Burning things is bad. No, seriously, we don't have engines that burn clean enough to not produce pollutants.
Uhh, no. This is like saying "chemicals are bad" or "radiation is bad". You need to look at what you're burning. The great thing about bio-mass fuels is the concept of "carbon neutral" combustion. You grow a bunch of plants/trees which take carbon -out- of the atmosphere, turn those plants into fuel and a year or so later release the same amount of carbon back into the atmosphere when you burn the fuel. There is no net increase in CO2 levels which means there is no contribution to the greenhouse effect.
On a macro scale there is little to no pollution, even if there appears to be because "burning things is bad". This is exactly the kind of hippy bullshit that holds back the development truly green technologies
In many of my higher level engineering classes there's no single text book that covers all the material in the way the professor wants to cover it. Our reference texts usually end up being 2 chapters from book a), 3 chapters from book b), 8 different academic papers, some random notes written by another lecturer 10 years ago and the rest are notes written by the lecturer themselves.
The kind of licensing discussed in TFA would completely destroy this kind of structure and would probably end up lowering the quality of the courses by forcing lecturers to teach out of a single ill-suited text-book or placing much higher demands on the prof's time to write a text-book's worth of material themselves. You'd also end up with a bunch of 'orphaned works' type problems where no one can trace the copyright holder for for decade old lecture notes.
Of course, it might be entirely possible to game this system by making a course consisting of 90% cheap filler that nobody actually uses and the remaining 10% consisting of the useful material in the current course.
You're now guilty of wire fraud, unauthorised system access and several thousand ToS and EULA violations. Don't ever get noticed by Sony, they own you for life and aren't shy in the courtroom
The problem is using programs that advertise themselves as WYSWYG editors when in fact they're not.
Now it's unreasonable to expect the every computer-literate but non-expert user to understand the data format, encoding and specific behaviour of every document editor. The blame here rests solely on the management that should have trained users how to manipulate sensitive documents using approved tools.
I know I shouldn't bite, but I'm amazed at the sheer ignorance of some of the comments in this article.
For the record, I'm Australian, not American. I work two jobs, study full time at university and do volunteer work when I can. I pay for my own food, water, housing, internet, phone service, medical treatment and education on top of paying taxes on the money I earn -and- the money I spend. The human rights recognised by my government actually make me a -more- productive member of society, while simultaneously increasing the duration and quality of my life.
I have a good quality of life and I've worked hard to get it. I don't think every slacker should get a free ride, but I do think people should have the same basic level of -opportunity- that I have. Without some level of human rights, "Getting off your ass and working for a living" isn't really an option, especially if by 'living' you mean something more than living day by day until poverty kills you.
Do you want to know what societies looked like before nations started recognising human rights? Think entrenched class-systems, peasants, slaves. People whose children will die young because they're poor, like their parents and their parent's parents . More crime, violence, fear, civil wars and deadly pandemics. And even if you can't see any moral or humanitarian justification for human rights, what about the increased economic output?
It makes me sick to hear so many people arguing against human rights when, almost certainly, they themselves would not be able to bitch about socialists and slackers on the internet if they had not enjoyed those very same rights. You're in no way 'independent' from the privileged society you live in and that society is built on human rights.
Instead of focusing on rights to this or that material thing, how about getting hot and bothered about the poor not having these rights in most of the world:
I think you're missing the point of "human rights". They're the rights that every human being has simply by being human, even if they're poor and/or live in Cuba. Now Human rights -violations- happen all the time across the world and people -do- get hot and bothered about them. This isn't what TFA's about.
It's the 21st century and Internet access -is- a fundamental human right. Obviously not on as basic a level as access to clean water or the right to live, but absolutely on the same level as other recognised human rights like: - access to education - rights to free speech - rights to seek employment - rights to communicate
These days the majority of my personal interactions with government services, retailers, educational institutions, employers and clients are through the internet. It's becoming increasingly necessary to have internet access just to function in modern society and people without are gradually being disadvantaged and marginalised. Without internet access you're severely limited in the number of stores you can shop at, the amount of educational material you can access and the number of employers that will hire you (try getting a professional job without an email address).
No, the right to access the internet doesn't mean everybody's entitled to free, super fast porn streaming in their living rooms. It does mean governments have a responsibility to ensure internet service in available to people in the same way they do electricity, phones, schools and medical treatment. It means that barring someone from accessing the internet is a violation of their rights and is not acceptable as a form of punishment. This is what's really wrong with all the bullshit MPAA/RIAA three-strikes disconnection laws, that after illegally downloading a total of 3 songs, you can lose your access to -everything- else you rely on the internet for. Hope you didnt need that connection for your job, studies, financial services or anything else in your life.
No, it's about time we recognise that internet access is a fundamental right in a modern, information based society.
The problem with geiger counters and even the SI 'becquerel' is that they only tell you about the radiation level right -now- and say nothing about radiation levels over the long term. All current information says that the vast majority of the radiation leaked from the reactors is from short-lived isotopes such as Iodine-131 (the one they inject people with in hospitals because it dies away quickly).This causes high radiation levels immediately following a leak but quickly decays to safe levels within a period of weeks. There is simply no comparison to substances like plutonium and uranium isotopes which stick around for 'ghost-town for life' kind of scales.
To use a metaphor which the scientifically illiterate might understand: It's like saying that you have a fire that's burning really hot, and it's nearly as hot as the 'great fire of Chernobyl' which was clearly a disaster of epic proportions. The difference being that some fires aren't that dangerous, because while they're still hot they burn out really quickly. Other fires burn for a much longer time and do a lot of cumulative damage. So far in Japan, we're still in the 'uncomfortably hot but short-lived' type of fire.
This is the reason why physicists and engineers are dismissing this 'Nuclear disaster' as a non-event. When the projected fatalities and/or economic impact exceeds that of the actual fucking earthquake/tsunami, it's worth paying attention to (about, say , half a week's worth of media coverage for 10000 dead?). The direct impact of this 'Nuclear disaster' will never exceed that of the recent Haiti earthquake, or the 2004 Boxing day Tsunami(That's half a million people wiped out between the two). Yet somehow even the slightest risk with the words 'nuclear' or 'radiation' attached to it is the devil incarnate, coming to punish us for playing with fire.
The sad thing is, this -is- a nuclear disaster, not because of any direct harm, but because media's created so much fear and panic surrounding this event. This will set back nuclear power for decades, this is the reason why we wont see new cleaner or safer nuclear reactors in our lifetimes.
Speaking as an (ex) math teacher with degrees in electronic engineering and computer science, I can tell you there are very good, educational, reasons to "show your work" and demonstrate that you can do more than -use- a program.
Any decent, modern teaching course spends alot of time studying assessment methods and all the various ways that students can jump through the hoops, get the correct answers and still not have a clue what they're doing. That xkcd comic is a perfect example of how to get a correct answer without understanding mathematics, which is really what I'm interested in as a teacher.
Sure, writing a program that implements a particular mathematical technique demonstrates that you understand it (and probably at a much higher level). In practice, you end up with a much larger number of students that can download and use programs without understanding a single line of code. They can type in the numbers and get the correct answer(some programs will even spit out a few lines of working out). This assesses nothing and the students learn nothing, simply getting the answer isn't enough to learn or assess mathematics.
You also end up with students that do know how to program but don't understand that it isn't appropriate to use a numerical solvers when studying analytical methods. Sure, they can get the answer and understand their process, but they really haven't shown that they understand the underlying trogonometric functions or calculus methods that are the focus of the course.
There's definitely a large number of teachers that don't understand new technology and are resistant to any sort of modernisation of the system (one of the reasons I ditched teaching for engineering), but to say that use of technologies with artifical restrictions is due solely to the 'idiocy' and 'cluelessness' of your 'big stupid-head' teachers shows a real lack of understanding of the purpose of mathematics courses and the practicalities of school-based education.
Also, Google has started producing full-length movies, such as Girl Walks Into a Bar. (The latter of which even features some semi-big names, like Carla Gugino, Josh Hartnett, Danny DeVito, and a bunch of other names you'd probably recognize.)
"The uploader has chosen not to make this video available in your country"
I honestly think--and hope!--that the times of big television networks being the gateway to what we can and can't see are soon to be over.
Only to be replaced by another 'gateway' that disallows me to participate in world culture based on who I am, where I'm from or their valuation of my demographic. Nothing's going to get better without major copyright reforms, Google, Fox, Apple, NBC, who gives a shit...
I'm not quite sure about the point the author is trying to make here: what's the purpose of differentiating between features/attributes and vulnerabilities? Is it only a vulnerability when it can be exploited? This is actually undermining the definitions the author uses for explaining the difference between threat and vulnerability: if a vulnerability can be "exploited by multiple adversaries having a range of motivations and interest in a lot of different assets", requiring attack scenarios to be specified before allowing an "attribute" to be called a vulnerability feels a bit unnecessary, and could even focus the attention too much onto one kind of attack. Incidentally, neither attribute nor attack scenario is defined anywhere in the paper, which makes the distinction being drawn here weird.
*Editor’s Note: This paper was not peer-reviewed. This work was performed under the auspices of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357. The views expressed here are those of the author and should not necessarily be ascribed to Argonne National Laboratory or DOE. Jon Warner provided useful suggestions.
Exactly how to treat a computer is a problem of ethics, not AI.
But the issue of ethics is one of the reasons that AI is so interesting. Ethics cause people to treat a collection of matter forming a sentient human-being differently to that forming insentient rock.
People tend to instinctively make this distinction, but artificial intelligence makes us question the basis of our ethics.
Slashdot Mirror
Burning things is bad. No, seriously, we don't have engines that burn clean enough to not produce pollutants.
Uhh, no. This is like saying "chemicals are bad" or "radiation is bad". You need to look at what you're burning. The great thing about bio-mass fuels is the concept of "carbon neutral" combustion. You grow a bunch of plants/trees which take carbon -out- of the atmosphere, turn those plants into fuel and a year or so later release the same amount of carbon back into the atmosphere when you burn the fuel. There is no net increase in CO2 levels which means there is no contribution to the greenhouse effect.
On a macro scale there is little to no pollution, even if there appears to be because "burning things is bad". This is exactly the kind of hippy bullshit that holds back the development truly green technologies
In many of my higher level engineering classes there's no single text book that covers all the material in the way the professor wants to cover it. Our reference texts usually end up being 2 chapters from book a), 3 chapters from book b), 8 different academic papers, some random notes written by another lecturer 10 years ago and the rest are notes written by the lecturer themselves.
The kind of licensing discussed in TFA would completely destroy this kind of structure and would probably end up lowering the quality of the courses by forcing lecturers to teach out of a single ill-suited text-book or placing much higher demands on the prof's time to write a text-book's worth of material themselves. You'd also end up with a bunch of 'orphaned works' type problems where no one can trace the copyright holder for for decade old lecture notes.
Of course, it might be entirely possible to game this system by making a course consisting of 90% cheap filler that nobody actually uses and the remaining 10% consisting of the useful material in the current course.
You're now guilty of wire fraud, unauthorised system access and several thousand ToS and EULA violations. Don't ever get noticed by Sony, they own you for life and aren't shy in the courtroom
The problem is using programs that advertise themselves as WYSWYG editors when in fact they're not.
Now it's unreasonable to expect the every computer-literate but non-expert user to understand the data format, encoding and specific behaviour of every document editor. The blame here rests solely on the management that should have trained users how to manipulate sensitive documents using approved tools.
I know I shouldn't bite, but I'm amazed at the sheer ignorance of some of the comments in this article.
For the record, I'm Australian, not American. I work two jobs, study full time at university and do volunteer work when I can. I pay for my own food, water, housing, internet, phone service, medical treatment and education on top of paying taxes on the money I earn -and- the money I spend. The human rights recognised by my government actually make me a -more- productive member of society, while simultaneously increasing the duration and quality of my life.
I have a good quality of life and I've worked hard to get it. I don't think every slacker should get a free ride, but I do think people should have the same basic level of -opportunity- that I have. Without some level of human rights, "Getting off your ass and working for a living" isn't really an option, especially if by 'living' you mean something more than living day by day until poverty kills you.
Do you want to know what societies looked like before nations started recognising human rights? Think entrenched class-systems, peasants, slaves. People whose children will die young because they're poor, like their parents and their parent's parents . More crime, violence, fear, civil wars and deadly pandemics.
And even if you can't see any moral or humanitarian justification for human rights, what about the increased economic output?
It makes me sick to hear so many people arguing against human rights when, almost certainly, they themselves would not be able to bitch about socialists and slackers on the internet if they had not enjoyed those very same rights. You're in no way 'independent' from the privileged society you live in and that society is built on human rights.
Instead of focusing on rights to this or that material thing, how about getting hot and bothered about the poor not having these rights in most of the world:
I think you're missing the point of "human rights". They're the rights that every human being has simply by being human, even if they're poor and/or live in Cuba. Now Human rights -violations- happen all the time across the world and people -do- get hot and bothered about them. This isn't what TFA's about.
It's the 21st century and Internet access -is- a fundamental human right.
Obviously not on as basic a level as access to clean water or the right to live, but absolutely on the same level as other recognised human rights like:
- access to education
- rights to free speech
- rights to seek employment
- rights to communicate
These days the majority of my personal interactions with government services, retailers, educational institutions, employers and clients are through the internet. It's becoming increasingly necessary to have internet access just to function in modern society and people without are gradually being disadvantaged and marginalised. Without internet access you're severely limited in the number of stores you can shop at, the amount of educational material you can access and the number of employers that will hire you (try getting a professional job without an email address).
No, the right to access the internet doesn't mean everybody's entitled to free, super fast porn streaming in their living rooms. It does mean governments have a responsibility to ensure internet service in available to people in the same way they do electricity, phones, schools and medical treatment. It means that barring someone from accessing the internet is a violation of their rights and is not acceptable as a form of punishment.
This is what's really wrong with all the bullshit MPAA/RIAA three-strikes disconnection laws, that after illegally downloading a total of 3 songs, you can lose your access to -everything- else you rely on the internet for. Hope you didnt need that connection for your job, studies, financial services or anything else in your life.
No, it's about time we recognise that internet access is a fundamental right in a modern, information based society.
The problem with geiger counters and even the SI 'becquerel' is that they only tell you about the radiation level right -now- and say nothing about radiation levels over the long term. All current information says that the vast majority of the radiation leaked from the reactors is from short-lived isotopes such as Iodine-131 (the one they inject people with in hospitals because it dies away quickly).This causes high radiation levels immediately following a leak but quickly decays to safe levels within a period of weeks. There is simply no comparison to substances like plutonium and uranium isotopes which stick around for 'ghost-town for life' kind of scales.
To use a metaphor which the scientifically illiterate might understand: It's like saying that you have a fire that's burning really hot, and it's nearly as hot as the 'great fire of Chernobyl' which was clearly a disaster of epic proportions. The difference being that some fires aren't that dangerous, because while they're still hot they burn out really quickly. Other fires burn for a much longer time and do a lot of cumulative damage. So far in Japan, we're still in the 'uncomfortably hot but short-lived' type of fire.
This is the reason why physicists and engineers are dismissing this 'Nuclear disaster' as a non-event. When the projected fatalities and/or economic impact exceeds that of the actual fucking earthquake/tsunami, it's worth paying attention to (about, say , half a week's worth of media coverage for 10000 dead?). The direct impact of this 'Nuclear disaster' will never exceed that of the recent Haiti earthquake, or the 2004 Boxing day Tsunami(That's half a million people wiped out between the two). Yet somehow even the slightest risk with the words 'nuclear' or 'radiation' attached to it is the devil incarnate, coming to punish us for playing with fire.
The sad thing is, this -is- a nuclear disaster, not because of any direct harm, but because media's created so much fear and panic surrounding this event. This will set back nuclear power for decades, this is the reason why we wont see new cleaner or safer nuclear reactors in our lifetimes.
Speaking as an (ex) math teacher with degrees in electronic engineering and computer science, I can tell you there are very good, educational, reasons to "show your work" and demonstrate that you can do more than -use- a program.
Any decent, modern teaching course spends alot of time studying assessment methods and all the various ways that students can jump through the hoops, get the correct answers and still not have a clue what they're doing. That xkcd comic is a perfect example of how to get a correct answer without understanding mathematics, which is really what I'm interested in as a teacher.
Sure, writing a program that implements a particular mathematical technique demonstrates that you understand it (and probably at a much higher level). In practice, you end up with a much larger number of students that can download and use programs without understanding a single line of code. They can type in the numbers and get the correct answer(some programs will even spit out a few lines of working out). This assesses nothing and the students learn nothing, simply getting the answer isn't enough to learn or assess mathematics.
You also end up with students that do know how to program but don't understand that it isn't appropriate to use a numerical solvers when studying analytical methods. Sure, they can get the answer and understand their process, but they really haven't shown that they understand the underlying trogonometric functions or calculus methods that are the focus of the course.
There's definitely a large number of teachers that don't understand new technology and are resistant to any sort of modernisation of the system (one of the reasons I ditched teaching for engineering), but to say that use of technologies with artifical restrictions is due solely to the 'idiocy' and 'cluelessness' of your 'big stupid-head' teachers shows a real lack of understanding of the purpose of mathematics courses and the practicalities of school-based education.
Also, Google has started producing full-length movies, such as Girl Walks Into a Bar . (The latter of which even features some semi-big names, like Carla Gugino, Josh Hartnett, Danny DeVito, and a bunch of other names you'd probably recognize.)
"The uploader has chosen not to make this video available in your country"
I honestly think--and hope!--that the times of big television networks being the gateway to what we can and can't see are soon to be over.
Only to be replaced by another 'gateway' that disallows me to participate in world culture based on who I am, where I'm from or their valuation of my demographic. Nothing's going to get better without major copyright reforms, Google, Fox, Apple, NBC, who gives a shit...
I'm not quite sure about the point the author is trying to make here: what's the purpose of differentiating between features/attributes and vulnerabilities? Is it only a vulnerability when it can be exploited? This is actually undermining the definitions the author uses for explaining the difference between threat and vulnerability: if a vulnerability can be "exploited by multiple adversaries having a range of motivations and interest in a lot of different assets", requiring attack scenarios to be specified before allowing an "attribute" to be called a vulnerability feels a bit unnecessary, and could even focus the attention too much onto one kind of attack. Incidentally, neither attribute nor attack scenario is defined anywhere in the paper, which makes the distinction being drawn here weird.
*Editor’s Note: This paper was not peer-reviewed. This work was performed under the auspices of the
United States Department of Energy (DOE) under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357. The views expressed
here are those of the author and should not necessarily be ascribed to Argonne National Laboratory or
DOE. Jon Warner provided useful suggestions.
Exactly how to treat a computer is a problem of ethics, not AI.
But the issue of ethics is one of the reasons that AI is so interesting. Ethics cause people to treat a collection of matter forming a sentient human-being differently to that forming insentient rock. People tend to instinctively make this distinction, but artificial intelligence makes us question the basis of our ethics.