Another of those articles that was already partially addressed in SF 60-70 years ago. The guy named Asimov laid out a chunk of the groundwork. But no, they were busy laughing it off as nonsense.
A robot with *only* Asimov's laws is a pretty good start. A robot programmed with a lot of Social Media crap built in would find itself in violation of a bunch of cases of Rule 1 and Rule 2 pretty fast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics 1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2 A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
... And once you go down THAT path then it becomes a Zork maze of twisty passages and onion layers that would *make you legally insane* *during* your trial for something. "So, you belonged to the association of privacy professionals, and then you sold some of your data for cash to marketers, and then after that your database got hacked... remind the court exactly what you used to do again for a living?"
(And since that group is full of general counsels, this is commentary, opinion, and cast in a hypothetical future tense, etc etc.)
It might be. After all, they managed this lack of proof-reading:
" The IAPP is always looking for dynamic, self-motivated individuals to join our team.... There are no positions available at this time. Please check back soon."
So, "always" looking for... creative values of "always".
Right, I don't even know who to reply to, all the early comments are hitting useful markers in the discussion, and it's a big complicated mess. It's full of "chief compliance officers", supposedly people whose jobs do "sorta" depend on not blundering too badly.
But then other people are remarking on the de-anon of data, "Platinum Members", cookies and web beacons "that provide functionality", a shameless admission of Google Analytics (really?! they couldn't grow their own?!) and more.
This story and this entire group feels ripe for Flamebaiting. And maybe (gasp do I dare say it?) Anonymous.
"Privacy organization got hacked and their entire database of members is in the wild". Oops.
There's some disturbing news trickling around the employment process market that you have better chance to get a new job *if you already have one*. If you quit, you risk screwing yourself because then if you don't land one you often don't get unemployment benefits either, and then if your resume goes stale then you're shunned. Scary.
Also that gets into Gattaca grade problems because data "wants to be abused!" (To abuse a phrase!) So what's stopping insurance companies from playing games with it as well as employers?
I'm no Apple fanboy, and for desktop I'm still on Win XP. But for a phone, my last comparison was an HTC Win Mobile 6 slide phone, which I hated because... it didn't work like desktop windows. But I couldn't get it to do anything truly useful either.
What Apple did was put rubber bumpers on the smartphone, chop off a lot of the power-user type finesses I for one am used to on the desktop, (and even I'm only "medium"), and then *polish* the blue blazes out of what was left. That lack of polish was the fatal weak spot in existing mobile. So I decided to take a long look back at the smartphone landscape and try to continue my style of "pick once and pick well". It did mean I had to sit out the first couple of years when the hype was in swing. Then I settled on the 3GS with the 32Gig storage model and I have been "satisfied" ever since. I still only do about 20 little things on it, and I have serious doubts about the quality of iPhone apps as an ecosystem, but what it did, it did well.
"some things cant scale indefinitely" That's exactly the direction I was aiming at. Except they do *eventually* scale, just that we've hit a slowdown in precisely what scales and how. It's fair that I might be wrong in how each core performed per old P4, though simple proliferation of cores bothers me as a concept that feels like it will have scale problems as well, possibly soon when we begin debating 8-core vs 12-core machines etc. Eventually the OS has to become really good at allocating all those cores cleanly and I don't know if we're there yet.
What I'm thinking is that we're due for the Big-P from the Biz School land - Paradigm Shift etc. Some kind of advance that just smashes our current abilities to bits. But... there is probably a big chunk of hard R&D involved to do that before it shows up as "second generation" (aka usable) in UserLand.
So much for "innovation", right? And in the 90's (and I'm gonna borrow about 2 years from the next decade) we saw the ferocious increase in computer technology ranging from Mac OS System 7 and the invention of Linux and then Windows 3.11 at the beginning, to the first iteration of Mac OS X, solid contributions to Linux, and Win XP. Hardware went from a midline 40mhz with the 486 chip just getting going, to say 3.5 ghz near the end of the Pentium 4 run. Similar increases in hard drives and graphics/sound and other things. I among others was eagerly awaiting each new improvement.
Now it's 2013, "after even the Mayan apocalypse so to speak, ", and all I got is this "we're going back to 5400 drives" tshirt from Seagate. This is Moore's Law creaking at the seams because the next killer jump in tech to be "disruptive" as the biz types like to call it, is risky as get-out, and no one's taking the chance on it yet.
While the wording is inaccurate, I think they mean purposely confusing the trend Chrome popularized of what used to be a point release or Windows Update into fully numbered new versions to help make people sneer at "last year's version".
Since the Slashdot tradition is to apply caution to news-spin, here's my reply to your fair post.
I certainly agree that if multiple companies can agree to work together on something like a rendering engine, they all share the cost savings. That's the easy part.
Right now the blend of players is interesting - with Opera folding its efforts on Presto, the player mix is becoming "Them", who all that ever entails, Microsoft, and Mozilla. I wish Opera well but I never saw them as a "shaker" in the scuttle of the modern internet white water rapids. If either of the *other two* follow suit, then I think we'll see a real turbulent shift with an "odd man out" scenario.
We can agree that companies can achieve neat cost savings with a single render engine. The usual curse of Ant-Trust is when they *then* decide to jam something into it that users can no longer escape from.
Sure, and I'll even do it with an "imitation" of the method they are talking about. (Meanwhile you get to laugh at my fake pseudocode!)
100 Rem School Report AutoGenerator 110 A1$="The School District at " ; A2$="The ______ School " ; A3$ = "If you go to _____ School " 120 B1$="Funding has seen " ; B2$="Funding has been" 130 C1$="cuts " ; C2$="cut " 140 R1$="raises " ; R2$="raised " 200 d=0 ; rem unassigned decision flag 210 Array School$(52,000,d) 220 Load in School$ (All Schools,d) ; rem decision marker is still blank 230 Read Database for all decisions and populate School$(Name,decision) 250 (More code goes here)
1000 Input "name of school?", Name$ 1010 Narrative$=((Story#)of Name$ School)
----
Bleh or something.
So these are formulaic stories, with obfuscation to cover the fact that they are so if you read any 10 of them they look different but after that it becomes obvious.
(shock, horror) I actually read The Article, and you're spot on about how thin it is.
I don't know anymore. Maybe slashdot editors feel like they're under a gun to produce something/"anything" in the timeframe, but the cost to the readers of bad stories is growing. In other news sites I wouldn't care because we expect that drivel from some of them. But "news for *nerds"... yes this matters, but aren't / weren't nerds the ones who dug into the details!? The ones who got thrown into the dumpster because we asked too many questions in class?
Supposedly the raw code to slashdot is open, but I haven't once seen us fork slashdot to only include (fewer?) high quality stories. (Not saying someone didn't, just saying that this medium regular user never saw it.)
I agree, hence my disclaimer that it seems "dated", but we're thinking forward. Since I hope we don't still want precisely the same UI in *another* 20 years, I was just suggesting that those were some of the ways more context could be added into the computing space. Another one is sound. I agree they're not here yet, but we're at the brainstorming stage. We got something good, aka the "standard desktop", the companies have a short term tactical play to go all Walled Garden, but that's gotta break eventually, and then someone will explode on the scene with something Oh-Dear-Gawd level that makes everyone wonder why we all did X for so long.
Random example: We're all still typing on this basically crazy qwerty/azerty/dvorak/something layout when it's purely intertia alone. Maybe "multi-touch" like playing a piano could get some certain functions done way faster. Then anyone with 8th grade music lessons and a year to practice like a bastard can run circles around us. I'm a hybrid peck typist - sloppy handling I know but I'm NOT "hunting" - my fingers are typing this from muscle memory to produce letters. There's no reason we can't get whole words and even sentences in there with a multi-touch UI also including the gloves, which powerfully feature two gestures at once.
While maybe those movies seem a bit dated now, I'll point to ones like Johnny Mnemonic, in which the "3d" involved entirely new formatting of types of information. Minus a lot of the dazzle, in "today's 2d world" (to abuse a business phrase) I can basically only have one panel (however compound) of info in front of me at a time on the monitor, while everything else just has to sit there and wait to be looked at. If anything I have a "pseudo-2.5d" workflow whereupon info is organized in the following hierarchy: Current Tab Other Tabs in same Browser window Other browser windows in the same "slice of desktop" Other "desktop slices" (from a desktop splitter, I use Trandesk) which blanks the screen and lets you start all over again. While it's a bit much for me, I think you can even run the desktop splitter a second time and add a layer on top of all of that. (My particular program makes a few mistakes but it mostly works.)
Instead, in what might be a case of "what does a car give me that a horse buggy doesn't", instead if non-text info especially were all merged into a huge multi-colored spatial layout, one "whoosh ride" through the "roller coaster" could leave you with a complete update of the state of all your info in about five minutes.
I'm sure I'm missing something, but this question made me grumpy so I'll keep it quick.
Let me take this slowly to be sure I'm not missing the obvious:
"An anonymous reader writes... I am a programmer with a fledgling mass-market product that needs marketing... I must say that for a product to reach the widest possible audience in a given time period, marketing is a necessity."
Nope. Not having it. Let's presume his IP-Law junk is in order. An *Anonymous* submitter has an *Anonymous program-product* that he wants to reach the widest possible audience with? Give us the link to a Demo as crippled as you think it makes you feel good at night, then let us all download it and play with it. I'm open basically to evaluating any program that I remotely understand.
But then AC won't read this, so that's my blanket response to these kinds of posts. Same rough answer for the "An Anonymous reader writes I am a musician and want to reach as many people as possible". Same thing. Tangibles or it is the tree falling in the forest that didn't happen.
Hear that submitters? If you think we're worth talking to then get intense and start dialogs. Continue in email after you think the thread is too old. But I'm done with these "fire and forget" stories.
This is also a very real possibility, in this crispy new age of "sensational story - haha, it's just a joke, so long and thanks for all the ad clicks."
My big response is below. I'll end here by just saying that there is something seriously wrong with this story, so I'm not going to sit on pins and needles for 2-4 days for it to pan out as a joke if it is. Because if it's not, we're all busy going "haha cool joke man" when the 100 people pictured in this video are going to lose their jobs.
Because of the immense blowback that's about to happen.
If this was told as a "college beer frat party" story even if it was all the same, we would all have "lol okay back to work". Instead there's *video footage of people and "stuff" (places, unmanned areas, etc.)
So we have a real problem coming up: Youtube is already ahead of us wondering if this is just a "footage hoax"... or the big mean Security Theater Beast will be really PISSED and then we'll see more rounds of lockdown.
Bruce Schneier himself said a ways back that he is shifting focus slightly away from ever more ultra algorithmic breaks to stuff like just calling "Mr./Mrs. X" in some company and getting an insecurely defended password that someone mistakenly gave too many privileges.
Chris Chase from USA Today expressed a similar note of caution with the *CLEARLY INCOMPLETE* story he'd been handed and wondered what's the next step to (maybe/maybe not) punking the security force of the biggest football game of the year. (Does hit the Libel/Slander rules if it is in fact a hoax but makes them look bad?)
Maybe the answer is to use their own sales processes against them in the opposite direction.
I have an iPhone. On AT&T. With no data plan. That's the spec required here, right?
So let's go play a little. Go to the "stores" aka those mall outlets, rather than someone in corporate. Just like we/they/someone says about Greater ______ ****wad, the workers in those stores have to earn their living doing real work rather than being a faceless voice of policy. So my example is from AT&T. It could be different on those other carriers.
1. Go to AT&T Store. "Hi. I want to end my contract. What if any fees do I need to pay to get out of it?" (Sometimes/often you'll have a minimum left on the "subsidy".) End your contract. Or, if this was that "second hand phone" you might just go to step 2. 2. "I want a Go-Phone plan on this phone. $100, so that the minutes last all year." By making a purchase, you are directing the discussion. There's nowhere for them to wiggle you.
Put facetiously for slashdot humor effect, you can go all baby-steps on this. "Go-Phone plan. You still sell those, right? I like the Meatloaf ad on TV. He's my hero." "Yay. Now I can be just like Meatloaf. Or something. Here's $100. In the $100 option the minutes last a whole year right? Good." GoPhone *doesn't have* data. Since we all know companies don't like giving away stuff for free, and you handed them five $20's, "of course you can't get free data". Which is... wait for it... what we wanted. There's nowhere for them to charge anything else because you handed cash to the sales person at an AT&T store.
"I had been thinking "wouldn't it be cool if" for a while about something like this, but I would like to see it taken a few steps further. Though it would be rather difficult, wouldn't it be cool if there was a system like this which detected bad/underhanded debating tactics such as straw man, Ad hominem, cherry picking and so on."
(Note to mods: the following strange reply has a couple of layers, so be careful what mod category you use!)
We're talking about full Strong AI, aren't we? Political speech is one of the most difficult categories of speech to process! So wait, we're asking a *computer program*... built in *three months*... to fact check *tax policy*?
But then we turn around and say that 30 *years* worth of attempts at AI can't figure out the transcript you had with that girl at the bar? And Siri can't figure out what you meant by "tell me where the nearest RPG game store is that doesn't require getting on ____ train on the transit system"?
Yet we want to believe that *in real time* a computer can deduce a statement like "the economy will have less money in the hands of citizens because some of the payroll tax cuts expired and were not replaced."
I'll reply to you since you're one of the first Non-AC posters to say this.
I agree they'll let this article sit a week so everyone can make their nice "clickbait ad revenue", then the reply/result will come which will pulverize this whole story into the ground. There is *no way* a cute little country-lette like Antigua can create themselves Napster 3.0. US is gonna pick their figurative dignity up and throw it in a dumpster.
I'm late to this thread, but it strikes a nerve with me. This will sound a little Saranwrap-hat (slightly less than tinfoil?) but I believe that *certain* kinds of AI are *not... that... hard*. (For complicated definitions of hard). The movies have had fun portraying smart AI as the absolute number one threat ever. Case examples: Skynet, Borg, Matrix Revolution. Your choice of a couple others. (Hal?)
While I will not go far as to say those movies were orchestrated propaganda - I think they're foremost just revenue generating instruments onscreen - I do believe that what I will tentatively call "Medium AI" is in the top 3 of our deepest Racial Fears - because once that ecosystem is locked down, we'll (almost) never make it back. (There are a couple of tiny loopholes - maybe we can compromise like Neo at the end of the Matrix series.)
We *could* have had some grades of Medium AI if (for example) Gore had won Bush v Gore and then if the Patriot Act and the "revenge wars" had never happened. The problem with AI research is it's been part of a fallacy for which I don't yet know the name. It goes something like: For a big concept that you want to keep at bay, marginalize it socially, so that it has no resources to grow, then paint the smear campaign that it "will never grow".
Drawing upon a couple of examples from different places, "many people spend *amounts of time* that just isn't that smart". McDonalds comes to mind. Not counting minor finesses of robotic movement, have you ever ordered a cheeseburger "with nothing but cheese" and it comes along with everything but cheese? Or even just regular? Really?!
The Cyc project started to do some of this but it was missing some/a lot of the story. Their idea was to look at how simple colossal chunks of every day life is. Hamburger. You eat it. (We're skipping the Art Installations etc now.) Pen. You write with it. Noun. You do ____ with it. Not counting maybe my computer stuff, that kind of thing fills up a lot of our lives. Dog. Walk it 3 times a day. Cats. Feed twice a day and change litter box 3 x per week. Move the car back and forth across the street to deal with street cleaning rules. It's Not... That... Hard.
But with say only 50 researchers in the field, of course they'll get bogged down. That's because we desperately DON'T want progress here. IBM made the breakthrough and then no one managed to notice it: if Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, which requires *second level* answers, the language understanding is there. So you hook a Watson Engine to something, then load in enough "mini modules", and poof, out comes an IQ 80 entity. Maybe not good enough to debate religious theory with you, but it sure as heck will be able to do 40% of your life without sleeping.
A *properly* trained oppenent knows the key fundamental point of all "new moves" to be suspicious" and not trust them. It's quite hard to inject yourself into new chess theory. Most players need advice.
Slashdot Mirror
Another of those articles that was already partially addressed in SF 60-70 years ago. The guy named Asimov laid out a chunk of the groundwork. But no, they were busy laughing it off as nonsense.
A robot with *only* Asimov's laws is a pretty good start. A robot programmed with a lot of Social Media crap built in would find itself in violation of a bunch of cases of Rule 1 and Rule 2 pretty fast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2 A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
(There were some finesses, etc.)
(And since that group is full of general counsels, this is commentary, opinion, and cast in a hypothetical future tense, etc etc.)
It might be. After all, they managed this lack of proof-reading:
" The IAPP is always looking for dynamic, self-motivated individuals to join our team. ... There are no positions available at this time. Please check back soon."
So, "always" looking for ... creative values of "always".
Right, I don't even know who to reply to, all the early comments are hitting useful markers in the discussion, and it's a big complicated mess. It's full of "chief compliance officers", supposedly people whose jobs do "sorta" depend on not blundering too badly.
But then other people are remarking on the de-anon of data, "Platinum Members", cookies and web beacons "that provide functionality", a shameless admission of Google Analytics (really?! they couldn't grow their own?!) and more.
This story and this entire group feels ripe for Flamebaiting. And maybe (gasp do I dare say it?) Anonymous.
"Privacy organization got hacked and their entire database of members is in the wild". Oops.
There's some disturbing news trickling around the employment process market that you have better chance to get a new job *if you already have one*. If you quit, you risk screwing yourself because then if you don't land one you often don't get unemployment benefits either, and then if your resume goes stale then you're shunned. Scary.
Also that gets into Gattaca grade problems because data "wants to be abused!" (To abuse a phrase!) So what's stopping insurance companies from playing games with it as well as employers?
This sounds like a card game.
"Money and status trump children's privacy, but Children trump adult privacy in legal filesharing". Or something.
You missed the perfect setup!
In Soviet Russia, you don't domesticate dogs, dogs domesticate you!!
It's even there in the summary!
Millions of voices were crying out for the Lack of Smirnoff and the editors gave us one.
I for one welcome our new canine overlords.
I'd call it "enhancement *then* marketing".
I'm no Apple fanboy, and for desktop I'm still on Win XP. But for a phone, my last comparison was an HTC Win Mobile 6 slide phone, which I hated because ... it didn't work like desktop windows. But I couldn't get it to do anything truly useful either.
What Apple did was put rubber bumpers on the smartphone, chop off a lot of the power-user type finesses I for one am used to on the desktop, (and even I'm only "medium"), and then *polish* the blue blazes out of what was left. That lack of polish was the fatal weak spot in existing mobile. So I decided to take a long look back at the smartphone landscape and try to continue my style of "pick once and pick well". It did mean I had to sit out the first couple of years when the hype was in swing. Then I settled on the 3GS with the 32Gig storage model and I have been "satisfied" ever since. I still only do about 20 little things on it, and I have serious doubts about the quality of iPhone apps as an ecosystem, but what it did, it did well.
"some things cant scale indefinitely"
That's exactly the direction I was aiming at. Except they do *eventually* scale, just that we've hit a slowdown in precisely what scales and how. It's fair that I might be wrong in how each core performed per old P4, though simple proliferation of cores bothers me as a concept that feels like it will have scale problems as well, possibly soon when we begin debating 8-core vs 12-core machines etc. Eventually the OS has to become really good at allocating all those cores cleanly and I don't know if we're there yet.
What I'm thinking is that we're due for the Big-P from the Biz School land - Paradigm Shift etc. Some kind of advance that just smashes our current abilities to bits. But ... there is probably a big chunk of hard R&D involved to do that before it shows up as "second generation" (aka usable) in UserLand.
So much for "innovation", right? And in the 90's (and I'm gonna borrow about 2 years from the next decade) we saw the ferocious increase in computer technology ranging from Mac OS System 7 and the invention of Linux and then Windows 3.11 at the beginning, to the first iteration of Mac OS X, solid contributions to Linux, and Win XP. Hardware went from a midline 40mhz with the 486 chip just getting going, to say 3.5 ghz near the end of the Pentium 4 run. Similar increases in hard drives and graphics/sound and other things. I among others was eagerly awaiting each new improvement.
Now it's 2013, "after even the Mayan apocalypse so to speak, ", and all I got is this "we're going back to 5400 drives" tshirt from Seagate. This is Moore's Law creaking at the seams because the next killer jump in tech to be "disruptive" as the biz types like to call it, is risky as get-out, and no one's taking the chance on it yet.
While the wording is inaccurate, I think they mean purposely confusing the trend Chrome popularized of what used to be a point release or Windows Update into fully numbered new versions to help make people sneer at "last year's version".
Since the Slashdot tradition is to apply caution to news-spin, here's my reply to your fair post.
I certainly agree that if multiple companies can agree to work together on something like a rendering engine, they all share the cost savings. That's the easy part.
Right now the blend of players is interesting - with Opera folding its efforts on Presto, the player mix is becoming "Them", who all that ever entails, Microsoft, and Mozilla. I wish Opera well but I never saw them as a "shaker" in the scuttle of the modern internet white water rapids. If either of the *other two* follow suit, then I think we'll see a real turbulent shift with an "odd man out" scenario.
We can agree that companies can achieve neat cost savings with a single render engine. The usual curse of Ant-Trust is when they *then* decide to jam something into it that users can no longer escape from.
Sure, and I'll even do it with an "imitation" of the method they are talking about.
(Meanwhile you get to laugh at my fake pseudocode!)
100 Rem School Report AutoGenerator
110 A1$="The School District at " ; A2$="The ______ School " ; A3$ = "If you go to _____ School "
120 B1$="Funding has seen " ; B2$="Funding has been"
130 C1$="cuts " ; C2$="cut "
140 R1$="raises " ; R2$="raised "
200 d=0 ; rem unassigned decision flag
210 Array School$(52,000,d)
220 Load in School$ (All Schools,d) ; rem decision marker is still blank
230 Read Database for all decisions and populate School$(Name,decision)
250 (More code goes here)
1000 Input "name of school?", Name$
1010 Narrative$=((Story#)of Name$ School)
----
Bleh or something.
So these are formulaic stories, with obfuscation to cover the fact that they are so if you read any 10 of them they look different but after that it becomes obvious.
Nice catch.
(shock, horror) I actually read The Article, and you're spot on about how thin it is.
I don't know anymore. Maybe slashdot editors feel like they're under a gun to produce something/"anything" in the timeframe, but the cost to the readers of bad stories is growing. In other news sites I wouldn't care because we expect that drivel from some of them. But "news for *nerds" ... yes this matters, but aren't / weren't nerds the ones who dug into the details!? The ones who got thrown into the dumpster because we asked too many questions in class?
Supposedly the raw code to slashdot is open, but I haven't once seen us fork slashdot to only include (fewer?) high quality stories. (Not saying someone didn't, just saying that this medium regular user never saw it.)
I agree, hence my disclaimer that it seems "dated", but we're thinking forward. Since I hope we don't still want precisely the same UI in *another* 20 years, I was just suggesting that those were some of the ways more context could be added into the computing space. Another one is sound. I agree they're not here yet, but we're at the brainstorming stage. We got something good, aka the "standard desktop", the companies have a short term tactical play to go all Walled Garden, but that's gotta break eventually, and then someone will explode on the scene with something Oh-Dear-Gawd level that makes everyone wonder why we all did X for so long.
Random example: We're all still typing on this basically crazy qwerty/azerty/dvorak/something layout when it's purely intertia alone. Maybe "multi-touch" like playing a piano could get some certain functions done way faster. Then anyone with 8th grade music lessons and a year to practice like a bastard can run circles around us. I'm a hybrid peck typist - sloppy handling I know but I'm NOT "hunting" - my fingers are typing this from muscle memory to produce letters. There's no reason we can't get whole words and even sentences in there with a multi-touch UI also including the gloves, which powerfully feature two gestures at once.
While maybe those movies seem a bit dated now, I'll point to ones like Johnny Mnemonic, in which the "3d" involved entirely new formatting of types of information. Minus a lot of the dazzle, in "today's 2d world" (to abuse a business phrase) I can basically only have one panel (however compound) of info in front of me at a time on the monitor, while everything else just has to sit there and wait to be looked at. If anything I have a "pseudo-2.5d" workflow whereupon info is organized in the following hierarchy:
Current Tab
Other Tabs in same Browser window
Other browser windows in the same "slice of desktop"
Other "desktop slices" (from a desktop splitter, I use Trandesk) which blanks the screen and lets you start all over again.
While it's a bit much for me, I think you can even run the desktop splitter a second time and add a layer on top of all of that. (My particular program makes a few mistakes but it mostly works.)
Instead, in what might be a case of "what does a car give me that a horse buggy doesn't", instead if non-text info especially were all merged into a huge multi-colored spatial layout, one "whoosh ride" through the "roller coaster" could leave you with a complete update of the state of all your info in about five minutes.
I'm sure I'm missing something, but this question made me grumpy so I'll keep it quick.
Let me take this slowly to be sure I'm not missing the obvious:
"An anonymous reader writes ... I am a programmer with a fledgling mass-market product that needs marketing... I must say that for a product to reach the widest possible audience in a given time period, marketing is a necessity."
Nope. Not having it. Let's presume his IP-Law junk is in order. An *Anonymous* submitter has an *Anonymous program-product* that he wants to reach the widest possible audience with? Give us the link to a Demo as crippled as you think it makes you feel good at night, then let us all download it and play with it. I'm open basically to evaluating any program that I remotely understand.
But then AC won't read this, so that's my blanket response to these kinds of posts. Same rough answer for the "An Anonymous reader writes I am a musician and want to reach as many people as possible". Same thing. Tangibles or it is the tree falling in the forest that didn't happen.
Hear that submitters? If you think we're worth talking to then get intense and start dialogs. Continue in email after you think the thread is too old. But I'm done with these "fire and forget" stories.
This is also a very real possibility, in this crispy new age of "sensational story - haha, it's just a joke, so long and thanks for all the ad clicks."
My big response is below. I'll end here by just saying that there is something seriously wrong with this story, so I'm not going to sit on pins and needles for 2-4 days for it to pan out as a joke if it is. Because if it's not, we're all busy going "haha cool joke man" when the 100 people pictured in this video are going to lose their jobs.
Because of the immense blowback that's about to happen.
If this was told as a "college beer frat party" story even if it was all the same, we would all have "lol okay back to work". Instead there's *video footage of people and "stuff" (places, unmanned areas, etc.)
So we have a real problem coming up: Youtube is already ahead of us wondering if this is just a "footage hoax" ... or the big mean Security Theater Beast will be really PISSED and then we'll see more rounds of lockdown.
Bruce Schneier himself said a ways back that he is shifting focus slightly away from ever more ultra algorithmic breaks to stuff like just calling "Mr./Mrs. X" in some company and getting an insecurely defended password that someone mistakenly gave too many privileges.
Chris Chase from USA Today expressed a similar note of caution with the *CLEARLY INCOMPLETE* story he'd been handed and wondered what's the next step to (maybe/maybe not) punking the security force of the biggest football game of the year. (Does hit the Libel/Slander rules if it is in fact a hoax but makes them look bad?)
Maybe the answer is to use their own sales processes against them in the opposite direction.
I have an iPhone. On AT&T. With no data plan. That's the spec required here, right?
So let's go play a little. Go to the "stores" aka those mall outlets, rather than someone in corporate. Just like we/they/someone says about Greater ______ ****wad, the workers in those stores have to earn their living doing real work rather than being a faceless voice of policy. So my example is from AT&T. It could be different on those other carriers.
1. Go to AT&T Store. "Hi. I want to end my contract. What if any fees do I need to pay to get out of it?" (Sometimes/often you'll have a minimum left on the "subsidy".) End your contract. Or, if this was that "second hand phone" you might just go to step 2.
2. "I want a Go-Phone plan on this phone. $100, so that the minutes last all year." By making a purchase, you are directing the discussion. There's nowhere for them to wiggle you.
Put facetiously for slashdot humor effect, you can go all baby-steps on this. ... wait for it ... what we wanted. There's nowhere for them to charge anything else because you handed cash to the sales person at an AT&T store.
"Go-Phone plan. You still sell those, right? I like the Meatloaf ad on TV. He's my hero."
"Yay. Now I can be just like Meatloaf. Or something. Here's $100. In the $100 option the minutes last a whole year right? Good."
GoPhone *doesn't have* data. Since we all know companies don't like giving away stuff for free, and you handed them five $20's, "of course you can't get free data". Which is
"I had been thinking "wouldn't it be cool if" for a while about something like this, but I would like to see it taken a few steps further. Though it would be rather difficult, wouldn't it be cool if there was a system like this which detected bad/underhanded debating tactics such as straw man, Ad hominem, cherry picking and so on."
(Note to mods: the following strange reply has a couple of layers, so be careful what mod category you use!)
We're talking about full Strong AI, aren't we? Political speech is one of the most difficult categories of speech to process! So wait, we're asking a *computer program* ... built in *three months* ... to fact check *tax policy*?
But then we turn around and say that 30 *years* worth of attempts at AI can't figure out the transcript you had with that girl at the bar? And Siri can't figure out what you meant by "tell me where the nearest RPG game store is that doesn't require getting on ____ train on the transit system"?
Yet we want to believe that *in real time* a computer can deduce a statement like "the economy will have less money in the hands of citizens because some of the payroll tax cuts expired and were not replaced."
I'll reply to you since you're one of the first Non-AC posters to say this.
I agree they'll let this article sit a week so everyone can make their nice "clickbait ad revenue", then the reply/result will come which will pulverize this whole story into the ground. There is *no way* a cute little country-lette like Antigua can create themselves Napster 3.0. US is gonna pick their figurative dignity up and throw it in a dumpster.
I'm late to this thread, but it strikes a nerve with me. ... that ... hard*. (For complicated definitions of hard). The movies have had fun portraying smart AI as the absolute number one threat ever. Case examples: Skynet, Borg, Matrix Revolution. Your choice of a couple others. (Hal?)
This will sound a little Saranwrap-hat (slightly less than tinfoil?) but I believe that *certain* kinds of AI are *not
While I will not go far as to say those movies were orchestrated propaganda - I think they're foremost just revenue generating instruments onscreen - I do believe that what I will tentatively call "Medium AI" is in the top 3 of our deepest Racial Fears - because once that ecosystem is locked down, we'll (almost) never make it back. (There are a couple of tiny loopholes - maybe we can compromise like Neo at the end of the Matrix series.)
We *could* have had some grades of Medium AI if (for example) Gore had won Bush v Gore and then if the Patriot Act and the "revenge wars" had never happened. The problem with AI research is it's been part of a fallacy for which I don't yet know the name. It goes something like: For a big concept that you want to keep at bay, marginalize it socially, so that it has no resources to grow, then paint the smear campaign that it "will never grow".
Drawing upon a couple of examples from different places, "many people spend *amounts of time* that just isn't that smart". McDonalds comes to mind. Not counting minor finesses of robotic movement, have you ever ordered a cheeseburger "with nothing but cheese" and it comes along with everything but cheese? Or even just regular? Really?!
The Cyc project started to do some of this but it was missing some/a lot of the story. Their idea was to look at how simple colossal chunks of every day life is. Hamburger. You eat it. (We're skipping the Art Installations etc now.) Pen. You write with it. Noun. You do ____ with it. Not counting maybe my computer stuff, that kind of thing fills up a lot of our lives. Dog. Walk it 3 times a day. Cats. Feed twice a day and change litter box 3 x per week. Move the car back and forth across the street to deal with street cleaning rules. It's Not ... That ... Hard.
But with say only 50 researchers in the field, of course they'll get bogged down. That's because we desperately DON'T want progress here. IBM made the breakthrough and then no one managed to notice it: if Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, which requires *second level* answers, the language understanding is there. So you hook a Watson Engine to something, then load in enough "mini modules", and poof, out comes an IQ 80 entity. Maybe not good enough to debate religious theory with you, but it sure as heck will be able to do 40% of your life without sleeping.
I'll join those nipping this in the bud later ...
A *properly* trained oppenent knows the key fundamental point of all "new moves" to be suspicious" and not trust them. It's quite hard to inject yourself into new chess theory. Most players need advice.