Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "ColdFusion"
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Nicely done.
One thought for you: isn't it highly likely that artificial intelligences will be more moral than human ones?
Humans have done a whole lot of the fairly complicated stuff -- penicillin, sewer systems, feeding eight or ten billion people -- but we screw up the simple stuff, e.g. getting into fights over borders.
Wouldn't a machine like Deep Mind be able to play a few million games of any political conflict and figger out the Pareto-optimal?
Query: how are we going to like its rules?
We, humans, have basically two kinds of rules, the Kantian, or emotional: the Folden Rule in all its different wordings, and the Millian, or "rational."
The Kantian only works if the other person likes and dislikes the same things as you. A Kantian sadist and masochist will reach suboptimal series of actions, shurely?
Our other morality is the Millian one, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This one breaks down right out of the gate. Which? Greatest happiness, or greatest number? "Choose one" is what the Mills didn't face up to saying.
My guess is that machine intelligences will come up with Pareto-efficient sets of strategies -- and the majority of humans won't like that very much.
:-)
-dlj.
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The "Web" was not "invented" by Tim Berners-Lee.
If it had a single father, "inventor," if you like, that would be Vannevar Bush somewhere around 1942-45.
The packet-switched Internet that we use today came alive in several, different and unconnected, places in 1989. ARPA-net seems to me to have the best claim on being "the" Internet of that time. It became dominant among the originals, all of which either joined up to it and each other, or evaporated, by February 1972.
At the point Senator Mike Mansfield tacked the notorious Mansfield Amendment on something-or-other, making it illegal for the military to corrupt civilian projects with their money. since everybody desperately wanted, and arguably needed, to be corrupted, ARPA added a D for defence to the front of its name. Problem solved. Today's Internet is the ARPAnet of to February 1972, or the DARPAnet from mid-December 1971, with about four or five weeks of overlap and confusion about the names in there.
Time Berners-Lee, working in Switzerland, made valuable additions to the front end on people's machine, ten years later. MCI developed Joseph Lickleider's advanced switching systems, and proclaimed that an employee of their had done what his teacher, "Lick," had in fact done.
That employee until recently repeated the MCI propaganda that he had invented the Internet. Recently he switched to claiming to have been "an" inventor of it.
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Eyeglasses.
Sewing machines.
It's didn't all start with Sputnik.
As for ARPAnet, it is a copy of Usenet (not the later e-mail system of the same name), Digital Equipment Corporation's system for talking to its own customers.
The key technology involved is packet-switching, developed by Bolt, Beranek and Newman, today's BBN, contractors to DEC.
Dick Bolt of BBN sold the idea for a second time to Johnny Foster in the JFK White House and Joe Licklider in the Pentagon. Together they got ARPA involved.
In mid-1971, when I was user #300 on ARPAnet, there were seven nodes, five in the US, and two in Britain. At that time, Digital Equipment claimed, possibly with a bit of exaggeration, that their Usenet, using identical technology, had 400 nodes and 10,000 users.
It didn't start with the Pentagon. It isn't a government initiative. Vinton Cerf was the major developer of TCP/IP, a later set of (excellent and necessary) software which made it easier for the linking of different networks to grow.
One fey "origin" of the Internet is Vannevar Bush's 1945 Atlantic article http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ . Others run back to H.G Wells and, naturally, Roger Bacon.
The most relevant intellectual basis for it might be the hypothetical plans developed by the Carnegie Corporation about 1964. These were first instantiated in a dormitory at MIT and at the library and campus of the then emerging tech powerhouse University of Waterloo, both in place by 1965.
-dlj.
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Some other errors:
7:45 "The central banking model from the United States and England..." This is disingenuous, a little bit like saying that windmills and bicycles are the same thing because they both have parts that go round and round. Yes, both the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System can be called central banks -- except that the Bank of England is a bank, and fairly central, while the Federal Reserve is not a bank and is not central.
7:57 "This unites several countries under one economic policy." Nope. 180 degrees incorrect. It supplies several countries with a single currency in very general use in all of them. They keep their own economic policies independent of one another, which results in all sorts of problems which are still being worked out.
8:14. "Since the end of World War Two, the US dollar has been the reserve currency of the world." Not quite. Since 1947 or so the US dollar has been one of the most important reserve currencies of the world. Right up there with gold, and ahead of the pound sterling for most of that period. For most of this period the reserve currency of the world has been Special Drawing Rights, SDR's, on the World Bank, and these are backed by a basket of currencies and other assets, of which the US dollar is just one.
8:23 "This means that all other currencies are backed by the US dollar..." Among other things, and only from day to day. All currencies are backed by the probity of the governments behind them and the productivity of the people in their home countries.
8:43 "A result of this (the Bretton Woods system) was that all currencies were very stable with respect to each other." Wildly wrong. Not even close. Bretton Woods set up the system within which the variations in currencies' relative values would continue to fluctuate.
"Mike Maloney, monetary historian." Nope. Mike Maloney is a metals retailer or an author of the propaganda of metals traders.
Mike Maloney is a good place for me to stop. This is a well-intentioned video, and thankfully free of stupid conspiracism, but it is terribly oversimplified because it assumes "control" and "stability" to be real. They are just words, and don't have a lot of applicability within this topic. "Change," "adjustment," "flow" and similar words are much more needed in this discussion.
Mike Maloney is a perfectly honest propagandist, but he is not a historian, nor is he even a journalist. He is a spinner of stories useful to metals traders.
Long story short: all currencies, from food or candy bars at one end of the spectrum, up through gold and silver and national fiat currencies, right up to the international instruments like the SDR, are different. They all have their own stories. All of them are traded sometimes, and the conditions under which all of them trade change from day to day and place to place. That's why so much of the space in newspapers is given over simply to pages and pages of grey columns of type: prices.
Trying to make them more the same than this is the wrong thing for a video to do. There's lots of room for good videos detailing actual facts rather than attempts at structures and theories. One good story you might enjoy making: the two generation-long war between the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and all the other Federal Reserve banks is a lot of fun.
Why did Harry Truman say "What I need is a one-handed economist?" Wey-yull, there are a lot of economists who say "...and on the other hand..." but I've always suspected it might be connected with the fact that Missouri is the only state that has two Federal Reserve banks in it. I don't know whether this is the cause or an effect of Missouri being the Show-Me State.
-dlj.
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