Buck up and get business-level service, or find yourself a real hosting service for your mail server. If you buy Internet service, you should expect to GET Internet service WITHOUT having to read a TOS, hire a lawyer, or spend 10 times more money routing certain packets in a so-called Business Plan. This is arrogance gone wild.
Companies who arbitrarily restrict built-in abilities of the TCP/IP protocol to prey for extra money should NOT be rewarded by consumers. Instead the consumer should PUNISH their ISP by shopping elsewhere (where applicable of course), and pressure their government with Net Neutrality laws and VERY HEAVY and enforcible fines for companies who break the rules.
I can anticipate the Libertarians complaining, but even many of them want their unrestricted P2P services running so they can download the latest version of Ubuntu, or use TOR services to look at their competition anonymously. Yes I suppose businesses may think I'm just griping, but it is THEY who go out of their way to create artificial barriers for Internet access and then have the nerve to charge a LOT more money to unblock these restrictions. As I said; arrogance gone wild.
The real issue would be how any privacy protections like storing IPs would be enforced. It is doubtful that a company would willfully admit to storing IPs if it is against the law to do so. I know if I were running a server (Web, FTP, IRC, etc), then I would store IPs despite the law, just because it makes sense from a security perspective (I would want to know who is online, who to ban, etc).
IP's contain less value over time (most consumers have dynamic IP's, can switch ISPs, use proxies, etc), so storing them for years wouldn't make a lot of practical sense anyways in most cases. Calling something as ephemeral and virtual as an IP personal property may be fine for politicians, but the utility of this is yet to be seen.
The more practical solution would be to legislate what a company or individual actually does with an IP. Do they sell it to spammers or crackers? or do they store it so that they can ban known spammers or crackers from entering their servers?
Encouraging Microsoft to have it's own proprietary schemes for rendering Web pages is implicitly encouraging bad behavior. I think it is a slippery slope for many people.
On the surface it seems more FUD than anything. If I understand the issue correctly, DTD's are already standard, and software designed to create Web pages will automatically insert DTD's as default. And this is the real issue here; the defaults.
Indeed, as with any democracy the outcome of ones choices are not always optimal. It is always good to know that people have choices though. For me, a well rendered Web page would be able to display legibly in Lynx, but my vote is rather meaningless in that case. Forcing an issue with the use of lawyers is rather Draconian however.
Why is it a surprise they would only fund free training for their own software? I mean isn't that kind of a duh thing? Are Linux companies sinister too now because they don't pay for free windows training for people who don't buy Linux? It's no surprise. The disappointment is the requirements.
From TFA:
"Of course, that includes the fact they [the schools] use Windows," Ayala said.' If you don't use Windows you don't get the cash." It doesn't matter what the intentions are.
That makes so much sense to me. It wouldn't be logical for Microsoft or any company to donate money for their competition (i.e. donate money for computers to run competing software). I would not suspect anything else from a for-profit company. I'm sure Microsoft's shareholders would agree. Nothing new in this news.
In the US, you are required to pay taxes on loan interest, even if you didn't collect any interest at all (because doing so would violate Mosaic law).
This statement strikes me as being odd. If you don't collect interest, then paying taxes on interest you don't pay would be meaningless (because, tax_rate * zero_percent_interest = zero tax). Could you elaborate please.
You also talk about Mosaic law (the law of Moses I would presume). I find it dubious that current US tax law is based on the Old Testament. At any rate, the religious freedoms you speak of are not relevant to privacy in anything but the most contrived manner. This is not a discussion about morality (religious or otherwise). I don't think anybody really wants to go there.
Yes it is control, but people fail to realize the psychological aspects of privacy, that is from the perspective of the spy.
Having the ability to know everything about both their friends and their foes gives them a feeling of control, however transient and imaginary that may be. It is the act of trying to control their own psychological insecurity.
It's like a patriarch snooping through their child's belongings, or reading their diary, it gives them a sense of power. In the end it doesn't matter why they do it; they have a compulsion to do it. It is not surprising that leaders in government and industry would do this because the same psychological motivations that drove them to positions of power are the same motivations that drive them to gain control in other areas. Much like Ford or Disney wanted to have total control of their employees; the same types of people in power today have the same psychological needs. Only laws and enforcement of laws that aim at mitigating these behaviors can help stifle the worst abuses. The real problem is trying to convince these people to give up some of this power once they have it. It's not an easy task. Nobody wants to give up (power).
Nearly all (given the exception of instinctual) knowledge that a child will know about the world around him will be learned. A newborn, if you consider a newborn to be intelligent, already has built in knowledge systems (the instincts that computer systems do not inherently have if they are also deprived of this knowledge).
Intelligence is NOT a means of turning knowledge into information. Intelligence is the ability to learn (to put it simply. There are in fact different forms of intelligence. Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence). One cannot learn without knowledge. If you take a child and deprive them of information, they will grow up to have severe learning disabilities (as is the case of extreme deprivation; i.e. the child abuse cases where children were locked in a closet for most of their existence). Children need knowledge to utilize their intelligence (hence we have schools to fill their brains with knowledge). You can't have one without the other. They are complimentary.
At the crux of the argument is how one decides to DEFINE intelligence. It seems unreasonable to presuppose that a computer system can be imbued with human intelligence. It is rather a matter of approximating that intelligence as closely as possible with that of the human experience.
It's enough to make one believe that there should be a separation between Politics and Education (an unrealistic ideal admittedly). It's like equating federal highway funding to a state's right to impose a minimum drinking age; they are attempting to impose influence where they have no legal authority otherwise. But then again, if one has a criminal conviction for smoking marijuana, then that person will be denied a student loan (Hypocrisy speaks). Politics and education just don't mix.
One would think that debt-ridden students should be the last target on an RIAA hit-list.
"Note that chocolate is poisonous to many animals, including dogs and cats." I wish. I don't presume to be an expert, but if you are going to be making claims like this then it is fair to give a counterpoint from an authoritative source (American Veterinary Medical Association): http://www.avma.org/careforanimals/animatedjourneys/livingwithpets/poisoninfo.asp#Misc3
It's a chicken and egg question. One cannot build an intelligent system without at least some "knowledge" to manipulate. One also cannot use this knowledge (in an intelligent manner) without an intelligent system in place.
I've never heard any AI researchers claim that a mere database is an intelligent system in and of itself.
In a more human analogy people need to have a knowledge of numbers and equations before they can start doing calculus. They need to memorize their times tables, if you will. From this base knowledge people can however start doing more creative things, like developing theories of relativity. There does need to be a base knowledge however.
Simple logic would determine that the question "Do you still beat your wife?" has a bias, and not that it is a stupid question as you imply. Given enough parameters or "knowledge" of a system, I would think an intelligent system would either determine that the question is unfounded (i.e. if the system has meta-knowledge of itself and knows it is not married, then this question would simply be passed off as bogus.
I would think McKinstry would have known about the assumptions that a binary system of logic has, and would limit the inputs to the types of questions that such a system could reasonably answer. There are certainly very many types of intelligence, and it appears obvious to me that he is trying to limit the tasks by making the questions easier (binary; yes and no). Of course if the intelligent answer is "maybe" then it is not a (valid) yes-or-no question.
It's more a point of having perspective than not taking things "seriously" as you put it. People who have no feelings (in real life or on the Internet) towards other people or what they say are psychopaths. Then again, people who become obsessive over casual slights can also become neurotic.
People certainly can and do take things far too seriously (I'm sure we've all heard of Internet spurred suicides, murders, etc). It's too glib too just completely pass this off. As in real life, I try to keep a measure of civility in my conversations.
why would you want to give robots feelings? I mean the novelty would be great, but the whole point is to make robots that do our bidding, not ones that go around moping half the time. I think Marvin would disagree, you androidaphobe!
Creating AI with enormous databases of trivial knowledge is a completely preposterous idea: knowledge is the result of intelligence - not a source of it. I think it is more akin to what the mapping of the human gnome project is. They were merely trying to map out the rules of "common sense" or "reasoning"; much like linguists map out the rules of language.
It's a rather brute force way of gaining knowledge (well in this case, for a computer system to gain knowledge). One may not necessarily gain more understanding of intelligence by doing this (much like one will not necessarily gain a better understanding of how to fight cancer just because one knows the the DNA structure of a blood cell for example). It is however a tool. If this "common sense" knowledge could be combined with neural networks (combining the knowledge with a mechanism to learn), then perhaps something useful may be had of this. All AI systems (as far as I know) require the input of knowledge, like typing in the quality and quantity of weapons in a war game simulator for example. The difference being that their efforts were more grandiose than these more limited forms of AI.
"Knowledge" itself is not the product of intelligence as you propose (although it can be). This knowledge already exists without human intervention. The phrase "Dogs have four legs" does not require a human brain for this fact to be true. The crux is having a computer system with this knowledge, and then developing a system to use this knowledge in an intelligent, human-like fashion.
I suppose I'm strange. Nobody I have ever gotten to know, including friends, family etc have ever been to jail, had a divorce, etc.
Yes I've MET people like that, but I've never gotten to KNOW people like that. It was never a conscious decision on my part. It seems that people of like minds congregate together and people of unlike minds do not. I will certainly have a difficult time understanding the more anti-social element because of this.
I will elaborate. I have hit before. More so when I was NOT a legal adult but a child, and almost always out of self-defense (as far as I can remember). When I said it is "in my genes not to hit people"... well, I suppose I shouldn't have said that. As an adult certainly, I do not hit people, but I should have been more careful with the way I worded that.
I know I can get VERY angry, but I have learned over the process of many years to control myself and avoid situations where I can get angry. As an adult, it doesn't even cross my mind to hit somebody. As a child, like I said, it was almost always in self-defense. It's ironic because I was also in the infantry at one point in my life. I have never killed anyone, or even gotten into a fight with some of the psychopaths who feel they are a good fit for such a career. Yes violence has it's utility, but for me it is more intellectual than emotional.
I would say, compared to most people perhaps, I am less prone to violence. I feel more comfortable slugging it out verbally than physically (perhaps Slashdot is a vent for me... notice my growing list of Freaks).
My own irrationality humbles me. I only wish more people would admit to being as irrational as myself. OK I also admit that I can be pretty intelligent at times as well:)
I would agree that violence is natural, but that there is a great variation on how natural it is to some people. Yes people can make mistakes, but I would argue that a person who NEVER hits their wife is probably less violence prone than somebody who hits there wife ONLY once. Yes there will always be exceptions, and these exceptions should be treated with fairness and rationality.
So you're NOT complaining that there's a contradiction between:
There's never an excuse to beat up on a woman,
and
there's a difference between a habitual wife beater and someone who falls victim to their rage
because that certainly is what
You said it right when you said "There's never an excuse". You lost me when you said "but".
sounds like. Correct. I was not pointing out a contradiction in the statements he made. I was merely emphasizing the significance of what he said after the "but".
Now you want to argue about the merits of comparing things to a particular movie, but you also complain
I always get the sense, that when posting, I need to explain that I am only attacking the arguments to which I am making reference to, and nothing else.
Your initial complaint made no mention of the movie, so its obviously not part of what you are arguing against This is true, and not relevant. The fact that he is using a fictional Robert DiNero movie as an example to illustrate a point should be self-obvious. I was merely emphasizing the rather ridiculous nature of this fact in my subsequent post.
So before you were attacking his use of but. That was successfully refuted (there's no contradiction in his statement). Wrong of course; you successfully refuted nothing. But I fail to see why you are contradicting me.
Now you are attacking his use of City By the Sea. I'll agree with you that the comparison to a fictional case does not really add anything to his argument. But could you please point out the hypocrisy? The hypocrisy is implicit in my argument. Most people would argue that trying to do violence to a president should not be forgiven. The same cannot be true for violence against a woman. The relevance of this is the fact that we are talking about one-time acts of violence, and happen to be talking about two Robert DeNiro movies that happen to involve violence.
From the original post:
He explains that he "lost control" once I would argue that it all depends on who they lost control on once. If this was a five year old child, a president, a girlfriend, etc... People will have different reactions.
Again, it seems unfortunate that I even have to explain this.
How can you call one incident a pattern? The patterns I see are in the people I have seen, known and talked to. The patterns I have seen are in the studies I have done (secondary research that is) of people and societies.
One of the reasons I don't involve myself in the Social Sciences very much anymore is because professionals in these areas get no respect and quite a lot of abuse. Nobody likes to be studied or criticized.
Slashdot Mirror
Companies who arbitrarily restrict built-in abilities of the TCP/IP protocol to prey for extra money should NOT be rewarded by consumers. Instead the consumer should PUNISH their ISP by shopping elsewhere (where applicable of course), and pressure their government with Net Neutrality laws and VERY HEAVY and enforcible fines for companies who break the rules.
I can anticipate the Libertarians complaining, but even many of them want their unrestricted P2P services running so they can download the latest version of Ubuntu, or use TOR services to look at their competition anonymously. Yes I suppose businesses may think I'm just griping, but it is THEY who go out of their way to create artificial barriers for Internet access and then have the nerve to charge a LOT more money to unblock these restrictions. As I said; arrogance gone wild.
The real issue would be how any privacy protections like storing IPs would be enforced. It is doubtful that a company would willfully admit to storing IPs if it is against the law to do so. I know if I were running a server (Web, FTP, IRC, etc), then I would store IPs despite the law, just because it makes sense from a security perspective (I would want to know who is online, who to ban, etc).
IP's contain less value over time (most consumers have dynamic IP's, can switch ISPs, use proxies, etc), so storing them for years wouldn't make a lot of practical sense anyways in most cases. Calling something as ephemeral and virtual as an IP personal property may be fine for politicians, but the utility of this is yet to be seen.
The more practical solution would be to legislate what a company or individual actually does with an IP. Do they sell it to spammers or crackers? or do they store it so that they can ban known spammers or crackers from entering their servers?
Don't believe everything you read. The Onion has about as much credibility with me as Fox News.
Encouraging Microsoft to have it's own proprietary schemes for rendering Web pages is implicitly encouraging bad behavior. I think it is a slippery slope for many people.
On the surface it seems more FUD than anything. If I understand the issue correctly, DTD's are already standard, and software designed to create Web pages will automatically insert DTD's as default. And this is the real issue here; the defaults.
Indeed, as with any democracy the outcome of ones choices are not always optimal. It is always good to know that people have choices though. For me, a well rendered Web page would be able to display legibly in Lynx, but my vote is rather meaningless in that case. Forcing an issue with the use of lawyers is rather Draconian however.
Businesses can do as they please, but consumers can always vote with their browsers.
From TFA: "Of course, that includes the fact they [the schools] use Windows," Ayala said.' If you don't use Windows you don't get the cash." It doesn't matter what the intentions are.
That makes so much sense to me. It wouldn't be logical for Microsoft or any company to donate money for their competition (i.e. donate money for computers to run competing software). I would not suspect anything else from a for-profit company. I'm sure Microsoft's shareholders would agree. Nothing new in this news.
You also talk about Mosaic law (the law of Moses I would presume). I find it dubious that current US tax law is based on the Old Testament. At any rate, the religious freedoms you speak of are not relevant to privacy in anything but the most contrived manner. This is not a discussion about morality (religious or otherwise). I don't think anybody really wants to go there.
It's attention getting. The shock value gives the poster a buzz, like the goatse posts. Don't take it seriously.
Yes it is control, but people fail to realize the psychological aspects of privacy, that is from the perspective of the spy.
Having the ability to know everything about both their friends and their foes gives them a feeling of control, however transient and imaginary that may be. It is the act of trying to control their own psychological insecurity.
It's like a patriarch snooping through their child's belongings, or reading their diary, it gives them a sense of power. In the end it doesn't matter why they do it; they have a compulsion to do it. It is not surprising that leaders in government and industry would do this because the same psychological motivations that drove them to positions of power are the same motivations that drive them to gain control in other areas. Much like Ford or Disney wanted to have total control of their employees; the same types of people in power today have the same psychological needs. Only laws and enforcement of laws that aim at mitigating these behaviors can help stifle the worst abuses. The real problem is trying to convince these people to give up some of this power once they have it. It's not an easy task. Nobody wants to give up (power).
Nearly all (given the exception of instinctual) knowledge that a child will know about the world around him will be learned. A newborn, if you consider a newborn to be intelligent, already has built in knowledge systems (the instincts that computer systems do not inherently have if they are also deprived of this knowledge).
Intelligence is NOT a means of turning knowledge into information. Intelligence is the ability to learn (to put it simply. There are in fact different forms of intelligence. Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence). One cannot learn without knowledge. If you take a child and deprive them of information, they will grow up to have severe learning disabilities (as is the case of extreme deprivation; i.e. the child abuse cases where children were locked in a closet for most of their existence). Children need knowledge to utilize their intelligence (hence we have schools to fill their brains with knowledge). You can't have one without the other. They are complimentary.
At the crux of the argument is how one decides to DEFINE intelligence. It seems unreasonable to presuppose that a computer system can be imbued with human intelligence. It is rather a matter of approximating that intelligence as closely as possible with that of the human experience.
It's enough to make one believe that there should be a separation between Politics and Education (an unrealistic ideal admittedly). It's like equating federal highway funding to a state's right to impose a minimum drinking age; they are attempting to impose influence where they have no legal authority otherwise. But then again, if one has a criminal conviction for smoking marijuana, then that person will be denied a student loan (Hypocrisy speaks). Politics and education just don't mix.
One would think that debt-ridden students should be the last target on an RIAA hit-list.
http://www.avma.org/careforanimals/animatedjourneys/livingwithpets/poisoninfo.asp#Misc3
It's a chicken and egg question. One cannot build an intelligent system without at least some "knowledge" to manipulate. One also cannot use this knowledge (in an intelligent manner) without an intelligent system in place.
I've never heard any AI researchers claim that a mere database is an intelligent system in and of itself.
In a more human analogy people need to have a knowledge of numbers and equations before they can start doing calculus. They need to memorize their times tables, if you will. From this base knowledge people can however start doing more creative things, like developing theories of relativity. There does need to be a base knowledge however.
Simple logic would determine that the question "Do you still beat your wife?" has a bias, and not that it is a stupid question as you imply. Given enough parameters or "knowledge" of a system, I would think an intelligent system would either determine that the question is unfounded (i.e. if the system has meta-knowledge of itself and knows it is not married, then this question would simply be passed off as bogus.
I would think McKinstry would have known about the assumptions that a binary system of logic has, and would limit the inputs to the types of questions that such a system could reasonably answer. There are certainly very many types of intelligence, and it appears obvious to me that he is trying to limit the tasks by making the questions easier (binary; yes and no). Of course if the intelligent answer is "maybe" then it is not a (valid) yes-or-no question.
It's more a point of having perspective than not taking things "seriously" as you put it. People who have no feelings (in real life or on the Internet) towards other people or what they say are psychopaths. Then again, people who become obsessive over casual slights can also become neurotic.
People certainly can and do take things far too seriously (I'm sure we've all heard of Internet spurred suicides, murders, etc). It's too glib too just completely pass this off. As in real life, I try to keep a measure of civility in my conversations.
It's a rather brute force way of gaining knowledge (well in this case, for a computer system to gain knowledge). One may not necessarily gain more understanding of intelligence by doing this (much like one will not necessarily gain a better understanding of how to fight cancer just because one knows the the DNA structure of a blood cell for example). It is however a tool. If this "common sense" knowledge could be combined with neural networks (combining the knowledge with a mechanism to learn), then perhaps something useful may be had of this. All AI systems (as far as I know) require the input of knowledge, like typing in the quality and quantity of weapons in a war game simulator for example. The difference being that their efforts were more grandiose than these more limited forms of AI.
"Knowledge" itself is not the product of intelligence as you propose (although it can be). This knowledge already exists without human intervention. The phrase "Dogs have four legs" does not require a human brain for this fact to be true. The crux is having a computer system with this knowledge, and then developing a system to use this knowledge in an intelligent, human-like fashion.
I suppose I'm strange. Nobody I have ever gotten to know, including friends, family etc have ever been to jail, had a divorce, etc.
Yes I've MET people like that, but I've never gotten to KNOW people like that. It was never a conscious decision on my part. It seems that people of like minds congregate together and people of unlike minds do not. I will certainly have a difficult time understanding the more anti-social element because of this.
The fact is, it does not matter what arguments I use or how good they are, you will always contradict me. Your mission is obvious :)
We see things very differently. I certainly enjoy a good verbal spar, but I can't see things progressing.
I will give you the victory.
QED
I will elaborate. I have hit before. More so when I was NOT a legal adult but a child, and almost always out of self-defense (as far as I can remember). When I said it is "in my genes not to hit people"... well, I suppose I shouldn't have said that. As an adult certainly, I do not hit people, but I should have been more careful with the way I worded that.
:)
I know I can get VERY angry, but I have learned over the process of many years to control myself and avoid situations where I can get angry. As an adult, it doesn't even cross my mind to hit somebody. As a child, like I said, it was almost always in self-defense. It's ironic because I was also in the infantry at one point in my life. I have never killed anyone, or even gotten into a fight with some of the psychopaths who feel they are a good fit for such a career. Yes violence has it's utility, but for me it is more intellectual than emotional.
I would say, compared to most people perhaps, I am less prone to violence. I feel more comfortable slugging it out verbally than physically (perhaps Slashdot is a vent for me... notice my growing list of Freaks).
My own irrationality humbles me. I only wish more people would admit to being as irrational as myself. OK I also admit that I can be pretty intelligent at times as well
I would agree that violence is natural, but that there is a great variation on how natural it is to some people. Yes people can make mistakes, but I would argue that a person who NEVER hits their wife is probably less violence prone than somebody who hits there wife ONLY once. Yes there will always be exceptions, and these exceptions should be treated with fairness and rationality.
There's never an excuse to beat up on a woman,
and
there's a difference between a habitual wife beater and someone who falls victim to their rage
because that certainly is what
You said it right when you said "There's never an excuse". You lost me when you said "but".
sounds like. Correct. I was not pointing out a contradiction in the statements he made. I was merely emphasizing the significance of what he said after the "but". Now you want to argue about the merits of comparing things to a particular movie, but you also complain
I always get the sense, that when posting, I need to explain that I am only attacking the arguments to which I am making reference to, and nothing else.
Your initial complaint made no mention of the movie, so its obviously not part of what you are arguing against This is true, and not relevant. The fact that he is using a fictional Robert DiNero movie as an example to illustrate a point should be self-obvious. I was merely emphasizing the rather ridiculous nature of this fact in my subsequent post. So before you were attacking his use of but. That was successfully refuted (there's no contradiction in his statement). Wrong of course; you successfully refuted nothing. But I fail to see why you are contradicting me. Now you are attacking his use of City By the Sea. I'll agree with you that the comparison to a fictional case does not really add anything to his argument. But could you please point out the hypocrisy? The hypocrisy is implicit in my argument. Most people would argue that trying to do violence to a president should not be forgiven. The same cannot be true for violence against a woman. The relevance of this is the fact that we are talking about one-time acts of violence, and happen to be talking about two Robert DeNiro movies that happen to involve violence.
From the original post: He explains that he "lost control" once I would argue that it all depends on who they lost control on once. If this was a five year old child, a president, a girlfriend, etc... People will have different reactions.
Again, it seems unfortunate that I even have to explain this.
One of the reasons I don't involve myself in the Social Sciences very much anymore is because professionals in these areas get no respect and quite a lot of abuse. Nobody likes to be studied or criticized.
The discussion is about abuse (that for which "There's never an excuse"), and not self defense.