Another side of this lies somewhere between Freud and Konrad Lorentz. The reason people are unfair in the first place is because an unfair system serves the genetically mediated (and archaic) impulses of those who seek power. It's not enough to be rich if everyone else is. The vision of a world in which everyone had more than enough , and is therefore equal, is anathema to the unconscious of this kind of person and they , unconsciously, will always and automatically work to defeat anything that takes society in this direction.
Remember that Freud saw in the run up to WWII a depressing confirmation of this theories of the unconscious, even going so far as to theorize another psychic force, thanatos, or the drive to die. The work of Konrad Lorentz effectively materialized and contextualized a lot of Freud's theories within evolution and specifically the mechanism of genes, which has been carried forward by the development of sociobiology.
Both of these theories say that human behavior, human impulses are structurally locked outside of human awareness , evolved to serve ancient needs, and anyway immune from the prosecution of a more evolved "self" The best we can hope for is to uncover their expression in our world and counter them, consciously, with energy and in the face of resistance . The good life redirects it's energies to love and work and the good society expressed those countermeasures in its customs and norms and codifies them into laws
Personalities like as diverse as Rush Limbaugh , Lance Armstrong, Rupert Murdoch, Harvey Weinstein and Steve Jobs need not just to succeed, they need to succeed differentially. Pushing the other guy down through any means and keeping him there is at least as essential a technique as excelling through work.
It has to do with genetic fitness, materialized in the human partly as attracting females through being "better" , having more stuff. Power itself is an unconsciously interpreted by humans as a presumed form of genetic fitness, Implicitly facilitating the Ghengis Khan Effect. : no need to attract women when you can just take all you want through overwhelming force.
The impulse is innate, the motivation to behave in certain selfish ways and not other, egalitarian way\ , is unconscious and never sleeps or grows old. The old shriveled dick of these personalty types yearns ever for green pastures, even unto death.
To combine Freud and Lorentz together in one contempoary observation involving these types, if there were no differential to be created, why would anyone fuck them in the first place?
You have to know the true , deep nature of the thing you're proposing to take on is, even if there's till nothing you can do about it.
Yeah it's never going to happen, as in , permitted... legal. Have fun flying on your farm. Why? A body in motion tends to stay in motion. Flying cars and flying bikes and such like,when they go out of control, go out of control. Nothing to stop it from coming down pretty much anywhere, or flying forward without restrained.
Friction is what keeps cars relatively safe. Plus, physical curbs, dedicated roads, safety rails etc etc. Just regular people flying here there everywhere at a decent speed... the safety corridor needed would be impractical.
" over-inflated his position, he has over-inflated his access and he's even over-inflated what the actual technology of the programs would allow one to do. "
You know you get the same effect from thinking really hard on problems, right? Treat your won thinking like a muscle and watch it change- a lot.
ON the same topic, there machines that do electrostimulation of muscles. When they first came out, because they can cause nearly 100% of the muscle to contract at once, (typically only 30% does on most people) people thought they'd be great for wieghtlifting and bodybuilding. We'd all just zap ourselves and get unimaginable results . Turns out, not so much.
This has the same smell to it. People get *some* effect (as opposed to the *no effect* diet they've been on most of their careers...) and then start projecting wildly and beyond any evidence about what could be done....
1). Any *blueprint* was never any further away than
1) FOAF network analysis 2) a signal splitter 3) the power to force your nation's providers to cooperate 4) a data warehouse 5) analysts. 6)?????? 7) profit !
I *really* don't think many nations needed the U.S. to tell them that.
So the *blueprint* point is totally false- the NSA did not provide a much needed but missing blueprint to anyone for any purpose
2) What nefarious thing has the NSA or US government ever done with this knowledge? Name one thing. As I see it, the US with all this data collection and the apparent restraint *to do nothing* with it, makes the US a provably good steward of the internet, almost better than we could have hoped for, given men and their nature.
I totally agree a despotic regime could emerge and would leverage this database in the process. I actually actively fear a Cheney or a Gonzales or a Rumsfeld or a Pipes or a Wolfowitz getting a hold of this kind of power.
That's why it's very important - VERY IMPORTANT- for the presumed demographic of slashdot to vote. b We're what keep the REAL fascists at bay.
I also think we need a provable, physical way (encryption / partial keys held by a number of judges? dunno..) to prevent the kind of leveraging of the chain of command that would permit neocons from gaining access to this database in the dark and use it against his political enemies
(I'll link to the specific thing the neocons did that has me so concerned at the bottom of this post)
Without the chain of command, we're fucked; it is a totally necessary part of any military.. But the chain of command + read/write access to this database means the power to potentially destroy who you want, in any way you want, for any reason you want and to distort reality itself to the intelligence community in any way you want. This represents a non-trivial, even existential and decidedly non-theoretical threat to our nation.
\http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B
and for those familiar with it, go to Criticisms section.
Cheney literally re-assembled Team-B in the run up to the Iraq war. scroll to: " team b sweeps the series "
That's why we also need to go easy on Snowden and Manning. Here's my reasoning, it's pretty simple - they're young and idealistic and didn't mean to harm America - and that matters. Not that many people can know or can get their minds around the full,ugly picture of all the trade-offs that reality forces on you. Those tradeoffs are analyzed, decided upon, get institutionalized, and finally become structural, procedural.
Later, some regular guy working in the system looks at the fleshy details of what those trade-offs entail, and it appears callous and horrifying. They're just going to react out of a surfeit of humanity.
Do we really want to punish those people to the hilt and over time , through word of mouth reputation, actually prevent people of good conscience from joining up ? Read Antigone- it's no way to run a nation.
Republican hate it but there has has has to be some place they can go "out" of a system they think is breaking the law and into the light, because that's the psychology that's motivating them to do this in the first place. "They're doing this in the dark. " No one knows what's going on" Holy shit!".
IMHO the military has to publicly differentiate between acts of espionage and acts like these and gauge its public and prosecutorial reaction accordingly. What is reality telling you? This is how people are now. This goes to the core of what this generation is. Even the military has to chan
Mod parent way up... what you say about academia is 100% true and authentic and not at all a case of sour grapes or anything else...unfortunately I spent too much time ignorant of this fact:(
It's a good point. I never said what they wanted. What they wanted was a GUI front end to an existing system. I wasn't inventing new equations to take down the Bank of England. Sure you can teach someone to program, but the very long list of nitpicking facts and relationships that you'd have to master, just the sheerest headcount of them- supposing they could be enumerated in the first place- would make it tough for someone with no experience to do what I do in anything like a reasonable time frame. Nevermind doing anything well which is mostly soft skills even I can't articulate.
How much money SHOULD there be in the world? How do you know? What if more people want to make more money, have 1st world wages? What if the money is flowing to them? Dont' we need more money then? How do you know?
The economyu is not a closed system witha limited number of goods and services and jobs of fixed value. How much money ought to be floating around at any given time is not a question easily answered and ALSO injecting more money into the economy DOES NOT NECESSARILY result in devaluing that money. Yes, that's right even though there's more of it, ti's value is not declining. Why? More people injected into the system who are trading it, making it , saving it spending it.
Sure in some very very theoretical world you could have an oversupply\ of money if the Fed went nuts and started printing billion dollar bills at a billion a minute. But at the scale you're talking about, in a dynamic system, this is just not true and it is not true of our actual world.
OK I think we're talking past each other. Let me try this.
First, no one knows what consciousness is, so how can you say you recreated it? I can recreate any visual event , real or imaginary , on my TV. In effect, the pixels on my TV could show me all of human history from the beginning , from any perspective. Hannibal crossing the Alps from the elephant-eye's view? Got it.
But do we really want to say that because the TV can show that on its screen, it or has a conscious experience of it? And if we're not willing to say that despite the perfect pictures it makes of those events, then why should we think that a computer,a super-Siri say, has consciousness despite it's Turning Test A+ grades?
It's not something we can know about a machine, it's something we impugn to it out of a surfeit of imagination.
Just because I program a machine a little differently,well, so what? We still know what's going on inside it. Now it's just a different pattern of 1s and 0s. IS a difference in patterns of 1s and 0s what defines consciousness from jumped-up electronic adding machine, or Babbage';s machine ? Really?
That's one of the philosophical problems .
Another is much more practical, technical. Remember the goal is to offset yourself into something not yourself. That's what we're talking about. That means you have to recreate every aspect of yourself, every tendency, jevery preference, everything that makes you value what you value, reason the way you reason etc. Leave out the trivial stuff, it was really just an attempt to motivate the larger point.
All this stuff is an emergent property of the very specific and particular forces both structural (chemical, physiological, anatomical) and dynamic (other people's behavior, your environment) . You don't know what it is. Literlaly, we can't list it, know it, predict it.. nothing.. it's an ongoing emergent phenomena emerging from those factors I listed above. Remove those factors and you have.... something else entirely. Not you. Probably not conscious. And here is the point that I think you're wrong on- not *some variant of you at all, * Not a better variant, not a worse variant not anything.
This is supposing that you create this avatar based on somehow *downloading your mind* (that btw is the purest of pure fiction.. totally a verbal construct with no known referent although it strikes a vivid imaginative chord in people the same way "ether" struck one in 19th century physicists) . Then what? Suppose it says hello? So then what? What do we know about it that we don't know about a Turing test passing computer? Nothing.
But I give up too much territory evening entertaining the hypothesis. The two above are enough to insure it never happens., where never is the next 500 years, minimum.
IF this kind of thing lights up your imagination, then don't waste your time with ill defined pipe-dreams, better to look at transhumanism where (the best of the ) people there try to figure out ways to make us BETTER people as measured by our current value system using advanced technology.
That's something that might happen and be to humankind's benefit.
Look again. Not only is your comment nonconstrcutive (I think given the vocab and the ideational content of the post you can assume I know "they're" from "their" ) but also I didn't make the mistake you thought I made. As it happens, it's all grammatically correct, as other readers have pointed out.
But I am perfectly capable of starting to spell phonically and misspell words when I am typing.
Not the way it is. They wanted me to sign a "technology transfer agreement" which basically said anything I do is theirs, forever.
I declined.
Now when you go as a freshman, they have you sign that along with a thousand other "agreements". This is when you show uip on campus.
MOOCS are a plot by the right to destroy the university system which produces Knowledge They Don't Like, especially Science They Don't Like. I think we all know the right is basically fascist - and regards science with Soviet style disdain contempt and mistrust and we'll all be learning about Creationism and global warming denialism and Young Earth science and how Big Tobacco really got screwed by the government on that cancer rap when the universities fall.
We'll have real vs right wing science and become the laughing stock of the rest of the world.
Thank god for the rest of the world.
But all of that that doesn't mean the universities dealt any more fairly with anyone they had at a disadvantage or had power over. They were extremely manipulative, exploitative and coercive when they ruled the roost. They malignantly jacked their tuitions up year over year because they passed non-bankruptcy laws which permitted them to saddle 18 year olds with lifelong debt as a way to finance their mushrooming administrator's head count and Big 5 sports programs.
I 'd laugh at their fate if the thing that came next were effectively the end of America as a world leader.
It's all greed. It's all greed and the banks and the lawyers that implement that greed, from the non-bankruptcy laws which permitted tuition inflation, to the indentured servitude being a TAs has become, to the removal of resources from teaching into research to inflate the school's prestige at the expense of students learning to the MOOCS who just want to turn learning into a transactional affair of dubious quality and to destroy science and humanities in the process.
Everyone wants to get their while they can. This is a product of fear of being destitute when you're older. America has no serious old age security to speak of. In nations where there is a serious safety net, people are more relaxed, less greedy, less assholish, less selfish, less monstrous, more community minded. That is not America and never has been. Not until we've lost everything will we turn and look at ourselves and think.
I interviewed at a hedge fund in Greenwich CT.. As soon as I walked in the door, I wanted to leave and knew I wouldn't take the job. The advertised money was 180k. I was a perfect fit.
I stayed through the interview just to see what I could see. Assholes as far as the eye could see. Every single person there, from the prostitute cum secretary that was at the front desk, to the manager I met to the mostly Asian guys who interviewed me just dripped arrogant asshole.
The interview mostly consisted of physics questions. I got the impression that they knew nothing about the advertised programming skill set they were looking for. The interview process amounted to what personalities like that do when they know they know they are in the presence of someone who just knows more than they do on a topic, and is therefore in THEIR eyes their "superior".. they treated it like a form of ego combat and chose the field of combat to be the one they knew . Lots of physics questions..
Money makes people really ugly and people who just lust after money above all else can never be trusted, believed, or act as my employer. To see egos that inflated, you'd otherwise have to go to a martial arts exhibition or a bodybuilding contest or something. Perhaps people there were a little above average in intelligence but they literally walked and talked and postured as if they were simply from another planet and mere humans should not think they can understand what it is they do.
Reading the headlines, they still have that attitude. No small part of it is the coke and amphetamines that is an endemic part of that culture no doubt. Stimulants make people exactly that way.. I am superman... I am above everything- morality, other people's opinions, the law.....meanwhile they're killing brain cells by the tens of millions....
Some subcultures are so destructive any normal person could smell it on contact. This is one of them. You don't want that job at any price. Working with nothing but assholes coke fiends and sociopaths carries the potential to ruin your attitude towards not just work, but humanity itself.
It's what Sonya Sotomayor said in 60 Minutes this week,.. Until she was working as a prosecutor she didn't really grasp what evil was , that some people were just evil. She had to quit after some years lest she begin to lose a part of her humanity, her faith in the future and in other people.
This is a occupational hazard for cops also.
Life is short and you need to spend it doing constructive things that help humanity in ways whether large or small, personal or professional., creating that thing that only you will create or just being a good parent. THESE are the activities that keep civilization going and going forward, not the Foreign Exchange.
You have to fight in this world against the onslaught of assholes who hand you shitty experiences just to destroy your soul, because they're soulless ghouls and a part of being a soulless ghoul is to contemptuously and with pleasure destroy the things that are life affirming.
You have to guard your outlook and optimism , your vision of a better world and the belief that it can be realized from all attacks. That and time are your most precious assets.
A world in which good works from good-hearted people is freely flowing into it is the best defense, and by far the best offense against Wall Street / Hedge Fund scum. Don't let them even so much as brush up against your life, much less give them the position or leverage to make you think or feel anything on their account.
You get this form these guys. Ellison is like this also. IMHO it's an extension of their narcissism that they think this is a meaningful endeavor which should take priority over other, say, humanitarian concerns.
We're a million miles away from understanding how the brain works for any given function the brain performs. Some researchers think that the brain may be (about, practically )it's own simplest model, that is, to create an artificial brain, virtually every detail of the real brain would have to be not just modeled, but re-created right down to the exact nature of it's physical substrate.
For instance, consider (the conscious experience of ) being able to see as soon as normal level lights are turned on, but having to adjust your eyes to the dark. This comes down to a great fact involving the specific properties of the specific chemicals used by the rods in your eyes (rhodopsin ) and nothing else.
Yet, that shared experience is part of what it's *like* to be human. In some small part to understand the human experience and have it make sense to you and to be motivated under some circumstances the same way humans are, you have to be such a creature possessed of such a limitation.
Now if this seems trivial and leave-outable in any "brain transfer" process, know that this is an example used mostly to motivate this more encompassing fact - *every other human phenomena* is also arbitrarily underwritten by some specific set of chemicals and therefore experienced by us in some specific way.
So for instance, it's like something specific to fall in love and absent any of the underlying contingencies which define that phenomena, you're not feeling it, behaving as though you feel it, , making the same decisions as one who feels it, placing the same relative values on outcomes and tradeoffs and conflicts and risk and *insert everything Shakespeare ever wrote here* as one who feels it in the human way because they have a human brains and body in this particular world..
There's a reason Romeo loved Juliet, and in just way he did and would not make due with, say, a picture or a poem instead. In fact, every detail of experience of love, every proclivity to act a certain way and not some other is mediated by the arbitrary - from the "love system's" POV - and particular properties of the material systems which subtend it.
This is not a reference to just the chemical basis of love but also of the evolutionary reason for love, which goes to the particular environmental contingencies which pressured life to evolve the mechanisms it did and not some others and which play out in sometimes surprising ways when people fall in love.
What we are is our natural "instincts" and reactions to events and each other, everything involving our goals and values and morality, unfortunate aberrant behaviors and even absence thereof (virtually no one kidnaps people and forces them to eat food until they die.. they kidnap people and rape them).
We are not these things because they are expressions of our unfettered free will and self interest but rather because of our specific chemical, morphological, and evolutionary histories which have intersected and are intersecting in a meaningful and determining way with the unique, "one time, one way" story we call history . And history itself is a story which is just the way it is because of accidents which could have turned out differently but nevertheless now exert, through the resulting culture, a very strong influence on what makes you human.
The fantasy that you can abstract all this away , or take its end product, "you" and then have done with it and carry on going forward , go on being human (or even *transhuman* which is like human, only better !!) is adolescent nonsense of the highest caliber.
Any "mind" which is insensible to, unguided by, unconstrained by these things is not a human mind at all. It's not that it will be superior to humans, craftier, say or wiser.. more godlike, it's that
This is for legal purposes only . The "author" word is a word which is used in a particular way in legal contracts and means ONLY that within that legal context. He is using the word in the common sense meaning- "who thought of and wrote this first?" He is the author in that substantive and relevant sense and can go on saying he is the author.
Even if they SUED him for claiming to be "the author" , alleging one supposes "confusion" about "ownership" (have fun getting a judge to agree BTW) he could STILL say he "originally conceived of and then wrote it independently, before which act , it did not exist in any way" or similar weasel words.
You're still the author right, because who authored it is a matter of fact and not a legal technicality. Say you're the author. Invite the interviewer to discuss details about it with you. Don't let someone steal your best work. I had someone do the same thing, except I in my case i'ts immaterial to my life really could give a shit and the guy in question was basically fucking nuts anyways.,
I think what's happening is a kind of sum of all fears where the corruption of the prosecutor's office, political players and our knowledge of just plain old human nature is intersecting to produce a kind of sum of all fears in the monds of ordinary Americans.
What if it's true that in a series of well suitably positioned individuals, some will, irrespective of previous screening, be unable to resist the ability to abuse this information for political or personal gain?
What if the same is true at the level of an administration?
What if it's true that people simply cannot live with the fact of this level of surveillance? I recall an old joke that went something like
"How do you know it's going to be a bad day? When you wake up and see the 60 Minutes truck in your driveway.
the deep implication of this joke is that , as Edward Snowden alludes to, everyone or at least most people in society are consciously or unconsciously afraid that some hand picked series of facts culled from the totality of their lives, suitably presented , will make them look guilty of something they never did.
The belief is, guilt can be produced on demand. At any arbitrary future time, a series of revenge seeking "witnesses" can be produced to attest to whatever narrative the state wants to generate and the state can generate any narrative it wants through a process of selective culling and distortion of things you did and said and knowing who your enemies are.
The only thing preventing this from being realized is the incapacity of the state to preserve and access the ultra fine details of your life .
But now they have that.
Could a Cheney resist this kind of power ? Did they when they went after Valerie Plame and Edward Wilson ?
What if Cheney had this power earlier as he was aspiring to political power ? What kind of trail of destruction of other people's lives would he have left? Who would be in prison for life right now over something that never happened?
We all know that people seeking revenge or power will stop at nothing. Witness the recent spate (!) of ricin letter framings , one by the framee's wife.
A friend I have who is a lawyer claims that in at least 60% -70% of divorces where there are children, one spouse will try to accuse the other of molesting them . If there's a bomb you can drop on your enemy, you will.
A lot of people cooling their heels in GITMO were put their through just this kind of petty revenge seeking on the part of local "informants".
. People have deep and twisted motivations and especially it seems, with respect to revenge against real or perceived enemies, just ordinary people can justify anything; no one can be trusted.
Some say this is what the Iraq War was really about- Bush tasking revenge in some primal macho way against Hussein for the plot against Bush Sr.
Given human nature, the nature of politics and the "justice" system, the deep question is- can anyone be trusted with this power and also will other people accept the premise that there exists a system in which this power just can't be abused?
If all that' s needed to destroy someone's life is the will and a near demented, perspectiveless prosecutor like Carmen Ortiz
Just think how this could play out. "Kill em early" would be the slogan of the enfranchised against people who at age 15 or 18 or 25 fit the profile of "the enemy" and get targeted for selective "enforcement".
I think that the answer to the question "will society accept this" (and really, can anyone be trusted with it) is- not without some kind of transparency the nature of which we have not yet invented. The problem is transparency is the opposite of stealth and need-to-know.
You talk like laws never change. Get over your "written on a stone tablet for all time" mentality.
Technology changes and increases the capabilities of individuals. In response, and because of public outrage, the law then changes to forbid (or permit) more things involving that new technology. In the process high falutin concepts like "privacy" undergo an more or less rapid evolutionary change in their shared and accepted meaning.
If you really don't know that, if you really believe that there is no right to some kind of privacy sensibly defined even in the public sphere the same way you believe there is no anti-gravity machine (and there isn't because gravity is a side effect of the space curvature) then you're either young and repeating empty jingoisms you're picked up online and never thought through OR or just incredibly stupid and insensible to the facts of history, even as they unfold before your face in your own lifetime.
I can see it coming. This is the kind of shit people were afraid of with Oracle and now.... here it is. Jesus. I seriously didn't think they would do this.
What other language has the same quality GUI toolkit graphical packages, an open source text indexer like Lucene, an immense set of 3rd party APIs for just everything , first class data structure s built in , runs on both Linux and Windows comes with a scene graph / browser widget and has great IDE support?
I just read this back and it sounds like I am being sarcastic. I am not. This is a serious question because we absolutely need to have timezone support- no question and there's no way we're paying Oracle type prices to have it, so I guess my decades old investment in Java is about to go bankrupt.
Great. Fucking ASSHOLES.
Oracle reminds me of Matt Taibbi's great characterization of Goldman Sachs-
Goldman Sachs is a great vampire squid , roaming the earth, poking its blood funnel into anything that smells like money"
what the FUCK ALL does anything you listed have to do with ANYTHING other than deregulation of avaricious industries?
Christ. Is the NSA now in cohoots with scum who thought credit default swaps should be a defacto unregulated form of insurance?
What I get from this is the things you are pissed off about- and it's not like I am happy about some things also- all those things are a form of conspiracy.
The only "conspiracy" here is the massive deregulation of industry and it was industry and the pure free market coke snorters like Greenspan and now the Ayn Rand worshiping, Social Security targeting fucking power seeking psychpaths like Paul Ryan who are conspiring.
Jesus... WACO? REALLY? Some fucking psychopath who is telling people he is Jesus Christ and keeping kids in buses in a hole dug in the basement is some kind of victim of what exactly? Big Governemnt?
God what a tool some people are. You'll believe ANYTHING right wing talk radio tells you to or are you past that and into WND territory now.. perhaps Alex Jone's InfoWars is where you're getting your "facts" from.
How can anyone be so totally gullible and susceptible to every asshat psycho who mounts a virtual soapbox and starts spewing hallucinations?
Slashdot Mirror
Typing super faast, sorry about the sentences which are constructed half in one tense, half in the other. Hope you get at what I am saying.
Another side of this lies somewhere between Freud and Konrad Lorentz. The reason people are unfair in the first place is because an unfair system serves the genetically mediated (and archaic) impulses of those who seek power. It's not enough to be rich if everyone else is. The vision of a world in which everyone had more than enough , and is therefore equal, is anathema to the unconscious of this kind of person and they , unconsciously, will always and automatically work to defeat anything that takes society in this direction.
Remember that Freud saw in the run up to WWII a depressing confirmation of this theories of the unconscious, even going so far as to theorize another psychic force, thanatos, or the drive to die. The work of Konrad Lorentz effectively materialized and contextualized a lot of Freud's theories within evolution and specifically the mechanism of genes, which has been carried forward by the development of sociobiology.
Both of these theories say that human behavior, human impulses are structurally locked outside of human awareness , evolved to serve ancient needs, and anyway immune from the prosecution of a more evolved "self" The best we can hope for is to uncover their expression in our world and counter them, consciously, with energy and in the face of resistance . The good life redirects it's energies to love and work and the good society expressed those countermeasures in its customs and norms and codifies them into laws
Personalities like as diverse as Rush Limbaugh , Lance Armstrong, Rupert Murdoch, Harvey Weinstein and Steve Jobs need not just to succeed, they need to succeed differentially. Pushing the other guy down through any means and keeping him there is at least as essential a technique as excelling through work.
It has to do with genetic fitness, materialized in the human partly as attracting females through being "better" , having more stuff. Power itself is an unconsciously interpreted by humans as a presumed form of genetic fitness, Implicitly facilitating the Ghengis Khan Effect. : no need to attract women when you can just take all you want through overwhelming force.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0214_030214_genghis.html
The impulse is innate, the motivation to behave in certain selfish ways and not other, egalitarian way\ , is unconscious and never sleeps or grows old. The old shriveled dick of these personalty types yearns ever for green pastures, even unto death.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/tony-blair-denies-affair-rupert-1953684
To combine Freud and Lorentz together in one contempoary observation involving these types, if there were no differential to be created, why would anyone fuck them in the first place?
You have to know the true , deep nature of the thing you're proposing to take on is, even if there's till nothing you can do about it.
Great post,. Where are my mod points for a story when I need them. Oh that's right,. I squandered them with a toss-off snarky comment.
Yeah it's never going to happen, as in , permitted... legal. Have fun flying on your farm. Why? A body in motion tends to stay in motion. Flying cars and flying bikes and such like ,when they go out of control, go out of control. Nothing to stop it from coming down pretty much anywhere, or flying forward without restrained.
Friction is what keeps cars relatively safe. Plus, physical curbs, dedicated roads, safety rails etc etc. Just regular people flying here there everywhere at a decent speed... the safety corridor needed would be impractical.
Nev-ah.
Gon-na.
Hap-pen.
" over-inflated his position, he has over-inflated his access and he's even over-inflated what the actual technology of the programs would allow one to do. "
As opposed to the acceptable "inflated" ?
Sheesh.
You know you get the same effect from thinking really hard on problems, right? Treat your won thinking like a muscle and watch it change- a lot.
ON the same topic, there machines that do electrostimulation of muscles. When they first came out, because they can cause nearly 100% of the muscle to contract at once, (typically only 30% does on most people) people thought they'd be great for wieghtlifting and bodybuilding. We'd all just zap ourselves and get unimaginable results . Turns out, not so much.
This has the same smell to it. People get *some* effect (as opposed to the *no effect* diet they've been on most of their careers...) and then start projecting wildly and beyond any evidence about what could be done....
I'll stick to this thinking hard thing I do.
1). Any *blueprint* was never any further away than
1) FOAF network analysis
2) a signal splitter
3) the power to force your nation's providers to cooperate
4) a data warehouse
5) analysts.
6)??????
7) profit !
I *really* don't think many nations needed the U.S. to tell them that.
So the *blueprint* point is totally false- the NSA did not provide a much needed but missing blueprint to anyone for any purpose
2) What nefarious thing has the NSA or US government ever done with this knowledge? Name one thing. As I see it, the US with all this data collection and the apparent restraint *to do nothing* with it, makes the US a provably good steward of the internet, almost better than we could have hoped for, given men and their nature.
I totally agree a despotic regime could emerge and would leverage this database in the process. I actually actively fear a Cheney or a Gonzales or a Rumsfeld or a Pipes or a Wolfowitz getting a hold of this kind of power.
That's why it's very important - VERY IMPORTANT- for the presumed demographic of slashdot to vote. b We're what keep the REAL fascists at bay.
I also think we need a provable, physical way (encryption / partial keys held by a number of judges? dunno..) to prevent the kind of leveraging of the chain of command that would permit neocons from gaining access to this database in the dark and use it against his political enemies
(I'll link to the specific thing the neocons did that has me so concerned at the bottom of this post)
Without the chain of command, we're fucked; it is a totally necessary part of any military.. But the chain of command + read/write access to this database means the power to potentially destroy who you want, in any way you want, for any reason you want and to distort reality itself to the intelligence community in any way you want. This represents a non-trivial, even existential and decidedly non-theoretical threat to our nation.
\http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B
and for those familiar with it, go to Criticisms section .
Cheney literally re-assembled Team-B in the run up to the Iraq war. scroll to: " team b sweeps the series "
http://www.pitt.edu/~gordonm/JPubs/TeamBqjs.pdf
That's why we also need to go easy on Snowden and Manning. Here's my reasoning, it's pretty simple - they're young and idealistic and didn't mean to harm America - and that matters.
Not that many people can know or can get their minds around the full,ugly picture of all the trade-offs that reality forces on you. Those tradeoffs are analyzed, decided upon, get institutionalized, and finally become structural, procedural.
Later, some regular guy working in the system looks at the fleshy details of what those trade-offs entail, and it appears callous and horrifying. They're just going to react out of a surfeit of humanity.
Do we really want to punish those people to the hilt and over time , through word of mouth reputation, actually prevent people of good conscience from joining up ? Read Antigone- it's no way to run a nation.
Obama's Executive Order is a good start.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/10/15/11473/obama-order-protects-intelligence-community-whistleblowers
Republican hate it but there has has has to be some place they can go "out" of a system they think is breaking the law and into the light, because that's the psychology that's motivating them to do this in the first place. "They're doing this in the dark. " No one knows what's going on" Holy shit!".
IMHO the military has to publicly differentiate between acts of espionage and acts like these and gauge its public and prosecutorial reaction accordingly. What is reality telling you? This is how people are now. This goes to the core of what this generation is. Even the military has to chan
Mod parent way up... what you say about academia is 100% true and authentic and not at all a case of sour grapes or anything else...unfortunately I spent too much time ignorant of this fact :(
It's a good point. I never said what they wanted. What they wanted was a GUI front end to an existing system. I wasn't inventing new equations to take down the Bank of England. Sure you can teach someone to program, but the very long list of nitpicking facts and relationships that you'd have to master, just the sheerest headcount of them- supposing they could be enumerated in the first place- would make it tough for someone with no experience to do what I do in anything like a reasonable time frame. Nevermind doing anything well which is mostly soft skills even I can't articulate.
Not that I'm a slouch at math.
How much money SHOULD there be in the world? How do you know? What if more people want to make more money, have 1st world wages? What if the money is flowing to them? Dont' we need more money then? How do you know?
The economyu is not a closed system witha limited number of goods and services and jobs of fixed value. How much money ought to be floating around at any given time is not a question easily answered and ALSO injecting more money into the economy DOES NOT NECESSARILY result in devaluing that money. Yes, that's right even though there's more of it, ti's value is not declining. Why? More people injected into the system who are trading it, making it , saving it spending it.
Sure in some very very theoretical world you could have an oversupply\ of money if the Fed went nuts and started printing billion dollar bills at a billion a minute. But at the scale you're talking about, in a dynamic system, this is just not true and it is not true of our actual world.
OK I think we're talking past each other. Let me try this.
First, no one knows what consciousness is, so how can you say you recreated it? I can recreate any visual event , real or imaginary , on my TV. In effect, the pixels on my TV could show me all of human history from the beginning , from any perspective. Hannibal crossing the Alps from the elephant-eye's view? Got it.
But do we really want to say that because the TV can show that on its screen, it or has a conscious experience of it? And if we're not willing to say that despite the perfect pictures it makes of those events, then why should we think that a computer ,a super-Siri say, has consciousness despite it's Turning Test A+ grades?
It's not something we can know about a machine, it's something we impugn to it out of a surfeit of imagination.
Just because I program a machine a little differently,well, so what? We still know what's going on inside it. Now it's just a different pattern of 1s and 0s. IS a difference in patterns of 1s and 0s what defines consciousness from jumped-up electronic adding machine, or Babbage';s machine ? Really?
That's one of the philosophical problems .
Another is much more practical, technical. Remember the goal is to offset yourself into something not yourself. That's what we're talking about. That means you have to recreate every aspect of yourself, every tendency, jevery preference, everything that makes you value what you value, reason the way you reason etc. Leave out the trivial stuff, it was really just an attempt to motivate the larger point.
All this stuff is an emergent property of the very specific and particular forces both structural (chemical, physiological, anatomical) and dynamic (other people's behavior, your environment) . You don't know what it is. Literlaly, we can't list it, know it, predict it.. nothing.. it's an ongoing emergent phenomena emerging from those factors I listed above. Remove those factors and you have.... something else entirely. Not you. Probably not conscious. And here is the point that I think you're wrong on- not *some variant of you at all, * Not a better variant, not a worse variant not anything.
This is supposing that you create this avatar based on somehow *downloading your mind* (that btw is the purest of pure fiction.. totally a verbal construct with no known referent although it strikes a vivid imaginative chord in people the same way "ether" struck one in 19th century physicists) . Then what? Suppose it says hello? So then what? What do we know about it that we don't know about a Turing test passing computer? Nothing.
But I give up too much territory evening entertaining the hypothesis. The two above are enough to insure it never happens., where never is the next 500 years, minimum.
IF this kind of thing lights up your imagination, then don't waste your time with ill defined pipe-dreams, better to look at transhumanism where (the best of the ) people there try to figure out ways to make us BETTER people as measured by our current value system using advanced technology.
That's something that might happen and be to humankind's benefit.
not in the sense that this guy means. Disease is disease. Getting old and dying of opportunistic diseases like pneumonia is just.... dying.
Hey I think I recognize you from the interview!
Look again. Not only is your comment nonconstrcutive (I think given the vocab and the ideational content of the post you can assume I know "they're" from "their" ) but also I didn't make the mistake you thought I made. As it happens, it's all grammatically correct, as other readers have pointed out.
But I am perfectly capable of starting to spell phonically and misspell words when I am typing.
Just like everyone else.
Just.. didn't.
Not the way it is. They wanted me to sign a "technology transfer agreement" which basically said anything I do is theirs, forever. I declined. Now when you go as a freshman, they have you sign that along with a thousand other "agreements". This is when you show uip on campus. MOOCS are a plot by the right to destroy the university system which produces Knowledge They Don't Like, especially Science They Don't Like. I think we all know the right is basically fascist - and regards science with Soviet style disdain contempt and mistrust and we'll all be learning about Creationism and global warming denialism and Young Earth science and how Big Tobacco really got screwed by the government on that cancer rap when the universities fall. We'll have real vs right wing science and become the laughing stock of the rest of the world. Thank god for the rest of the world. But all of that that doesn't mean the universities dealt any more fairly with anyone they had at a disadvantage or had power over. They were extremely manipulative, exploitative and coercive when they ruled the roost. They malignantly jacked their tuitions up year over year because they passed non-bankruptcy laws which permitted them to saddle 18 year olds with lifelong debt as a way to finance their mushrooming administrator's head count and Big 5 sports programs. I 'd laugh at their fate if the thing that came next were effectively the end of America as a world leader. It's all greed. It's all greed and the banks and the lawyers that implement that greed, from the non-bankruptcy laws which permitted tuition inflation, to the indentured servitude being a TAs has become, to the removal of resources from teaching into research to inflate the school's prestige at the expense of students learning to the MOOCS who just want to turn learning into a transactional affair of dubious quality and to destroy science and humanities in the process. Everyone wants to get their while they can. This is a product of fear of being destitute when you're older. America has no serious old age security to speak of. In nations where there is a serious safety net, people are more relaxed, less greedy, less assholish, less selfish, less monstrous, more community minded. That is not America and never has been. Not until we've lost everything will we turn and look at ourselves and think.
I interviewed at a hedge fund in Greenwich CT.. As soon as I walked in the door, I wanted to leave and knew I wouldn't take the job. The advertised money was 180k. I was a perfect fit.
I stayed through the interview just to see what I could see. Assholes as far as the eye could see. Every single person there, from the prostitute cum secretary that was at the front desk, to the manager I met to the mostly Asian guys who interviewed me just dripped arrogant asshole.
The interview mostly consisted of physics questions. I got the impression that they knew nothing about the advertised programming skill set they were looking for. The interview process amounted to what personalities like that do when they know they know they are in the presence of someone who just knows more than they do on a topic, and is therefore in THEIR eyes their "superior" .. they treated it like a form of ego combat and chose the field of combat to be the one they knew . Lots of physics questions..
Money makes people really ugly and people who just lust after money above all else can never be trusted, believed, or act as my employer. To see egos that inflated, you'd otherwise have to go to a martial arts exhibition or a bodybuilding contest or something. Perhaps people there were a little above average in intelligence but they literally walked and talked and postured as if they were simply from another planet and mere humans should not think they can understand what it is they do.
Reading the headlines, they still have that attitude. No small part of it is the coke and amphetamines that is an endemic part of that culture no doubt. Stimulants make people exactly that way.. I am superman... I am above everything- morality, other people's opinions, the law.....meanwhile they're killing brain cells by the tens of millions. ...
Some subcultures are so destructive any normal person could smell it on contact. This is one of them. You don't want that job at any price. Working with nothing but assholes coke fiends and sociopaths carries the potential to ruin your attitude towards not just work, but humanity itself.
It's what Sonya Sotomayor said in 60 Minutes this week,.. Until she was working as a prosecutor she didn't really grasp what evil was , that some people were just evil. She had to quit after some years lest she begin to lose a part of her humanity, her faith in the future and in other people.
This is a occupational hazard for cops also.
Life is short and you need to spend it doing constructive things that help humanity in ways whether large or small, personal or professional., creating that thing that only you will create or just being a good parent. THESE are the activities that keep civilization going and going forward, not the Foreign Exchange.
You have to fight in this world against the onslaught of assholes who hand you shitty experiences just to destroy your soul, because they're soulless ghouls and a part of being a soulless ghoul is to contemptuously and with pleasure destroy the things that are life affirming.
You have to guard your outlook and optimism , your vision of a better world and the belief that it can be realized from all attacks. That and time are your most precious assets.
A world in which good works from good-hearted people is freely flowing into it is the best defense, and by far the best offense against Wall Street / Hedge Fund scum. Don't let them even so much as brush up against your life, much less give them the position or leverage to make you think or feel anything on their account.
You get this form these guys. Ellison is like this also. IMHO it's an extension of their narcissism that they think this is a meaningful endeavor which should take priority over other, say, humanitarian concerns.
We're a million miles away from understanding how the brain works for any given function the brain performs. Some researchers think that the brain may be (about, practically )it's own simplest model, that is, to create an artificial brain, virtually every detail of the real brain would have to be not just modeled, but re-created right down to the exact nature of it's physical substrate.
For instance, consider (the conscious experience of ) being able to see as soon as normal level lights are turned on, but having to adjust your eyes to the dark. This comes down to a great fact involving the specific properties of the specific chemicals used by the rods in your eyes (rhodopsin ) and nothing else.
Yet, that shared experience is part of what it's *like* to be human. In some small part to understand the human experience and have it make sense to you and to be motivated under some circumstances the same way humans are, you have to be such a creature possessed of such a limitation.
Now if this seems trivial and leave-outable in any "brain transfer" process, know that this is an example used mostly to motivate this more encompassing fact - *every other human phenomena* is also arbitrarily underwritten by some specific set of chemicals and therefore experienced by us in some specific way.
So for instance, it's like something specific to fall in love and absent any of the underlying contingencies which define that phenomena, you're not feeling it, behaving as though you feel it, , making the same decisions as one who feels it, placing the same relative values on outcomes and tradeoffs and conflicts and risk and *insert everything Shakespeare ever wrote here* as one who feels it in the human way because they have a human brains and body in this particular world. .
There's a reason Romeo loved Juliet, and in just way he did and would not make due with, say, a picture or a poem instead. In fact, every detail of experience of love, every proclivity to act a certain way and not some other is mediated by the arbitrary - from the "love system's" POV - and particular properties of the material systems which subtend it.
This is not a reference to just the chemical basis of love but also of the evolutionary reason for love, which goes to the particular environmental contingencies which pressured life to evolve the mechanisms it did and not some others and which play out in sometimes surprising ways when people fall in love.
What we are is our natural "instincts" and reactions to events and each other, everything involving our goals and values and morality, unfortunate aberrant behaviors and even absence thereof (virtually no one kidnaps people and forces them to eat food until they die.. they kidnap people and rape them) .
We are not these things because they are expressions of our unfettered free will and self interest but rather because of our specific chemical, morphological, and evolutionary histories which have intersected and are intersecting in a meaningful and determining way with the unique, "one time, one way" story we call history . And history itself is a story which is just the way it is because of accidents which could have turned out differently but nevertheless now exert, through the resulting culture, a very strong influence on what makes you human.
The fantasy that you can abstract all this away , or take its end product, "you" and then have done with it and carry on going forward , go on being human (or even *transhuman* which is like human, only better !!) is adolescent nonsense of the highest caliber.
Any "mind" which is insensible to, unguided by, unconstrained by these things is not a human mind at all. It's not that it will be superior to humans, craftier, say or wiser .. more godlike, it's that
This is for legal purposes only . The "author" word is a word which is used in a particular way in legal contracts and means ONLY that within that legal context. He is using the word in the common sense meaning- "who thought of and wrote this first?" He is the author in that substantive and relevant sense and can go on saying he is the author.
Even if they SUED him for claiming to be "the author" , alleging one supposes "confusion" about "ownership" (have fun getting a judge to agree BTW) he could STILL say he "originally conceived of and then wrote it independently, before which act , it did not exist in any way" or similar weasel words.
You're still the author right, because who authored it is a matter of fact and not a legal technicality. Say you're the author. Invite the interviewer to discuss details about it with you. Don't let someone steal your best work. I had someone do the same thing, except I in my case i'ts immaterial to my life really could give a shit and the guy in question was basically fucking nuts anyways.,
What if it's true that in a series of well suitably positioned individuals, some will, irrespective of previous screening, be unable to resist the ability to abuse this information for political or personal gain?
What if the same is true at the level of an administration?
What if it's true that people simply cannot live with the fact of this level of surveillance? I recall an old joke that went something like
"How do you know it's going to be a bad day? When you wake up and see the 60 Minutes truck in your driveway.
the deep implication of this joke is that , as Edward Snowden alludes to, everyone or at least most people in society are consciously or unconsciously afraid that some hand picked series of facts culled from the totality of their lives, suitably presented , will make them look guilty of something they never did.
The belief is, guilt can be produced on demand. At any arbitrary future time, a series of revenge seeking "witnesses" can be produced to attest to whatever narrative the state wants to generate and the state can generate any narrative it wants through a process of selective culling and distortion of things you did and said and knowing who your enemies are.
The only thing preventing this from being realized is the incapacity of the state to preserve and access the ultra fine details of your life .
But now they have that.
Could a Cheney resist this kind of power ? Did they when they went after Valerie Plame and Edward Wilson ?
What if Cheney had this power earlier as he was aspiring to political power ? What kind of trail of destruction of other people's lives would he have left? Who would be in prison for life right now over something that never happened?
We all know that people seeking revenge or power will stop at nothing. Witness the recent spate (!) of ricin letter framings , one by the framee's wife.
A friend I have who is a lawyer claims that in at least 60% -70% of divorces where there are children, one spouse will try to accuse the other of molesting them . If there's a bomb you can drop on your enemy, you will.
A lot of people cooling their heels in GITMO were put their through just this kind of petty revenge seeking on the part of local "informants".
. People have deep and twisted motivations and especially it seems, with respect to revenge against real or perceived enemies, just ordinary people can justify anything; no one can be trusted.
Some say this is what the Iraq War was really about- Bush tasking revenge in some primal macho way against Hussein for the plot against Bush Sr.
Given human nature, the nature of politics and the "justice" system, the deep question is- can anyone be trusted with this power and also will other people accept the premise that there exists a system in which this power just can't be abused? If all that' s needed to destroy someone's life is the will and a near demented, perspectiveless prosecutor like Carmen Ortiz
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/01/guide-finger-pointing-after-aaron-swartzs-suicide/61015/
and anything goes for anyone at any time. \
Just think how this could play out. "Kill em early" would be the slogan of the enfranchised against people who at age 15 or 18 or 25 fit the profile of "the enemy" and get targeted for selective "enforcement".
I think that the answer to the question "will society accept this" (and really, can anyone be trusted with it) is- not without some kind of transparency the nature of which we have not yet invented. The problem is transparency is the opposite of stealth and need-to-know.
Meh. java can do Runtime.exec....
http://www.coderanch.com/t/419192/java/java/Runtime-getRuntime-exec-String-command
That Linus is just a run of the mill, kick-down, kiss-up asshole of the sort graphically described in the book The No Asshole Rule?
You talk like laws never change. Get over your "written on a stone tablet for all time" mentality.
Technology changes and increases the capabilities of individuals. In response, and because of public outrage, the law then changes to forbid (or permit) more things involving that new technology. In the process high falutin concepts like "privacy" undergo an more or less rapid evolutionary change in their shared and accepted meaning.
If you really don't know that, if you really believe that there is no right to some kind of privacy sensibly defined even in the public sphere the same way you believe there is no anti-gravity machine (and there isn't because gravity is a side effect of the space curvature) then you're either young and repeating empty jingoisms you're picked up online and never thought through OR or just incredibly stupid and insensible to the facts of history, even as they unfold before your face in your own lifetime.
I can see it coming. This is the kind of shit people were afraid of with Oracle and now.... here it is. Jesus. I seriously didn't think they would do this.
What other language has the same quality GUI toolkit graphical packages, an open source text indexer like Lucene, an immense set of 3rd party APIs for just everything , first class data structure s built in , runs on both Linux and Windows comes with a scene graph / browser widget and has great IDE support?
I just read this back and it sounds like I am being sarcastic. I am not. This is a serious question because we absolutely need to have timezone support- no question and there's no way we're paying Oracle type prices to have it, so I guess my decades old investment in Java is about to go bankrupt.
Great. Fucking ASSHOLES.
Oracle reminds me of Matt Taibbi's great characterization of Goldman Sachs-
Goldman Sachs is a great vampire squid , roaming the earth, poking its blood funnel into anything that smells like money"
what the FUCK ALL does anything you listed have to do with ANYTHING other than deregulation of avaricious industries?
Christ. Is the NSA now in cohoots with scum who thought credit default swaps should be a defacto unregulated form of insurance?
What I get from this is the things you are pissed off about- and it's not like I am happy about some things also- all those things are a form of conspiracy.
The only "conspiracy" here is the massive deregulation of industry and it was industry and the pure free market coke snorters like Greenspan and now the Ayn Rand worshiping, Social Security targeting fucking power seeking psychpaths like Paul Ryan who are conspiring.
Jesus... WACO? REALLY? Some fucking psychopath who is telling people he is Jesus Christ and keeping kids in buses in a hole dug in the basement is some kind of victim of what exactly? Big Governemnt?
God what a tool some people are. You'll believe ANYTHING right wing talk radio tells you to or are you past that and into WND territory now.. perhaps Alex Jone's InfoWars is where you're getting your "facts" from.
How can anyone be so totally gullible and susceptible to every asshat psycho who mounts a virtual soapbox and starts spewing hallucinations?
Gawd.
It's a good idea for drivers (driven lately) but what about passengers looking on a map or confirming appointment times?