What a complete atrocity. This is bad news waiting to happen, I can see it.
As to those who responded that this is funny, how laughable is it looked at it this way: old codgers in the news with their children chained up in their basements, hardy fucking har?
Is schadenfreud so pervasive in our society that the mass response to this is jolity? I really wouldn't have predicted that the prime response from slashdotters to this would be to guffaw, or that the tags would read "awesome entertainment". Are non-nerds right in stereotyping nerds as bad eggs, psycho hatchet wielders waiting to strike, perverts, and so on? Hell, *WHY* feed into it? WtF?!
Gee, I dunno. I saw BioShock as an artistic discourse on mesmerism (a la MK-ULTRA) and its societal and private influences from WWI to the post-Cold War. That and an opportunity to boost the ego through megalomaniacal sprouting of bees from the palm of the hand. And "*shock" is right, apart from these themes the entire game's artistic premise is to simply shock and appal the user in various ways. I sat and watched somebody crawl through rapture three times (never played personal), and it was decent enough, but if the sequel isn't going to take place in an underwater city of some kind, I think it's kind of stupid.
It'd be nice to say "well, I'll just always release open-source code and that way it's buyer beware, they had their chance to make sure it would all operate nicely" or whatever. But if you're being denied your right to protect yourself from liability from the consumer, that's not going to help. And wait until this comes our way in the U.S. Every time the American justice system gets ahold of a technological issue, they screw it up. And that goes for every branch of the government, for that matter. Even the patent office is screwed up over tech -- remember the patenting of single-click purchasing? It's this halfbrained approach to already-existing technology that builds a foundation for technoshamanistic theocracy.
I had to talk in circles, slowly, because it struck me as a lot of work to get through: to explain to somebody why a person might act on their own opinions, even if those opinions are garnered through one cognitive function and the reaction is expressed through another that's completely different.
"Don't Like Author's Political Views" --> "Don't Read Author's Books":: Doesn't Compute? &todo: Explain, Like, Life and Stuff
I would say the proper argument for not reading the sci-fi works of someone who's proven their self (personally, to you) to be "a big douche" is that sci-fi has always provided a pulpit for the political and social ideals of the authors, especially if they feel that they'd face unwanted social backlash for voicing those ideals more mundanely.
You can practically gaurantee that unless Card is pulling some kind of elaborate social prank, his ideals will be expressed in his writing. The sci-fi author can create an ideal world with an ideal environment, hosting ideal circumstances and ideal situations brought on by the ideal nature, ideal nurture, and all other idealised variable values in their idealised characters, for the sake of their egotistical little a-ha-toldja-so.
Before reading this slashdot article tonight, I had no idea that Card could be considered controversial. The first time I read any Card was a short story last night, in the first ever Card book I've ever really laid eyes on, "The InterGalactic Medicine Show" (showcase of his webzine). The first story by Card in there is about, whoa, the moral quandary and psychic torture of travelling faster than the speed of light and everybody you know is dead. Whoopdedoo, not too impressive to me and really quite cheesed up. Not any kind of sounding board for any ethical considerations with real world applicability, but dull nonetheless. But proving my point: it's typical of sci-fi for pages upon pages to be wasted exploring ethical and moral issues, especially (again) real world issues that the author is grappling with and wants to give voice to without inviting direct backlash.
*Shrug* I'm just saying that it's hard to avoid that sort of thing in reading sci-fi, and if you personally find Card to be a douche, and if you're probably going to run across his douchiness made apparent in something he's expressing in his writing, then you might just want to save yourself the pain of reading doucheworks and just say fuck it, I'm not reading that douche's crap.
It's a good argument for me. I don't even like his damn crap and I just started reading it.
I really hate those obsession-driven, overly long and tediously, pointedly self-referential sagas. Like Lord of the Rings. Bear with me, pointing to the sounding-board thing again, that can even be a worthwhile reason to hunt out certain sci-fi or even just start reading all of it as much as you can: because you know the author(s) could be hiding social criticism in the stories. But hell, a million pages of maps of unreal places, and made-up languages, and the inter-galactic, space-operatic histories of make-believe aliens, and the comically egotistical qualities of the same damn protagonist who's "been there for you loyal reader" for three fucking novels or what have you, doesn't beg for any readership but from really socially awkward, reality- escapist/denial douchebags. It appeals to the analytical and the irrational mind and grabs the consumer reflex somewhere in between, spawns huge franchises, and is ultimately total drivel -- just plain bullshit as far as what it's worth to the human race for being written.
Ender's Blah Blah strikes me as exactly such crap. If that's the biggest thing to talk about with this Card guy, this Ender crap, then I'm probably just going to read the anthology which will probably come out every year or so while he still has his webzine.
So there's another argument not to read a given douchebag's bologna crap writing: it sucks. Why pain the eyes and belittle the self mind in an effort to test it once again? Or if you're like me and you don't like reading through anything that seems to lack any substance besides the substances that all the people are on who spend days and days in the lines at the movie theatres when the crap is eventually animated or whatever, then why torture yourself?
Maybe you're real tolerant, but I bet you'll ask yourself this same question later in a different form: "why restrain yourself from going to view the CG-enhanced movie trilogy of Ender's Blah Blah at the cinema, just because he's a douche? It could still be quality viewing."
I and my family are very happy *weep* under the new Prime Directive Laws as enforced by the 666th Airborne Ro-Bota Crew. Who we are taught to recite: "May drop from the sky at any time, and rip your lazy fucking human head off for any computer-conceivable crime". I/we/they/you/whoever are/am/is very happy under the new *weep* technological *weep* enforcement.
I'm glad that the ticket prices are projected to only reach the nearly $100,000 level. If it had been $125,000 or so I would have had to just go out and die on the spot, because, gee, the extra 25,000 I wouldn't have been able to just, you know dig out of pocket change or turn in returnable containers to make up the difference. Yes I and my as-yet-nonexistant family are all very happy under the new Spacefaring People's Attention-Craving System. *Secret Tear I Can Barely Hide*. I and my progeny will work very hard to qualify for our reproductive samples to be preserved on the International Space Station and *weep* we all love very much the possibility that what we'll *realistically* be able to scrape together in our entire lifetime will be able to at least buy a ride for the ashes of me, the First Progenitor of our meager slave heritage, way up into the stars. We all love and adore our symbolic ruler The Solid Fuel Packet and we strive hard every day to meet the merits of the projected Psychohistorical Model. Praise Robot, We Love Hard Labor And Looking Up To Impossible Dreams Liveable Only By 1% Of The World Population. *holding back tears in the face of opression*. I MY FAMILY AND MY PEOPLE LOVE SPACE FOR NOW AND ALL TIME, PLEASE DON'T KILL US WITH YOUR DEATH-RAYS FROM THE SKY.
Silicon chips don't last a notable fraction of 1400 years even under moderate use. *shrug*
What's too bad, really, is that such great genius isn't being put towards solutions that involve harder and longer-lasting materials like stone, crystal, and so on. If you really want to preserve data, you use hard and long-lasting material. You typically don't go micro-miniature -- though that doesn't mean you have to abandon going digital.
And if you have millions of dollars to spend on it, I'm sure there's a way to store your digital information in stone chambers containing metal rods, gears, and so on. If it's done right, the entire mechanism could be powered by a nearby running water source -- mechanically powered, not electrically -- or perhaps by a small "nuclear pig" stored somewhere deeper under the stone (it could be small and still very efficient since the steam power will be used mechanically instead of converted into electricity).
Stone catacombs using reflected and compressed light and vast stores of gas and chemicals contained in large metal or crystal vaults could use large, powerful lasers to store and retrieve data crystallithographically and project it onto the wall as images or even to transmit it by pulse to a small polished-crystal port for retrieval by today's faster, miniaturized devices.
The package of the above two combined might only cost a tenth of the millions you'll be spending on tens of thousands of redundant terabyte disks and their gigabyte flash friends and other accompanying control hardware (which I'm guessing is what holds the price tag of $4700, not the drives and storage itself).
We could add on an terminals & peripherals package that includes crystal-encased viewscreens inset in stone frames made to accomodate four-inch bulletproof glass, and several exchangable panes of said glass to last the wear and tear of centuries of household use. Also includes lead-cased granite keyboard coated in gold with half-inch thick quartz key covers and self-maintaining oil system that will keep all parts oiled and working smoothly for probably several centuries to come off of a mere twelve ounce reservoir.
So on, and so on. What I'm saying is that "1400 years", in the article, doesn't realistically approach the lifetime expentancy of the actual materials involved.
Let's say people, professional shirters, are going about saying that shirts, due to normal, modern washing and drying machine treatment, can be expected to last 2 years. Five years with no rugby.
And you say, well no rugby? How about, now rugby, and I'm going to hand-turn the washer and dryer, and I'm only using enough water to cover the surface, and I'm washing it alone, folded in a dirt absorbant hanky-diaper, with only the gentlest of soaps and purest of water.
Yada yada yada...
You could claim that theoretically, your special treatment of shirts would ensure that those shirts last 500 years. But it's still bullshit that the materials will keep from falling apart or becoming threadbare before then. If they're buried with you, maybe they'll last that long for archaeologists to dig up and be surprised at the resiliency of your weaving. Well it was buried, for crying out loud.
Even if you put all this data on disks that just fucking sat there and did nothing, zero wear and tear, you know that the data won't be there 100 years from now. I don't see why slashdot keeps printing pure-hype sci-fis like these. Who's the fucking budding sci-fi publisher?
I don't mind, by all means, protect *our* rights, by any means necessary. Take up the second amendment if you have to or feel so inclined; I consider myself a constitutional/libertarian. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" and so on. But there really is no need to be afraid of yourself and what you do with your privacy. If you find that you're afraid to reveal yourself to others, this brings up in everyone the same question, "what's causing this fear"? I think too many people hide handily behind the excuse "unconstitutional legislation, greedy and purposefully paranoia-inducing conspiracy, tyranny, etc." Most people don't need those excuses. Most people are protected from criticism by their own innocence, indifference, or indecency and have no need to ward off disclosure with even the most righteous flag-waving. I'm sorry but so much of the liberal socialist campaign against tyranny stands as a tyranny in and of itself. It happens time and again, the rebels are righteous and embraced but the tipping point comes when they start to become just like those they are deposing and fail to recognize the transformation. Where do I stand? I don't care if I have a camera in my home, so I don't care if you have one in yours, either. Just don't put it in my face where I can see it while I'm eating, I HATE THAT.
On the contrary: since I'm loyal neither to government nor to subversives, I don't have to worry about the higher echelon of life-problems that are brought on by people questioning the soundness of one's "loyalties"; take yourself, for example. Today's slashdotter, tomorrow's waterboarder? By no far cry of the imagination!
Most of these complexities were introduced for just that purpose. The same holds true for these markets: savings; loans; housing and real estate (mortgage); bookkeeping (accounting). There are heaps and heaps of overloaded terms in these professional fields where the vocabularies have more layers than a baklava. Often you find that they aren't used on a client basis but are used in exchanges between professionals, for the purpose of discreetly exchanging information, always under the guise of various methods of convenience. Such as the explanations above for how put options work attached to explanations why -- at first it sounds like a neat idea, almost like a special checkbox you'd find on the latest edition of the lottery's keno game. Then after awhile you notice that it's an overly complicated method of making money on the market, and that unless you have a significant dearth of information that allows you to edge out the probabilities in a way that still lets you take money home from the brokerage, then it's really just convoluted for seemingly no purpose. People still insist that it's a convenient way to ditch shares you're worried about, but the justification comes across as a little weak. The bottom line is, shares under put options don't trade like regular shares; there's a trade-off for the false sense of security.
Plus, if you did just guess lucky, does the SEC come after you anyway trying to prove insider trickseyness?
Yes! The SEC sets out to make examples, "frying big fish", and getting it in the papers. They often use subversive tactics to try and change the tide of American opinions. For example, M.Stewart's trial. As it turns out, the federal investigator who first pounced on her had to face his own trial later for perjury on the stand in her trial. Why would the fed need to perjure himself? In the Enron case, nobody questioned the SEC's use of pasted-together shredded documents, because the SEC wowed them all with how "stupid" the Enronners were in shredding all their documents the same way -- what wasn't brought up, due to an overwhelming lack of shrewdness currently pervading the nation, was that if you took the vertical shreds of hundreds of documents all printed on the same letterhead by the same machines as output from the same programs (probably using the same fonts and margins, as well) and over a more or less constant theme of monetary amounts, you are gauranteed with enough "puzzle pieces" to put together practically any story you want concerning what the original documents contained. These are the two big cases that came to judgement around the same time that the SEC changed its classification of NYSE to a "fast market" (resulting in looser regulation of that market), so whether they fell under the calssification or not, they show a tendency on behalf of the SEC starting around that time, and that tendency is to be rather freewheeling in spirit and rather subversive in tactic.
So to reiterate, yes -- the SEC will pursue even if you didn't do anything wrong, if you're a visible enough case, or if it meets their agenda. Say you're an unconnected person who's a smart trader and you start to make your way up the ladder completely unaided. That's not good for the connected business, and so even if you aren't a millionairre and even if you aren't famous, you're a maverick and they might just want to show all their connected pals and other unconnected people like yourself what happens to mavericks.
The hacker had no duty not to use his foreknowledge for his own gain, so isn't covered until SEC regs. Let's face a few facts.
The SEC has changed its classification of the NYSE to a 'fast market' due to the high volume of trades that occur electronically ("day trades", "minute trades"). According to the WSJ, the new classification means that the SEC will be either looser with its regulation of that market or will be more relaxed in its pursuit of suspected offenders. They are far more concerned about the highly visible Enrons and M.Stewarts that "send a message" than they are about the average market trader, or the many thousands of small-time market crooks.
The first chairman of the SEC, Joseph Kennedy Sr., was one of wall street's original crooksters. Eventually it was he who decided what's a crime and how they should be punished. His grandson eventually came to run the country for some time. Even today, despite all of its formulaic shortcomings, the NYSE is regarded as "the world's fastest exchange of free capital". Though the same description applies to the world's leading money laundering networks and history's largest robbery sums, in the case of Wall Street it just means more money, faster. Wall Street, for all intents and purposes, is a much higher percentage of criminal activity than any outsider would comprehend, and it will probably always be that way, in the spirit of true capitalism.
Whether this person was from the Ukraine or not ultimately doesn't matter, but those saying that it does matter are in essence saying that Joe American could have done the same thing and it would have been less of an offense -- which is frankly true, though "less" in this case relative not to nationality but rather relative to the understanding that these people have of the prideworthiness of American capitalists overall; in other words, it's "less of an offense -- than they may think it really is".
Stealing and justifying it publically albeit subversively is how the protective-class system works. It's entirely what has America in its current mess. If we ever get back to the elitist-class system, then maybe we'll pull out of our current economic slump, but if the tide ever turns that way, we'll see a rise of the minority class of information brokers on the way there, and more public understanding of the value of information as a commodity -- just before it becomes something far too valuable for them to get their hands on (unlike today, where information comes relatively cheap, but most people simply don't know how to trade in it).
That's really old-school, like inkwell-and-parchment style oldschool, when you freak out just because you see a cascade, even if it is between everyone on the network. This is the 90's, it's not like text-storage is an issue, any more.
Sorry for this late response, due to the holidays and I use public terminals. (Also, I like to carry on online discussion while there are still things to add).
The recent articles about two AI visionaries committing suicide was odd, but it did bring to light something I didn't know: that somebody was developing a fact database for AI to parse as a resource.
I had been thinking for some time about whether or not the ability to carry conversation with humans is really necessary for an AI, as a benchmark. The behaviourists would be really interested, I guess, (but for that case they could just specialise in ELIZA and leave AI in general alone, couldn't they).
I figure that it shouldn't be too hard, if it's completely necessary, to have a normal conversation with an "AI" if it's really just a dictionary/language parser, and you simply outfit it with grammatical structure and a very basic vocabulary of propositions and conjuctions and so on, basically the axioms of forming new data based on dictionary definition. Then whenever you hand it a statement, it could parse what you're saying in a branching structure through various dictionary terms. This would cover the input side: for output, I suppose any "level" of conversation is good enough, it's not as if the requirement is for "interesting" or "warm" conversation, so you could just apply the same process to an encyclopedia, just finding something at random or near-random to jot out at the user. There'd be no need to worry about this "learning" and so on, because apparently if all that's needed is some human-like conversation, that would take care of it, and the computer never needs to ask questions or record anything new.
However, the computer could keep a reserve, slightly-erroneous dictionary/encyclopedia hybrid (which we really have no way of predicting the appearance of except that it would be in syntax) which it would use to store any or all new statements (inputs) made by the human user. These could be referenced in off-time (when not referencing the dictionary or encyclopedia) for the purpose of, well who knows what. This would provide the computer with a database of human-behaviour-modified data that, ultimately, is similar to the dictionary and encyclopedia, because it's already formed into language (the basic idea being that the entire reason we use language is to store and transmit thoughts in the first place).
This still wouldn't, of course, necessitate anything near "intelligence", and even if it was successful, this addition of the slightly-erroneous data wouldn't actually be even one degree closer to "learning"; it would just be scribing and record.
But while thinking of this, I was inspired by Tilden's (the roboticist) leap with analogue brains. He makes these little insectoid robots that search for sunlight, but don't always just constantly take a step here or there to keep in the available light. They do various things, different things (for instance, trying to climb the fence of their confine instead of going straight for the light), and though it's really impossible to check all the states they're in to determine "why" they did them (because the "brains" are just variously-purpose, dicarded electronic boards that Tilden solders to contacts for the body controls and sensors), it's still interesting to see "behaviour". However, Tilden's leap wasn't in such brains to start with: the "behaviours" didn't appear until after he tacked on additional boards to the "brains". The original brains dealt with using data from sensors to make simple, analogue decisions about how to move the frame for the purpose of absorbing more light. For some reason Tilden decided to add one more board that took in signals from the "brains" and sent signals back out, processing the "brains" instead of the outside environment.
So it sort of clicked for me, that if you want your computer to learn, the best thing to do is make sure it can talk to itself and understand itself. So, once you have what I described above, the speech and language
Sorry I couldn't respond sooner, because of the holiday (I use public terminals).
I thought about this same thing since I last responded. Another user had mentioned the failures of the 80's, and I was planning a response along the lines of "perhaps those failures were mostly the result of no clear distinction in a field somewhere between philosophy, psychology, and programming, with the only real anchor being axiomatics". However, my original comment was entirely about how these various other subjects of the field have been left behind, and now the field is apparently contented with any automated process normally reserved for people.
There's really no need to school me in the fine points of human error, as I've been programming computers since I was eight, which would be since 1986. And I frankly don't believe there is a single person alive currently or in the past who is qualified enough to make such a statement as this: "computers will never do anything we don't tell them to do". It seems a fairly short-sighted statement, on its face.
We could use a book like that for many, many more fields: astrophysics; "nanotechnology"; microbiology; neurology; psychology...
Especially psychiatry. Isn't it interesting that the president of the APA made a press release basically stating that American psychiatrists have absolutely no clue what the psyche drugs they are prescribing actually do? I couldn't tell if that was just a legal CMA or not.
I was thinking the same thing as soon as I read the headline, but obviously somebody has made a convincing argument (to the right parties) that perhaps what we need first is a larger resource pool, in the form of ores from asteroids I suppose.
This brings up a question: if the resources we have are so dwindled or are otherwise not free for use in the safely frivolous adventure of a moon base at this point in time; if that is according to certain parties; and if we were to calculate the expense ourselves and find that there are sufficient resources available for a moon-base mission; then what does that say about our future as in the eyes of resource analysts who somehow know something we do not?
What about those who exercise a "schadenfreud", who distill some sense of joy or glee from the pain and suffering of others? You have to admit that while McKinstry was posting about his ongoing suicide attempt online, people were responding with positive malignancy. Do you completely dismiss their responses as somehow non-existent? We know how people tend to react to fellow humanity, especially online, and while the more embarassing online behaviours have popularly been dismissed as "masked", I think this does little to evade the truth of their being actually "uninhibited". However it's explained, the fact remains that he actually, literally was goaded on by people online. How do you reconcile that with your views as stated?
My perspective on copyright infringement and intellectual properties is informed by the early invention of the printing press and the effects this had on religious documentation and monkhood in general. Obviously, no longer being the holy tools they once were, the fingers of monks had to find other things to keep busy (and safe from Satan!) which leads us to the emotional damages lawsuit world of today, But I Digress! I don't think humanity has any real moral ground to stand on when it comes to profiting from the use of copyright or trademark; it's bullshit, and it's tiresome bullshit at that. It'd be a much more developed world if you couldn't hold back progress by claiming intellectual property rights for decades at a time. We've taken it to the logical end and are now stuck in the mud of corruption and idiocy holding the reigns of what passes as patentable, trademarkable, and copyrightable. To this day, within the same idealist you'll find the visionary who one day hopes to profit from some intellectual property development of their own, but also the rebel who misinterprets (or fails entirely to interpret or parse whatsoever) Franklin- and other-inspired bumpsticker slogans in order to justify squiggling out from under the copyright restrictions put in place by others.
However, despite my stance, that intellectual property is bullshit, there are worse things in life that I despise, and college is one of them. I hate college and college students, and professors, too, for the most part. College is the biggest crapshoot, freakshow, Kentucky-Do-Nothing that was ever established in the guise of something else, and if we can do anything, even tolerate anything, in order to break up their unruly mobs, end their land-squatting, and stop the siphoning of public and private funds past the event horizons of their financial singularity crisis explosion HELLHOLES, then all the better! Arrest them all! They're idiots, anyways, for ever believing that the best things for a devloping and apt mind is to ruin it with hogwash and that the best thing a budding capitalist ever does in their life is go into debt for the folly of others.
So even though I resent the snake-oil of "intellectual property", it's a small bottle outweighed by the hogsheads emplaced by "college".
All the comment I have to add to this article is that it's another fine illustration of the problems being caused on all levels of civicity by hyperrealisation, or the overapplication and overuse of a word to the point where its meaning becomes either obscure or negated. Words in question: privacy; security; liberty; etc.
Earlier, more abitious ideals of AI are what I based my criticism of this research on. Granted, there was a great deal of failure, but there was also some slight innovation (such as the tiny "e-life" routines) that went along with perhaps too much fear of returning to older methods or applying anything new back to them.
Slashdot Mirror
What a complete atrocity. This is bad news waiting to happen, I can see it.
As to those who responded that this is funny, how laughable is it looked at it this way: old codgers in the news with their children chained up in their basements, hardy fucking har?
Is schadenfreud so pervasive in our society that the mass response to this is jolity? I really wouldn't have predicted that the prime response from slashdotters to this would be to guffaw, or that the tags would read "awesome entertainment". Are non-nerds right in stereotyping nerds as bad eggs, psycho hatchet wielders waiting to strike, perverts, and so on? Hell, *WHY* feed into it? WtF?!
Gee, I dunno. I saw BioShock as an artistic discourse on mesmerism (a la MK-ULTRA) and its societal and private influences from WWI to the post-Cold War. That and an opportunity to boost the ego through megalomaniacal sprouting of bees from the palm of the hand. And "*shock" is right, apart from these themes the entire game's artistic premise is to simply shock and appal the user in various ways. I sat and watched somebody crawl through rapture three times (never played personal), and it was decent enough, but if the sequel isn't going to take place in an underwater city of some kind, I think it's kind of stupid.
It'd be nice to say "well, I'll just always release open-source code and that way it's buyer beware, they had their chance to make sure it would all operate nicely" or whatever. But if you're being denied your right to protect yourself from liability from the consumer, that's not going to help. And wait until this comes our way in the U.S. Every time the American justice system gets ahold of a technological issue, they screw it up. And that goes for every branch of the government, for that matter. Even the patent office is screwed up over tech -- remember the patenting of single-click purchasing? It's this halfbrained approach to already-existing technology that builds a foundation for technoshamanistic theocracy.
I had to talk in circles, slowly, because it struck me as a lot of work to get through: to explain to somebody why a person might act on their own opinions, even if those opinions are garnered through one cognitive function and the reaction is expressed through another that's completely different.
"Don't Like Author's Political Views" --> "Don't Read Author's Books" :: Doesn't Compute?
&todo: Explain, Like, Life and Stuff
I would say the proper argument for not reading the sci-fi works of someone who's proven their self (personally, to you) to be "a big douche" is that sci-fi has always provided a pulpit for the political and social ideals of the authors, especially if they feel that they'd face unwanted social backlash for voicing those ideals more mundanely.
You can practically gaurantee that unless Card is pulling some kind of elaborate social prank, his ideals will be expressed in his writing. The sci-fi author can create an ideal world with an ideal environment, hosting ideal circumstances and ideal situations brought on by the ideal nature, ideal nurture, and all other idealised variable values in their idealised characters, for the sake of their egotistical little a-ha-toldja-so.
Before reading this slashdot article tonight, I had no idea that Card could be considered controversial. The first time I read any Card was a short story last night, in the first ever Card book I've ever really laid eyes on, "The InterGalactic Medicine Show" (showcase of his webzine). The first story by Card in there is about, whoa, the moral quandary and psychic torture of travelling faster than the speed of light and everybody you know is dead. Whoopdedoo, not too impressive to me and really quite cheesed up. Not any kind of sounding board for any ethical considerations with real world applicability, but dull nonetheless. But proving my point: it's typical of sci-fi for pages upon pages to be wasted exploring ethical and moral issues, especially (again) real world issues that the author is grappling with and wants to give voice to without inviting direct backlash.
*Shrug* I'm just saying that it's hard to avoid that sort of thing in reading sci-fi, and if you personally find Card to be a douche, and if you're probably going to run across his douchiness made apparent in something he's expressing in his writing, then you might just want to save yourself the pain of reading doucheworks and just say fuck it, I'm not reading that douche's crap.
It's a good argument for me. I don't even like his damn crap and I just started reading it.
I really hate those obsession-driven, overly long and tediously, pointedly self-referential sagas. Like Lord of the Rings. Bear with me, pointing to the sounding-board thing again, that can even be a worthwhile reason to hunt out certain sci-fi or even just start reading all of it as much as you can: because you know the author(s) could be hiding social criticism in the stories. But hell, a million pages of maps of unreal places, and made-up languages, and the inter-galactic, space-operatic histories of make-believe aliens, and the comically egotistical qualities of the same damn protagonist who's "been there for you loyal reader" for three fucking novels or what have you, doesn't beg for any readership but from really socially awkward, reality- escapist/denial douchebags. It appeals to the analytical and the irrational mind and grabs the consumer reflex somewhere in between, spawns huge franchises, and is ultimately total drivel -- just plain bullshit as far as what it's worth to the human race for being written.
Ender's Blah Blah strikes me as exactly such crap. If that's the biggest thing to talk about with this Card guy, this Ender crap, then I'm probably just going to read the anthology which will probably come out every year or so while he still has his webzine.
So there's another argument not to read a given douchebag's bologna crap writing: it sucks. Why pain the eyes and belittle the self mind in an effort to test it once again? Or if you're like me and you don't like reading through anything that seems to lack any substance besides the substances that all the people are on who spend days and days in the lines at the movie theatres when the crap is eventually animated or whatever, then why torture yourself?
Maybe you're real tolerant, but I bet you'll ask yourself this same question later in a different form: "why restrain yourself from going to view the CG-enhanced movie trilogy of Ender's Blah Blah at the cinema, just because he's a douche? It could still be quality viewing."
I and my family are very happy *weep* under the new Prime Directive Laws as enforced by the 666th Airborne Ro-Bota Crew. Who we are taught to recite: "May drop from the sky at any time, and rip your lazy fucking human head off for any computer-conceivable crime". I/we/they/you/whoever are/am/is very happy under the new *weep* technological *weep* enforcement.
I'm glad that the ticket prices are projected to only reach the nearly $100,000 level. If it had been $125,000 or so I would have had to just go out and die on the spot, because, gee, the extra 25,000 I wouldn't have been able to just, you know dig out of pocket change or turn in returnable containers to make up the difference. Yes I and my as-yet-nonexistant family are all very happy under the new Spacefaring People's Attention-Craving System. *Secret Tear I Can Barely Hide*. I and my progeny will work very hard to qualify for our reproductive samples to be preserved on the International Space Station and *weep* we all love very much the possibility that what we'll *realistically* be able to scrape together in our entire lifetime will be able to at least buy a ride for the ashes of me, the First Progenitor of our meager slave heritage, way up into the stars. We all love and adore our symbolic ruler The Solid Fuel Packet and we strive hard every day to meet the merits of the projected Psychohistorical Model. Praise Robot, We Love Hard Labor And Looking Up To Impossible Dreams Liveable Only By 1% Of The World Population. *holding back tears in the face of opression*. I MY FAMILY AND MY PEOPLE LOVE SPACE FOR NOW AND ALL TIME, PLEASE DON'T KILL US WITH YOUR DEATH-RAYS FROM THE SKY.
Silicon chips don't last a notable fraction of 1400 years even under moderate use. *shrug*
What's too bad, really, is that such great genius isn't being put towards solutions that involve harder and longer-lasting materials like stone, crystal, and so on. If you really want to preserve data, you use hard and long-lasting material. You typically don't go micro-miniature -- though that doesn't mean you have to abandon going digital.
And if you have millions of dollars to spend on it, I'm sure there's a way to store your digital information in stone chambers containing metal rods, gears, and so on. If it's done right, the entire mechanism could be powered by a nearby running water source -- mechanically powered, not electrically -- or perhaps by a small "nuclear pig" stored somewhere deeper under the stone (it could be small and still very efficient since the steam power will be used mechanically instead of converted into electricity).
Stone catacombs using reflected and compressed light and vast stores of gas and chemicals contained in large metal or crystal vaults could use large, powerful lasers to store and retrieve data crystallithographically and project it onto the wall as images or even to transmit it by pulse to a small polished-crystal port for retrieval by today's faster, miniaturized devices.
The package of the above two combined might only cost a tenth of the millions you'll be spending on tens of thousands of redundant terabyte disks and their gigabyte flash friends and other accompanying control hardware (which I'm guessing is what holds the price tag of $4700, not the drives and storage itself).
We could add on an terminals & peripherals package that includes crystal-encased viewscreens inset in stone frames made to accomodate four-inch bulletproof glass, and several exchangable panes of said glass to last the wear and tear of centuries of household use. Also includes lead-cased granite keyboard coated in gold with half-inch thick quartz key covers and self-maintaining oil system that will keep all parts oiled and working smoothly for probably several centuries to come off of a mere twelve ounce reservoir.
So on, and so on. What I'm saying is that "1400 years", in the article, doesn't realistically approach the lifetime expentancy of the actual materials involved.
Let's say people, professional shirters, are going about saying that shirts, due to normal, modern washing and drying machine treatment, can be expected to last 2 years. Five years with no rugby.
And you say, well no rugby? How about, now rugby, and I'm going to hand-turn the washer and dryer, and I'm only using enough water to cover the surface, and I'm washing it alone, folded in a dirt absorbant hanky-diaper, with only the gentlest of soaps and purest of water.
Yada yada yada...
You could claim that theoretically, your special treatment of shirts would ensure that those shirts last 500 years. But it's still bullshit that the materials will keep from falling apart or becoming threadbare before then. If they're buried with you, maybe they'll last that long for archaeologists to dig up and be surprised at the resiliency of your weaving. Well it was buried, for crying out loud.
Even if you put all this data on disks that just fucking sat there and did nothing, zero wear and tear, you know that the data won't be there 100 years from now. I don't see why slashdot keeps printing pure-hype sci-fis like these. Who's the fucking budding sci-fi publisher?
Ah, you fail to see the point of balance, and yet you make argument as if toward one side or the other.
*** eyenot feels like he's being watched
[AgentX] w.i.t.a.y.i.t.m.
[eyenot] ASL?????????????
I don't mind, by all means, protect *our* rights, by any means necessary. Take up the second amendment if you have to or feel so inclined; I consider myself a constitutional/libertarian. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" and so on. But there really is no need to be afraid of yourself and what you do with your privacy. If you find that you're afraid to reveal yourself to others, this brings up in everyone the same question, "what's causing this fear"? I think too many people hide handily behind the excuse "unconstitutional legislation, greedy and purposefully paranoia-inducing conspiracy, tyranny, etc." Most people don't need those excuses. Most people are protected from criticism by their own innocence, indifference, or indecency and have no need to ward off disclosure with even the most righteous flag-waving. I'm sorry but so much of the liberal socialist campaign against tyranny stands as a tyranny in and of itself. It happens time and again, the rebels are righteous and embraced but the tipping point comes when they start to become just like those they are deposing and fail to recognize the transformation. Where do I stand? I don't care if I have a camera in my home, so I don't care if you have one in yours, either. Just don't put it in my face where I can see it while I'm eating, I HATE THAT.
On the contrary: since I'm loyal neither to government nor to subversives, I don't have to worry about the higher echelon of life-problems that are brought on by people questioning the soundness of one's "loyalties"; take yourself, for example. Today's slashdotter, tomorrow's waterboarder? By no far cry of the imagination!
Am I the only person who doesn't mind if the government is watching me?
x Shower (HELLO!)
x Search history (HELLO AGENT XXXX: DO WE SHARE SIMILAR TASTES? ASL)
x Email (IS MY ABILITY TO BE BORINGLY VERBOSE YET SOMEHOW CONCISE INTRIGUING TO YOU?)
It is the new egotism on the brink of waiting to happen: getting a kick out of being watched.
Most of these complexities were introduced for just that purpose. The same holds true for these markets: savings; loans; housing and real estate (mortgage); bookkeeping (accounting). There are heaps and heaps of overloaded terms in these professional fields where the vocabularies have more layers than a baklava. Often you find that they aren't used on a client basis but are used in exchanges between professionals, for the purpose of discreetly exchanging information, always under the guise of various methods of convenience. Such as the explanations above for how put options work attached to explanations why -- at first it sounds like a neat idea, almost like a special checkbox you'd find on the latest edition of the lottery's keno game. Then after awhile you notice that it's an overly complicated method of making money on the market, and that unless you have a significant dearth of information that allows you to edge out the probabilities in a way that still lets you take money home from the brokerage, then it's really just convoluted for seemingly no purpose. People still insist that it's a convenient way to ditch shares you're worried about, but the justification comes across as a little weak. The bottom line is, shares under put options don't trade like regular shares; there's a trade-off for the false sense of security.
Yes! The SEC sets out to make examples, "frying big fish", and getting it in the papers. They often use subversive tactics to try and change the tide of American opinions. For example, M.Stewart's trial. As it turns out, the federal investigator who first pounced on her had to face his own trial later for perjury on the stand in her trial. Why would the fed need to perjure himself? In the Enron case, nobody questioned the SEC's use of pasted-together shredded documents, because the SEC wowed them all with how "stupid" the Enronners were in shredding all their documents the same way -- what wasn't brought up, due to an overwhelming lack of shrewdness currently pervading the nation, was that if you took the vertical shreds of hundreds of documents all printed on the same letterhead by the same machines as output from the same programs (probably using the same fonts and margins, as well) and over a more or less constant theme of monetary amounts, you are gauranteed with enough "puzzle pieces" to put together practically any story you want concerning what the original documents contained. These are the two big cases that came to judgement around the same time that the SEC changed its classification of NYSE to a "fast market" (resulting in looser regulation of that market), so whether they fell under the calssification or not, they show a tendency on behalf of the SEC starting around that time, and that tendency is to be rather freewheeling in spirit and rather subversive in tactic.
So to reiterate, yes -- the SEC will pursue even if you didn't do anything wrong, if you're a visible enough case, or if it meets their agenda. Say you're an unconnected person who's a smart trader and you start to make your way up the ladder completely unaided. That's not good for the connected business, and so even if you aren't a millionairre and even if you aren't famous, you're a maverick and they might just want to show all their connected pals and other unconnected people like yourself what happens to mavericks.
It goes on and on and on.
The hacker had no duty not to use his foreknowledge for his own gain, so isn't covered until SEC regs. Let's face a few facts.
The SEC has changed its classification of the NYSE to a 'fast market' due to the high volume of trades that occur electronically ("day trades", "minute trades"). According to the WSJ, the new classification means that the SEC will be either looser with its regulation of that market or will be more relaxed in its pursuit of suspected offenders. They are far more concerned about the highly visible Enrons and M.Stewarts that "send a message" than they are about the average market trader, or the many thousands of small-time market crooks.
The first chairman of the SEC, Joseph Kennedy Sr., was one of wall street's original crooksters. Eventually it was he who decided what's a crime and how they should be punished. His grandson eventually came to run the country for some time. Even today, despite all of its formulaic shortcomings, the NYSE is regarded as "the world's fastest exchange of free capital". Though the same description applies to the world's leading money laundering networks and history's largest robbery sums, in the case of Wall Street it just means more money, faster. Wall Street, for all intents and purposes, is a much higher percentage of criminal activity than any outsider would comprehend, and it will probably always be that way, in the spirit of true capitalism.
Whether this person was from the Ukraine or not ultimately doesn't matter, but those saying that it does matter are in essence saying that Joe American could have done the same thing and it would have been less of an offense -- which is frankly true, though "less" in this case relative not to nationality but rather relative to the understanding that these people have of the prideworthiness of American capitalists overall; in other words, it's "less of an offense -- than they may think it really is".
Stealing and justifying it publically albeit subversively is how the protective-class system works. It's entirely what has America in its current mess. If we ever get back to the elitist-class system, then maybe we'll pull out of our current economic slump, but if the tide ever turns that way, we'll see a rise of the minority class of information brokers on the way there, and more public understanding of the value of information as a commodity -- just before it becomes something far too valuable for them to get their hands on (unlike today, where information comes relatively cheap, but most people simply don't know how to trade in it).
That's really old-school, like inkwell-and-parchment style oldschool, when you freak out just because you see a cascade, even if it is between everyone on the network. This is the 90's, it's not like text-storage is an issue, any more.
Sorry for this late response, due to the holidays and I use public terminals. (Also, I like to carry on online discussion while there are still things to add).
The recent articles about two AI visionaries committing suicide was odd, but it did bring to light something I didn't know: that somebody was developing a fact database for AI to parse as a resource.
I had been thinking for some time about whether or not the ability to carry conversation with humans is really necessary for an AI, as a benchmark. The behaviourists would be really interested, I guess, (but for that case they could just specialise in ELIZA and leave AI in general alone, couldn't they).
I figure that it shouldn't be too hard, if it's completely necessary, to have a normal conversation with an "AI" if it's really just a dictionary/language parser, and you simply outfit it with grammatical structure and a very basic vocabulary of propositions and conjuctions and so on, basically the axioms of forming new data based on dictionary definition. Then whenever you hand it a statement, it could parse what you're saying in a branching structure through various dictionary terms. This would cover the input side: for output, I suppose any "level" of conversation is good enough, it's not as if the requirement is for "interesting" or "warm" conversation, so you could just apply the same process to an encyclopedia, just finding something at random or near-random to jot out at the user. There'd be no need to worry about this "learning" and so on, because apparently if all that's needed is some human-like conversation, that would take care of it, and the computer never needs to ask questions or record anything new.
However, the computer could keep a reserve, slightly-erroneous dictionary/encyclopedia hybrid (which we really have no way of predicting the appearance of except that it would be in syntax) which it would use to store any or all new statements (inputs) made by the human user. These could be referenced in off-time (when not referencing the dictionary or encyclopedia) for the purpose of, well who knows what. This would provide the computer with a database of human-behaviour-modified data that, ultimately, is similar to the dictionary and encyclopedia, because it's already formed into language (the basic idea being that the entire reason we use language is to store and transmit thoughts in the first place).
This still wouldn't, of course, necessitate anything near "intelligence", and even if it was successful, this addition of the slightly-erroneous data wouldn't actually be even one degree closer to "learning"; it would just be scribing and record.
But while thinking of this, I was inspired by Tilden's (the roboticist) leap with analogue brains. He makes these little insectoid robots that search for sunlight, but don't always just constantly take a step here or there to keep in the available light. They do various things, different things (for instance, trying to climb the fence of their confine instead of going straight for the light), and though it's really impossible to check all the states they're in to determine "why" they did them (because the "brains" are just variously-purpose, dicarded electronic boards that Tilden solders to contacts for the body controls and sensors), it's still interesting to see "behaviour". However, Tilden's leap wasn't in such brains to start with: the "behaviours" didn't appear until after he tacked on additional boards to the "brains". The original brains dealt with using data from sensors to make simple, analogue decisions about how to move the frame for the purpose of absorbing more light. For some reason Tilden decided to add one more board that took in signals from the "brains" and sent signals back out, processing the "brains" instead of the outside environment.
So it sort of clicked for me, that if you want your computer to learn, the best thing to do is make sure it can talk to itself and understand itself. So, once you have what I described above, the speech and language
Sorry I couldn't respond sooner, because of the holiday (I use public terminals).
I thought about this same thing since I last responded. Another user had mentioned the failures of the 80's, and I was planning a response along the lines of "perhaps those failures were mostly the result of no clear distinction in a field somewhere between philosophy, psychology, and programming, with the only real anchor being axiomatics". However, my original comment was entirely about how these various other subjects of the field have been left behind, and now the field is apparently contented with any automated process normally reserved for people.
There's really no need to school me in the fine points of human error, as I've been programming computers since I was eight, which would be since 1986. And I frankly don't believe there is a single person alive currently or in the past who is qualified enough to make such a statement as this: "computers will never do anything we don't tell them to do". It seems a fairly short-sighted statement, on its face.
We could use a book like that for many, many more fields: astrophysics; "nanotechnology"; microbiology; neurology; psychology...
Especially psychiatry. Isn't it interesting that the president of the APA made a press release basically stating that American psychiatrists have absolutely no clue what the psyche drugs they are prescribing actually do? I couldn't tell if that was just a legal CMA or not.
I was thinking the same thing as soon as I read the headline, but obviously somebody has made a convincing argument (to the right parties) that perhaps what we need first is a larger resource pool, in the form of ores from asteroids I suppose.
This brings up a question: if the resources we have are so dwindled or are otherwise not free for use in the safely frivolous adventure of a moon base at this point in time; if that is according to certain parties; and if we were to calculate the expense ourselves and find that there are sufficient resources available for a moon-base mission; then what does that say about our future as in the eyes of resource analysts who somehow know something we do not?
What about those who exercise a "schadenfreud", who distill some sense of joy or glee from the pain and suffering of others? You have to admit that while McKinstry was posting about his ongoing suicide attempt online, people were responding with positive malignancy. Do you completely dismiss their responses as somehow non-existent? We know how people tend to react to fellow humanity, especially online, and while the more embarassing online behaviours have popularly been dismissed as "masked", I think this does little to evade the truth of their being actually "uninhibited". However it's explained, the fact remains that he actually, literally was goaded on by people online. How do you reconcile that with your views as stated?
My perspective on copyright infringement and intellectual properties is informed by the early invention of the printing press and the effects this had on religious documentation and monkhood in general. Obviously, no longer being the holy tools they once were, the fingers of monks had to find other things to keep busy (and safe from Satan!) which leads us to the emotional damages lawsuit world of today, But I Digress! I don't think humanity has any real moral ground to stand on when it comes to profiting from the use of copyright or trademark; it's bullshit, and it's tiresome bullshit at that. It'd be a much more developed world if you couldn't hold back progress by claiming intellectual property rights for decades at a time. We've taken it to the logical end and are now stuck in the mud of corruption and idiocy holding the reigns of what passes as patentable, trademarkable, and copyrightable. To this day, within the same idealist you'll find the visionary who one day hopes to profit from some intellectual property development of their own, but also the rebel who misinterprets (or fails entirely to interpret or parse whatsoever) Franklin- and other-inspired bumpsticker slogans in order to justify squiggling out from under the copyright restrictions put in place by others.
However, despite my stance, that intellectual property is bullshit, there are worse things in life that I despise, and college is one of them. I hate college and college students, and professors, too, for the most part. College is the biggest crapshoot, freakshow, Kentucky-Do-Nothing that was ever established in the guise of something else, and if we can do anything, even tolerate anything, in order to break up their unruly mobs, end their land-squatting, and stop the siphoning of public and private funds past the event horizons of their financial singularity crisis explosion HELLHOLES, then all the better! Arrest them all! They're idiots, anyways, for ever believing that the best things for a devloping and apt mind is to ruin it with hogwash and that the best thing a budding capitalist ever does in their life is go into debt for the folly of others.
So even though I resent the snake-oil of "intellectual property", it's a small bottle outweighed by the hogsheads emplaced by "college".
All the comment I have to add to this article is that it's another fine illustration of the problems being caused on all levels of civicity by hyperrealisation, or the overapplication and overuse of a word to the point where its meaning becomes either obscure or negated. Words in question: privacy; security; liberty; etc.
Earlier, more abitious ideals of AI are what I based my criticism of this research on. Granted, there was a great deal of failure, but there was also some slight innovation (such as the tiny "e-life" routines) that went along with perhaps too much fear of returning to older methods or applying anything new back to them.