Good point on latency, I forgot about that. What's worse is that streaming media can readily compensate for latency, as long as it's reasonably consistent. On the other hand, I work from home a fair amount, sometimes with vnc, sometimes with remote X. I'm a heck of a lot more sensitive to latency.
But even if you regulate Netflix like a content provider, it still leaves Comcast jealous, because none of the effects of that regulation wind up in Comcast's pockets. The reality is that Comcast doesn't want to be an ISP, they want to be a content provider, because that's where they're from. Being an ISP was just an "opportunity" they were well poised to take advantage of, with their infrastructure. Only problem is that in the real world, instead of Comcast's dream work, the "opportunity adder" is bigger than their core business. They're working really hard to impose their dream on reality, and since they own the pipes, they're getting away with it.
Once upon a time there was talk of Internet2 - I believe it hooks some universities, national labs, and businesses together. Part of me wonders if at some point corporate US really will manage to turn the internet into a series of walled gardens, and we'll be back to the days of modems, bang-paths, and line-of-sight hacks.
Go ahead and choose your walled garden, I won't stop you.
But from where I sit, it looks like everything that connects to the home is going to walled gardens, and open as an option is fading away.
Serious proposal: Allow a "fast lane" by any/all ISPs. They've got such a hard-on for a fast lane that they're going to keep buying legislators until they get one. Then place a limit on it. The fast lane can only be X times faster than the "neutral net lane", and NO traffic shaping or limits are allowed on that lane, other than being 1/X the speed of the fast lane. Plus X needs to be a legally asserted and testable value.
Issues like this are why Asimov sold a lot of books, and why the Three Laws come up whenever robots are discussed. He came up with a reasonable, minimal code of conduct, and then explored what could possibly go wrong.
I don't remember him writing about your type of situation, which is rather odd when you think about it, because that scenario is rather obvious. But his stories often lived in the cracks where it was really hard to apply the Three Laws. Two examples that come to mind, off the top of my head are: 1 - The Powell and Donovan story at hyper-base, where the act of going through hyperspace "temporarily" sort-of killed the passengers, causing the robot directing the ship all sorts of distress and neuroses. 2 - The robots who were taught the idea of preferentially applying the First Law in favor of the "best humans", and going on to logically decide that they were indeed the "best humans", and therefore to be favored above those organic beings that created them.
Since it's all conjecture, really fiction, let's drop back to Asimov for a moment.
1 - A robot may not harm a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.
What is a "human being"? Is it a torso with 2 arms, 2 legs, and a head? How do you differentiate that from a manniquin, a crash-test dummy, or a "terrorist decoy"? What about an amputee missing one or more of those limbs? So maybe we're down to the torso and head?? What about one of those neck-injury patients with a halo supporting their skull? Does that still pass visual muster as a "head"? What about a dead body then, that has a head, 2 arms, and 2 legs? Or if you've included temperature sensing, the dead body of a sick person who had a fever and is, some time later, still passing through the normal human temperature range.
Silly, yes. Absurd, yes. But before you can consider any code of conduct with respect to a human being, you have to first identify that human being AS a human being.
Pretend we get past that, then we can start talking about "harm", and trying to algorithmically define that.
These are all things we take for granted, having been born as human beings, raised by human beings, and spent years doing so. In most parts of the world it takes something like 18 years of experience to quit being a "child", an apprentice human being, and be considered autonomous in your own right. In that time, we have all both harmed and been harmed by other human beings, though thankfully generally on a lesser scale.
Each of us represents a lot of training and experience, which we frequently neglect, often calling it "common sense", sometimes making the observation that common sense is in fact uncommon. At some point we set about contemplating matters of (at some level) philosophy, such as this one.
But it takes us something approaching 18 years to learn the technical aspects. I know we can program machines and give them some amount of information "at birth", but I think we are underestimating the difficulty and value of those 18 years and overestimating our technical prowess. We're a long way from teaching machines philosophy.
Perhaps the best thing about arming drones now is that in a way it's like arming young children, and they generally try to do what their parents tell them to do. If machines became moral, and could decide what to do for themselves, we might not like those decisions. Forget the nightmare scenarios, think of the benign scenario taken to the nightmare, like "With Folded Hands."
Final thought... At one point, Asimov suggested that the 3 Laws were actually pretty decent conduct suggestions, even for people. (I would certainly question the relative priority of #2 and #3 in general life for real people, of course.)
I suspect the real desire has nothing to do with the phone itself. The telcos just want to move everyone they possibly can from merely-slightly-expensive voice plans to very-expensive data plans.
(Then call that "broadband internet access" for regulatory purposes.)
ISTR that chlorophyll is essentially a "voltage doubler", basically for red light. (Leaves are green because they use the red, and discard/reflect the green.) If you consider red to be between 600nM and 700nM, then a little more UV than we get might deliver enough content between 300nM and 350nM to be used directly for photosynthesis. I wonder how much UV would be needed to bypass the doubler, and if that would be too much for life, in general. Of course that would mean a hotter sun than ours, and I've more recently heard more about searching around red dwarves, where the leaves would more likely look black.
Absolutely not. There is still significant gravity in space - it falls by inverse-square law, after all. In LEO the force of gravity is practically undiminished. For a "long" structure you'll soon find out that vertical does exist, because that's the way the long axis of that structure will be oriented. Look up "gravity gradient stabilization".
Of course that discribes the axis toward/away from the Earth. I don't know if there is any preferred direction beyond that, but it would surprise me if extended objects don't feel some force related to the direction of their orbits. Basically I'm sure of up/down, and have a feeling that fore/aft can be differentiated from port/starboard. I'd have to agree that North/South/East/West are meaningless - at least for electrically neutral structures.
You could look at them as shills, or you could look at them as putting their money where their mouths are. The saw a threat and are doing what they can within our system to handle it.
So when government does it, it's either inefficient or a boondoggle, but when a company does it, attempting to inform about the threat they're trying to solve makes them a shill. As long as they're above-board about their position, and clear and honest with their science, I see no problem.
By "right school" I didn't mean Ivy or anything, I meant internet-connected. Though the likes of MIT or CMU aren't cheap, either. Since I don't remember the year, I don't remember how widespread internet acces was at that point.
Or to put it another way, did Slashdot come before or after AOL let the unwashed masses onto the internet?
You don't have to be rich for that, just early. Being at the right school at the right time and having an account with internet access would have been sufficient. What year did you get your 3-digit UID?
Years back, in the days of much higher inflation, my brother said he fully expected to be a millionaire one of these days, and he also expected to spend something like $100 of that money to get a hamburger at McDonalds.
The problem with systemd has been the steamroller attitude of its developers and advocates. They seem to want systemd to be the one true init system, accept no substitutes. RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch have all gone to systemd, and I'm not sure what other distros have as well. As far as I know Slackware, Gentoo, and Funtoo are the only distros that haven't, though Gentoo offers it.
I don't mind if systemd is an option. But I feel that there is some bad design in there, and would rather not use it myself. The problem comes when I can't avoid doing so.
It's only a good idea sticking all of that in PID1 until there's a problem. When PID1 crashes, so does your box. The more stuff in PID1, the more likely there is to be a bug somewhere in there. Now stuffing all of that in PID2, and having PID1 take care of itself and restarting PID2 might be a different story.
Mine has been in airplane mode from day 1, with wifi on. I've seen where others have problems keeping wifi on when airplane is also on, but I haven't. Perhaps the fact that the SIM card is still in the original box, never inserted, has something to do with this. I bought an unlocked phone, and have never given it a chance to lock itself.
As ChunderDownUnder reminds me, I forgot to mention that this phone has never been out of airplane mode, in addition to never having a SIM card plugged in. Flashing out of T-Mobile software was also one of the first things I did, and the other night I flashed CyanogenMod 11 M4. (Of course some of the guys on IRC suggest that even that is too commercial, and that I should go to snapshots over on xda-developers, to be safer.)
I keep my tinfoil hat handy, just like I tend to channel RMS and ESR. But there are practical limits...
So if I'm using my no-contract Samsung Galaxy phone as a wifi-only device, and have never inserted the SIM card at all, I believe I'm safe from this particular vulnerability.
I consider one of the saddest examples of inaccuracy to be "2001: A Space Odyssey".
No manned mission to Jupiter. No HAL-9000. (But maybe that's a blessing?) No manned base on the moon of any sort, let alone of the scale in the movie. No pure-space vehicles like the lunar shuttle. No commercial, civilian, accessible space station. No common-use picture-phones. No Pan Am shuttle to the space station. No Pan Am.
by Murray Leinster, March 1946. If you're going to talk about how our literature predicts the future, it's worth taking a look at how past literature predicted us. "A Logic Named Joe" did a pretty good job of nailing the internet, nomenclature aside, and it did it almost 70 years ago.
One of them watched the old "Total Recall" with Arnie. Even though the movie was rated R they didn't take advantage of the obvious opportunity with their "walking screening device".
They look at this article, as well as various responses to it. The overall tone is even and reasonable. There is a bit of sensationalism to TFA, and some of its claims appear to be taking worst-case situations and generalizing them to the entire population of wells, etc.
You had me with you up until you said "grown wiser". Yes, we learned that lesson, but I fear that rather than truly growing wiser, man has just found different and new expressions for folly.
I'll take a moment to answer several responses to this.
To call Creationism a theory is to miss the correct definition of the word theory. Many people seem to think of theory as a neat idea to explain nature, but that falls far short.
In this case, the key differentiator is that a theory is testable, typically by experimentation. When you claim to have a theory, you'd also better define some sort of experiment or other set of measurements that can prove, disprove, or modify that theory.
From what I've read, Creationism is at the (stoner voice) "Wow Man!" (/stoner voice) stage.
Of course the downside is that there may be no such thing as "string theory", because there seems to be no way to prove or disprove it. To be fair, from what I can see, those who call themselves string theorists are quite upset about that, and would love nothing more than a real experiment.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point on latency, I forgot about that. What's worse is that streaming media can readily compensate for latency, as long as it's reasonably consistent. On the other hand, I work from home a fair amount, sometimes with vnc, sometimes with remote X. I'm a heck of a lot more sensitive to latency.
But even if you regulate Netflix like a content provider, it still leaves Comcast jealous, because none of the effects of that regulation wind up in Comcast's pockets. The reality is that Comcast doesn't want to be an ISP, they want to be a content provider, because that's where they're from. Being an ISP was just an "opportunity" they were well poised to take advantage of, with their infrastructure. Only problem is that in the real world, instead of Comcast's dream work, the "opportunity adder" is bigger than their core business. They're working really hard to impose their dream on reality, and since they own the pipes, they're getting away with it.
Once upon a time there was talk of Internet2 - I believe it hooks some universities, national labs, and businesses together. Part of me wonders if at some point corporate US really will manage to turn the internet into a series of walled gardens, and we'll be back to the days of modems, bang-paths, and line-of-sight hacks.
Go ahead and choose your walled garden, I won't stop you.
But from where I sit, it looks like everything that connects to the home is going to walled gardens, and open as an option is fading away.
Serious proposal: Allow a "fast lane" by any/all ISPs. They've got such a hard-on for a fast lane that they're going to keep buying legislators until they get one. Then place a limit on it. The fast lane can only be X times faster than the "neutral net lane", and NO traffic shaping or limits are allowed on that lane, other than being 1/X the speed of the fast lane. Plus X needs to be a legally asserted and testable value.
Issues like this are why Asimov sold a lot of books, and why the Three Laws come up whenever robots are discussed. He came up with a reasonable, minimal code of conduct, and then explored what could possibly go wrong.
I don't remember him writing about your type of situation, which is rather odd when you think about it, because that scenario is rather obvious. But his stories often lived in the cracks where it was really hard to apply the Three Laws. Two examples that come to mind, off the top of my head are:
1 - The Powell and Donovan story at hyper-base, where the act of going through hyperspace "temporarily" sort-of killed the passengers, causing the robot directing the ship all sorts of distress and neuroses.
2 - The robots who were taught the idea of preferentially applying the First Law in favor of the "best humans", and going on to logically decide that they were indeed the "best humans", and therefore to be favored above those organic beings that created them.
Since it's all conjecture, really fiction, let's drop back to Asimov for a moment.
1 - A robot may not harm a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.
What is a "human being"? Is it a torso with 2 arms, 2 legs, and a head? How do you differentiate that from a manniquin, a crash-test dummy, or a "terrorist decoy"? What about an amputee missing one or more of those limbs? So maybe we're down to the torso and head?? What about one of those neck-injury patients with a halo supporting their skull? Does that still pass visual muster as a "head"? What about a dead body then, that has a head, 2 arms, and 2 legs? Or if you've included temperature sensing, the dead body of a sick person who had a fever and is, some time later, still passing through the normal human temperature range.
Silly, yes. Absurd, yes. But before you can consider any code of conduct with respect to a human being, you have to first identify that human being AS a human being.
Pretend we get past that, then we can start talking about "harm", and trying to algorithmically define that.
These are all things we take for granted, having been born as human beings, raised by human beings, and spent years doing so. In most parts of the world it takes something like 18 years of experience to quit being a "child", an apprentice human being, and be considered autonomous in your own right. In that time, we have all both harmed and been harmed by other human beings, though thankfully generally on a lesser scale.
Each of us represents a lot of training and experience, which we frequently neglect, often calling it "common sense", sometimes making the observation that common sense is in fact uncommon. At some point we set about contemplating matters of (at some level) philosophy, such as this one.
But it takes us something approaching 18 years to learn the technical aspects. I know we can program machines and give them some amount of information "at birth", but I think we are underestimating the difficulty and value of those 18 years and overestimating our technical prowess. We're a long way from teaching machines philosophy.
Perhaps the best thing about arming drones now is that in a way it's like arming young children, and they generally try to do what their parents tell them to do. If machines became moral, and could decide what to do for themselves, we might not like those decisions. Forget the nightmare scenarios, think of the benign scenario taken to the nightmare, like "With Folded Hands."
Final thought... At one point, Asimov suggested that the 3 Laws were actually pretty decent conduct suggestions, even for people. (I would certainly question the relative priority of #2 and #3 in general life for real people, of course.)
I suspect the real desire has nothing to do with the phone itself. The telcos just want to move everyone they possibly can from merely-slightly-expensive voice plans to very-expensive data plans.
(Then call that "broadband internet access" for regulatory purposes.)
ISTR that chlorophyll is essentially a "voltage doubler", basically for red light. (Leaves are green because they use the red, and discard/reflect the green.) If you consider red to be between 600nM and 700nM, then a little more UV than we get might deliver enough content between 300nM and 350nM to be used directly for photosynthesis. I wonder how much UV would be needed to bypass the doubler, and if that would be too much for life, in general. Of course that would mean a hotter sun than ours, and I've more recently heard more about searching around red dwarves, where the leaves would more likely look black.
That wasn't so much ejection as packing bags and leaving. (Not really a spoiler, this was revealed early in the book.)
Absolutely not. There is still significant gravity in space - it falls by inverse-square law, after all. In LEO the force of gravity is practically undiminished. For a "long" structure you'll soon find out that vertical does exist, because that's the way the long axis of that structure will be oriented. Look up "gravity gradient stabilization".
Of course that discribes the axis toward/away from the Earth. I don't know if there is any preferred direction beyond that, but it would surprise me if extended objects don't feel some force related to the direction of their orbits. Basically I'm sure of up/down, and have a feeling that fore/aft can be differentiated from port/starboard. I'd have to agree that North/South/East/West are meaningless - at least for electrically neutral structures.
You could look at them as shills, or you could look at them as putting their money where their mouths are. The saw a threat and are doing what they can within our system to handle it.
So when government does it, it's either inefficient or a boondoggle, but when a company does it, attempting to inform about the threat they're trying to solve makes them a shill. As long as they're above-board about their position, and clear and honest with their science, I see no problem.
By "right school" I didn't mean Ivy or anything, I meant internet-connected. Though the likes of MIT or CMU aren't cheap, either. Since I don't remember the year, I don't remember how widespread internet acces was at that point.
Or to put it another way, did Slashdot come before or after AOL let the unwashed masses onto the internet?
You don't have to be rich for that, just early. Being at the right school at the right time and having an account with internet access would have been sufficient. What year did you get your 3-digit UID?
Years back, in the days of much higher inflation, my brother said he fully expected to be a millionaire one of these days, and he also expected to spend something like $100 of that money to get a hamburger at McDonalds.
I simply don't know what to say.
The problem with systemd has been the steamroller attitude of its developers and advocates. They seem to want systemd to be the one true init system, accept no substitutes. RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch have all gone to systemd, and I'm not sure what other distros have as well. As far as I know Slackware, Gentoo, and Funtoo are the only distros that haven't, though Gentoo offers it.
I don't mind if systemd is an option. But I feel that there is some bad design in there, and would rather not use it myself. The problem comes when I can't avoid doing so.
It's only a good idea sticking all of that in PID1 until there's a problem. When PID1 crashes, so does your box. The more stuff in PID1, the more likely there is to be a bug somewhere in there. Now stuffing all of that in PID2, and having PID1 take care of itself and restarting PID2 might be a different story.
Too bad I have not mod points for this subthread, today.
Mine has been in airplane mode from day 1, with wifi on. I've seen where others have problems keeping wifi on when airplane is also on, but I haven't. Perhaps the fact that the SIM card is still in the original box, never inserted, has something to do with this. I bought an unlocked phone, and have never given it a chance to lock itself.
As ChunderDownUnder reminds me, I forgot to mention that this phone has never been out of airplane mode, in addition to never having a SIM card plugged in. Flashing out of T-Mobile software was also one of the first things I did, and the other night I flashed CyanogenMod 11 M4. (Of course some of the guys on IRC suggest that even that is too commercial, and that I should go to snapshots over on xda-developers, to be safer.)
I keep my tinfoil hat handy, just like I tend to channel RMS and ESR. But there are practical limits...
So if I'm using my no-contract Samsung Galaxy phone as a wifi-only device, and have never inserted the SIM card at all, I believe I'm safe from this particular vulnerability.
Tin-hatters, am I wrong on that?
Explain,
I consider one of the saddest examples of inaccuracy to be "2001: A Space Odyssey".
No manned mission to Jupiter.
No HAL-9000. (But maybe that's a blessing?)
No manned base on the moon of any sort, let alone of the scale in the movie.
No pure-space vehicles like the lunar shuttle.
No commercial, civilian, accessible space station.
No common-use picture-phones.
No Pan Am shuttle to the space station.
No Pan Am.
by Murray Leinster, March 1946. If you're going to talk about how our literature predicts the future, it's worth taking a look at how past literature predicted us. "A Logic Named Joe" did a pretty good job of nailing the internet, nomenclature aside, and it did it almost 70 years ago.
One of them watched the old "Total Recall" with Arnie. Even though the movie was rated R they didn't take advantage of the obvious opportunity with their "walking screening device".
They look at this article, as well as various responses to it. The overall tone is even and reasonable. There is a bit of sensationalism to TFA, and some of its claims appear to be taking worst-case situations and generalizing them to the entire population of wells, etc.
You had me with you up until you said "grown wiser". Yes, we learned that lesson, but I fear that rather than truly growing wiser, man has just found different and new expressions for folly.
I'll take a moment to answer several responses to this.
To call Creationism a theory is to miss the correct definition of the word theory. Many people seem to think of theory as a neat idea to explain nature, but that falls far short.
In this case, the key differentiator is that a theory is testable, typically by experimentation. When you claim to have a theory, you'd also better define some sort of experiment or other set of measurements that can prove, disprove, or modify that theory.
From what I've read, Creationism is at the (stoner voice) "Wow Man!" (/stoner voice) stage.
Of course the downside is that there may be no such thing as "string theory", because there seems to be no way to prove or disprove it. To be fair, from what I can see, those who call themselves string theorists are quite upset about that, and would love nothing more than a real experiment.