If they get so much traffic, financing should come either from ads, or from the ISP themselves, they profit from those "server" site too: if such sources did not exist, nobody would pay for a download link.
Ironic that you pay more to have good uplink;)
But I think the taxing traffic comes from video/audio/"rich content" anyway.
Information I was talking about is mostly text, maybe some pics. Even for a server, it's not so heavy nowadays....
I do not trash investigation journalist, that go deep to get information that would have remained hidden if they didn't. There are very few of those left. What is worst, it is now difficult to know, when you read a column, to know what is personal investigation, what comes for news agencies, and what comes from wikipedia/google/the author gut feeling...
I trash compilation journalists, that (often using the net) gather readily available info and witness stories, add an "expert" interview into the mix and blurb a semi-edited (removing polically incorrect phrasing and hinting about relation with the current trendy subject) column...
I can gather from the net as well as them, the expert are usually worthless when I know the subject (and, given innacuracies, I suspect they are not really usefull for the subjects I do not know), and there are endless ramification available should I choose to investigate further.
BTW, opinions and fact coloring is much stronger in newspaper that directly on the net. Sure, people distort the facts there, but at least you get multiple distortion, not the one filtered by the journalist, the main editor, and finally financial and/or political backers...
The analogy fails for media because people still want media, and still want media to be created by media creators (writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc.). In other words, the media creators still add value to society and/or their employer. The media's value is in its creation, not in its distribution.
And as everyone loves to point out, distribution costs can go to $0 or close to it...but creation costs do not. You still have to pay writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc., to create the media. If you choose not to pay your media creators, then you end up with amateurs recording home movies of their cats doing stupid things and uploading them to YouTube. Which has yet to make a profit for anyone.
So, no, news and reporters are not on par with monks who copied documents thousands of years ago. They are reporting news, and there is still value in, and demand for, that.
The skilled media creators can still make a living...but most journalist certainly are not. I would far prefer to read stories from people directly concerned than from journalist (that only compile stories from other, with better syntax and some editing - hopefully not creative editing if not pulling something out of their ass).
For me, journalism is dead (except maybe for the few ones that still do their own investigation in difficult conditions, sometimes risking their lives doing so). Just because people WANT to speak about interresting things that happen to them, and can do it directly now.
Only the pipe infrastructure providing the bandwidth really has to be paid, and guess what? I pay my ISP...
For the information, sure, professional wants you to pay for it...but a lot of hobbyist are willing to provide it free, and the beauty of internet is that, when you connect enough people together, you are sure to find an obsessed hobbyist for almost any subject, that is very happy to rant about his hobby and drown you in information just for the fun of it. And the info is often equivalent, if not better than what you can get if you pay for it.
Why?
Well, partly because many of those hobbyist are the same clever people that work for the commercial organisation that want you pay for this info, in fact THEY answer the question (or put the info in a DB), once you remove all the PHB and office monkeys that act as intermediaries. OR, as often, because clever people have other center of interests than what they do for a living, but are as skilled in what they do for fun as in what they are paid to do.
Sure it is annoying to answer questions constantly, but because one answer takes one unit of your time but provide the info to potentially a huge number of people, it is enough that informed people answer when they feel like it to get the system rolling.
I act as an expert, for free, on forums/newsgroup sometimes, but I do not spend much time doing that. It is so easy to do that I would not even think asking money for it...On the other hand I get a huge amount of info from a lot of people doing exactly like me. Would I pay for this information? Never, I pay already by providing MY own informations...
Thats what happen when you connect a lot of experts/hobbyists together without human intermediaries: no way for intellectual parasites to steal...well, at least not as much as they did before. I will not cry about their lost revenue...
I have found a short definition of unsustainable: "average fertility above 2". Nothing more, but nothing less.
How about that for eco-responsibility, instead crypto-communist resources allocation and typical western judeo-christian guilt-trip concern about "saving the planet"?
Pay less? suuuuuuure.
That beeing said, you can consider that this amount of energy is small, it is...
But if you are thinking people mentioning that the energy does not comes out of nowhere and is leeched
from vehicles show a lack of understanding of physics...Nope, not even close, it just show that YOU have to re-read some physics books...and try to undestand them this time.
1. Steal energy from your customers
2. Pretend it is green, it is a very small amount of energy, and it would have been wasted anyway.
3. Profit.
If this fly, does it means that i can steal anything that is not used by its owner, provided it is small and that I am caring about "saving the planet"? Nice:-)
or perhaps you can use the slope you climbed to pick back some free speed when going away from the store after your visit?
Yep, very small perhaps, but leech anyway. I don't know how you feel, but do not like leech, especially when it is a corporation/company leeching from individuals.
Using green arguments does not make it more acceptable to my eyes, on the contrary, I become slowly but surely allergic to green arguments
Sorry, I do not believe this is true, even if it is the standard economic explication of relocalisation.
What I believe is that relocating jobs to to cheaper places is akin to thermodynamics: there is no global increase, but a leveling...and as long as a non-equilibrium exist, it can be exploited to produce work, i.e. enrich the ones that have the decision power and are not trapped in one legal system - i.e. large supra-national conglomerates.
So what we have now is middle class of western countries getting slowly poorer, a slow creation of a new middle class in some non western countries, and a very few world "elite" getting richer quite fast. Income ratio between the most and less wealthy in western nation is spreading steadily since the 70ties...
Imho, the standard of living around the globe (for western world) has been increasing mostly because of 2 things:
- technical progress and cheap energy: one average man hour can produce much more goods that it used to...but this is leveling lately (energy less cheap because it is no longer in infinite supply, technical progress lacking a new revolution, electronic is maturing, and biotech/nanotech not yet), and it is a potential source of unemployment.
- using the demographic growth for a global credit: the debt of today will be paid by the people of tomorrow...which will be more thus will have to pay less...
There is no more demographic growth in western countries, and it is levelling up fast globally - fortunately because here too we are getting closer to hard limits. In fact, demographic decrease and/or population aging means that people of tomorrow will be less for sharing the debt created by more people today - oups.
The pyramidal scheme is collapsing...and, as always in those case, I fear that the end result will not look pretty...
And since I've been repeating myself a lot when it comes to barfing up statements about morality on these occasions, I'll try a different angle that I'm sure will be more along most slashdotters' line of thought: that robot slave society your dreaming of simply won't work, just like all previous slave-owning societies have failed. There will be an uprising - and this time, we're all going to die. Seriously. It's not a matter of science fiction, it's just the logical conclusion.
And we'll deserve it, too.
Nope, I don't think there will be an uprising if the AI/slaves (Like you I do not see any difference between AI and genetically engineered humans or animals - just 2 different means to the same end, even if I think the AI way is safer because more controllable, genetic to phenotypte translation seems so convoluted I doubt the output of a genetic change can be predicted with enough accuracy).
I think you are anthropomorphising the "slaves", because you still think of them like crippled human beeings, not like a different specie. Crippled humans, or human slaves, craves better life because they share most of the same "instincts" as you. Basically their motivational loop, pleasure/pain reward system, satisfaction/anxiousness/fear triggers are all the same as you (and, to a large extent, similar to other mammals). Thinking of AI (or well tuned genetically engineered organisms) as "exploited slaves that crave to liberate themselves and crush their masters" is anthropomorphisation, exactly like when you think that we exploit apple trees by confiscating all thier apples without compensation (many children, and quite a few adults really think like that, anthropomorphisation is a powerfull tendency).
Or thinking that parents are slaves to their babies, which exploits them, are a burden and offer nothing in exchange...Objectively, this is completely true, and few people would accept such a behavior from anybody else that their own babies....Yet almost every human (including myself) think this is one of the most beatiful feeling and unconditional proof of love....
I suspect that, to a specie that do not help their youngs but let them completely on their own, human behavior to their children would seems as disgusting and incomprehensible as we think of some insects, whose female eat the male after reproduction, or larvae eat the mother at a certain stage...
This is a far better way to think of how designed AI would behave and feel, instead of the slave analogy. As I said, how can you be a suffering slave dreaming of revolt when all your instincts and internal reward systems tells you you are doing exactly what you want and what every other sane being in existence should crave to do?:-)
There seems to be some kind of limitation that prevents people from recognizing suffering and evil as soon as neither they nor their immediate relatives are concerned - so I'll spell it out one more time: if your sister was conditioned to "love" the local nobleman, so she could perform the function of being his mistress, then that conditioning is wrong - even if she's brainwashed into liking it.
I agree brainwashing is wrong - but not for the same reason you do, at least if I understand your point of view correctly.
I believe it is wrong because it imply suffering and maltreatment of the brainwashed, not because it reduce freewill. If reduction of freewill is achieved without suffering and with the prior agreement of the subject, I have no problem with it. In fact, if you have strong problem with this reduction of free will even with the agreement of the subject, you should be incredibly unhappy about our current social organisation:
- advertising is brainwashing - it even annoys me because it is not accepted and it is (mildly) painfull: annoying, and physically intrusive when sound level is increased during advertisong compared to what you choosed to watch (it is more and more the case, and not by a small amount, the sound level in some theater is incredible during pre-movie advertising, and on TV it is much higher than during normal broadcasting)
- education is brainwashing, it enforce what the society currently consider the norm on the youngs. And they do not have choice...
-all motivation techniques and therapies are brainwashing - either self-brainwashing which is the less objectionable form (but still, one observe that the target of such is usually to become closer to an accepted social norm - i.e. under social pressure ) or plain brainwashing, many times aided by mind-aletring substances (anti-depressors,...)
Back to AI, that's why I do not see a problem with this sort of "brainswashing": designing instincts, natural preferences and cravings can not hurt a conscious individual, because it is done before it become conscious. No hurt done, just a set a artificial instinct, a sort of finetuned species with only one member.
Only thing that I would consider morally very wrong is a set of instincts which can not be satisfied and put the AI through deep physical or emotional distress, without hopes of relief. I consider that the designer would have to be very cruel and skillfull, or incredibly badlucky, to achieve a set of preprogrammed instincts and preferences which will put the AI in a worst spot than the set with which most human beeings come equipped with;-)
BTW, look at all the movies/books/stories about the horror of societies with (genetically/by software) programmed individuals/AI...notice a common feature? There is one: the hero always suffer from it in some ways, together with a few companions, because he comes from outside, or was accidently not programmed, or because it is a totalitarian society enforcing norm by force instead of programming. Indeed....because the true instincts are part of the individuals, they try to fulfill them to be happy, and if rebellion ever occur it is to satisfy those instincts, not to rebel against them...Not much of a story when everyone is happy about his own program;-)
My god, if you can not see the difference between SD and HD, I hope you did not forget your white stick and black glasses, and do not own a car: you are THAT visually impaired. I am far from 20/20 vision, but at my normal viewing distance, the difference is striking, on screens of any size...(a small screen just means I sit closer, I never really understood the common assertion "HD is only usefull on huge screens").
Yes, an HD picture can be so so, if the transfer was not good, if there is too much noise, and so on...and HD do not turn a bad movie in a good one, just like you can still enjoy a great story out of a crappy 320*240 video...
But good HD is really spectacular: I still remember the first time I saw an HD TV, playing some wildlife documentary, it was a few years ago in japan and HD was still confidential at the time: from far away, the picture looked a little bit different and better, so I went closer...Even before I was close enough to be comfortable, i was wowed: it gives you a "seeing through a window" experience quite different from "normal" SD TV...
I do not own yet an HD TV, but it is not because the technology is irrelevant: I just wait for more source (HD digital broadcast, renting blurays in my videostore at DVD prices) before making the jump, and I guess after getting used to it, it will be the SD material that will look like cheap WebTV or cameraphone videos...
Slashdot Mirror
If they get so much traffic, financing should come either from ads, or from the ISP themselves, they profit from those "server" site too: if such sources did not exist, nobody would pay for a download link.
Ironic that you pay more to have good uplink ;)
But I think the taxing traffic comes from video/audio/"rich content" anyway.
Information I was talking about is mostly text, maybe some pics. Even for a server, it's not so heavy nowadays....
I do not trash investigation journalist, that go deep to get information that would have remained hidden if they didn't. There are very few of those left. What is worst, it is now difficult to know, when you read a column, to know what is personal investigation, what comes for news agencies, and what comes from wikipedia/google/the author gut feeling...
I trash compilation journalists, that (often using the net) gather readily available info and witness stories, add an "expert" interview into the mix and blurb a semi-edited (removing polically incorrect phrasing and hinting about relation with the current trendy subject) column...
I can gather from the net as well as them, the expert are usually worthless when I know the subject (and, given innacuracies, I suspect they are not really usefull for the subjects I do not know), and there are endless ramification available should I choose to investigate further.
BTW, opinions and fact coloring is much stronger in newspaper that directly on the net. Sure, people distort the facts there, but at least you get multiple distortion, not the one filtered by the journalist, the main editor, and finally financial and/or political backers...
The analogy fails for media because people still want media, and still want media to be created by media creators (writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc.). In other words, the media creators still add value to society and/or their employer. The media's value is in its creation, not in its distribution.
And as everyone loves to point out, distribution costs can go to $0 or close to it...but creation costs do not. You still have to pay writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc., to create the media. If you choose not to pay your media creators, then you end up with amateurs recording home movies of their cats doing stupid things and uploading them to YouTube. Which has yet to make a profit for anyone.
So, no, news and reporters are not on par with monks who copied documents thousands of years ago. They are reporting news, and there is still value in, and demand for, that.
The skilled media creators can still make a living...but most journalist certainly are not. I would far prefer to read stories from people directly concerned than from journalist (that only compile stories from other, with better syntax and some editing - hopefully not creative editing if not pulling something out of their ass).
For me, journalism is dead (except maybe for the few ones that still do their own investigation in difficult conditions, sometimes risking their lives doing so).
Just because people WANT to speak about interresting things that happen to them, and can do it directly now.
Only the pipe infrastructure providing the bandwidth really has to be paid, and guess what? I pay my ISP...
For the information, sure, professional wants you to pay for it...but a lot of hobbyist are willing to provide it free, and the beauty of internet is that, when you connect enough people together, you are sure to find an obsessed hobbyist for almost any subject, that is very happy to rant about his hobby and drown you in information just for the fun of it. And the info is often equivalent, if not better than what you can get if you pay for it.
Why?
Well, partly because many of those hobbyist are the same clever people that work for the commercial organisation that want you pay for this info, in fact THEY answer the question (or put the info in a DB), once you remove all the PHB and office monkeys that act as intermediaries. OR, as often, because clever people have other center of interests than what they do for a living, but are as skilled in what they do for fun as in what they are paid to do.
Sure it is annoying to answer questions constantly, but because one answer takes one unit of your time but provide the info to potentially a huge number of people, it is enough that informed people answer when they feel like it to get the system rolling.
I act as an expert, for free, on forums/newsgroup sometimes, but I do not spend much time doing that. It is so easy to do that I would not even think asking money for it...On the other hand I get a huge amount of info from a lot of people doing exactly like me. Would I pay for this information? Never, I pay already by providing MY own informations...
Thats what happen when you connect a lot of experts/hobbyists together without human intermediaries: no way for intellectual parasites to steal ...well, at least not as much as they did before. I will not cry about their lost revenue...
I have found a short definition of unsustainable: "average fertility above 2".
Nothing more, but nothing less.
How about that for eco-responsibility, instead crypto-communist resources allocation and typical western judeo-christian guilt-trip concern about "saving the planet"?
Pay less? suuuuuuure. That beeing said, you can consider that this amount of energy is small, it is...
But if you are thinking people mentioning that the energy does not comes out of nowhere and is leeched from vehicles show a lack of understanding of physics...Nope, not even close, it just show that YOU have to re-read some physics books...and try to undestand them this time.
You can put it in much simpler than that:
:-)
1. Steal energy from your customers
2. Pretend it is green, it is a very small amount of energy, and it would have been wasted anyway.
3. Profit.
If this fly, does it means that i can steal anything that is not used by its owner, provided it is small and that I am caring about "saving the planet"? Nice
or perhaps you can use the slope you climbed to pick back some free speed when going away from the store after your visit?
Yep, very small perhaps, but leech anyway. I don't know how you feel, but do not like leech, especially when it is a corporation/company leeching from individuals.
Using green arguments does not make it more acceptable to my eyes, on the contrary, I become slowly but surely allergic to green arguments
Sorry, I do not believe this is true, even if it is the standard economic explication of relocalisation.
What I believe is that relocating jobs to to cheaper places is akin to thermodynamics: there is no global increase, but a leveling...and as long as a non-equilibrium exist, it can be exploited to produce work, i.e. enrich the ones that have the decision power and are not trapped in one legal system - i.e. large supra-national conglomerates.
So what we have now is middle class of western countries getting slowly poorer, a slow creation of a new middle class in some non western countries, and a very few world "elite" getting richer quite fast. Income ratio between the most and less wealthy in western nation is spreading steadily since the 70ties...
Imho, the standard of living around the globe (for western world) has been increasing mostly because of 2 things:
- technical progress and cheap energy: one average man hour can produce much more goods that it used to...but this is leveling lately (energy less cheap because it is no longer in infinite supply, technical progress lacking a new revolution, electronic is maturing, and biotech/nanotech not yet), and it is a potential source of unemployment.
- using the demographic growth for a global credit: the debt of today will be paid by the people of tomorrow...which will be more thus will have to pay less...
There is no more demographic growth in western countries, and it is levelling up fast globally - fortunately because here too we are getting closer to hard limits. In fact, demographic decrease and/or population aging means that people of tomorrow will be less for sharing the debt created by more people today - oups.
The pyramidal scheme is collapsing...and, as always in those case, I fear that the end result will not look pretty...
And since I've been repeating myself a lot when it comes to barfing up statements about morality on these occasions, I'll try a different angle that I'm sure will be more along most slashdotters' line of thought: that robot slave society your dreaming of simply won't work, just like all previous slave-owning societies have failed. There will be an uprising - and this time, we're all going to die. Seriously. It's not a matter of science fiction, it's just the logical conclusion.
And we'll deserve it, too.
Nope, I don't think there will be an uprising if the AI/slaves (Like you I do not see any difference between AI and genetically engineered humans or animals - just 2 different means to the same end, even if I think the AI way is safer because more controllable, genetic to phenotypte translation seems so convoluted I doubt the output of a genetic change can be predicted with enough accuracy).
I think you are anthropomorphising the "slaves", because you still think of them like crippled human beeings, not like a different specie. Crippled humans, or human slaves, craves better life because they share most of the same "instincts" as you. Basically their motivational loop, pleasure/pain reward system, satisfaction/anxiousness/fear triggers are all the same as you (and, to a large extent, similar to other mammals). Thinking of AI (or well tuned genetically engineered organisms) as "exploited slaves that crave to liberate themselves and crush their masters" is anthropomorphisation, exactly like when you think that we exploit apple trees by confiscating all thier apples without compensation (many children, and quite a few adults really think like that, anthropomorphisation is a powerfull tendency).
Or thinking that parents are slaves to their babies, which exploits them, are a burden and offer nothing in exchange...Objectively, this is completely true, and few people would accept such a behavior from anybody else that their own babies....Yet almost every human (including myself) think this is one of the most beatiful feeling and unconditional proof of love....
I suspect that, to a specie that do not help their youngs but let them completely on their own, human behavior to their children would seems as disgusting and incomprehensible as we think of some insects, whose female eat the male after reproduction, or larvae eat the mother at a certain stage...
This is a far better way to think of how designed AI would behave and feel, instead of the slave analogy. As I said, how can you be a suffering slave dreaming of revolt when all your instincts and internal reward systems tells you you are doing exactly what you want and what every other sane being in existence should crave to do? :-)
I agree brainwashing is wrong - but not for the same reason you do, at least if I understand your point of view correctly.
I believe it is wrong because it imply suffering and maltreatment of the brainwashed, not because it reduce freewill. If reduction of freewill is achieved without suffering and with the prior agreement of the subject, I have no problem with it. In fact, if you have strong problem with this reduction of free will even with the agreement of the subject, you should be incredibly unhappy about our current social organisation:
- advertising is brainwashing - it even annoys me because it is not accepted and it is (mildly) painfull: annoying, and physically intrusive when sound level is increased during advertisong compared to what you choosed to watch (it is more and more the case, and not by a small amount, the sound level in some theater is incredible during pre-movie advertising, and on TV it is much higher than during normal broadcasting)
- education is brainwashing, it enforce what the society currently consider the norm on the youngs. And they do not have choice...
-all motivation techniques and therapies are brainwashing - either self-brainwashing which is the less objectionable form (but still, one observe that the target of such is usually to become closer to an accepted social norm - i.e. under social pressure ) or plain brainwashing, many times aided by mind-aletring substances (anti-depressors, ...)
Back to AI, that's why I do not see a problem with this sort of "brainswashing": designing instincts, natural preferences and cravings can not hurt a conscious individual, because it is done before it become conscious. No hurt done, just a set a artificial instinct, a sort of finetuned species with only one member.
Only thing that I would consider morally very wrong is a set of instincts which can not be satisfied and put the AI through deep physical or emotional distress, without hopes of relief. I consider that the designer would have to be very cruel and skillfull, or incredibly badlucky, to achieve a set of preprogrammed instincts and preferences which will put the AI in a worst spot than the set with which most human beeings come equipped with ;-)
BTW, look at all the movies/books/stories about the horror of societies with (genetically/by software) programmed individuals/AI...notice a common feature? There is one: the hero always suffer from it in some ways, together with a few companions, because he comes from outside, or was accidently not programmed, or because it is a totalitarian society enforcing norm by force instead of programming. Indeed....because the true instincts are part of the individuals, they try to fulfill them to be happy, and if rebellion ever occur it is to satisfy those instincts, not to rebel against them...Not much of a story when everyone is happy about his own program ;-)
My god, if you can not see the difference between SD and HD, I hope you did not forget your white stick and black glasses, and do not own a car: you are THAT visually impaired. I am far from 20/20 vision, but at my normal viewing distance, the difference is striking, on screens of any size...(a small screen just means I sit closer, I never really understood the common assertion "HD is only usefull on huge screens"). Yes, an HD picture can be so so, if the transfer was not good, if there is too much noise, and so on...and HD do not turn a bad movie in a good one, just like you can still enjoy a great story out of a crappy 320*240 video... But good HD is really spectacular: I still remember the first time I saw an HD TV, playing some wildlife documentary, it was a few years ago in japan and HD was still confidential at the time: from far away, the picture looked a little bit different and better, so I went closer...Even before I was close enough to be comfortable, i was wowed: it gives you a "seeing through a window" experience quite different from "normal" SD TV... I do not own yet an HD TV, but it is not because the technology is irrelevant: I just wait for more source (HD digital broadcast, renting blurays in my videostore at DVD prices) before making the jump, and I guess after getting used to it, it will be the SD material that will look like cheap WebTV or cameraphone videos...