Kinda like swimming in the same way that a good chatbot can be said to be doing something kinda like thinking.
We're only willing to attribute the term to things which provide a convincing enough illusion that they're living.
A submarine can go faster, deeper and in short "swim" vastly more effectively than that little fish bot which is merely trying to look like a fish. Yet only the one which provides an illusion of life at the expense "swimming" well gets the term swim.
How about if a machine ever gets to the point where it can read a load of medical textbooks and then reason out a reasonable diagnosis when you tell it a patients symptoms then there's no reason to say it isn't thinking. But of course even good expert systems are just running an algorithm, there's nothing special going on. No thinking.
It takes a hell of a lot of thinking to plan the logistics for an invasion and one of DARPA's pet AI's handled a fair amount of the planning an logistics for the last war, they claimed it cut the time it took to plan the invasion down by months and saved a huge amount of human labour. yet it's just an algorithm at heart, no thinking.
You're just posing a variation on the turing test, if a machine can appear to think like a human then it's reasonable to say it's thinking. Which people, especially the programmers who know what's going on underneath, generally don't accept.
asking if a computer can think is like asking if a machine can swim.
A machine may be able to move through the water faster than any swimmer, it may be able to go deeper and further. A machine sail, it can move through the water, it can submerse. But it can't swim. It can never swim.
because it's a term we reserve for what living things do.
a machine can never think because the word "think" in the english language doesn't encompas anything a machine can do.
every time he or wikileaks is talked about in the conservative press they'll be sure to throw in something like "who has been accused of rape" or some variation.
And rape is one of those ones you simply cannot shake off, it's socially unacceptable to not believe a claim of rape or even be sceptical about it. Nobody wants to side with the rapist so wikileaks loses a lot of support right off the bat.
other businesses around the globe do this sort of thing on a regular basis
*Monopolies which design their systems to run poorly with competitors products. *Major phone companies which threaten to not allow their customers to call certain businesses (or threatens to make the lines really crackly and poor)who are connected through different phone companies unless the business in question pays them extra as well. *Manufacturers which pay suppliers to not carry their competitors products or delay their competitors products.
Oh wait. That sort of thing is generally already illegal.
Ski Resort? equivalent to getting a T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN. If the tour bus driver who brought the customers there insisted that the ski resort pay him or he'd take them elsewhere that would be a better analogy.
Airports? Again T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN. Perhaps if the Airlines expected the hotels near the airports you were going to to pay extra or else they'd take you elsewhere.
Toll roads? Again T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN.
medical insurance? makes not even a little sense.
snazzy clubs? can actually be illegal in some countries already, discrimination based on sex.
Retail businesses? Again T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN.
Web sites? Again T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN.
What would be enacted under any government bill by that title likely has very little to do with real Net Neutrality. Lobbyists poison everything.
That doesn't mean people who support net neutrality support everything some shill calls by the same name. Like how someone who believes in freedom of speech doesn't have to support "Free Speech Zones".
But is there any evidence that real net neutrality is this way or are you like most Net Neutrality opponents who make up their own strawman and then attack that?
Prioritizing based on source or destination would be a problem under Net Neutrality but prioritizing based on protocol etc isn't necessarily unless it's to try to degrade a competitors products(like a phone company which is also an ISP intentionally degrading VOIP). NN doesn't stop you pushing VOIP packets through faster than FTP or UDP faster than TCP.
ever evolved to infect our species you'd have something pretty close to a zombie outbreak.
Imagine, people infected with something which diverts their basic instincts, millions more parasites start growing in their flesh and they protect them as an otherwise sentient free humans with all the zeal and ferocity that someone will protect their children.
If the only thing that pointed you at him was that search of the database then it tells you almost nothing about how likely he is to be guilty on it's own.
If you find a suspect be searching through a database of a million people with a test that has a 1 in a million chance of making a false positive and no other evidence exists then the chances of that match should not be used in any way to establish guilt in court. But then lawyers don't care about using stats correctly.
If however you find someone, they have a knife with the victims blood on it and they have a motive and you compare their DNA to the DNA found at the scene then that same test with a 1 in a million chance of a false positive is a perfectly valid piece of data to submit in court.
I was under the impression that cheap passive RFID chips were completely incapable of any kind of encryption and only more expensive ones on the order of 20 times the price could handle even rudimentary encryption never mind anything really solid like private key crypto.
You could probably fit a reasonably small RFID reader in a backback, ever paid any attention to someone brushing past you with a backpack?
Several seconds? Even the door swipes in the library take a fraction of a second to scan.
when a bad system is being rolled out and there are better alternatives there's nothing wrong with complaining.
Credit cards are a great example of that, it should be almost trivial with modern crypto to make a payment system vastly harder to exploit that the current CC system. yet they don't because it would cost slightly more per card.
Please elaborate, I was under the impression that a signal simply powers the card and induces a response from the card. No processing or challenge response unless it's a really expensive card.
In which case anyone walking past you could read the card without you knowing.
In reality unless you're an actual government agent this isn't an issue. have a cell phone? Well anyone with enough clout to ask the cell company for it's logs can track you easily.
A student at the local uni disappeared, the phone logs revealed that the last known position of his phone was a bridge in the city popular for suicides.
The general gist is that someone figures out the ultimate surveillance system.
I'm of the opinion that everything being recorded isn't so bad as long as it's symmetric.
If the police want to record everything I do I want the right to record right back.
I approve of police being required to have dashboard cameras. but I want to have the right to my own recording in case theirs mysteriously goes missing.
similar idea, white collar crime where some email exchange is involved each and every email counts as a separate case of wire fraud so someone in the course of a few conversations can rack up hundreds of years of jail time.
what I don't get is why they don't just bite the bullet and make committing any crime while having eyebrows and not wearing a pink shirt with the word "crime" written on it prominently a mandatory 1000 year sentence.
Then everyone who loves the "but it means they can add extra charges" thing can be happy and we can do away with all the other inane bullshit.
conspiracy is the best though. there's no need for anything illegal to actually happen other than the conspiracy itself.
So if you and I have a chat about committing a felony, lets say we hatch a plot to make ourselves an unlicensed copy of Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended.(It's over the thousand dollar limit making it a felony )
"hey, know anywhere I can pick up a copy of photoshop?" "Sure, try the pirate bay."
Next I commit any overt act, you do nothing. Lets say I look up the listings on the pirate bay. Well both you and I can then be done for conspiracy. I may have missed some of the finer points of the requirements for a conspiracy as IANAL but you get the idea.
much better to just keep the recorder hidden or hack it so the "off" button does nothing but turn off a small green light. Being a smartarse is never smart but your assertion of
"never argue with a police officer"
is true in the same sense as the assertion
"never argue with someone 2 feet taller than you who's wearing lots of leather with a big knife and a short temper"
Lets follow that path a little. Someone could edit a letter between themselves and someone else and release that, should keeping correspondence without the explicit permission of both parties be illegal because of that?
And if the editing is malicious and misrepresents someone then it should be covered under libel laws.
All your approach does is allow politicians and policemen know when they should actually pay attention to the rulebook rather than having to stick to it all the time.
There are systems which allow you to rank your choices, you put your dream party first, the party you wouldn't mind second etc. If your dream party doesn't get enough votes to get in then all the ballots go to their second choice, if they don't have enough to get in then on to the third, etc.
it's a far far better system than the American lesser of 2 evils model.
of course crappy politicians still get into power no matter what system.
His spelling an grammar are poor but the general sentiment is perfectly valid. Having to pay to have your media rated benefits large industry over small, especially on the international market.
You can say goodbye to any free iphone games in Australia because if you're not making any money then you're not going to pay to have it rated. You can say goodbye to almost everything that's made by a small company which isn't already getting great sales in Australia.
Meanwhile the large media companies love this since they concentrate on a few big titles rather than lots of little ones so next to their advertising budgets this wouldn't even register and from their point of view all this is doing is killing off the free competition.
Politicians do so love endorsements from celebrities and if they support what large media companies want then they have no problem getting big names to appear with them on chat shows.
You assume that "nanny state" laws are responsible. It could equally be true that many of the problems in the US are caused by the existence of a large poor underclass that has nothing to do with a nanny state.
The problem is that of course most people define "pragmatism" as "let me do what I want but anything I don't want to do that I dislike should be banned".
I've encountered people arguing that anti-gay laws are just "pragmatism" because of some garbled belief about STD's. People who believe that "pragmatism" includes banning anything controversial from mass media because they're too lazy care for their own kids but sure pragmatism and it "takes a village" etc. People who think "pragmatism" covers religious discrimination since they're sure we'd have much safer cities if everyone was a good *fill in whatever they believe the one true is here* and just went to *church/mosque/etc* every week and did what they were told.
Slashdot Mirror
Kinda like swimming in the same way that a good chatbot can be said to be doing something kinda like thinking.
We're only willing to attribute the term to things which provide a convincing enough illusion that they're living.
A submarine can go faster, deeper and in short "swim" vastly more effectively than that little fish bot which is merely trying to look like a fish.
Yet only the one which provides an illusion of life at the expense "swimming" well gets the term swim.
How about if a machine ever gets to the point where it can read a load of medical textbooks and then reason out a reasonable diagnosis when you tell it a patients symptoms then there's no reason to say it isn't thinking.
But of course even good expert systems are just running an algorithm, there's nothing special going on. No thinking.
It takes a hell of a lot of thinking to plan the logistics for an invasion and one of DARPA's pet AI's handled a fair amount of the planning an logistics for the last war, they claimed it cut the time it took to plan the invasion down by months and saved a huge amount of human labour.
yet it's just an algorithm at heart, no thinking.
You're just posing a variation on the turing test, if a machine can appear to think like a human then it's reasonable to say it's thinking.
Which people, especially the programmers who know what's going on underneath, generally don't accept.
Properly encrypted?
A digital stream is still a bit odd.
poorly encrypted?
then it would be non-random and distinguisable from random noise.
if it wasn't encrypted then it may not be decodable but would be recognisable as non-random.
Show me a sensible definition of "sentience".
asking if a computer can think is like asking if a machine can swim.
A machine may be able to move through the water faster than any swimmer, it may be able to go deeper and further.
A machine sail, it can move through the water, it can submerse.
But it can't swim.
It can never swim.
because it's a term we reserve for what living things do.
a machine can never think because the word "think" in the english language doesn't encompas anything a machine can do.
every time he or wikileaks is talked about in the conservative press they'll be sure to throw in something like "who has been accused of rape" or some variation.
And rape is one of those ones you simply cannot shake off, it's socially unacceptable to not believe a claim of rape or even be sceptical about it.
Nobody wants to side with the rapist so wikileaks loses a lot of support right off the bat.
other businesses around the globe do this sort of thing on a regular basis
*Monopolies which design their systems to run poorly with competitors products.
*Major phone companies which threaten to not allow their customers to call certain businesses (or threatens to make the lines really crackly and poor)who are connected through different phone companies unless the business in question pays them extra as well.
*Manufacturers which pay suppliers to not carry their competitors products or delay their competitors products.
Oh wait.
That sort of thing is generally already illegal.
Ski Resort? equivalent to getting a T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN. If the tour bus driver who brought the customers there insisted that the ski resort pay him or he'd take them elsewhere that would be a better analogy.
Airports? Again T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN. Perhaps if the Airlines expected the hotels near the airports you were going to to pay extra or else they'd take you elsewhere.
Toll roads? Again T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN.
medical insurance? makes not even a little sense.
snazzy clubs? can actually be illegal in some countries already, discrimination based on sex.
Retail businesses? Again T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN.
Web sites? Again T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN.
What would be enacted under any government bill by that title likely has very little to do with real Net Neutrality.
Lobbyists poison everything.
That doesn't mean people who support net neutrality support everything some shill calls by the same name.
Like how someone who believes in freedom of speech doesn't have to support "Free Speech Zones".
But is there any evidence that real net neutrality is this way or are you like most Net Neutrality opponents who make up their own strawman and then attack that?
So they're using their position in one market(as an ISP) to give themselves an advantage in another market(VOIP provision)?
Very true, it'd be one hell of a complex calculation to come up with any halfway accurate figure.
Prioritizing based on source or destination would be a problem under Net Neutrality but prioritizing based on protocol etc isn't necessarily unless it's to try to degrade a competitors products(like a phone company which is also an ISP intentionally degrading VOIP).
NN doesn't stop you pushing VOIP packets through faster than FTP or UDP faster than TCP.
If anything like this:
http://www.damninteresting.com/body-snatching-barnacles-and-zombie-crabs
ever evolved to infect our species you'd have something pretty close to a zombie outbreak.
Imagine, people infected with something which diverts their basic instincts, millions more parasites start growing in their flesh and they protect them as an otherwise sentient free humans with all the zeal and ferocity that someone will protect their children.
If the only thing that pointed you at him was that search of the database then it tells you almost nothing about how likely he is to be guilty on it's own.
If you find a suspect be searching through a database of a million people with a test that has a 1 in a million chance of making a false positive and no other evidence exists then the chances of that match should not be used in any way to establish guilt in court.
But then lawyers don't care about using stats correctly.
If however you find someone, they have a knife with the victims blood on it and they have a motive and you compare their DNA to the DNA found at the scene then that same test with a 1 in a million chance of a false positive is a perfectly valid piece of data to submit in court.
I was under the impression that cheap passive RFID chips were completely incapable of any kind of encryption and only more expensive ones on the order of 20 times the price could handle even rudimentary encryption never mind anything really solid like private key crypto.
You could probably fit a reasonably small RFID reader in a backback, ever paid any attention to someone brushing past you with a backpack?
Several seconds? Even the door swipes in the library take a fraction of a second to scan.
when a bad system is being rolled out and there are better alternatives there's nothing wrong with complaining.
Credit cards are a great example of that, it should be almost trivial with modern crypto to make a payment system vastly harder to exploit that the current CC system.
yet they don't because it would cost slightly more per card.
Please elaborate, I was under the impression that a signal simply powers the card and induces a response from the card.
No processing or challenge response unless it's a really expensive card.
In which case anyone walking past you could read the card without you knowing.
In reality unless you're an actual government agent this isn't an issue.
have a cell phone?
Well anyone with enough clout to ask the cell company for it's logs can track you easily.
A student at the local uni disappeared, the phone logs revealed that the last known position of his phone was a bridge in the city popular for suicides.
Mistake, the book was "The Light of Other Days"
Try reading "Times eye" by Arthur C. Clarke.
The general gist is that someone figures out the ultimate surveillance system.
I'm of the opinion that everything being recorded isn't so bad as long as it's symmetric.
If the police want to record everything I do I want the right to record right back.
I approve of police being required to have dashboard cameras.
but I want to have the right to my own recording in case theirs mysteriously goes missing.
That would make any news show really really really dull.
How about "maliciously edited" or "misleadingly edited"
similar idea, white collar crime where some email exchange is involved each and every email counts as a separate case of wire fraud so someone in the course of a few conversations can rack up hundreds of years of jail time.
what I don't get is why they don't just bite the bullet and make committing any crime while having eyebrows and not wearing a pink shirt with the word "crime" written on it prominently a mandatory 1000 year sentence.
Then everyone who loves the "but it means they can add extra charges" thing can be happy and we can do away with all the other inane bullshit.
conspiracy is the best though.
there's no need for anything illegal to actually happen other than the conspiracy itself.
So if you and I have a chat about committing a felony, lets say we hatch a plot to make ourselves an unlicensed copy of Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended.(It's over the thousand dollar limit making it a felony )
"hey, know anywhere I can pick up a copy of photoshop?"
"Sure, try the pirate bay."
Next I commit any overt act, you do nothing.
Lets say I look up the listings on the pirate bay.
Well both you and I can then be done for conspiracy.
I may have missed some of the finer points of the requirements for a conspiracy as IANAL but you get the idea.
much better to just keep the recorder hidden or hack it so the "off" button does nothing but turn off a small green light.
Being a smartarse is never smart but your assertion of
"never argue with a police officer"
is true in the same sense as the assertion
"never argue with someone 2 feet taller than you who's wearing lots of leather with a big knife and a short temper"
Lets follow that path a little.
Someone could edit a letter between themselves and someone else and release that, should keeping correspondence without the explicit permission of both parties be illegal because of that?
And if the editing is malicious and misrepresents someone then it should be covered under libel laws.
All your approach does is allow politicians and policemen know when they should actually pay attention to the rulebook rather than having to stick to it all the time.
That's because the US voting system is shit.
There are systems which allow you to rank your choices, you put your dream party first, the party you wouldn't mind second etc.
If your dream party doesn't get enough votes to get in then all the ballots go to their second choice, if they don't have enough to get in then on to the third, etc.
it's a far far better system than the American lesser of 2 evils model.
of course crappy politicians still get into power no matter what system.
His spelling an grammar are poor but the general sentiment is perfectly valid.
Having to pay to have your media rated benefits large industry over small, especially on the international market.
You can say goodbye to any free iphone games in Australia because if you're not making any money then you're not going to pay to have it rated.
You can say goodbye to almost everything that's made by a small company which isn't already getting great sales in Australia.
Meanwhile the large media companies love this since they concentrate on a few big titles rather than lots of little ones so next to their advertising budgets this wouldn't even register and from their point of view all this is doing is killing off the free competition.
Politicians do so love endorsements from celebrities and if they support what large media companies want then they have no problem getting big names to appear with them on chat shows.
You assume that "nanny state" laws are responsible.
It could equally be true that many of the problems in the US are caused by the existence of a large poor underclass that has nothing to do with a nanny state.
The problem is that of course most people define "pragmatism" as "let me do what I want but anything I don't want to do that I dislike should be banned".
I've encountered people arguing that anti-gay laws are just "pragmatism" because of some garbled belief about STD's.
People who believe that "pragmatism" includes banning anything controversial from mass media because they're too lazy care for their own kids but sure pragmatism and it "takes a village" etc.
People who think "pragmatism" covers religious discrimination since they're sure we'd have much safer cities if everyone was a good *fill in whatever they believe the one true is here* and just went to *church/mosque/etc* every week and did what they were told.