Why is it that the first application that I can think of for such project developed by DARPA is that to use it against the citizens?
Like it or lump it, you are in this boat with everyone else. If AI is solved, it will be used for good and evil. If your country does not use it for evil (extremely doubtful), somebody else's country will. Better yours than theirs. What I mean is that true AI will be an extremely powerful thing; if any country other than yours gets an early monopoly on AI, you can bet they are going to use it to kick your country's ass. I don't think you'd like that very much.
<strangelove>There must not be a AI Gap!</strangelove>
The only reason for slandering another person or company on a web-site is that one's evidence wasn't good enough to convince either the police, the court or any news-media; and in that case, perhaps you are simply wrong?
This argument only holds if one of these three outlets is actually evaluating said evidence
helpful tip for the Finnish crowd...if your coffee can double as brick mortar, you're doing it wrong.:)
Bah, I've tried this "liquid coffee" stuff, and it's terrible. It lacks the wonderful crunchiness of well-brewed coffee. Worse, it does nothing for my minor repairs around the house.
Where the Grimm Brothers got it wrong, is that that phenomenon is very hard to unravel.
In the story, all it takes is one kid shouting "the emperor is naked", for the whole charade to come apart.
In reality, that wouldn't do jack squat.
In fact, the crowd would start chuckling at the foolish child who cannot see the emperor's wonderful clothes.
They would teach the child their ways of seeing the clothes.
They would instruct the child how to make more of these clothes for the king.
And woe be unto the child that continues to question the existence of the clothes, even after childhood.
They are marginalized for their inability to see clothes.
If they talk about the seeming lack of clothes, they are derided.
If they proclaim the emperor's nakedness, they are hated.
Even those that claim the clothes are a certain way run afoul of those that see the clothes a different way.
People would be segregated based on the clothes they see.
Fights of all sizes would be fought, with sides determined by the colors they saw.
Of course, this is an entirely pessimistic view of the situation fueled by some personal experience and some anecdotal evidence.
Take what you want from it.
No offense was taken. Even thought the "somewhat prickly" response, you thoughtfully responded to my arguments. To me, that more than makes up for a abrasive response. So, thank you for thinking despite being "pissy."
Besides, I had somewhat primed you for a personal attack by using the charged phrase "emotional argument." Even if that wasn't the intent, being careless with words is even more magnified in a written context, and I have to take some responsibility for that.
Despite all of the difficulties encountered, I think the discussion was successful.
As a mild agnostic—the group sitting in the middle of the whole discussion, and often wondering what the fuss is about—I find that both sides have their overly outspoken pundits. The really surprising bit is the fact that both sides also have members who keep their mouths shut and are just as annoyed by their own pundits as the rest of us are. Someone wiser than myself once said that extremists exist to show the rest of us where the boundaries are.
Who said we were talking about curing the patient? Or what was good for the individual? The species' survival is more important than the survival of any single individual.
Why ?
Because a single individual is a subset of a species.
I don't have time to respond fully.
I do take issue with your immediate claim that my post represented an "emotional argument" as if by it being "emotional" it is less of an argument that your rebuttal.
I call bullshit.
If I offended, it was not my intention.
Emotional arguments are not necessarily flawed arguments.
They are quite effective at evoking a response among humans, and are quite useful in that regard.
I was attempting to praise your argument while also critiquing it.
<snip>
Issue: #1
</snip>
Response: Verizon can shut down the service for any reason they choose.
They can cut access to a few alt.* groups, or they can cut the entire alt.* hierarchy.
They can even cut out all of the big seven and shut off their nntpd.
And it won't matter one whit what rationale they choose to do this, for nowhere are they required to provide USENET news access as part of their offering.
Verizon could choose to shut off USENET for the stated reason that too many chucacabra sightings are reported there if they so wish.
Or because chickens like to cluck.
Perhaps they might choose to shut off USENET for the reason that it's not carbon-neutral.
Whatever - it's their hardware and their service they sell.
I fully agree with you.
Verizon has control over their equipment and can use whatever rationale they choose to determine which services they will or will not provide, as well as the timings of said choices.
You don't like it? Cancel and find another ISP. Or buy the service from another USENET news provider.
Often, this is not a true option for a given consumer, since ISPs often have a virtual monopoly on an area.
Unless you are suggesting that chosing an ISP is more important than any other consideration in chosing a place of residence—in which case, ISPs have an even greater obligation to provide above excellent service to their customers.
So - whatever reason Verizon chose - you don't have standing to claim that these actions amount to any wrongdoing whatsoever.
I agree that Verizon's actions are well within their rights, and that the rights themselves are innocent of any wrongdoing.
I take issue with Verizon's claimed reasonings, because—and since this is my main point, I'll emphasize it for clarity—purveyors of goods and services have a obligation to deal honestly with their customers, and provide rationales not out of proportion with their actions.
I believe not following this guideline is evidence of bad faith.
<snip>Issue #2, censorship</snip>
The district attorney's office in the State of New York has asked that Verizon and other ISPs cut access to a small number of USENET newsgroups where users are currently trading in child-pornography.
The ISPs have agreed.
Thus it is not the ISPs who are engaged in censorship, it is the State of New York which has requested that this material be censored.
As is the right and responsibility of that district attorney.
I would like to point out that neither the District Attorney nor the ISP have technically engaged in censorship, as the information was not made inaccessable, but reduced a venue to access it.
That said, I would like to admit that when I had first responded, the extent of the District Attorney's Office of the State of New York was not clear to me.
As such, I arrived at an irrelevant conclusion about the role corporate censorship played in this instance.
As much as I still think there is an interesting point about corporation's roles in the flow of data, it has no bearing on this discussion.
Your argument that these actions amount to "save the children" fear mongering, I argue, is the real emotional argument that ought to be challenged.
While I agree that the handling of the 88 groups actually involved
While this is quite an effective emotional argument, it overlooks some of the important points.
We're talking about felony distribution of child pornography.
Actually, we're talking about a major company cutting a service to its customers for the stated reason that a extremely small subset of the service in question being used for such behavior.
Such material is not "protected free speech" and it never has been. Unprotected speech has a long history of censorship in this country, the court case in the link being just one of many examples. That case is what brought forth and confirmed the argument that "yelling fire in a crowded theater" is not protected speech due to the risk of unintended mob violence. Threats of violence is another example of unprotected speech.
While I do not dispute that the U.S. governments have historically prevented the use of speech that induces harm, governmental approval does not necessarily make the practice correct. I am explicitly not discussing the merits and demerits of free speech in this post.
Thus, while many on slashdot might not like this fact, it is legal and justified to censor material that causes great harm to another person.
This assumes that this material existed on at least a statistically significant portion of the service. Generally, statistical significance is a few orders of magnitude larger than 0.088% and generally falls within 7% ± 2%. Many would argue that even statistical significance is not enough of a benchmark to drop a service.
And in this case, it is great harm done to a child, for profit. To censor this material is to uphold the right of privacy for those children who have been sexually abused in front of a camera for profit.
While there is a great amount of damage dealt to the child, adding the "for profit" qualifier weakens the argument. As a large portion of the internet is not "for profit," it is conceivable that a large portion of the material in question could escape the argument on the basis that it is "not for profit."
The distribution of that material is assumed to cause those children involved great personal harm. That harm is far worse than the harm to society in general due to a policy of censorship.
If the topic in question was a surgical strike against the materials in question, I would fully agree with you. However, this is not the case.
Particularly since we're not censoring political speech, but are censoring the commercial product of a criminal conspiracy.
Technically, Verizon is not censoring any speech, as it is only cutting a service. If they were engaging in censorship, not only would I question the propriety of a corporation doing the work of a government, but I would also question what percentage of the 100,000 groups in the alt.* category could be classified as "political speech." To put a more concrete scale on the question, is the percentage of groups in alt.* engaged in political discourse less than, equal to, or greater than 0.088%?
As an aside, was using a charged phrase like "criminal conspiracy" really necessary? I question the attribution of such a organized malevolence to an entire group of individuals.
Let's be clear: child porn is essentially a snuff-film.
While this is very effective rhetoric, the point is somewhat crippled by association fallacy, in so far as—unless there is a preponderance of such material that literally ends in the death of a child—they are not technically snuff.
Finally, Verizon owns that hardware. There are no filters in place across the network to block access to the nntpd
<obligatory>Emacs is a great operating system, but it lacks a good text editor.</obligatory>
Emacs and vi are both good—I personally prefer modal/stateful commands to chording, but that's me—for those willing to put time into learning an entire set of keystrokes, or want to spend a time hand-tweaking a configuration file to make either do exactly what they want.
However, for a dead simple interface that puts the most important functions right in front of the user's face, it's hard to beat Notepad++. Sure, I bet there's ways of tweaking the interface so it's even more intuitive, but as it stands, I personally was able to start it up and have the tools I needed most at my fingertips.
While emacs and vi may be very intuitive once a user is familiar with them, the most important feature is what could be termed "discoverablity." When the user interface naturally leads the users to what they want to do, the amount of training needed is lessened. A user who already likes the product is easier to train than one who is unsure, so the less the program has to teach the user, the more likely new users will pick it up.
Notepad++ could be vastly underpowered compared to Emacs and vi, but the users are able to get to work much faster in Notepad++. The faster a user is able to work, the more naive users it will win. Winning naive users give a project a user base, which all projects—commercial or not—need to survive.
For example, maybe the poster would have done something else useful for his employer during the non-overtime time that he wasted with the inferior tool, something that would have been worth more than $200.
As a counterexample, perhaps having a tool that worked would have allowed him to do something damaging to his employer. Assuming productivity lost is equal to income lost is as much of a cognitive trap as assuming that all actors made an informed decision.
Or, maybe it drives the poster to change jobs and work at a company that will actually pay for the tools it takes for him to be most productive. I've done exactly that in my own career. Time spent as a developer trying to solve some business problem with code is fulfilling to me; time spent as a developer wrestling with a shitty tool is not. I guarantee that the costs involved in finding and hiring a replacement developer are more than $200.
Perhaps, but it is worth remembering that purchasing a tool that cost $200 for the individual user often become quite expensive in a licensing situation, especially when an entire department needs to be standardized on a single tool-chain. If that tool chain becomes expensive enough, the cost of renting a developer—or set of developers—with the skill-set for a free equivalent may become cheaper than purchasing a license to keep a developer—or set of developers.
I don't think this is meant to be a GPU, at least not this card. I think this is meant to be what the GPU is made on. If that's the case, then this is really cool.
Coming from the software side here is my idea of what this could mean: if the OS has problems with the GPU card, the GPU's specs are open and the driver could be matched all the way down to the bare metal. If the GPU doesn't do what is needed, the GPU can be redesigned on this FPGA card. If the tools used to work with the FPGA card are troublesome, the tools can be programmed better. If the FPGA doesn't do what is needed, the FPGA card can be redesigned.
I think it's pretty cool that a card can be completely open from before the design of the card. Sure, the price tag is a bit steep, but with time, I wouldn't be surprised if this project—or another like it—becomes a platform of choice in making video cards.
And just in case I wasn't going to get moded troll too ill add, promoting an unpopular opinion isn't trolling, is this how groupthink slashdot moderation has become, That is truly pathetic.
Well, that's half right. Promoting an unpopular opinion in good faith is not trolling. On the other hand, using an unpopular opinion to anger and insult is quite nearly the definition of trolling.
Rephrasing the more-than-slightly-invective parent was fine; the micro-rant about trolling was a bit trollish itself.
In short, trolling isn't so much about what is said, but is far more about how it is said.
Well, considering it uses something along the lines of magnetic induction--"inductively coupled power circuit that dynamically seeks resonance," as they put it--neither Mr. Barnum nor Mr. Goldberg are very much involved here. They have a few cool prototype they demoed at CES2008. It seems that they're aiming at battery chargers more than the power grid. You could probably also read a few of their patent if you'd like a more in depth explanation. It also sounds like it automagically handles charging multiple types of devices simultaneously.
For what it's worth, I wouldn't mind getting rid of a bunch of mutually incompatible AC adapters for a single charging surface.
Since it appears that the vote machine manufacturers are having difficulty programming a vote machine, why don't we help?
It shouldn't be that difficult to create--I dunno, libvote--to handle all the things we consider basic issues. We might even be able to tackle the security problems. Maybe even get a few user interaction experts to design a interface that doesn't confuse the less-than-tech-savvy crowd.
Release it under a permissive license, maybe even figure out a platform or two to run it on, with a simple installer so all the counties have to do is buy the hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it that the first application that I can think of for such project developed by DARPA is that to use it against the citizens?
Like it or lump it, you are in this boat with everyone else. If AI is solved, it will be used for good and evil. If your country does not use it for evil (extremely doubtful), somebody else's country will. Better yours than theirs. What I mean is that true AI will be an extremely powerful thing; if any country other than yours gets an early monopoly on AI, you can bet they are going to use it to kick your country's ass. I don't think you'd like that very much.
<strangelove>There must not be a AI Gap!</strangelove>
No, the world will end with a scientist uttering "Oh, sweet!"
I personally like "Not again."
black holes emit nothing.
Oh, I'm sorry, the correct answer was "Black holes emit X-rays of varying intensity in a repeating pattern over regular intervals." Thanks for playing, though.
This argument only holds if one of these three outlets is actually evaluating said evidence
Where have you been? Australia was made the 49th state in 1959. This is what we get for not giving enough funding to schools.
Bah, I've tried this "liquid coffee" stuff, and it's terrible. It lacks the wonderful crunchiness of well-brewed coffee. Worse, it does nothing for my minor repairs around the house.
Where the Grimm Brothers got it wrong, is that that phenomenon is very hard to unravel. In the story, all it takes is one kid shouting "the emperor is naked", for the whole charade to come apart. In reality, that wouldn't do jack squat.
In fact, the crowd would start chuckling at the foolish child who cannot see the emperor's wonderful clothes. They would teach the child their ways of seeing the clothes. They would instruct the child how to make more of these clothes for the king.
And woe be unto the child that continues to question the existence of the clothes, even after childhood. They are marginalized for their inability to see clothes. If they talk about the seeming lack of clothes, they are derided. If they proclaim the emperor's nakedness, they are hated.
Even those that claim the clothes are a certain way run afoul of those that see the clothes a different way. People would be segregated based on the clothes they see. Fights of all sizes would be fought, with sides determined by the colors they saw.
Of course, this is an entirely pessimistic view of the situation fueled by some personal experience and some anecdotal evidence. Take what you want from it.
No offense was taken. Even thought the "somewhat prickly" response, you thoughtfully responded to my arguments. To me, that more than makes up for a abrasive response. So, thank you for thinking despite being "pissy."
Besides, I had somewhat primed you for a personal attack by using the charged phrase "emotional argument." Even if that wasn't the intent, being careless with words is even more magnified in a written context, and I have to take some responsibility for that.
Despite all of the difficulties encountered, I think the discussion was successful.
Since when is responding to a straw poll of a group with a high concentration of software developers worthy of a PhD? If it is, where do I sign up?
As a mild agnostic—the group sitting in the middle of the whole discussion, and often wondering what the fuss is about—I find that both sides have their overly outspoken pundits. The really surprising bit is the fact that both sides also have members who keep their mouths shut and are just as annoyed by their own pundits as the rest of us are. Someone wiser than myself once said that extremists exist to show the rest of us where the boundaries are.
Why ?
Because a single individual is a subset of a species.
I don't have time to respond fully. I do take issue with your immediate claim that my post represented an "emotional argument" as if by it being "emotional" it is less of an argument that your rebuttal. I call bullshit.
If I offended, it was not my intention. Emotional arguments are not necessarily flawed arguments. They are quite effective at evoking a response among humans, and are quite useful in that regard. I was attempting to praise your argument while also critiquing it.
<snip> Issue: #1 </snip>
Response: Verizon can shut down the service for any reason they choose. They can cut access to a few alt.* groups, or they can cut the entire alt.* hierarchy. They can even cut out all of the big seven and shut off their nntpd. And it won't matter one whit what rationale they choose to do this, for nowhere are they required to provide USENET news access as part of their offering.
Verizon could choose to shut off USENET for the stated reason that too many chucacabra sightings are reported there if they so wish. Or because chickens like to cluck. Perhaps they might choose to shut off USENET for the reason that it's not carbon-neutral. Whatever - it's their hardware and their service they sell.
I fully agree with you. Verizon has control over their equipment and can use whatever rationale they choose to determine which services they will or will not provide, as well as the timings of said choices.
You don't like it? Cancel and find another ISP. Or buy the service from another USENET news provider.
Often, this is not a true option for a given consumer, since ISPs often have a virtual monopoly on an area. Unless you are suggesting that chosing an ISP is more important than any other consideration in chosing a place of residence—in which case, ISPs have an even greater obligation to provide above excellent service to their customers.
So - whatever reason Verizon chose - you don't have standing to claim that these actions amount to any wrongdoing whatsoever.
I agree that Verizon's actions are well within their rights, and that the rights themselves are innocent of any wrongdoing. I take issue with Verizon's claimed reasonings, because—and since this is my main point, I'll emphasize it for clarity—purveyors of goods and services have a obligation to deal honestly with their customers, and provide rationales not out of proportion with their actions. I believe not following this guideline is evidence of bad faith.
<snip>Issue #2, censorship</snip>
The district attorney's office in the State of New York has asked that Verizon and other ISPs cut access to a small number of USENET newsgroups where users are currently trading in child-pornography. The ISPs have agreed. Thus it is not the ISPs who are engaged in censorship, it is the State of New York which has requested that this material be censored. As is the right and responsibility of that district attorney.
I would like to point out that neither the District Attorney nor the ISP have technically engaged in censorship, as the information was not made inaccessable, but reduced a venue to access it. That said, I would like to admit that when I had first responded, the extent of the District Attorney's Office of the State of New York was not clear to me. As such, I arrived at an irrelevant conclusion about the role corporate censorship played in this instance. As much as I still think there is an interesting point about corporation's roles in the flow of data, it has no bearing on this discussion.
Your argument that these actions amount to "save the children" fear mongering, I argue, is the real emotional argument that ought to be challenged.
While I agree that the handling of the 88 groups actually involved
While this is quite an effective emotional argument, it overlooks some of the important points.
We're talking about felony distribution of child pornography.
Actually, we're talking about a major company cutting a service to its customers for the stated reason that a extremely small subset of the service in question being used for such behavior.
Such material is not "protected free speech" and it never has been. Unprotected speech has a long history of censorship in this country, the court case in the link being just one of many examples. That case is what brought forth and confirmed the argument that "yelling fire in a crowded theater" is not protected speech due to the risk of unintended mob violence. Threats of violence is another example of unprotected speech.
While I do not dispute that the U.S. governments have historically prevented the use of speech that induces harm, governmental approval does not necessarily make the practice correct. I am explicitly not discussing the merits and demerits of free speech in this post.
Thus, while many on slashdot might not like this fact, it is legal and justified to censor material that causes great harm to another person.
This assumes that this material existed on at least a statistically significant portion of the service. Generally, statistical significance is a few orders of magnitude larger than 0.088% and generally falls within 7% ± 2%. Many would argue that even statistical significance is not enough of a benchmark to drop a service.
And in this case, it is great harm done to a child, for profit. To censor this material is to uphold the right of privacy for those children who have been sexually abused in front of a camera for profit.
While there is a great amount of damage dealt to the child, adding the "for profit" qualifier weakens the argument. As a large portion of the internet is not "for profit," it is conceivable that a large portion of the material in question could escape the argument on the basis that it is "not for profit."
The distribution of that material is assumed to cause those children involved great personal harm. That harm is far worse than the harm to society in general due to a policy of censorship.
If the topic in question was a surgical strike against the materials in question, I would fully agree with you. However, this is not the case.
Particularly since we're not censoring political speech, but are censoring the commercial product of a criminal conspiracy.
Technically, Verizon is not censoring any speech, as it is only cutting a service. If they were engaging in censorship, not only would I question the propriety of a corporation doing the work of a government, but I would also question what percentage of the 100,000 groups in the alt.* category could be classified as "political speech." To put a more concrete scale on the question, is the percentage of groups in alt.* engaged in political discourse less than, equal to, or greater than 0.088%?
As an aside, was using a charged phrase like "criminal conspiracy" really necessary? I question the attribution of such a organized malevolence to an entire group of individuals.
Let's be clear: child porn is essentially a snuff-film.
While this is very effective rhetoric, the point is somewhat crippled by association fallacy, in so far as—unless there is a preponderance of such material that literally ends in the death of a child—they are not technically snuff.
Finally, Verizon owns that hardware. There are no filters in place across the network to block access to the nntpd
<obligatory>Emacs is a great operating system, but it lacks a good text editor.</obligatory>
Emacs and vi are both good—I personally prefer modal/stateful commands to chording, but that's me—for those willing to put time into learning an entire set of keystrokes, or want to spend a time hand-tweaking a configuration file to make either do exactly what they want.
However, for a dead simple interface that puts the most important functions right in front of the user's face, it's hard to beat Notepad++. Sure, I bet there's ways of tweaking the interface so it's even more intuitive, but as it stands, I personally was able to start it up and have the tools I needed most at my fingertips.
While emacs and vi may be very intuitive once a user is familiar with them, the most important feature is what could be termed "discoverablity." When the user interface naturally leads the users to what they want to do, the amount of training needed is lessened. A user who already likes the product is easier to train than one who is unsure, so the less the program has to teach the user, the more likely new users will pick it up.
Notepad++ could be vastly underpowered compared to Emacs and vi, but the users are able to get to work much faster in Notepad++. The faster a user is able to work, the more naive users it will win. Winning naive users give a project a user base, which all projects—commercial or not—need to survive.
For example, maybe the poster would have done something else useful for his employer during the non-overtime time that he wasted with the inferior tool, something that would have been worth more than $200.
As a counterexample, perhaps having a tool that worked would have allowed him to do something damaging to his employer. Assuming productivity lost is equal to income lost is as much of a cognitive trap as assuming that all actors made an informed decision.
Or, maybe it drives the poster to change jobs and work at a company that will actually pay for the tools it takes for him to be most productive. I've done exactly that in my own career. Time spent as a developer trying to solve some business problem with code is fulfilling to me; time spent as a developer wrestling with a shitty tool is not. I guarantee that the costs involved in finding and hiring a replacement developer are more than $200.
Perhaps, but it is worth remembering that purchasing a tool that cost $200 for the individual user often become quite expensive in a licensing situation, especially when an entire department needs to be standardized on a single tool-chain. If that tool chain becomes expensive enough, the cost of renting a developer—or set of developers—with the skill-set for a free equivalent may become cheaper than purchasing a license to keep a developer—or set of developers.
I don't think this is meant to be a GPU, at least not this card. I think this is meant to be what the GPU is made on. If that's the case, then this is really cool.
Coming from the software side here is my idea of what this could mean: if the OS has problems with the GPU card, the GPU's specs are open and the driver could be matched all the way down to the bare metal. If the GPU doesn't do what is needed, the GPU can be redesigned on this FPGA card. If the tools used to work with the FPGA card are troublesome, the tools can be programmed better. If the FPGA doesn't do what is needed, the FPGA card can be redesigned.
I think it's pretty cool that a card can be completely open from before the design of the card. Sure, the price tag is a bit steep, but with time, I wouldn't be surprised if this project—or another like it—becomes a platform of choice in making video cards.
Well, that's half right. Promoting an unpopular opinion in good faith is not trolling. On the other hand, using an unpopular opinion to anger and insult is quite nearly the definition of trolling.
Rephrasing the more-than-slightly-invective parent was fine; the micro-rant about trolling was a bit trollish itself.
In short, trolling isn't so much about what is said, but is far more about how it is said.
Well, considering it uses something along the lines of magnetic induction--"inductively coupled power circuit that dynamically seeks resonance," as they put it--neither Mr. Barnum nor Mr. Goldberg are very much involved here. They have a few cool prototype they demoed at CES2008. It seems that they're aiming at battery chargers more than the power grid. You could probably also read a few of their patent if you'd like a more in depth explanation. It also sounds like it automagically handles charging multiple types of devices simultaneously.
For what it's worth, I wouldn't mind getting rid of a bunch of mutually incompatible AC adapters for a single charging surface.
Since it appears that the vote machine manufacturers are having difficulty programming a vote machine, why don't we help?
It shouldn't be that difficult to create--I dunno, libvote--to handle all the things we consider basic issues. We might even be able to tackle the security problems. Maybe even get a few user interaction experts to design a interface that doesn't confuse the less-than-tech-savvy crowd.
Release it under a permissive license, maybe even figure out a platform or two to run it on, with a simple installer so all the counties have to do is buy the hardware.
We can do this. Right?