The conventional wisdom is to spend your way out of a recession and clean up the mess later rather than trying to pay your way out of debt with money you don't really have.
That worked really well. Until 2000. And again, until 2009. And it will work really well again, until year (2017?)
I'm from Europe, but aren't you paying for receiving Dish?
From my standpoint: Either pay or ads, but never both.
The pay-TV in Europe is ad-free (well, at least during the show), pay-TV companies are treating their customers like dirt. Free-TV is rich, has many consumers, but is continuously degrading in quality (both the kind of content, and amount of ads) since 15 years.
As soon as something becomes routinely doable by a computer, it is no longer considered a sign of intelligence; it's a mere mechanical activity.
Correct. I have observed this thought in myself. I also wondered whether I deceive myself. But this is something else than AI: AI aspires to create "intelligent" machines, which can: learn, understand, and reason.
Without having been programmed specifically. To follow a certain programmed algorithm, which is simply processed and executed, doesn't count as AI for me. That is then indeed purely mechanical. Input -> specific, given process -> Output.
What we see is that we can program ever more jobs as such a mechanical algorithm, through advances in hardware and software as you describe. Our toolbox increases, gets more powerful, therefore we can build more powerful, more useful machines. We can take a data source like the ID3 tags of songs played in Amarok, and compare that with those from other users, and find matches and differences, and based on that make proposals. 20 years ago, we'd have said that needs a true music lover or an inspired music shop owner, but now we can program it with our bigger toolbox. We can even generalize it to arbitrary data sources (RDF, OWL). Nevertheless, it's still a mechanical process that a human has analyzed, abstracted, broken down, and expressed as mechanical steps using the toolbox. It's the human who thought it out, and the computer just follows a given work pattern.
This is very useful and on a very high level, but it's per se not KI for me, because the computer has neither learned nor understood nor reasoned. Throw corn in from the top, run through mill, get flour out at the bottom. "Routinely" and "mechanical" are the key words in your comment. Sorting letters into a file folder cabinet is a routine that requires no intelligence, even if a human executes it. Inventing sorting was intelligent. But it only needs to be done once. That's what computers are good for, IMHO: Routine. We are striving to let them do ever more, higher-level routine jobs.
> for the most part all the bbc channels are ad free - it's what we pay a tv license for.
Be glad about it. In Germany, we pay forced license fees for ARD and ZDF (public TV stations), but they do have ads and, what's worse, product placement, and a lot of their content is crap (folk music to copies of commercial TV formats), not like BBC.
> After all, cops are there to meet out physical consequences > for disobedience of the law, at least in part
Yeah, you see, and I think that police is there to protect the innocent.
> just pointing out the obvious, I suppose.
Well, it may seem obvious, but that doesn't mean that actual results match it.
Just now, I was out and there was a party about the World Cup. Unfortunately, there are always a few pricks (20 out of 3000) who want to fight, so they attack the police. However it started, I saw 3-4 people all hitting and lying on 1-2 persons, which were pressed on the ground and into the bushes. I tried to help those lying, by dragging away those on the top. Luckily, it worked, and within seconds, the one lying person was free, and it was a policeman. As soon as he could move, he hit around himself with a police stick, including on me. I guess I moved immediately away, it was only one hit, but it nevertheless made me angry to be attacked as a totally innocent person, and to top it the only one who *helped* him.
Guess what the "obvious" reaction to such an experience would be...
Sure, I can understand the officer, lying on the ground being attacked, he's scared for life, and it's all happening in seconds to milliseconds. But still, police should be more selective. That's one things that's distinguishing them from the bad guys.
It was the state police (not USA), BTW. So far, all my experiences with state police was neutral to relatively bad, and all with local police was very good. Tonight, in my head was "state police bad, local police good". In any case, I start to understand those people who hate the police and attack them when they have a chance (although I do not apologise that). Bad circle starting...
> Plus their jobs do require a bit of prickishness just as self defense.
No, they can be perfectly nice until they have reason to be otherwise. They have no *need* to be pricks, because they have the law on their side and can hand out fines and even prison to real offenders, if *need* be. But only then.
> > but I have found that if you respect the police, they will respect you.
> I've never had such experienced. They are pricks to you by default.
Not my experience.
This highly depends on - The country where you are, and the specific area, even the city - The policeman's personality obviously - The impression you make
In Germany, there is very very few police around (yet not much crime), but occasional hidden radar. If they get you in person, they are typically polite, but with little leeway. They typically let you get away with minor things. If you get catched by an automated radar, there is no mercy.
In France is more police, and the attitude varies widely depending on type of police (municipal or Gendarmerie) and city and where you come from (foreign tourist, French or local). Local police in south of France is very nice.
In the USA, there is *lots* and lots of police, and the fines are stiff and painful, much more so than in continental Europe. I got catched 3-4 times for speeding etc., but they always led me go when they saw that I am a foreigner. This was around San Francisco. (Given that I am German and 100 miles/h is a relaxed travelling speed for me, the American speed limits of 55-65 on the highway were very hard for me.)
> I have some friends in law enforcement and here they are > trained to be assholes to "get control of the situation".
Where is "here"?
This is very stupid, because being an asshole will most likely escalate the situation, *esp* if you're not in control of it yet. I guess that's true for generally aggressive people. And even for me, although I am generally respectful, if somebody is an asshole to me, I am much more likely to be aggressive. If the policeman is nice, so am I.
> If these things were done using a VM in userspace (Java?) then > the security and reliability holes would remain--as long as > code verification is optional (by writing in Java rather than > C), the malicious coder will opt not to use it.
Wrong, because it's the normal coder and user that makes the choice, not the malicious coder. He is limited to exploit whatever is being used. If my mail server is implemented in Java, the attacker has to find a hole in that Java code or Java/VM itself to gain entry via the mail server. (And there is a mail server written in Java, BTW.)
> These facilities make it impossible for any application to have > buffer overruns, segfaults, or overruns of other apps' data > -- as a result, all applications can run in ring 0 and virtual > memory is not required.
Which is complete nonsense, because there are many other classes of security problems, some of them application-specific, other than buffer overruns and memory access.
Or, tell me how Singularity helps me to protect cases where I want to right-click on an email address in the body of an email, but garantee (!) that there is no hole that would allow the sender to anyhow access my address book.
> All that has nothing whatsoever to do with Eros. > The two projects are not even similar.
Right. They are orthogonal. That's what he tried to say.
If you have money on your hands, and the talents of many hobby writers, and maybe some very good student actors, why not roll your own series, driven by fans?
It obviously couldn't be called "Star Trek" or "Enterprise". There probably wouldn't be a "Star Fleet Command" either, but it could have the spirit of Star Trek, and maybe a universe loosy leaning on Star Trek's, but not a clone. Surely there are areas where the universe could be much better, e.g. more fined-grained politics, economics etc.. Star Trek often simplifies questions too much for my taste - in the universe, in the doctrines and the stories.
But it should keep the spirit of Star Trek: Scientific. An optimistic projection of the future. Pointing out social dilemmas, teaching good moral values (mostly). It could use more personalty-building insights. And more hints where to look for more background on certain questions.
As for concrete organisation, even with 3 millions you don't get far with traditional production, so it would have to rely a lot on hobbyists and university students. I think there is a lot of talent that is unused, it could be the student excerzise in many areas, but obviously writing, acting, camera, cut. Maybe you'll also find volunteers to help with the scenery, both design and building. A critical part will be the decision making process, to avoid long discussions, quarrels and splits. I guess a reasonable goverance/management will be best to drive things forward and avoid long internal discussions. I guess the money would have to be spent on the materials alone, and it might not even be enough for that.
Just FYI: I desperately needed a good SCM (for a open-source program from a company), and found nothing in the Open-Source space. I was interested in BK, because Linus drooled so much about it, but didn't want to accept their "free" license where they forbid working on competing systems etc., so I called them for pricing. I couldn't believe what I heard:
US-$2400. Per developer. Per Year.
That's ridiculous, which I tried to make clear, politely, but they were unwilling to negotiate. Not even given the fact that it was just open-source that's being maintained. So I forgot about them.
> you could put outbound filtering on port 25, > and require everyone to send mail through > the ISP's servers
Just that you wouldn't be an ISP anymore. An Internet Service Provider is for me primarily an IP packet transporter. If they fail to deliver an arbitary or random set of packets, they fail to deliver on their primary purpose.
Alternatively, call it censorship or whatever. In ayn case, I won't let myself be forced to use the ISP SMTP servers.
> It seems IBM's argument is that there are > way too many patent applications
So, wouldn't it be the obvious solution to *reduce* the number of patent applications?
How about disallowing any and all software patents? It's not like the world would be over, then. Software patents are now allowed by law in the EU (*so far*), and it didn't seem to hurt. Moreover, I can't remember a case where a software patent helped, but many where they caused nightmares that should have been ridiculous drooling of sick crooks.
> It's the difference between breaking something > like a poorly written personal firewall and > breaking something like a completely > non-Internet-enabled graphics app.
Agreed. But note that security fixes *can* sometimes have legitimate effects in cases where you wouldn't suspect them, not even as developer, much less as user.
I don't know what breaks and why. I was just trying to counter the (stupid) argument "If it's harder than 'Click here', it's broken".
No, because there are cases where this is *impossible*. More security often means stuff with bad security breaks. That's the basic line of SP2, and that's the problem with the current Firefox 1.0.3 dilemma.
I pray for the day when some really smart person writes replacement code that will allow a complete switchover from MSIE to Firefox -- that would include all of those APIs and things that third-party software uses to activate the MSIE rendering...it would be a good day for all.
That won't be a virus, though, because that infected player can't infect other players (unless it has network, which your $50 player doesn't). It could be a virus, if HD DVDs were writable, so any disc you insert into the infected player would be infected as well and infect other players that play that DVD.
BTW: If you could rely on DVD players having network, things would be far easier to make "secure". But a privacy nightmare.
> Given N player models, there are also N encrypted > master keys, one for each (non-revoked) player > model.
All shipping with the disc, I presume. So, let's say there are 1500 different player models on the market. Each disc then ships with 1500 different asymetric encryptions of the symetric key used to encrypt the actual content. Let's say each takes 1 KB, that's 1,5 MB for all.
Now what about future player models? The keys of the players released 2015 must be on discs released 2005, otherwise the future players won't be able to play the older discs. (Or are they going to skip over this as well and just only make the new prints of old releases include the new keys? Meaning that new models can't play used discs? How about "consumer protection" here?)
Let's say there are 1000 models released per year, and that over 20 years, means 20000 keys. That's 20MB, still sounds reasonable for discs with 18GB capacity.
Of course, that still doesn't sovled the discussed problem that each model will be sold thousands of times, and several thousand of customers who did nothing at all get punished for the one that was a "bad boy" and cracked the key of the device.
Slashdot Mirror
A) Please get into the habit of using metric.
[energy provided by sun to earth] 1KW per sqr Meter on the earth [surface]
Now that's a nice coincidence! (Speaking about the metric system...)
FWIW, 1l water = 10cmx10cmx10 cm = 1kg (or 1mx1mx1m water = 1 ton) is not a coincidence.
Neither is 1 W = 1 kg * m / sÂ
The conventional wisdom is to spend your way out of a recession and clean up the mess later rather than trying to pay your way out of debt with money you don't really have.
That worked really well. Until 2000. And again, until 2009. And it will work really well again, until year (2017?)
I'm from Europe, but aren't you paying for receiving Dish?
From my standpoint: Either pay or ads, but never both.
The pay-TV in Europe is ad-free (well, at least during the show), pay-TV companies are treating their customers like dirt. Free-TV is rich, has many consumers, but is continuously degrading in quality (both the kind of content, and amount of ads) since 15 years.
As soon as something becomes routinely doable by a computer, it is no longer considered a sign of intelligence; it's a mere mechanical activity.
Correct. I have observed this thought in myself. I also wondered whether I deceive myself. But this is something else than AI: AI aspires to create "intelligent" machines, which can:
learn, understand, and reason.
Without having been programmed specifically. To follow a certain programmed algorithm, which is simply processed and executed, doesn't count as AI for me. That is then indeed purely mechanical. Input -> specific, given process -> Output.
What we see is that we can program ever more jobs as such a mechanical algorithm, through advances in hardware and software as you describe. Our toolbox increases, gets more powerful, therefore we can build more powerful, more useful machines. We can take a data source like the ID3 tags of songs played in Amarok, and compare that with those from other users, and find matches and differences, and based on that make proposals. 20 years ago, we'd have said that needs a true music lover or an inspired music shop owner, but now we can program it with our bigger toolbox. We can even generalize it to arbitrary data sources (RDF, OWL). Nevertheless, it's still a mechanical process that a human has analyzed, abstracted, broken down, and expressed as mechanical steps using the toolbox. It's the human who thought it out, and the computer just follows a given work pattern.
This is very useful and on a very high level, but it's per se not KI for me, because the computer has neither learned nor understood nor reasoned. Throw corn in from the top, run through mill, get flour out at the bottom. "Routinely" and "mechanical" are the key words in your comment. Sorting letters into a file folder cabinet is a routine that requires no intelligence, even if a human executes it. Inventing sorting was intelligent. But it only needs to be done once. That's what computers are good for, IMHO: Routine. We are striving to let them do ever more, higher-level routine jobs.
> for the most part all the bbc channels are ad free - it's what we pay a tv license for.
Be glad about it. In Germany, we pay forced license fees for ARD and ZDF (public TV stations), but they do have ads and, what's worse, product placement, and a lot of their content is crap (folk music to copies of commercial TV formats), not like BBC.
> After all, cops are there to meet out physical consequences
> for disobedience of the law, at least in part
Yeah, you see, and I think that police is there to protect the innocent.
> just pointing out the obvious, I suppose.
Well, it may seem obvious, but that doesn't mean that actual results match it.
Just now, I was out and there was a party about the World Cup. Unfortunately, there are always a few pricks (20 out of 3000) who want to fight, so they attack the police. However it started, I saw 3-4 people all hitting and lying on 1-2 persons, which were pressed on the ground and into the bushes. I tried to help those lying, by dragging away those on the top. Luckily, it worked, and within seconds, the one lying person was free, and it was a policeman. As soon as he could move, he hit around himself with a police stick, including on me. I guess I moved immediately away, it was only one hit, but it nevertheless made me angry to be attacked as a totally innocent person, and to top it the only one who *helped* him.
Guess what the "obvious" reaction to such an experience would be...
Sure, I can understand the officer, lying on the ground being attacked, he's scared for life, and it's all happening in seconds to milliseconds. But still, police should be more selective. That's one things that's distinguishing them from the bad guys.
It was the state police (not USA), BTW. So far, all my experiences with state police was neutral to relatively bad, and all with local police was very good. Tonight, in my head was "state police bad, local police good". In any case, I start to understand those people who hate the police and attack them when they have a chance (although I do not apologise that). Bad circle starting...
> Plus their jobs do require a bit of prickishness just as self defense.
No, they can be perfectly nice until they have reason to be otherwise. They have no *need* to be pricks, because they have the law on their side and can hand out fines and even prison to real offenders, if *need* be. But only then.
> > but I have found that if you respect the police, they will respect you.
> I've never had such experienced. They are pricks to you by default.
Not my experience.
This highly depends on
- The country where you are, and the specific area, even the city
- The policeman's personality obviously
- The impression you make
In Germany, there is very very few police around (yet not much crime), but occasional hidden radar. If they get you in person, they are typically polite, but with little leeway. They typically let you get away with minor things. If you get catched by an automated radar, there is no mercy.
In France is more police, and the attitude varies widely depending on type of police (municipal or Gendarmerie) and city and where you come from (foreign tourist, French or local). Local police in south of France is very nice.
In the USA, there is *lots* and lots of police, and the fines are stiff and painful, much more so than in continental Europe. I got catched 3-4 times for speeding etc., but they always led me go when they saw that I am a foreigner. This was around San Francisco. (Given that I am German and 100 miles/h is a relaxed travelling speed for me, the American speed limits of 55-65 on the highway were very hard for me.)
> I have some friends in law enforcement and here they are
> trained to be assholes to "get control of the situation".
Where is "here"?
This is very stupid, because being an asshole will most likely escalate the situation, *esp* if you're not in control of it yet. I guess that's true for generally aggressive people. And even for me, although I am generally respectful, if somebody is an asshole to me, I am much more likely to be aggressive. If the policeman is nice, so am I.
So *that*'s why all these Stallmans and Greens never wash themselves.
> If these things were done using a VM in userspace (Java?) then
> the security and reliability holes would remain--as long as
> code verification is optional (by writing in Java rather than
> C), the malicious coder will opt not to use it.
Wrong, because it's the normal coder and user that makes the choice, not the malicious coder. He is limited to exploit whatever is being used. If my mail server is implemented in Java, the attacker has to find a hole in that Java code or Java/VM itself to gain entry via the mail server. (And there is a mail server written in Java, BTW.)
> These facilities make it impossible for any application to have
> buffer overruns, segfaults, or overruns of other apps' data
> -- as a result, all applications can run in ring 0 and virtual
> memory is not required.
Which is complete nonsense, because there are many other classes of security problems, some of them application-specific, other than buffer overruns and memory access.
Or, tell me how Singularity helps me to protect cases where I want to right-click on an email address in the body of an email, but garantee (!) that there is no hole that would allow the sender to anyhow access my address book.
> All that has nothing whatsoever to do with Eros.
> The two projects are not even similar.
Right. They are orthogonal. That's what he tried to say.
> Usually there's some sort of starters
> (bands or musicians) that do something different
> It's good music. The bad part of pop comes
> when the labels try to reproduce what made
> the original bands popular - and fail terribly.
That's why I am so glad that the Backstreets Boys are back.
BTW: Some of the parent posts are great.
If you have money on your hands, and the talents of many hobby writers, and maybe some very good student actors, why not roll your own series, driven by fans?
It obviously couldn't be called "Star Trek" or "Enterprise". There probably wouldn't be a "Star Fleet Command" either, but it could have the spirit of Star Trek, and maybe a universe loosy leaning on Star Trek's, but not a clone. Surely there are areas where the universe could be much better, e.g. more fined-grained politics, economics etc.. Star Trek often simplifies questions too much for my taste - in the universe, in the doctrines and the stories.
But it should keep the spirit of Star Trek: Scientific. An optimistic projection of the future. Pointing out social dilemmas, teaching good moral values (mostly). It could use more personalty-building insights. And more hints where to look for more background on certain questions.
As for concrete organisation, even with 3 millions you don't get far with traditional production, so it would have to rely a lot on hobbyists and university students. I think there is a lot of talent that is unused, it could be the student excerzise in many areas, but obviously writing, acting, camera, cut. Maybe you'll also find volunteers to help with the scenery, both design and building. A critical part will be the decision making process, to avoid long discussions, quarrels and splits. I guess a reasonable goverance/management will be best to drive things forward and avoid long internal discussions.
I guess the money would have to be spent on the materials alone, and it might not even be enough for that.
Just FYI: I desperately needed a good SCM (for a open-source program from a company), and found nothing in the Open-Source space. I was interested in BK, because Linus drooled so much about it, but didn't want to accept their "free" license where they forbid working on competing systems etc., so I called them for pricing. I couldn't believe what I heard:
US-$2400. Per developer. Per Year.
That's ridiculous, which I tried to make clear, politely, but they were unwilling to negotiate. Not even given the fact that it was just open-source that's being maintained. So I forgot about them.
Now I am quite happy with SVK.
> you could put outbound filtering on port 25,
> and require everyone to send mail through
> the ISP's servers
Just that you wouldn't be an ISP anymore. An Internet Service Provider is for me primarily an IP packet transporter. If they fail to deliver an arbitary or random set of packets, they fail to deliver on their primary purpose.
Alternatively, call it censorship or whatever. In ayn case, I won't let myself be forced to use the ISP SMTP servers.
> Software patents are now allowed by law in the EU
s/now/not/ ! sorry.
> It seems IBM's argument is that there are
> way too many patent applications
So, wouldn't it be the obvious solution to *reduce* the number of patent applications?
How about disallowing any and all software patents? It's not like the world would be over, then. Software patents are now allowed by law in the EU (*so far*), and it didn't seem to hurt. Moreover, I can't remember a case where a software patent helped, but many where they caused nightmares that should have been ridiculous drooling of sick crooks.
> It's the difference between breaking something
> like a poorly written personal firewall and
> breaking something like a completely
> non-Internet-enabled graphics app.
Agreed. But note that security fixes *can* sometimes have legitimate effects in cases where you wouldn't suspect them, not even as developer, much less as user.
I don't know what breaks and why. I was just trying to counter the (stupid) argument "If it's harder than 'Click here', it's broken".
> It's in everyone's best interest.
No, because there are cases where this is *impossible*. More security often means stuff with bad security breaks. That's the basic line of SP2, and that's the problem with the current Firefox 1.0.3 dilemma.
That exists in the form of the ActiveX Mozilla Control, posing as MSIE embed API
Right. If it's harder than "Click here" in 99% of the cases, then it's broken.
Please don't make me hate Microsoft *users*.
> It's your job as user to figure out if
> your player is still licenced.
I really wonder when the industry will totally lose the mass of consumers.
> violating your EULA with the content provider...
I don't have a contract (or "license", which is a kind of contract) with content providers. It's just a movie! Which I *bought*.
(Nevermind the fact that EULAs are per se not effective contracts in Germany, not even for software.)
That won't be a virus, though, because that infected player can't infect other players (unless it has network, which your $50 player doesn't). It could be a virus, if HD DVDs were writable, so any disc you insert into the infected player would be infected as well and infect other players that play that DVD.
BTW: If you could rely on DVD players having network, things would be far easier to make "secure". But a privacy nightmare.
> Given N player models, there are also N encrypted > master keys, one for each (non-revoked) player
> model.
All shipping with the disc, I presume. So, let's say there are 1500 different player models on the market. Each disc then ships with 1500 different asymetric encryptions of the symetric key used to encrypt the actual content. Let's say each takes 1 KB, that's 1,5 MB for all.
Now what about future player models? The keys of the players released 2015 must be on discs released 2005, otherwise the future players won't be able to play the older discs.
(Or are they going to skip over this as well and just only make the new prints of old releases include the new keys? Meaning that new models can't play used discs? How about "consumer protection" here?)
Let's say there are 1000 models released per year, and that over 20 years, means 20000 keys. That's 20MB, still sounds reasonable for discs with 18GB capacity.
Of course, that still doesn't sovled the discussed problem that each model will be sold thousands of times, and several thousand of customers who did nothing at all get punished for the one that was a "bad boy" and cracked the key of the device.