Well, apart of Matlab (which I could easily swap for octave or scilab, but I'm too lazy to rewrite all my code) and 2 or 3 games I use once in the year, all the other 3k+ packages on my computers are FOSS, which is probably >80%. I guess it is more or less the same for any linux user with no alternative OS.

Which brings us to the next point: If obfuscation is worthless and someone will steal you code whatever you do, just release it with an open source license in the first place.

My guess is that the short amount of time between the release and the cracking is where the management expects to make profit, and even more profit than if it was FLOSS in the first place. This highlights greatly the short-term objectives of today's business.

Isn't this like unreported employment, where workers have no rights and the state gets nothing (for maintaining the infrastructures used). I know /. is US-centric and my little European country seems communist to most of you (I'm from France). But seriously unreported employment is a bad idea, although it might look better than unenployment. Firstly, it's a downhill to slavery, like the world was before the introduction of labour laws. And secondly, it's not sharing at all because there is no collectivity in such shemes. It's everyone is on its own without any place for a collective structure, which is obviously not the way humankind has eveloved for the last couple of thousands of years.

These deregulated systems are utopias that only work if people are equally smart and potent, which will definitely never be the case.

Not really in France. "Le Mans" is pronounced without the final 's' (this is a french classic), with the sound [], like in the end of croissant (again, no final 't'), which doesn't exist in many languages.

When working on Unix systems, it is easy to get lost at C. Let's hope she'll hack her way to the coast.

Still it is difficult not to feel a little shame from the fact we all belong to the same species. Of course you are by no way responsible for the actions of others, but you can still fell a little sad and ashamed by the incommensurable stupidity of our fellows.

I am exactly in the same case. It has been a very long time since I wiped out any windows off my computers at home (never had one at work). I am so used to linux it would take me ages to regain my productivity if I were to switch to another OS.

Moreover, as far as I know, Windows is still no free software. I cannot count the number of things I learned thanks to the openness of linux by just browsing the code (things on filesystems, memory management, processes and scheduling, etc). Plus colsed things do not correspond to my ethics, which is a personal choice.

What is the point in having a TV or not? I do not get it.

Absolutely not. The improvement in fields that were said to be impossible for AI are just astonishing, and I am among the first surprised by such successes. Let's state it clear: computing power is increasing, theoretical models are improving, practical implementations are getting more efficient. So yeah, basically Turing was right, we are just impressively capable computers and nothing more.

Around 5 or 6 years ago, there were some image classification benchmarks that were incredibly tough and said to be almost impossible to solve with a machine, with very low accuracies. Were are we now? Well the improvements have been far better than expected. Far better than I expected, to be honest. In some sense I would have loved if it didn't, since the pressure of this ever growing progress is stressful to my students and complicates the publication of novel ideas. But basically, yeah, it is improving a lot. It is science, it just works.

You could argue computer vision is not AI, but it is. Everything that allows a computer to make a statement that you thought was only possible by a human is AI.

Again, I am not interested in the the colorful stories about consciousness or whatever. What I'm saying is that there is basically no task that a computer will not be able to perform in the long run. Get over it, we are all replaceable by machines. Engineers, researchers, artists, name what you want, it is only a question of time and not of possibility.

And still you know it will work very well in the long run, like almost every other task that was set to fail with AI.

Well, the truck can deliver the goods to a local market. Then, you can go to that market using your feet or even a bike. I guess it is even more green. It is the way our grandparents did. Why do we different? Because we have plenty of cheap energy and it is more comfortable the other way.

It might change when the energy will not be that cheap, though. I am pretty pessimistic at the idea some environmental enlightenment will win against laziness...

I have the greatest difficulties with the assumption our society is a stationary process. Especially when most of the things around us are expected to grow exponentially. These 2 are mutualy exclusive, that is, you should take one but not both. Either you take the stationary society, and the "it was so before, thus it will be so in the future" is a very valid argument. Or you take the exponential growth everyone is looking for, and things will surely not be in the future as they were in the past.

You didn't understand his point. He says that whether you pay artists or not, they will continue to create new things, because the primary reason they do it is that they like it much more than everything else. Which may obviously not be the case of you taxi driver, who takes his job as a necessity to survive instead of a pleasant activity.

So yeah, you can basically cut some art revenues with little (if any) effect on art creation.

Here are more curves that were posted in the comments of the blog you're linking:

https://sites.google.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/piomas

Clearly, the exponential model has the best fit (which is not very surprising), and says 2015, take or give 1 year for 95% confidence. Of course, there is no theoretical model behind, but most of the time, the theoretical explanation comes after the empirical fit.

Not exactly. Java is unable to vectorize floating point operations now (might change with java8 though), which is very common in any multimedia application. So it remains a lot slower than what you get by default in C/C++ with a decent compiler.

Exactly this!

Almost everything you ever dreamed of as a non machine learning expert is available at https://mloss.org/software/
Please now annotate more data so that we can tune the algorithms ;-)