if the document looks the same, the structure will be different. The way you edit it will change. The saved undo history will probably have to be thrown away. The interaction with other Word features like Track Changes might be different. etc etc...
People expect their documents to always look and work *exactly* the same, even though they do incredibly boneheaded things that end up relying on every feature and bug Word has ever had. For just one example, a relative of mine who will remain nameless typed out all his Word documents using tabs in place of carriage returns. That's right: between every paragraph, instead of pressing enter, he pressed tab to fill up lines until he got far enough down the page to start another paragraph. He centered text using this method too. Not a single carriage return in the entire document. What do you think that document will look like after *any* conversion at all? The precise to-the-pixel word-wrap decisions made by Word define everything about how that document looks. But if this person upgrades their Word and their documents are messed up, are they going to say "Boy I'm a dumbass, thanks Microsoft for showing me the error of my ways, I'll just retype all my documents now"? I think you know the answer.
This is why the OOXML spec is 6000 pages of hacks like 'autoSpaceLikeWord95' or 'lineWrapLikeWord6'. Not just to be obtuse; not as a grand conspiracy to hinder interoperability and shut out Open Office; not because Microsoft is incompetent. Because people demand uncompromising perfect backwards compatibility, and that's the only way to truly deliver it.
Well, I guess my speculation there is that node communication is too expensive, and putting the whole thing on one piece of silicon will help; also wide availability of such hardware will produce a lot more innovation in software. But you have a very good point. I'm not really familiar with the results of brain-modeling supercomputers. Do you know of any interesting research papers I could peruse?
This argument is tired. AI is massively parallel; as such it needs a lot more computing power than people today give it credit for. Yes, you could run AI on a 286, and you could simulate a GeForce 8800 too, if you were immortal and bored. But we're rather mortal and busy; we can't wait a lifetime to render a single frame of Half-Life 2. Just as you couldn't develop today's software on a 286, we're not going to be able to develop AI until we have computers suitable to run it at something approaching a decent speed, and today's computers just don't cut it.
The difference is that memory is interleaved with the processors. We're trying to eliminate the bottleneck between the discrete processor and its separate memory. You might even say that the processors are inside the memory. The individual processors might still be called Von Neumann machines, but when there are thousands of them inside a large bank of memory, the whole is something different.
First of all, if we implemented HAL today he would run at much, much less than 1/1000 real time. AI takes much more computational power than people like you give it credit for, which is why we haven't developed it yet. Just by looking at the brain you can derive that it is massively parallel and worse, memory bandwidth intensive. It is just not a good fit for today's computer architectures.
Secondly, imagine trying to develop today's software on a 286. It's theoretically possible to run all of today's software on such a system at 1/1000 real time or worse, but developing it would be practically impossible. When you're developing for a 286, you use completely different programming tools and techniques. If all you had was 286s, you wouldn't even get the *idea* to develop the kinds of software we have today. Until we get the kinds of computers that are suitable to run AI, we're not going to develop AI either.
Re:real AI is a long way off
on
Marvin Minsky On AI
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Personally I don't think it's quantum computers that will be the breakthrough, but simply a different architecture for conventional computers. Let me go on a little tangent here.
Now that we've reached the limits of the Von Neumann architecture, we're starting to see a new wave of innovation in CPU design. The Cell is part of that, but also the stuff ATI and NVIDIA are doing is also very interesting. Instead of one monolithic processor connected to a giant memory through a tiny bottleneck, processors of the future will be a grid of processing elements interleaved with embedded memory in a network structure. Almost like a Beowulf cluster on a chip.
People are worried about how conventional programs will scale to these new architectures, but I believe they won't have to. Code monkeys won't be writing code to spawn thousands of cooperating threads to run the logic of a C++ application faster. Instead, PhDs will write specialized libraries to leverage all that parallel processing power for specific algorithms. You'll have a raytracing library, an image processing library, an FFT library, etc. These specialized libraries will have no problem sponging up all the excess computing resources, while your traditional software continues to run on just two or three traditional cores.
Back on the subject of AI, my theory is that these highly parallel architectures will be much more suited to simulating the highly parallel human brain. They will excel at the kinds pattern matching tasks our brains eat for breakfast. Computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing; all of these will be highly amenable to parallelization. And it is these applications which will eventually prove the worth of non-traditional architectures like Intel's 80-core chip. It may still be a long time before the sentient computer is unveiled, but I think we will soon finally start seeing real-world AI applications like decent automated translation, image labeling, and usable stereo vision for robot navigation. Furthermore, I predict that Google will be on the forefront of this new AI revolution, developing new algorithms to truly understand web content to reject spam and improve rankings.
Your comment ignores the fact that wireless is already a heavily regulated industry. Any industry that is heavily regulated is prone to developing problems. The correct libertarian solution is to remove the legislation, but the chances of that actually happening in this case are exactly zero. Given that, a libertarian can, without ignoring his/her conscience, support changes to the regulations that keep the market as close to fair as possible.
Have you visited ABC.com or NBC.com lately? Actually, I wouldn't blame you for missing it, because they haven't exactly been sounding the trumpets about this. They've buried it under piles of throwaway interview clips and crapisodes, I mean webisodes. But if you click around for a while, you'll eventually come across the fabled Full-Episode player, where you can actually, really, right now watch the entire current season run of all of ABC and NBC shows, free with ads.
Ignoring the player app (a typical Flash monstrosity), ABC is actually doing everything right: There are 3-4 commercials per show, which you can choose to watch at any time (by skipping forward). Some commercials are longer than 30 seconds; if you're interested you can keep watching it, but if not you can skip the rest! Once you've watched a commercial, that part of the show is "unlocked", so you never have to watch the same commercial twice (Hallelujah!). It's actually possible to watch all the commercials upfront and then see the entire show with no breaks.
It's amazing to me that this made it through the corporate innovation-crushing machine. If ABC's player had a decent full-screen mode, and better quality video, it would basically be my perfect ad-supported-TV-watching experience.
Remember Google's arguments about how they would rather put up with China's censorship than leave Chinese citizens without access to Google? They'll never revoke Belgian citizens' access over something as small as this. Unfortunately.
It's not magic, it's just the case that your presence causes people to pay more attention to what they are doing to their machines. The mere presence of a guru modifies their behavior even before you tell them to do anything, and in the case of mysterious computer problems even the slightest change of user behavior can have huge effects, possibly even resulting in a permanent fix to the problem (especially if the problem was simply a lack of attention in the first place, as is so often the case). It happens to me too and I'm guessing a significant percentage of the rest of the Slashdot population.
As for the alleged lack of peer review, that's the standard defense of wackos and nutjobs, and rarely true. I've heard of these guys before; it's not like they haven't gotten any exposure in the scientific community. They are just not very convincing. If they could demonstrate a mechanism, or harness their purported effect to actually *do* something, people would become interested.
The future is now, and the spaghetti is Windows. Microsoft admits that no one person understands Windows. The real future of operating systems is virtualization. If Microsoft's Windows department has anyone with a lick of sense in charge, the next version of Windows will be a ground-up new operating system (Singularity), with legacy apps and drivers running in an included virtualized copy of Windows Vista, exactly like Parallels in Coherence mode.
I don't think you have to worry about Wal-Mart monopolizing the online movie business. If the studios ever come out with a download service of their own, that's when you should start to worry. But they would never be stupid enough to hand Wal-Mart as much power online as they already have (and are resented for) in the offline business of selling movies.
There is no need for lawmakers to "go after" DRM; it is only necessary for them to stop protecting it. It's ironic: these countries are "calling" for Apple to make it possible to play iTunes files on other hardware, when software to enable this already exists. It's called myFairTunes6. If it was simply made legal, then problem solved!
Imagine a country in which it was legal to make and even sell software/hardware for the explicit purpose of breaking DRM for interoperability purposes. Software companies could openly employ DRM-breakers like DVD Jon and muslix64. You could go to the store and buy a copy of DeCSS or BackupHDDVD or myFairTunes6, only with user-friendly interfaces developed by paid coders. With the full resources of a completely legal software/hardware company at the disposal of DRM-breakers, it is quite obvious that *no* form of DRM would stand a chance.
This is why I don't understand Jimbo's decision. The current system works. When I go to Wikipedia, I am almost always surprised by the *lack* of commercially motivated worthless links. There may be some links that were added by bots, but Wikipedia *always* edits out the ones that aren't genuinely useful. As far as I can tell, there is no problem to solve. Maybe it takes a lot of work to filter all the spam links, but that work is successful.
I actually am not too worried about this though. I think Google is smarter than people give it credit for, and doesn't completely ignore every nofollow link. If I was writing Google I would have some sort of per-site indicator of how trustworthy nofollow links really were, and if they were generally pretty good I'd give them some weight anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I certainly appreciate that a lexer/parser generator can save me months of work. And as I mentioned in my original post, I'm using one. When I did my Google search for parser generators, I found several, and I chose the one that was public domain over BSD and GPL ones because the license makes it easy to use. I was unable to judge merit having not used any of them before, but ANTLR did not look markedly inferior to the alternatives. (Some lexer/parser generators, including ANTLR, require distributing a runtime with your application, not just the output code; thus the license is relevant. Bison/Flex was not an option as we are not using C).
I think you are overestimating my aversion to BSD code. Like I said, the situation where using BSD code would save me months of work has not yet come up (because there is more public domain code out there than you might think), and in that situation I would use it. Also, if our project had already incorporated some BSD code and therefore had precedent (approval from management/legal, a CREDITS file or equivalent to put the attribution in) I would be more comfortable.
And you must admit that it's possible things could get uglier. For example, an IP holding company could buy the copyright to the code and start suing. I'll grant that's far-fetched, but stranger things have happened. The law is not something you want to mess around with just because you don't see how anything bad could possibly happen.
If there was a piece of BSD code that would save me months of work, I would probably use it. That situation hasn't yet occurred. But I would clear it with management first (and they'd probably send me to legal). I'm not going to go around copy-and-pasting such code willy-nilly. Public domain, on the other hand, is hassle free.
There are really no foolproof solutions; SSL's users can't judge the authenticity of certificates so asking them to verify anything isn't an option. Usable yet bulletproof security is still an unreachable holy grail. But I'd like to point out that you can still trust your SSL connection to Amazon as long as you really do trust all the people with certs in your trusted root list.
And I'd also like to point out that unless you manually verify the SSH keys using a seperate secure channel during your first connection to a host, SSH is vulnerable to attack at that time. Sure, SSH tells you you're insecure, but when you ignore it that doesn't help anything. And I'll wager *very* few people actually check their SSH keys properly.
SSL enables you to securely connect to anyone with a cert you trust on a moment's notice without a separate secure channel to enable key exchange; SSH doesn't replace that and neither do VPNs.
You have a good point. Also, organizations that pre-load their own root certs on their computers get the power to intercept SSL connections made from those computers. I never really thought about it before, but that means if I'm doing online banking at work, the IT department could read it all. Theoretically.
The protocol is not insecure; In order to enable the proxy to decrypt the SSL session, one of the endpoints must cooperate. It could work the same way with any of the protocols you mention.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for the awesomeness that is SQLite, and especially for putting it in the public domain. It's been the perfect base for the C# application I'm writing at work (via the equally excellent and also public domain System.Data.SQLite wrapper). The public domain license means I can use it without worrying about maintaining lists of attributions (such as required with the BSD license, and which, as a lowly developer, I can't guarantee will remain with my code forever, inevitably causing legal problems down the road).
In the future, I see many more C# applications using SQLite, especially after Microsoft releases C# 3.0. SQLite combined with C# 3.0's language-integrated query features will be killer.
As a developer on an internal project, I am reluctant to use even BSD licensed code. I have no problem with giving credit where credit is due, I just can't personally guarantee that it will happen. At the moment we don't have formal user documentation or any other good place to put the attribution required such that it will stick around. There's no possible way I can guarantee, when I put something in, that it will remain in the future. The code I'm writing, though it is internal for now, could end up anywhere in a few years. If anyone forgets to copy all the correct attributions when moving the code around, all of a sudden bam! You're illegal.
That's why I only use public domain code, of which a surprising amount exists. At the moment, I'm using SQLite and ANTLR (though v3 is moving to BSD...).
The fact that the report doesn't go into detail about technical problems with WiFi deployment doesn't make it "vague". The report's major purpose is not to advocate any particular technology for Internet access, so a critique of Wi-Fi's problems is not directly relevant. This report is not a blueprint for constructing municipal WiFi; it is an advocacy piece for a policy of public ownership of infrastructure.
That said, overall the report is rather cautious about WiFi. It does in fact quote a 90-95% coverage rate (i.e. 5-10% no coverage, is that consistent with your experience?) and notes that mesh network solutions are proprietary. It also notes that WiMAX is really more suitable (though constrained by spectrum ownership issues) and really sounds much more optimistic overall about fiber.
The "hand-waving" and "analogies" you complain about are necessary evils because this document isn't aimed at Slashdotters. It is for city council members who care nothing of bandwidth and latency, spectrum and interference. But there's plenty of facts and hard data in there, especially in the case studies at the end.
P.S. You don't have to convince me that wide-area WiFi deployment is a bad idea, municipal or otherwise. It's obviously a terrible idea. You need far too many routers, mesh networking is a mess, it'll be obsolete in no time (WiMAX, other 4G), and as you say interference is impossible to avoid. Plus if there was already a commercial WiFi provider in my area, I'd never advocate pulling the carpet from under them with a tax-funded WiFi deployment. OTOH, municipal fiber vs. entrenched telecom monopolies makes all kinds of sense.
The article may be vague, but the report is quite specific and detailed. There are many case studies of publicly-owned communication infrastructures, some offering telephone services. There is also debunking of industry-funded studies claiming failures of projects which are actually succeeding.
As I read the report, I found myself constantly nodding my head. It sounds like it was written by a Slashdotter (but then edited for clarity). This report lays down in plain language every single good reason why communications infrastructure, including both wireless and fiber, should be publicly owned (not necessarily publicly operated). Every public official from city council members up to Congress needs to read and understand this report before they make policy decisions on these issues.
If only it was that easy. The real problem is that Word must without fail remain 100.0% compatible with every previous version, down to the pixel. The feature sets of WMF and SVG are not identical, and a converter with true 100% compatibility is not something anyone is going to whip up in a few days. It may not even be feasible. And after conversion, even if the document looks the same, the structure will be different. The way you edit it will change. The saved undo history will probably have to be thrown away. The interaction with other Word features like Track Changes might be different. etc etc...
People expect their documents to always look and work *exactly* the same, even though they do incredibly boneheaded things that end up relying on every feature and bug Word has ever had. For just one example, a relative of mine who will remain nameless typed out all his Word documents using tabs in place of carriage returns. That's right: between every paragraph, instead of pressing enter, he pressed tab to fill up lines until he got far enough down the page to start another paragraph. He centered text using this method too. Not a single carriage return in the entire document. What do you think that document will look like after *any* conversion at all? The precise to-the-pixel word-wrap decisions made by Word define everything about how that document looks. But if this person upgrades their Word and their documents are messed up, are they going to say "Boy I'm a dumbass, thanks Microsoft for showing me the error of my ways, I'll just retype all my documents now"? I think you know the answer.
This is why the OOXML spec is 6000 pages of hacks like 'autoSpaceLikeWord95' or 'lineWrapLikeWord6'. Not just to be obtuse; not as a grand conspiracy to hinder interoperability and shut out Open Office; not because Microsoft is incompetent. Because people demand uncompromising perfect backwards compatibility, and that's the only way to truly deliver it.
Well, I guess my speculation there is that node communication is too expensive, and putting the whole thing on one piece of silicon will help; also wide availability of such hardware will produce a lot more innovation in software. But you have a very good point. I'm not really familiar with the results of brain-modeling supercomputers. Do you know of any interesting research papers I could peruse?
This argument is tired. AI is massively parallel; as such it needs a lot more computing power than people today give it credit for. Yes, you could run AI on a 286, and you could simulate a GeForce 8800 too, if you were immortal and bored. But we're rather mortal and busy; we can't wait a lifetime to render a single frame of Half-Life 2. Just as you couldn't develop today's software on a 286, we're not going to be able to develop AI until we have computers suitable to run it at something approaching a decent speed, and today's computers just don't cut it.
The difference is that memory is interleaved with the processors. We're trying to eliminate the bottleneck between the discrete processor and its separate memory. You might even say that the processors are inside the memory. The individual processors might still be called Von Neumann machines, but when there are thousands of them inside a large bank of memory, the whole is something different.
First of all, if we implemented HAL today he would run at much, much less than 1/1000 real time. AI takes much more computational power than people like you give it credit for, which is why we haven't developed it yet. Just by looking at the brain you can derive that it is massively parallel and worse, memory bandwidth intensive. It is just not a good fit for today's computer architectures.
Secondly, imagine trying to develop today's software on a 286. It's theoretically possible to run all of today's software on such a system at 1/1000 real time or worse, but developing it would be practically impossible. When you're developing for a 286, you use completely different programming tools and techniques. If all you had was 286s, you wouldn't even get the *idea* to develop the kinds of software we have today. Until we get the kinds of computers that are suitable to run AI, we're not going to develop AI either.
Personally I don't think it's quantum computers that will be the breakthrough, but simply a different architecture for conventional computers. Let me go on a little tangent here.
Now that we've reached the limits of the Von Neumann architecture, we're starting to see a new wave of innovation in CPU design. The Cell is part of that, but also the stuff ATI and NVIDIA are doing is also very interesting. Instead of one monolithic processor connected to a giant memory through a tiny bottleneck, processors of the future will be a grid of processing elements interleaved with embedded memory in a network structure. Almost like a Beowulf cluster on a chip.
People are worried about how conventional programs will scale to these new architectures, but I believe they won't have to. Code monkeys won't be writing code to spawn thousands of cooperating threads to run the logic of a C++ application faster. Instead, PhDs will write specialized libraries to leverage all that parallel processing power for specific algorithms. You'll have a raytracing library, an image processing library, an FFT library, etc. These specialized libraries will have no problem sponging up all the excess computing resources, while your traditional software continues to run on just two or three traditional cores.
Back on the subject of AI, my theory is that these highly parallel architectures will be much more suited to simulating the highly parallel human brain. They will excel at the kinds pattern matching tasks our brains eat for breakfast. Computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing; all of these will be highly amenable to parallelization. And it is these applications which will eventually prove the worth of non-traditional architectures like Intel's 80-core chip. It may still be a long time before the sentient computer is unveiled, but I think we will soon finally start seeing real-world AI applications like decent automated translation, image labeling, and usable stereo vision for robot navigation. Furthermore, I predict that Google will be on the forefront of this new AI revolution, developing new algorithms to truly understand web content to reject spam and improve rankings.
This doesn't help immediately, but Firefox is taking the lead in developing standards for offline web applications.
Your comment ignores the fact that wireless is already a heavily regulated industry. Any industry that is heavily regulated is prone to developing problems. The correct libertarian solution is to remove the legislation, but the chances of that actually happening in this case are exactly zero. Given that, a libertarian can, without ignoring his/her conscience, support changes to the regulations that keep the market as close to fair as possible.
Have you visited ABC.com or NBC.com lately? Actually, I wouldn't blame you for missing it, because they haven't exactly been sounding the trumpets about this. They've buried it under piles of throwaway interview clips and crapisodes, I mean webisodes. But if you click around for a while, you'll eventually come across the fabled Full-Episode player, where you can actually, really, right now watch the entire current season run of all of ABC and NBC shows, free with ads.
Ignoring the player app (a typical Flash monstrosity), ABC is actually doing everything right: There are 3-4 commercials per show, which you can choose to watch at any time (by skipping forward). Some commercials are longer than 30 seconds; if you're interested you can keep watching it, but if not you can skip the rest! Once you've watched a commercial, that part of the show is "unlocked", so you never have to watch the same commercial twice (Hallelujah!). It's actually possible to watch all the commercials upfront and then see the entire show with no breaks.
It's amazing to me that this made it through the corporate innovation-crushing machine. If ABC's player had a decent full-screen mode, and better quality video, it would basically be my perfect ad-supported-TV-watching experience.
Remember Google's arguments about how they would rather put up with China's censorship than leave Chinese citizens without access to Google? They'll never revoke Belgian citizens' access over something as small as this. Unfortunately.
It's not magic, it's just the case that your presence causes people to pay more attention to what they are doing to their machines. The mere presence of a guru modifies their behavior even before you tell them to do anything, and in the case of mysterious computer problems even the slightest change of user behavior can have huge effects, possibly even resulting in a permanent fix to the problem (especially if the problem was simply a lack of attention in the first place, as is so often the case). It happens to me too and I'm guessing a significant percentage of the rest of the Slashdot population.
As for the alleged lack of peer review, that's the standard defense of wackos and nutjobs, and rarely true. I've heard of these guys before; it's not like they haven't gotten any exposure in the scientific community. They are just not very convincing. If they could demonstrate a mechanism, or harness their purported effect to actually *do* something, people would become interested.
The future is now, and the spaghetti is Windows. Microsoft admits that no one person understands Windows. The real future of operating systems is virtualization. If Microsoft's Windows department has anyone with a lick of sense in charge, the next version of Windows will be a ground-up new operating system (Singularity), with legacy apps and drivers running in an included virtualized copy of Windows Vista, exactly like Parallels in Coherence mode.
I don't think you have to worry about Wal-Mart monopolizing the online movie business. If the studios ever come out with a download service of their own, that's when you should start to worry. But they would never be stupid enough to hand Wal-Mart as much power online as they already have (and are resented for) in the offline business of selling movies.
There is no need for lawmakers to "go after" DRM; it is only necessary for them to stop protecting it. It's ironic: these countries are "calling" for Apple to make it possible to play iTunes files on other hardware, when software to enable this already exists. It's called myFairTunes6. If it was simply made legal, then problem solved!
Imagine a country in which it was legal to make and even sell software/hardware for the explicit purpose of breaking DRM for interoperability purposes. Software companies could openly employ DRM-breakers like DVD Jon and muslix64. You could go to the store and buy a copy of DeCSS or BackupHDDVD or myFairTunes6, only with user-friendly interfaces developed by paid coders. With the full resources of a completely legal software/hardware company at the disposal of DRM-breakers, it is quite obvious that *no* form of DRM would stand a chance.
This is why I don't understand Jimbo's decision. The current system works. When I go to Wikipedia, I am almost always surprised by the *lack* of commercially motivated worthless links. There may be some links that were added by bots, but Wikipedia *always* edits out the ones that aren't genuinely useful. As far as I can tell, there is no problem to solve. Maybe it takes a lot of work to filter all the spam links, but that work is successful.
I actually am not too worried about this though. I think Google is smarter than people give it credit for, and doesn't completely ignore every nofollow link. If I was writing Google I would have some sort of per-site indicator of how trustworthy nofollow links really were, and if they were generally pretty good I'd give them some weight anyway.