] Japanese researchers in robot technology are advocating a
] grand project, under which the government would spend 50
] billion yen a year over three decades to develop a
] humanoid robot with the mental, physical and emotional
] capacity of a 5-year-old human.

Japan's big robot project

bucy wrote:
] ] Internet users fed up with the seemingly endless flow of
] ] spam should pin their hopes on a technological solutions
] ] rather than legislative ones, a top U.S. regulator said
] ] this week.

When government officials say "its a software problem" I tend to think of hardware vendors. This article was very short winded. There was no detailed explanation of exactly what problems the FTC has in prosecuting this stuff. Its hard to tell if its the article that sucks, or if the FTC statement was intentionally vauge.

Anonymnity is not the problem. The company whose product is advertised should bear full liability. No one is advertising your product without your knowledge.

Bust one company and the amount of illegal spam will drop dramatically. Sending spam out will mean sending out millions of messages that say "send the police here."

] Like I keep saying, most spam is already illegal under the
] fraud statutes. New laws absolutely will not help, especially
] considering that a huge volume of spam comes from overseas --
] pac rim, eastern europe, etc.

I agree with your first conclusion. Most of the spam I get seems to be coming from compromised machines/open relays and has forged headers. Its not just fraud, is computer fraud and abuse. However, my friend Cyan has spent a lot more time then I have looking at this stuff and has told me that statistically most spam is not sent out using those methods.

Either way, I can see the potential for legal fixes, for example, in the case of spam that is not fraudulently sent, but which you cannot unsubscribe from, and also in the case of open relays. (Someone could easily argue that running an open relay is giving permission to email senders, and reference toad.com as an example. Legislation needs to clarify that.)

However, no amount of legislation is going to have an impact if there is no enforcement, and I agree that there is NO enforcement, and this is a huge part of the problem.

However, overseas should not be seen as an inpenetrable barrier. Its merely a reality of the changing nature of government. As it becomes easier to commit "petty" crimes across international lines, it will become more important for law enforcement to develop the capability to respond to "petty" crimes across international lines. This means getting rid of the old chain of command, where huge beaurocratic barriers existed to international cooperation between local police forces. These barriers existed because of the expense and political issues involved. Those issues don't exist in the modern world. You can pick up a phone and call Korea for less then 25 cents a minute. Local police in Korea ought to be in communication with local police in the United States. Directly.

I think that is what will happen over time. I don't think that spam will spurn it. I think that more serious crimes will... Ultimately, however, law enforcement must become a distributed, many to many system, where the people on the ground are empowered, and can work seamlessly with collegues from other countries, just as the military is currently reorganizing. Its only a matter of when.

RE: FTC chief says antispam bills won't work

] SPRAY-ON computers the size of a grain of sand are set to
] transform information technology across the world thanks
] to pioneering research at Edinburgh University.

Edinburgh Evening News - Top Stories - A spray-on computer is way to do IT

] "In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your
] gross,' " said Rick Sands, chief operating officer at
] Miramax, referring to the millions of dollars studios
] throw at a movie to ensure a big opening weekend.
]
] "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome
] bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out
] into the general audience," he said. "Those days are
] over. Today, there is no fooling the public."

High-Tech Word of Mouth Maims Movies in a Flash

] Internet users who type the WindowsUpdate.com URL in
] their browser get an error message. Microsoft has deleted
] the Domain Name System (DNS) information for the domain,
] and it no longer sends traffic to an actual Web site.

According to Reuters, the number of Blaster-infected machines currently ranges from 386,000 to 1.2 million, depending who you ask:
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=internetNews&storyID=3287116

Microsoft pulls WindowsUpdate.com to avert Blaster

] Look at the "jobless" economic recovery in the United States.
] Productivity growth has outstripped production by a percentage
] point, so while GDP goes up, employment does not. And that's
] just due to increased efficiency from the application of
] information technology.

Ultimately this means that the cost of products goes down. Eventually you reach a point where people begin to consider cutting hours, because you can make ends meet with less money and would rather have the freedom.

I have a friend in Austin who works three days a week. She would much rather have the time then the money. I'd honestly like to do the same. Having time to work on projects like MemeStreams would be well worth a significant cut in salary. I know a lot of people who feel the same.

The barrier to this, usually, is employers. If they can have two people working half time instead of one person working full time, ultimately this is the same deal for them, but its hard to convince them to change the way they operate. So difficult, in fact, that the last time this occured it took a widespread social movement to make it happen.

I'm talking, of course, about the 30 hour work week. Which has a precident, the forty hour work week. I think this is where we are headed.

This is also another place where I think this author is wrong. The fact that this doesn't work for minimum wagers is basically a policy problem and not an economic problem. Minimum wage should be livable, based on a standard work week. Arguements to the contrary from well meaning conservatives are simply short sighted. To devalue labor is to devalue people. This is a barrier to automation. Its the cost of people that moves us toward robotics. Making people cheap mires us in the status quo. Look at China. A lot of the automation we use in construction and manufacturing simply doesn't exist there because the people are too cheap. Higher minimum wage spurs innovation which increases productivity and ultimately lowers the price of goods.

RE: Robotic Nation, by Marshall Brain

] The next step was autonomous, humanoid robots. The
] mechanics of walking were not simple, but Honda had
] proven that those problems could be solved with the
] creation of its ASIMO robot at the turn of the century.
] Sony and other manufacturers followed Honda's lead. Over
] the course of two decades, engineers refined this
] hardware and the software controlling it to the point
] where they could create humanoid bodyforms with the grace
] and precision of a ballerina or the mass and sheer
] strength of the Incredible Hulk.

Iclough's memeings about robots made me go back and look at this essay.

This was making the rounds a few weeks ago. I ignored it because he started off talking about McDonald's Kiosks. We had those in Murfreesboro in the early 90's. Hasn't gone anywhere. Not exciting...

However, a fully automated McDonalds is an easy thing to imagine. We (finally) can buy robotic lawn mowers. The primary problem with these things is battery power. As fuel cells become a reality robotic lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners will become common place in American homes. People will have their weekends free.

What is a combine but a big lawn mower? Robotic combines are already running at Texas A&M. The food gets automatically harvested.

Transportation? They have a Humvee at Georgia Tech that drives itself. This can be aided with the right kind of infrastructure in the roads. When the time comes, we'll build it. The food will move from the farm to the plant automatically. Its already processed automatically. Then it will move automatically to the store, where a kisok will take your order. Cooking it? Easy I think. I'm actually somewhat amazed that people still cook fries. The mechanical motion is so simple. They really only need a person there to make sure that nothing goes wrong... And we're off...

I agree with the author that we will see a lot of robotics in our lives in the next few decades. It will be an important growth industry. I also agree that honda's humanoid robot is a tremendous achievement.

However, this article gets several things wrong.

A leap of logic is made between humanoid robots and robots doing human jobs. Many human jobs are a lot more complex then we think. Cleaning a room is incredibly complex, when you consider how varied the environments can be, and the need to ID so many different kinds of objects, and sort them properly. This is a tremendous knowledge problem. I will admit that more computing power could help you tacle it, but its just an example. The point is that human's easily handle situations that are very complex to program because humans aren't computers. More on that below.

This article assumes that Moore's law will continue unabated. This is a bad assumption. Moore's law has a shelf life that will end in a decade or two. You can't get smaller then atoms, and no engineering breakthrough is going to fix th... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Robotic Nation, by Marshall Brain

] This paper explores a novel interface to a system
] administration task. Instead of creating an interface de
] novo for the task, the author modified a popular computer
] game, Doom, to perform useful work.

Doom as an Interface for Process Management

] A widely publicized project to transform a man-made
] platform off the coast of England into a haven for
] controversial Web businesses has failed due to political,
] technical and management problems, one of the project's
] founders said.

Has 'haven' for questionable sites sunk? | CNET News.com

] Evolving Self-Diagnosing Hardware was first attempted by
] the author for some toy circuits in the hope it would be
] possible. The toy circuits attempted where a two bit
] multiplier and a one bit adder. After hundreds of
] thousands of generations, circuits evolved performing
] full diagnosis using about half the overhead the
] conventional solution would have required. For example
] when using two-input logic-gate technology, a two-bit
] multiplier can be implemented using 7 gates. Adding an
] extra copy, and 7 more gates for comparing 4 outputs, we
] have an overhead of 14 gates for the conventional voting
] system BIST solution. After four million generations the
] GA found a circuit (diagram) with the same behaviour
] using only 9 extra gates. It is hard to work out exactly
] what operating principles underlie its operation but it
] looks like it tends to use more XOR gates which always
] propagate a bit flip in one of their inputs, and also
] exploits design diversity to compare multiple sections of
] the circuit simultaneously.

I'm going to have to look at this in detail tonight.

I'm a little sceptical. Its not "hard to work out exactly what operating principles underlie" a 9 gate circuit. "Exploits design diversity" sounds like something a politician would say. I'm fairly certain that karnaugh maps produce solutions that are proveably optimised for simple cases like this. If he got results from this technique he probably started with an improperly designed circuit.

This is not to say that evolving hardware isn't interesting. It just seems like something isn't right with this example. A little math will tell me, and I'll post an update later.

Distributed Hardware Evolution