Offtopic, but I found this article in the sacramento bee about American men seeking brides in Russia fascinating: http://www.sacbee.com/news/ projects/brides/day2_01.html. A large number of the men work in the computer industry. Coincidence?
Bacteria, virii, etc. may be annoying, but they only adapt under evolutionary forces; medical science has been advancing fast enough to keep ahead of them, and I expect it to continue doing so.
I think you, and the panelists underestimate the resilence of biological life. Biological life has been around for a long time; life forms have been grappling and competing with each other, filling up evolutionary niches, and generally doing what they do best: living.
Biological life isn't about to roll over and give way to artificial life -- in fact biological life has evolved to be exquisitely suited to its environment and to be extremely tenacious. In my opinion, biological life will have an edge over artificial life.
What worries me isn't really the fact that artificial life will be possible, but that the ability to engineer lifeforms may become ubiquitous; whether these lifeforms are artificial or biologically engineered viruses is, in my opinion, an unimportant distinction.
The solution will have to be social rather than technological. But as with all social change, there will be a period of immense upheaval -- so hold on tight, we're in for a rough ride.
What? Why was this embarrassing? It does seem unclear whether biological machinery is inherently better at defense or offense, since there appear to be no perfect immune systems in nature, nor are there any microbes that invariably win against immune systems.
It's embarrassing because while Merkle was calling for greater research in nanotech to understand whether it gave an advantage to the offense or defense, he had apparently not bothered to find out whether the existing bioweapons gave an advantage to the offense or defense.
I am sure many more will post a lot, since there were a lot of people there who, not to make a stereotype, looked like they read slashdot.
On the contrary, I was quite pleasantly surprised by the diversity of the audience who turned up. They were not stereotypical "geeks" (whatever that means) -- the audience was very diverse in terms of age, ethnicity and gender.
Ralph Merkele, a nanotech man, made some excellent comments on offensive and defensve uses of new inventions. The idea being that an innovation that is primarily defensive (ie: a castle) is good, while offensive developments (the atom bomb) are bad. But his best point came when refuting Bill Joy's worries. He spoke about a centralized reproductive process, saying that if replecators were designed to recieve their genetic "code" from a central location, they would be rendered completely benign since that code could be changed at will.
Merkle was actually a pioneer in cryptography. He has a website here. I'm not really convinced by Merkle's arguments. The distinction between "offensive and defensive" weapons seems kind of bogus to me -- there's a saying that the best defense is a strong offense, and to make an example, in terms of nuclear arms, the threat of offense has served as a defense.
The best defense to me seems to be social ones rather than technological ones. We have to, as a species, learn to deal with these new challenges, to grow up ethically, so to speak. We've succesfully (I hope) navigated the threat of nuclear destruction, with much pain and suffering in between, and the greatest danger seems to me that this be repeated with the advent of machine life, before we learn as a species to deal with this maturely.
I don't quite buy Joy's arguments either. I don't really see how self-replicating nano-machines present a qualitatively different threat from existing biological weapons. But yes, the danger will come if the ability to create such machines is widespread so that anybody can build one on his desktop.
He spoke about a centralized reproductive process, saying that if replecators were designed to recieve their genetic "code" from a central location, they would be rendered completely benign since that code could be changed at will
Not convincing either. Some people will try to put the code on the machines. What happens then?
On a final note, I couldn't belive how RUDE some of the audience was.
Yes, but I thought it was also a good thing that the audience wasn't overawed by the panel.
A browser is really like an operating system and more: it has to enfore a security policy, provide an object model to running programs (e.g. javascript), it has to run multiple pages (analogous to processes) at a time, crashes in one page should not crash another, one page should not be able to read the contents of another,etc. etc.
Browsers really have to be written with the same rigorous approach taken towards Operating System design; unfortunately, there isn't much, if any, theory on how to write a browser -- browsers are written in a very ad hoc manner.
The Advogato thing is not a joke. Andover cleverly timed their harrasment of Advogato to conincide with April fools, so that no one would believe them when they cried for help. This is despicable.
The behemoth-ness of Origin and Electronic Arts has crippled his ability to produce truly great games.
Oh come on. He could have seen what was coming from a million miles away, but he gave in to greed and sold Origin to (cookie-cutter, make money now, bottom-line is all that matters) EA anyway.
Also check out the stanford prison experiment: www.prisonexp.org The ability of people, experimenters included, to get caught up in games of control is chilling.
Breaking up Microsoft will have little effect on its day-to-day business. Sure, the overhead will increase, but I don't think it'll help foster competition. It shouldn't be allowed to unfairly push manufacturers, but breaking it up will have no effect on all this
MS does some good things, but it would be better for the marketplace if MS were broken up. We might even see MS Word and IE for Linux and other platforms.
Correct me if I'm wrong but, aren't there many precedents that have said that content providers such as Yahoo, AOL, whatever, CANNOT be held responsible for content posted to their website as long as they aren't monitoring for it and take a laissez faire hands off approach. The second they start monitoring their stuff for illegal/whatever they become liable for what they miss.
The game companies claim that Yahoo directly profits from the sale of bootleg games sold on their auctions. If that were the case, their role would be much more like a bookstore or a computer store than a neutral content carrier, and it would be reasonable to require that they police their auction boards.
However, I just looked through Yahoo's auction policies, and it seems that they do not charge any auctions fees nor get a cut from the transaction, so the game companies suing Yahoo are on much shakier ground. (Ebay on the other hand does get a cut from the transaction, so they do have to police their boards).
it isn't redundant unless it's been said ... A warning like that needs to be at the top
It has already been said, and a warning is at the top. It's called the article in question.
From what I've read thus far, I like Lynda because she seems to understand the realities of the situation while still hoping for a real solution.
As other people have pointed out in the thread, Lynda does not practice what she preaches. Liking her just because she's smart enough to make a populist remark in an interview seems a little too naive, especially given her previous track record (as you point out).
However, Open Source goes a long way to helping out the other three goals: if you can simply recompile, or patch the source, what could be more open and friendly than that? It's additional and optional, and programmer-friendly. No one else should care, except that they might get an enhanced product out of the deal. But we'll see how Netscape 6 is soon enough...
I'd like to hear about web design, as in the design of usable and aesthetic web sites. Not more open-standards/open-source rah rahing. Turning everything into yet another hymn in praise of open-source is extremely boring, and saying that she's cool and you like her just because she's smart enough to say that she likes open source in an interview is extremely superficial.
btw, I moderated the other post you were talking about down as redundant (the moderation was undone after I posted of course), because it really doesn't contribute to the discussion. To get moderator access, you need to post/reload less often Slashdot - I haven't been reading Slashdot much the past few days so I've some moderator points now.
Of course, if he had created an account and called himself "matthewskala", no one would have doubted him, when an account name actually has no real authentication value
To consider a computer to truly be conscious, I would expect it to be able to be self-aware, in the sense that it could independently evolve its own programming.
There are methods of evolving computer programs e.g. genetic programming. In fact, the inventor of genetic algorithms, John Holland, will be speaking, and so will John Koza, the inventor of genetic programming.
Countries with stricter porn laws, for example, will need to code computers to recognize the naked human (animal?) form, and ban such images/sites.
Believe it or not, this is actually an area of research in computer vision. e.g. See 'Naked people skin filter'. The opportunity for commercial exploitation of an effective porn search tool is... great.
The inter-machine communication requirements for genetic programming are low. Basically each machine can operate independently, and at the end of each generation, transmit only the fitness of each individual evaluated back to the server - very little data has to be sent over the network. See http://www.genetic-programming.com/machine1000.htm l
In fact, they're using a very standard 100Mbps ethernet, while my impression is that the IBM supercomputer will be much more tightly coupled. The GP cluster is rate at 0.37 Thz, about the same as the IBM machine.
On a side note, genetic programming will be an ideal for distributed.net; it's disappointing that GP isn't being attempted there.
If the encrypted list can be used by the software, the software must contain the means by which the list can be decrypted i.e. the decryption key. Which implies that the software must be crackable, however good your programmers were.
I guess there's another way around this: hash the urls.
Slashdot Mirror
Offtopic, but I found this article in the sacramento bee about American men seeking brides in Russia fascinating: http://www.sacbee.com/news/ projects/brides/day2_01.html. A large number of the men work in the computer industry. Coincidence?
====
Bacteria, virii, etc. may be annoying, but they only adapt under evolutionary forces; medical science has been advancing fast enough to keep ahead of them, and I expect it to continue doing so.
I think you, and the panelists underestimate the resilence of biological life. Biological life has been around for a long time; life forms have been grappling and competing with each other, filling up evolutionary niches, and generally doing what they do best: living.
Biological life isn't about to roll over and give way to artificial life -- in fact biological life has evolved to be exquisitely suited to its environment and to be extremely tenacious. In my opinion, biological life will have an edge over artificial life.
What worries me isn't really the fact that artificial life will be possible, but that the ability to engineer lifeforms may become ubiquitous; whether these lifeforms are artificial or biologically engineered viruses is, in my opinion, an unimportant distinction.
The solution will have to be social rather than technological. But as with all social change, there will be a period of immense upheaval -- so hold on tight, we're in for a rough ride.
What? Why was this embarrassing? It does seem unclear whether biological machinery is inherently better at defense or offense, since there appear to be no perfect immune systems in nature, nor are there any microbes that invariably win against immune systems.
It's embarrassing because while Merkle was calling for greater research in nanotech to understand whether it gave an advantage to the offense or defense, he had apparently not bothered to find out whether the existing bioweapons gave an advantage to the offense or defense.
Which processor would be better for realtime, high end mathematical computations?
High end mathematical computations are unlikely to run in real time on any processor. Do you really mean games?
I am sure many more will post a lot, since there were a lot of people there who, not to make a stereotype, looked like they read slashdot.
On the contrary, I was quite pleasantly surprised by the diversity of the audience who turned up. They were not stereotypical "geeks" (whatever that means) -- the audience was very diverse in terms of age, ethnicity and gender.
Ralph Merkele, a nanotech man, made some excellent comments on offensive and defensve uses of new inventions. The idea being that an innovation that is primarily defensive (ie: a castle) is good, while offensive developments (the atom bomb) are bad. But his best point came when refuting Bill Joy's worries. He spoke about a centralized reproductive process, saying that if replecators were designed to recieve their genetic "code" from a central location, they would be rendered completely benign since that code could be changed at will.
Merkle was actually a pioneer in cryptography. He has a website here. I'm not really convinced by Merkle's arguments. The distinction between "offensive and defensive" weapons seems kind of bogus to me -- there's a saying that the best defense is a strong offense, and to make an example, in terms of nuclear arms, the threat of offense has served as a defense.
The best defense to me seems to be social ones rather than technological ones. We have to, as a species, learn to deal with these new challenges, to grow up ethically, so to speak. We've succesfully (I hope) navigated the threat of nuclear destruction, with much pain and suffering in between, and the greatest danger seems to me that this be repeated with the advent of machine life, before we learn as a species to deal with this maturely.
I don't quite buy Joy's arguments either. I don't really see how self-replicating nano-machines present a qualitatively different threat from existing biological weapons. But yes, the danger will come if the ability to create such machines is widespread so that anybody can build one on his desktop.
He spoke about a centralized reproductive process, saying that if replecators were designed to recieve their genetic "code" from a central location, they would be rendered completely benign since that code could be changed at will
Not convincing either. Some people will try to put the code on the machines. What happens then?
On a final note, I couldn't belive how RUDE some of the audience was.
Yes, but I thought it was also a good thing that the audience wasn't overawed by the panel.
A browser is really like an operating system and more: it has to enfore a security policy, provide an object model to running programs (e.g. javascript), it has to run multiple pages (analogous to processes) at a time, crashes in one page should not crash another, one page should not be able to read the contents of another,etc. etc.
Browsers really have to be written with the same rigorous approach taken towards Operating System design; unfortunately, there isn't much, if any, theory on how to write a browser -- browsers are written in a very ad hoc manner.
The Advogato thing is not a joke. Andover cleverly timed their harrasment of Advogato to conincide with April fools, so that no one would believe them when they cried for help. This is despicable.
April 1st is the new fiscal year for many companies, and many companies routinely power-cycle their machines on April 1st.
The behemoth-ness of Origin and Electronic Arts has crippled his ability to produce truly great games.
Oh come on. He could have seen what was coming from a million miles away, but he gave in to greed and sold Origin to (cookie-cutter, make money now, bottom-line is all that matters) EA anyway.
The real reason (or at least one of the real reasons) that this is Netscape 6 and not 5 is that the beginnings of Netscape 5 actually existed.
No. The real reason why this is Netscape 6 and not Netscape 5 is to beat MS at the version number game.
Also check out the stanford prison experiment: www.prisonexp.org
The ability of people, experimenters included, to get caught up in games of control is chilling.
[Insert fits of laughter from the Mac crowd here]
Sorry, had to be said. Windows does not have a good user interface by any stretch of the imagination.
Strange, because I find the Windows interface much better than the Mac or any of the Linux desktops.
Breaking up Microsoft will have little effect on its day-to-day business. Sure, the overhead will increase, but I don't think it'll help foster competition. It shouldn't be allowed to unfairly push manufacturers, but breaking it up will have no effect on all this
MS does some good things, but it would be better for the marketplace if MS were broken up. We might even see MS Word and IE for Linux and other platforms.
Correct me if I'm wrong but, aren't there many precedents that have said that content providers such as Yahoo, AOL, whatever, CANNOT be held responsible for content posted to their website as long as they aren't monitoring for it and take a laissez faire hands off approach. The second they start monitoring their stuff for illegal/whatever they become liable for what they miss.
The game companies claim that Yahoo directly profits from the sale of bootleg games sold on their auctions. If that were the case, their role would be much more like a bookstore or a computer store than a neutral content carrier, and it would be reasonable to require that they police their auction boards.
However, I just looked through Yahoo's auction policies, and it seems that they do not charge any auctions fees nor get a cut from the transaction, so the game companies suing Yahoo are on much shakier ground. (Ebay on the other hand does get a cut from the transaction, so they do have to police their boards).
it isn't redundant unless it's been said
...
A warning like that needs to be at the top
It has already been said, and a warning is at the top. It's called the article in question.
From what I've read thus far, I like Lynda because she seems to understand the realities of the situation while still hoping for a real solution.
As other people have pointed out in the thread, Lynda does not practice what she preaches. Liking her just because she's smart enough to make a populist remark in an interview seems a little too naive, especially given her previous track record (as you point out).
However, Open Source goes a long way to helping out the other three goals: if you can simply recompile, or patch the source, what could be more open and friendly than that? It's additional and optional, and programmer-friendly. No one else should care, except that they might get an enhanced product out of the deal. But we'll see how Netscape 6 is soon enough...
I'd like to hear about web design, as in the design of usable and aesthetic web sites. Not more open-standards/open-source rah rahing. Turning everything into yet another hymn in praise of open-source is extremely boring, and saying that she's cool and you like her just because she's smart enough to say that she likes open source in an interview is extremely superficial.
btw, I moderated the other post you were talking about down as redundant (the moderation was undone after I posted of course), because it really doesn't contribute to the discussion. To get moderator access, you need to post/reload less often Slashdot - I haven't been reading Slashdot much the past few days so I've some moderator points now.
Say the magic 'O' word and all is forgiven! I'll say it too: open-source. open-source. open-source.
Of course, if he had created an account and called himself "matthewskala", no one would have doubted him, when an account name actually has no real authentication value
To consider a computer to truly be conscious, I would expect it to be able to be self-aware, in the sense that it could independently evolve its own programming.
There are methods of evolving computer programs e.g. genetic programming. In fact, the inventor of genetic algorithms, John Holland, will be speaking, and so will John Koza, the inventor of genetic programming.
Countries with stricter porn laws, for example, will need to code computers to recognize the naked human (animal?) form, and ban such images/sites.
... great.
Believe it or not, this is actually an area of research in computer vision. e.g. See 'Naked people skin filter'. The opportunity for commercial exploitation of an effective porn search tool is
Assertions, assertions.
In the US "Campaign Finance Reform" is a big issue, people don't understand what it means.
What do people not understand about it?
"Gun Control" is another term for social engineering. Keep the poor and middle class afraid and they will keep voting for you.
How so, explain.
The inter-machine communication requirements for genetic programming are low. Basically each machine can operate independently, and at the end of each generation, transmit only the fitness of each individual evaluated back to the server - very little data has to be sent over the network. See http://www.genetic-programming.com/machine1000.htm l
In fact, they're using a very standard 100Mbps ethernet, while my impression is that the IBM supercomputer will be much more tightly coupled. The GP cluster is rate at 0.37 Thz, about the same as the IBM machine.
On a side note, genetic programming will be an ideal for distributed.net; it's disappointing that GP isn't being attempted there.
I don't think the bits of metal and stuff are just going to disappear.
What if one of them hits a boat or something?
If the encrypted list can be used by the software, the software must contain the means by which the list can be decrypted i.e. the decryption key. Which implies that the software must be crackable, however good your programmers were.
I guess there's another way around this: hash the urls.