True. Removing the fog is very expensive. It can be done, though. Watch Fog, Intensive, Dispersal Of (FIDO)

I remember people said the same about smartphones. Waah, the battery only lasts a day, I'll never use one of those. Somehow smartphones still took over the world. People do go to sleep every night - a nice cordless charging stand seems like a relatively small issue if the devices are genuinely useful.

That's not quite how I remember Manna.

The reason the American economy is trashed in the world Manna envisions is not because it's run by an AI but because America failed to adjust to a post-work society. Everyone is on social security/benefits, because hardly anyone has a job as it was all automated away or pirated. So people have a kind of futuristic subsistence lifestyle in which robots attend to their basic needs but they can never get anything more.

The Australia project, on the other hand, is not meant to be communist. It's meant to be a society where your having a job was disconnected from you having social value. It's a society that prioritises leisure time and finds other ways to allocate the few scarce resources that are left in ways that aren't money. Communism as a term is too heavily linked with the real-world implementations in the Soviet union to be useful for describing this state of affairs.

IIRC at the end the story goes off on a bit of a tangent and all the Australians just end up having VR sex all day or something. Not a great ending. But I remember Manna kind of blew my mind when I first read it, and its prediction that robots/computers would replace middle management before the toilet cleaners was (to me) very new and obviously correct. Indeed that's what this story is about.

http://www.withings.com/activite/en-US

Interesting that didn't take my link.

I'll wait for this.

I think you massively overestimate how bad Russia is, especially compared to the USA.

Snowden is 30 and newly single. Russia is a large country that is notorious for its abundance of highly educated and attractive women. It has quite a few famous and sophisticated software companies, especially in the security realm that Snowden likes. 143 million people manage to live there without going crazy.

Of all the places in the world to have landed, Russia is definitely not the worst. Heck it's probably the best place he could have landed. I guess he was trying to get to Ecuador but they don't have the stones Putin does, nor is it a large country, nor does it have any noted IT firms.

Interestingly enough, back in 1928 the Republican Presidental campaign of Herbert Hoover promised "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage".

What makes it interesting is back then, chicken was 3 - 5 times the price of beef. It was a luxury food as production wasn't industrialized and unless you lived on a farm, you didn't eat it. Even on the farm you only at chicken when the hens were no longer fit for laying or annually when you let a batch hatch to replenish your hens and culled those that were roosters.

Probably nothing can be done to stop it in the short to medium term. I suspect that many years from now historians will look back and see this as just a phase humanity had to go through, kind of like the evolution from monarchy to democracy.

It's clear that the power to know everything about everyone has gone to the heads of the political class so badly that they'll never give it up. They'll always find a justification and any "reasonable compromise" that is arrived at won't be what we had 40-50 years ago (i.e. no total surveillance) even though that seemed to work OK, it'll be "slightly less than totalitarian surveillance, sorta, unless there's a good reason for it".

So for now we're stuck with it. The geek in me wants to believe that what starts with Snowden is an epic and very long struggle to design technology to make it surveillance-proof, which will inevitably result in some kind of (hopefully mostly non-violent) quasi civil war a la the monarchists vs parliamentarians. Governments will fight back hard and eventually the fact that technology needs to be government-proof will become as widely accepted a principle as the free press being government-proof. But it will take a loooooong time. Probably longer than any of us will be alive.

The cynic in me says we're all boned and 1984 has arrived.

I think it's smart. Lots and lots of people don't respond to stories that are technical and abstract. OK so they spy on people using "tor" with "selectors" yawn change channel *zap*.

Human interest stories are different. This story might reach a whole audience who just couldn't find it in themselves to care until now. But ooooh juicy details about someone's romance with a jihadist, interesting, and huh .... wait. They could get that stuff on anyone, couldn't they. They could get that on me.

So this story could prompt the housewives of America to care more than perhaps they have so far.

Everyone who deals with financial statements professionally does that.

AI as a field suffers from the delusion that we're one breakthrough away from strong AI. There were people saying that at Stanford in the mid-1980s when I was there, just as the "expert system" hype was failing. There is progress; the current generation of machine learning can do some things quite well. But it's not leading to strong AI Real Soon Now. We can't even do dog-level AI. Or mouse-level AI. Insect-level AI, yes. (It was bacteria-level AI in the 1980s. There is progress.)

More likely, we'll get robots that can sort of deal with the real world, and they'll be improved over time. (It's embarrassing how lame robotics really is, after 50 years of R&D. DARPA is trying to kick some ass with the DARPA Humanoid Challenge to get machines that can do something useful other than work an assembly line.) We'll get programs which can deal with most business problems ("Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0"), and they'll be improved over time.

Hardware is not the problem. If it were, we'd have things that were very smart, but very slow. Then someone would rent enough Amazon AWS instances to make them fast.

PC boards aren't that expensive. What's the point?

I'd rather have fewer connectors. Fewer points of failure.

The SEC started requring companies to file their earnings reports in the Extensible Business Reporting Language a few years ago. At first, it was only for big companies; now it's everybody. The SEC displays this info in a standard format on line. Here are the latest earnings for DICE Holdings, Slashdot's parent. Here's the raw XML behind that data. Turning that into verbiage isn't that hard.

I've been doing this for years at Downside.com, extracting the raw data from the human-readable text. This is now obsolete, but it's still running. Here's the same DICE financial statement as processed by Downside. That's Perl code that's been running for 15 years now. When it started, nobody was doing that. Now that everybody in finance has that data, it's probably time to retire Downside's old extraction engine.

It's another materials article. They do not have a "walking robot". They have one piece of synthetic muscle fiber hooked up to some supports. If they hook up an oscillator to the power, it jerks along. There are other artificial muscle technologies. This new one is supposedly powered by the chemical solution in which it operates, not by the electric field that triggers it. That's new. But if it's chemically powered, there must be waste products from the reaction that have to be flushed out. You need a whole circulatory system for the thing.

FWIW, I'm also learning German. It's the fifth language I'm learning as an adult and it's definitely the toughest. I've never found any good software or edu-websites, I just use the old methods. I watch a lot of German telly:

* http://mediathek.daserste.de/s...
* http://www.zdf.de/Sendungen-vo...

Series are the easiest because you can get to know the characters and then they're kinda predictable so you can't get completely lost. The News is easy enough because there's lots of pictures and you'll know the context of most stories, but it doesn't teach you conversational German. Comedy can be the toughest. On Das Erste, there's a crime drama most Friday and Sunday nights called Tatort which is good because there's also a version for blind people ("hÃrfassung" - o-umlaut between h and r, if that doesn't display right), which has everything of the normal version plus one extra voice describing the visuals, so you hear a lot more words.

I also read German translations of books I've already read. And when I'm cooking I leave on WDR5 talk radio in the background, all to help develop a feel for how the language sounds when used correctly:

* http://www.listenlive.eu/germa...

And I do tandems with a native German:

* http://conversationexchange.co...

Oh, and of course I'm working my way through a book with grammar and exercises.

Yeh, German's a tough nut to crack alright. Unlike Spanish, you have to do a lot of grammar before you can really start building sentences (the declensions are what frustrate me most) but I think it's a language where your effort won't show at first, but then there's the breakthrough later.