How many public servants do you know who are serving prison sentences for breaking ethics rules?
You kidding? Just off the top of my head, this guy, this guy, local to me this lady, and this guy who just got out last year.
No, you didn't understand. I didn't mean people who once were elected representatives or public servants who got jail time. Anyone can get jail time for breaking the law.
I meant public servants who got jail time for performing their duty but not heeding ethics rules. Bernard Ebbers wasn't jailed because he made some employee of his company do chores at his farm. He was jailed because he tried to increase his company's profits, which was his duty as a high-ranking officer of that company, but he didn't follow ethics rules while doing so.
From the point of view of the WorldCom company, Bernard Ebbers was a perfect manager, he did his best to increase profits.
Now name one public servant who got jail time for being overzealous, not for sidestepping the law for his own personal motives.
Name me the TSA officer who got 25 years in jail for overdoing his physical examinations of travelers. Name the police officer who got 25 years in jail for shooting a suspect in the chest instead of going for the shoulder. Name the IRS officer who got 25 years in jail for checking a bank account without doing the proper paperwork.
And every one of those thousands of people would be fired or imprisoned if they were caught breaking their institution's ethics rules for their own personal gain. It's called "political corruption" in that case.
But the leaders of a *corporation* are not just allowed to use the corporation's resources for profit regardless of ethics, they're *required* to, and their thousands of employees will be fired if they don't go along with it. It's called "preserving shareholder value" in this case.
at least the federal government doesn't have a profit motive for sharing the information it has about me.
Do you really believe this? As Robert Heinlein said in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", "My point is that some person is responsible. Always. If H-bombs exist - and they do - some person controls them. In terms of morals there is no such thing as 'state'. Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts."
The profit motive of the federal government is that of thousands of people who would be without a job if the government didn't have all those agencies controlling every detail in your life.
I don't have to get a state-issued ID card if I don't want either, right? Except once these gov-sanctioned IDs come into play, they do become standards
They will do it like they did with driver licenses, they will say "accessing the internet is not a right, it's a privilege".
I wonder which part of "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people" they didn't understand.
Or how about "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people
A reasonable limit might be to disallow recording of any sound (or sight) that is not detectable by human ears/eyes.
So, telephoto lenses should be illegal? Directional microphones? How would you record a speech in a public place?
I recommend you watch a classic film from the 1960s, "Blowup" by Michelangelo Antonioni where a photographer unknowingly takes a picture of a murder in a public park. Even simple equipment may capture sounds and sights that humans wouldn't detect.
The rule should be expect no privacy in public places. And in private places be discreet. If the neighbors can hear your wife screaming while you have sex, it's not their fault. If the neighbors can see your WiFi network it's not their fault either.
Just start RTFAing: "In my last post I outlined the general bufferbloat problem."
Follow the link:
"Each of these initial experiments were been designed to clearly demonstrate a now very common problem: excessive buffering in a network path. I call this bufferbloat
Rapidshare may be legally right, morally they are very wrong.
A law that extends copyright for decades after the author's death is immoral. Extending copyrights decades after a work was created is immoral.
So, should we follow the law or should we try to be moral?
If the law had any relation to morality it would follow the constitutional mandate that copyrights are for the authors and last for a limited time. They are not for a corporation to extend indefinitely long after the original term expired and the author died.
Considering that a 1000-pack of transistors can be bought for $50, the total price for the transistors today would be less than the $300 a 6800 cost in the late 1970s, even unadjusted for inflation.
So, here's a challenge for that badass electronics hobbyist: build a working 6502 out of discrete transistors.
But if you buy a bunch of Pinto's KNOWING of the flaw, and then deliberately crash them into things to try and make them explode so that you can sue the manufacturer... why exactly should you be exempt from liability?
The Pinto had a design fault in that the fuel tank wasn't well protected from rear-end crashes. The manufacturer was found liable for *any* damages caused by that fault, independent of what caused the accident.
Ford had to have protected better the fuel tank, no matter what. They could not claim that the accident wouldn't have occurred if one of the drivers involved had been more careful.
The conclusion was that accidents happen and the manufacturer had the responsibility to take that into account, no matter what caused the accident.
Oh, this website didn't secure their Logins for SQL injection, it's not MY fault the series of buttons I pressed resulted in me accessing their database records.
That's absolutely correct and that's how it should be.
There was a fault in the system, the result of incomplete testing by incompetent programmers. That's what happens when you hire the lowest degree of people, instead of paying the wages required by competent people.
Consider this: suppose the fault in the system caused a crash that killed someone. Shouldn't the manufacturer be liable for that damage, caused by a design error? Isn't the manufacturer responsible for the consequences of the design their engineers came up with?
Why should software be exempt from the liability that car manufacturers face?
People are still going to ignore all the retractions from the real medical and scientific community in favor of Jenny McCarthy saying on TV that "Vaccines gave my baby autism!"
Fortunately, those people's children will have a greater than average probability of dying young, which will improve average human intelligence in the long run.
The effects that I saw claimed were more like, 3% better than random.
Which should be more than good enough to make a fortune.
At European casinos, if you play red vs. black in the roulette, you have a 18/37 chance, that is 48.64%, of winning double your bet.
A 3% better than random precognition rate would let you get rich in a few hours, while still being random enough to be considered pure luck, so you could get filthy rich before they banned you from all the casinos in the world.
I'd be impressed if we could build something with the senses and decision making capabilities of a fruit fly.
That will be when we have software discerning the difference of parsing between "time flies like an arrow" and "fruit flies like a banana"
The big problem in AI is context. We spend the first years of our lives learning about context. We never see situations without a context, there's always a circumstance that originates another.
Every time we face a novel situation our first instinctive reaction is to evaluate what situations we have been in that are most similar to this one. If the situation is random enough we often associate unrelated facts, that's why people see a cloud shaped like a camel or the face of Jesus in a moldy sandwich.
A successful artificial vision system to work as a human would need a huge database of images representing the visual memory of an average human being. That's how humans recognize things.
It has been at least 50 years since heat-seeking missiles were invented. They can hunt down a fighter with far more accuracy than a human pilot can, they can withstand much higher accelerations, they are much cheaper than a manned fighter plane.
Even if you had an arbitrarily powerful CPU, you'd still have to load in everything from memory, hard disk, or network sources (i.e. all very slow)
Considering that light only travels 30 cm per nanosecond in a vacuum, the maximum practical clock speed depends on how far your memory is. At a 3 GHz clock rate, a request for data from a chip that's just 5 cm away on the circuit board will have a latency longer than the clock period.
The only solution to this problem is increasing the on-chip cache. But that will depend on having software that manages the cache well, i.e. more complex algorithms. In that case, since you have to optimize the software anyhow, why not go to a parallel architecture?
I bet that in the future we will see chips with simpler (read RISC) architectures with more on-chip memory and special compilers designed to optimize tasks to minimize random memory access.
If they get there, they stop trying as they reached the prophecy. If they do not get there, they will try harder to reach the prophecy.
Now the question is if the self fulfilling prophecy speeds up the process or slows it down in the long term.
Let's try it out:
-"Boss, I have this fantastic idea for a chip that will have ten times more components than the ones we have today". -"No way! That would violate Moore's Law, make it just twice the number of components!"
No, I don't think Moore's Law is slowing down progress.
I remember in the early 90s, processor performance was easily doubling every 2 years, and it certainly hasn't been that way the last 4-5 years.
It was easier to measure then, because performance was directly related to clock rate. Now that clock has stopped going up, performance depends on parallel processing.
Then there's a catch, parallel processing depends on the software. Doubling clock rate will probably double the performance of almost any software that runs in the computer, doubling the number of cores not necessarily. Luckily, the most demanding tasks in computing are those that can be parallelized.
With the advent of the GPGPU the future looks bright for Moore's Law. I've recently run some benchmarks using Cuda to perform FFTs and compared it to the data I have from my old computers. In my case, at least, my current computer is above the curve predicted by applying Moore's Law to the computers I've had in the last 25 years.
Slashdot Mirror
If I was an alien, I'd invade the US first, and only the US.
And I'd invade China and only China. Your planet would owe its ass to my planet.
How many public servants do you know who are serving prison sentences for breaking ethics rules?
You kidding? Just off the top of my head,
this guy, this guy, local to me this lady, and this guy who just got out last year.
No, you didn't understand. I didn't mean people who once were elected representatives or public servants who got jail time. Anyone can get jail time for breaking the law.
I meant public servants who got jail time for performing their duty but not heeding ethics rules. Bernard Ebbers wasn't jailed because he made some employee of his company do chores at his farm. He was jailed because he tried to increase his company's profits, which was his duty as a high-ranking officer of that company, but he didn't follow ethics rules while doing so.
From the point of view of the WorldCom company, Bernard Ebbers was a perfect manager, he did his best to increase profits.
Now name one public servant who got jail time for being overzealous, not for sidestepping the law for his own personal motives.
Name me the TSA officer who got 25 years in jail for overdoing his physical examinations of travelers. Name the police officer who got 25 years in jail for shooting a suspect in the chest instead of going for the shoulder. Name the IRS officer who got 25 years in jail for checking a bank account without doing the proper paperwork.
And every one of those thousands of people would be fired or imprisoned if they were caught breaking their institution's ethics rules for their own personal gain. It's called "political corruption" in that case.
But the leaders of a *corporation* are not just allowed to use the corporation's resources for profit regardless of ethics, they're *required* to, and their thousands of employees will be fired if they don't go along with it. It's called "preserving shareholder value" in this case.
I once worked for a company owned by this guy.
He's currently serving a 25 year prison sentence.
How many public servants do you know who are serving prison sentences for breaking ethics rules?
at least the federal government doesn't have a profit motive for sharing the information it has about me.
Do you really believe this? As Robert Heinlein said in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", "My point is that some person is responsible. Always. If H-bombs exist - and they do - some person controls them. In terms of morals there is no such thing as 'state'. Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts."
The profit motive of the federal government is that of thousands of people who would be without a job if the government didn't have all those agencies controlling every detail in your life.
I don't have to get a state-issued ID card if I don't want either, right? Except once these gov-sanctioned IDs come into play, they do become standards
They will do it like they did with driver licenses, they will say "accessing the internet is not a right, it's a privilege".
I wonder which part of "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people" they didn't understand.
Or how about "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people
You don't have to have one of these IDs.
FTFY.
lays out a common strategy for something-you-have authentication that can then be potentially used in a much wider variety of venues than your bank.
You mean, like credit cards?
We already have something-you-have authentication for any situation that NEEDS authentication.
And I'd rather NOT be authenticated in all other situations.
A reasonable limit might be to disallow recording of any sound (or sight) that is not detectable by human ears/eyes.
So, telephoto lenses should be illegal? Directional microphones? How would you record a speech in a public place?
I recommend you watch a classic film from the 1960s, "Blowup" by Michelangelo Antonioni where a photographer unknowingly takes a picture of a murder in a public park. Even simple equipment may capture sounds and sights that humans wouldn't detect.
The rule should be expect no privacy in public places. And in private places be discreet. If the neighbors can hear your wife screaming while you have sex, it's not their fault. If the neighbors can see your WiFi network it's not their fault either.
Just start RTFAing: "In my last post I outlined the general bufferbloat problem."
Follow the link:
"Each of these initial experiments were been designed to clearly demonstrate a now very common problem: excessive buffering in a network path. I call this bufferbloat
Rapidshare may be legally right, morally they are very wrong.
A law that extends copyright for decades after the author's death is immoral. Extending copyrights decades after a work was created is immoral.
So, should we follow the law or should we try to be moral?
If the law had any relation to morality it would follow the constitutional mandate that copyrights are for the authors and last for a limited time. They are not for a corporation to extend indefinitely long after the original term expired and the author died.
During meteor showers, which happen at predictable times every year, one can watch several meteors per minute. It's nothing out of the ordinary.
It's almost like saying "astronomer overslept and missed sunrise" in an ordinary day.
Considering that a 1000-pack of transistors can be bought for $50, the total price for the transistors today would be less than the $300 a 6800 cost in the late 1970s, even unadjusted for inflation.
So, here's a challenge for that badass electronics hobbyist: build a working 6502 out of discrete transistors.
But if you buy a bunch of Pinto's KNOWING of the flaw, and then deliberately crash them into things to try and make them explode so that you can sue the manufacturer... why exactly should you be exempt from liability?
The Pinto had a design fault in that the fuel tank wasn't well protected from rear-end crashes. The manufacturer was found liable for *any* damages caused by that fault, independent of what caused the accident.
Ford had to have protected better the fuel tank, no matter what. They could not claim that the accident wouldn't have occurred if one of the drivers involved had been more careful.
The conclusion was that accidents happen and the manufacturer had the responsibility to take that into account, no matter what caused the accident.
Oh, this website didn't secure their Logins for SQL injection, it's not MY fault the series of buttons I pressed resulted in me accessing their database records.
That's absolutely correct and that's how it should be.
There was a fault in the system, the result of incomplete testing by incompetent programmers. That's what happens when you hire the lowest degree of people, instead of paying the wages required by competent people.
Consider this: suppose the fault in the system caused a crash that killed someone. Shouldn't the manufacturer be liable for that damage, caused by a design error? Isn't the manufacturer responsible for the consequences of the design their engineers came up with?
Why should software be exempt from the liability that car manufacturers face?
Ironic, coming from a username pronounced "man goo" ;-)
Be afraid, be very afraid of who you make fun of...
Well the kitten isn't going to bury itself ya know
I don't think he needs burying yet.
Perhaps we would be better served by making the very *concept* of genocide or war simply inconceivable.
You keep using that word but I don't think it means what you think.
People are still going to ignore all the retractions from the real medical and scientific community in favor of Jenny McCarthy saying on TV that "Vaccines gave my baby autism!"
Fortunately, those people's children will have a greater than average probability of dying young, which will improve average human intelligence in the long run.
The effects that I saw claimed were more like, 3% better than random.
Which should be more than good enough to make a fortune.
At European casinos, if you play red vs. black in the roulette, you have a 18/37 chance, that is 48.64%, of winning double your bet.
A 3% better than random precognition rate would let you get rich in a few hours, while still being random enough to be considered pure luck, so you could get filthy rich before they banned you from all the casinos in the world.
I'd be impressed if we could build something with the senses and decision making capabilities of a fruit fly.
That will be when we have software discerning the difference of parsing between "time flies like an arrow" and "fruit flies like a banana"
The big problem in AI is context. We spend the first years of our lives learning about context. We never see situations without a context, there's always a circumstance that originates another.
Every time we face a novel situation our first instinctive reaction is to evaluate what situations we have been in that are most similar to this one. If the situation is random enough we often associate unrelated facts, that's why people see a cloud shaped like a camel or the face of Jesus in a moldy sandwich.
A successful artificial vision system to work as a human would need a huge database of images representing the visual memory of an average human being. That's how humans recognize things.
It has been at least 50 years since heat-seeking missiles were invented. They can hunt down a fighter with far more accuracy than a human pilot can, they can withstand much higher accelerations, they are much cheaper than a manned fighter plane.
Why do they insist on manned fighter aircraft?
Looks like the site has been eclipsed already. :(
Perhaps it was running in an Eclipse server
Even if you had an arbitrarily powerful CPU, you'd still have to load in everything from memory, hard disk, or network sources (i.e. all very slow)
Considering that light only travels 30 cm per nanosecond in a vacuum, the maximum practical clock speed depends on how far your memory is. At a 3 GHz clock rate, a request for data from a chip that's just 5 cm away on the circuit board will have a latency longer than the clock period.
The only solution to this problem is increasing the on-chip cache. But that will depend on having software that manages the cache well, i.e. more complex algorithms. In that case, since you have to optimize the software anyhow, why not go to a parallel architecture?
I bet that in the future we will see chips with simpler (read RISC) architectures with more on-chip memory and special compilers designed to optimize tasks to minimize random memory access.
If they get there, they stop trying as they reached the prophecy.
If they do not get there, they will try harder to reach the prophecy.
Now the question is if the self fulfilling prophecy speeds up the process or slows it down in the long term.
Let's try it out:
-"Boss, I have this fantastic idea for a chip that will have ten times more components than the ones we have today".
-"No way! That would violate Moore's Law, make it just twice the number of components!"
No, I don't think Moore's Law is slowing down progress.
I remember in the early 90s, processor performance was easily doubling every 2 years, and it certainly hasn't been that way the last 4-5 years.
It was easier to measure then, because performance was directly related to clock rate. Now that clock has stopped going up, performance depends on parallel processing.
Then there's a catch, parallel processing depends on the software. Doubling clock rate will probably double the performance of almost any software that runs in the computer, doubling the number of cores not necessarily. Luckily, the most demanding tasks in computing are those that can be parallelized.
With the advent of the GPGPU the future looks bright for Moore's Law. I've recently run some benchmarks using Cuda to perform FFTs and compared it to the data I have from my old computers. In my case, at least, my current computer is above the curve predicted by applying Moore's Law to the computers I've had in the last 25 years.