Even more to the point, should we condemn someone for not getting a high-paying stressful job and using their excess income to help others? Selfish slackers who don't make the most of themselves are very unfair to those who could benefit from them sharing?
My mother-in-law spouts out with stuff like this. What's funny, is that I've driven up and down and across the US quite a bit in the last few years, and I have yet to see all the gross examples of crumbling infrastructure that are supposedly out there. I have also seen my entire family, getting by on USDA food surplus cheese, powdered milk, and eggs in the 1970s, achieve reasonable levels of living, with their own homes, vehicles, and no more welfare/food stamps etc.
Ironic that you push for people to vote for gun control (which we already have plenty of), then talk about people slowly loosing more of their freedoms. How about we encourage people to be civil and respectful to each other, everyone all together. That might work better.
The $15/hour minimum wage is just a placeholder for now in the US Democratic platform. The actual objective is to get a Guaranteed Minimum Income for everyone. I'm not sure whether they think it should only apply to citizens.
Perhaps more to the point, if people start using VPNs so that they can view porn while they are at a family restaurant, McDonald's may choose to start blocking VPNs (like my local library did). And that would screw up my ability to securely access my Contacts, Calendar, and e-mail while I'm chowing down at lunch or dinner while I'm on the road.
We are all members of a *society* - anyone who wants to be anti-social should excuse themselves and head for the woods or the mountains. Good luck finding porn there. If someone likes the benefits they gain from society, they should understand that they need to put up with some restraints as well. (Don't they sell stroke mags at convenience stores anymore for the wankers?)
I think Microsoft already made the argument that free/open source software was a threat to the commercial software industry and needed to be reined in, that using Microsoft's typical FUD wasn't going to be enough, and that they now needed to be fighting standard protocols, using tactics such as "embrace, extend, and extinguish." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents. Given the revealed and suggested tactics, its not hard to imagine that a different attack vector could be funded.
The problem could be removed, easily. Eliminate the completely artificial premise that just because a person makes a particular noise, they have the right to control all subsequent times that noise is made, and to be enriched by all subsequent times that noise is made. Will society really cease to function if that premise is no longer valid? Will all music suddenly vanish? If all corporately-produced music did vanish, would our lives be left less rich and meaningful?
Musical performers would still be able to make a living, if they are good enough, putting on live performances for other people to attend. They would probably have to adjust the cost of a live performance to account for the competition from recordings and other performers with the same music/sound... and some of them would have to find another line of work.
I think health insurance is for everyone, because the risk of having expensive health problems exists for just about everyone, especially if health issues due to accidents are included. This is similar to automobile insurance - everyone who drives carries insurance, not just the bad drivers. However, insurance companies of all types love to have reasons to divide people up into very small risk pools, and charge people more for insurance if they have even a casual relationship to some risk factor that indicates that they may make claims (or higher than average claims) against insurance. In the US, auto insurance companies are using things like people's credit score to determine how much to charge them for automobile insurance, on the basis of a belief that people with certain ranges of credit scores are more likely to be involved in accidents, apparently.
For health insurance, the risk of the health companies getting access to too much data about individuals is that they will start charging individuals for insurance according to their perception of the risk of insuring those individuals. Even if they could correctly screen people into various risk categories, this would be detrimental to the overall way insurance works in general - a large pool of people are charged for insurance based on the average risk in the pool. Everyone pays a more or less affordable rate, and when the risks materialize as claims, those claims get paid off, but the insurance company doesn't have to pay out more than they took in (if they did, they would go out of business).
If only sick/unhealthy people get health insurance, then the cost of that insurance has to be high, because they will have a higher rate of claims. Those who are fortunate enough to have great health might forego insurance, but on average most people expect to have some issue or other that might require insurance coverage, so on average most people will want insurance. So more people get insurance, and the average cost of insurance goes down because the average claims rate across the larger pool is lower.
The higher the certainty of people making claims, the less of a solution "insurance" is - insurance is intended to spread risk among a large pool. It seems to be very hard to get people to understand that on average, people cannot expect to get more out of an insurance plan than what they pay into the plan. If that were so, the insurance company would go out of business. As much as people may dislike insurance companies (and many insurance companies have earned the dislike/hatred of their customers), they provide a substantial social benefit when they perform their basic risk management function.
The only way I can think of addressing the problem of a lack of competition in the last mile of communications services is for local governments to provide the communications service as a basic utility, the same as water, sewer, trash pickup. Or maybe its provided by a utility provider like electricity or gas. Then companies like Comcast don't need to be a "monopoly" cable provider for a town or county; other companies like Verizon don't need to be a "monopoly" telephony provider either - anyone who wants to provide services (any data service, including telephony data and what we now thing of as cable television service data) can, with the services riding over the utility communications network. Perhaps that is what we are backing into, with ISPs being declared to be the utilities that they so obviously seem to be. Couple that with VoIP telephone services being broken free from cable companies and RBOCs, and the move to "cut the cord" with A/V entertainment services, and pretty soon there aren't any government-protected monopolies for phone and cable... just a basic communications utility provide by or on behalf of the local government, and a multitude of service providers, all competing openly with one another.
One of the things I like about "the Internet" is that Internet Service Providers (the actual entities that were found to be Title II communications carriers) are most emphatically NOT the Internet. In the days of CompuServe, AOL, GENIE, et al., that confusion was understandable, because the only part of the service that wasn't run by the commercial provider was the actual analog telephone circuit used to carry the modulated data. Now, however, the major ISPs have steadily reduced most elements of service that used to be expected: no FTP services, no web site hosting except for very lame web site hosting, no USENET news feeds; the only thing most of them do except provide transit of IP packets from a subscriber's premise is provide e-mail hosting.
The Internet is a grand bazaar, forum, and meeting place, and what is needed on the parts of the absolutely necessary firms that transport our communications traffic to/from the Internet is for them to most emphatically not muck with it, whether that mucking comes in the form of "super-cookies" (injections of information into what should be inviolate virtual connections), invading people's privacy by tracking what they are doing, or trying to enhance their profits by trying to charge both ends for the same traffic.
There IS honor in providing an ordinary, plebeian transport service, albeit that honor may come with lower profit margins. Over the road truckers don't sort through our packages in order to build dossiers about what we buy, nor do they insert GPS trackers into packages in order to see where they are going. We wouldn't stand for them trying to monetize the delivery service they are already being paid to provide. We should expect no less from Internet Service Providers.
The word "robot" as used by roboticists, although not specifically defined in a way that all would accept without quibbling, does not include the requirement of "Artificial Intelligence". See, for example, the way that industrial robots are defined in ISO 8373 as "an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose, manipulator programmable in three or more axes, which may be either fixed in place or mobile for use in industrial automation applications."
Even the word "autonomous" is not synonymous with "Artificial Intelligence" (or else there would be great demand for the thousands of students creating LEGO Mindstorms-Based autonomous robots to play the FIRST LEGO League "Robot Game"). So even if the requirement for something to be a robot is for it to be autonomous (and many roboticists would disagree with that requirement) that still doesn't require the device to be imbued with Artificial Intelligence.
As pointed out in the parent posting, it is Science Fiction literature that tends to equate robotics with Artificial Intelligence, not the actual, real practice of robotics that is all around us in the world today. I interpret Asimov's fascination with the three laws of "robotics" as being an exploration of the consequences of creating sentient (or at least conscious") artificial minds, regardless of whether they are embodied (in the form of a robot), and then trying to place restrictions on those artificial minds sufficient to prevent those minds from ever turning on their creators. The ancient Greeks demonstrated in their mythology an understanding of the potential for the created to turn on and become superior to the creators (younger gods tended to rebel against and imprison/destroy the elder gods who created them). It would be silly for us humans to not be wary of the possibility of a truly sentient/conscious artificially-created mind becoming a threat to humanity, whether for our own good (as in some science fiction explorations where the robots seek to protect us from our own flawed selves) or to our detriment (such as in the Terminator series, or the Matrix movies).
The idea that a machine built for the purpose of causing pain/harming people in any way represents a serious exploration of the challenges/pitfalls of building a machine capable of harm but designed specifically to avoid harm seems odd to me at best.
The claim that I was refuting was the narrow one that CERN and the EU developed the "IP/TCP/HTTP/HTML stack", not the broader idea that Europeans were involved in the network research that contributed to the knowledge used by the people who defined the IP protocol. I provided citations to the Request For Comments that define the IP and TCP protocols, both of which emanated from US institutions being funded by the US government. Those RFCs clearly identify the source of the IP and TCP protocols that are in use today for the Internet.
Packet switching - aka ARPANET- was US funded. The IP/TCP/HTTP/HTML stack was developed at CERN, EU.
To be clear - The foundation of the Internet as we know it today, the IP protocol stack, including IP (the Internet Protocol) https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc791 and TCP (the Transmission Control Protocol) https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt, were most emphatically *not* developed at CERN or by any entity in Europe. Europe was busy working on the International Standards Organization (ISO) Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) protocol stack while the US was whipping up IP, TCP, UDP (et al.) as a follow-on to the original ARPAnet communications protocols. The ISO OSI reference model for networking survived (sort of); the OSI protocol stack largely sank beneath the waves. The Internet development model (rough consensus and running code) was a lot more productive than endless committee meetings and the attempt to put everything including the kitchen sink into a protocol stack (think of it as Agile development versus Waterfall development). I'm a bit touchy about this because I got embroiled in battles involving European agencies who tried to insist that major global communications networks should be based on ISO OSI long after TCP/IP was firmly established as the clear standard for internetworking.
This of course in no way diminishes the value of the introduction of HTTP/HTML to the Internet by Tim Berners-Lee while he worked at CERN.
I've run into a company or two that doesn't have their own website, just a Facebook page. Some of them don't even let you SEE their page unless you log into Facebook! Since I don't have a Facebook account, I couldn't do business with them.
I know lots of people who don't use Facebook, and we all get along just fine. However, we are of an age where we still remember how to make phone calls, send invitations via mail (e-mail or USPS), and make plans in advance for what we are going to do.
Are friends really friends if they neglect you in their social life just because you don't use a particular on-line social media platform? I'm truly wondering on this question, because I don't hang around in social circles where this is required. What do those who do think?
If the specification of a software interface as expressed in the manner precisely needed to make the interface operable in a given programming language is copyrightable, then wouldn't the specification of any interface as implemented in the manner to make the interface usable be copyrightable?
That could make it a copyright violation to use a non-Ford oil filter on your Ford engine, or non-OEM lightbulbs in your lighting fixture, or non-Keurig K-cups in your Keurig coffee maker unless the equipment manufacturer specifically allowed it.
Ok, so perhaps it can be claimed that software is different because it is expressed in a written form that makes its interfaces themselves specifically vulnerable to a copyright claim that can't be made against the actual interfaces of physical objects. If so, that specific vulnerability should probably be removed from copyright law unless there is a good reason for not removing it. Creating a "something" that can interface with another "somethingelse" should fundamentally be a protected act against claims from the creators of the "somethingelse", as long as the internal mechanism of the "something" doesn't steal intellectual property belonging to the creators of the "somethingelse", whether the objects are physical or virtual. The greater good lies in the interface itself being freely copy-able/re-usable by others.
Which is why buyers and sellers should limit the amount of information they share during a negotiation. Uber's ability to use the app to pull battery data from the phone essentially turns the user's phone into a spy funneling information to the other party in the negotiation.
The general principle here might be "Don't host your negotiating adversary's minions within the walls of your castle unless you can wall them off from everything except that which you wish to share."
I think your succinct dismissal of polygraphs is too hasty. Polygraphs work quite well in many circumstances. However, the misconception that they are a "lie detector" confuses a lot of people. They are an interrogation tool, not a lie detection tool. The tool "works" if the objectives of the interrogator are met.
Yes, Sprint does continue to block the free market as much as they can in the US. Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile are both Sprint brands and use the Sprint network, but a phone bought under one of the brands is either very difficult to get provisioned under another brand, or impossible to get provisioned, depending on who you listen to and what dodge they managed to work on the customer service folks. One consequence is that the used market in Sprint-network compatible phones is very fragmented.
We got our kids iPod Touches after having iPod Nanos. For those who don't know, the iPod Nanos have a built-in FM radio; the iPod Touches don't. The kids like the iPod Touches for the web access, e-mail, messaging, and streaming services, but are very frustrated that they had to give up FM radio.
I'm curious to understand why FM radio isn't available in iPod Touches, iPhones, and other smart phones. Seems like it isn't a matter of real estate, if the chip is already there.
Ultimately, we'll need fewer people. That coincides well with the need to reduce the human population in order to have a better balance in the overall ecosystem. Getting there in a humane way is the challenge.
It is my understanding that a "theory" is an explanation of observed behavior. A good theory will predict certain behavior that can be tested - i.e., a "falsifiable" hypothesis. If an experiment is carried out to test the hypothesis, it may result in a positive result that supports the hypothesis, and thus the theory. (Note - A single positive outcomes doesn't mean the hypothesis is proven - the experiment needs to be repeatable and each repetition needs to yield the same positive results. Also note that a successful experimental outcome doesn't "prove" the theory, it just shows that the theory has some explanatory power, which is the main function of a theory. The theory may have other consequences [falsifiable hypotheses] that may be found to be not true, showing that although the theory has some explanatory power, it is not the complete explanation.) The experiment may result in a negative outcome that disproves the hypothesis, and hence the theory as it is currently described. Sometimes the theory can be salvaged by adding the results of the experiment to the observed data used to develop the theory, then "refactoring" the theory to incorporate the new observations. If the new version of the theory can successfully explain the new data in a fundamental way (i.e., not just as an exception to a rule), then the new theory is probably a better explanation than the original theory.
Theories that have stood up to a lot of experimental testing are judged to be more likely and more complete explanations, while those that are relatively new and untested are considered suspect. Heuristics such as Occam's razor play a role in judging the quality of a theory as well; simple explanations are preferred over more complex explanations, all else being equal (ability to explain observed data, ability to generate falsifiable hypotheses).
A good theory will probably have generated many falsifiable hypotheses, all of which will have been experimentally validated (with repeatable experiments carried out by a number of people, not just one experiment by one person). At least, that is how I understand the interrelationship between theories and hypotheses.
The word "robots," to roboticists, means a much wider range of devices than the popular conception of a robot. Pure autonomous activity is not a requirement for something to considered a robot or a robotic device; nor is mobility for that matter.
As someone else already pointed out, the FIRST robot games (FIRST LEGO League, FIRST Tech Challenge, and FIRST Robotics Competition) all include autonomous activity as part of the game. For FLL (upper elementary school and junior high school), it *is* the whole game - no remote control is used (but robots can be retrieved from the field during game play by the "operators" at the cost of a penalty, and the environment is highly simplified). For FTC and FRC, the autonomous period is only part of the game, and it's the smaller part at present. However, all of the robotic elements for autonomous action are present in the robots - sensors, actuators, on-board controller, on-board power - and the current limit on how much of the robot's activity is autonomous and/or automated assistance to the operators is the knowledge and ability of the high school (FRC, FTC) and junior high school (FTC) designers, builders, programmers. Given the level of resources and time needed to create totally autonomous robots capable of complex activity, I'm more than willing to cut the students some slack and not rain on their parade telling them "they didn't *really* build a robot" because its not totally self-directed. Anyone who wants to rise up to the challenge of helping build a totally autonomous robot can start by finding a nearby high school or junior high school with a FIRST program and offering their time as a mentor to the student team members. If your local schools don't have a FIRST program - start one. http://www.firstinspires.org/
By volunteering as a mentor, you will get the chance to work with real robots being built to solve challenges that are closely related to real world needs, using equipment that costs anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars (at no cost to you other than your time), where the imagination and ingenuity of the students and mentors get put into concrete form and tested out in full-on competition.
Look's like there won't be a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for humans... The marketers will know both our location and what we are doing if they get their way...
What puzzles me as how they have any belief or even foundation of a belief that this kind of data will be accessible to them. Shouldn't the makers of these devices be being bent over backwards by the consumers to ensure that the consumers data is being kept secure? Oh, wait... companies like Polar have already convinced the masses that they should upload their watch data "to the cloud" in order to analyze and record it. Sigh.
I suppose that if you focus on the "theme" of the competition (Medieval Siege Warfare) you might come away thinking that it was a festival of violence. However, if you look at the actual game play and functional requirements of the robots, you would see that it is a technically challenging team-oriented game that happens to be played with robots instead of people. It was no more focused on violence than sports such as soccer, baseball, or volleyball. The theme was purely for fun.
The robots had to be able to "cross" various types of defenses; engineering the robots for this part of the challenge required very robust and reliable construction as well as (in some cases) very interesting manipulator capabilities. The robots had to be able to carry a "boulder" (more like a foam rubber ball" over the defenses and into a courtyard, and then the robots had to shoot the boulder into either a low goal or a high goal (more points for the high goal). In the end game, the robots had to be able to "scale" the goal tower (for the most points) by pulling itself up on a horizontal rod, all while not extending any part of the robot more than 15 inches past the perimeter frame of the robot.
The robots are controlled remotely for most of the match (except for a short autonomous period at the start). This means that each robot had a driver/pair of drivers who had to play the game by proxy (through their robot). The best robots typically involve creative use of sensors and programming to optimize the behavior of the robot for scoring (such as automatically lining up shots on the high goals). The robots play in teams of three against three for each match. Aggressive behaviors intended to damage opponents robots are right out and will get a team either fouled or disqualified. As others have pointed out, Battlebots this is not.
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Even more to the point, should we condemn someone for not getting a high-paying stressful job and using their excess income to help others? Selfish slackers who don't make the most of themselves are very unfair to those who could benefit from them sharing?
My mother-in-law spouts out with stuff like this. What's funny, is that I've driven up and down and across the US quite a bit in the last few years, and I have yet to see all the gross examples of crumbling infrastructure that are supposedly out there. I have also seen my entire family, getting by on USDA food surplus cheese, powdered milk, and eggs in the 1970s, achieve reasonable levels of living, with their own homes, vehicles, and no more welfare/food stamps etc.
Ironic that you push for people to vote for gun control (which we already have plenty of), then talk about people slowly loosing more of their freedoms. How about we encourage people to be civil and respectful to each other, everyone all together. That might work better.
I don't think that would be allowed; if viewing porn isn't ok, then creating porn is probably right out.
The $15/hour minimum wage is just a placeholder for now in the US Democratic platform. The actual objective is to get a Guaranteed Minimum Income for everyone. I'm not sure whether they think it should only apply to citizens.
Perhaps more to the point, if people start using VPNs so that they can view porn while they are at a family restaurant, McDonald's may choose to start blocking VPNs (like my local library did). And that would screw up my ability to securely access my Contacts, Calendar, and e-mail while I'm chowing down at lunch or dinner while I'm on the road.
We are all members of a *society* - anyone who wants to be anti-social should excuse themselves and head for the woods or the mountains. Good luck finding porn there. If someone likes the benefits they gain from society, they should understand that they need to put up with some restraints as well. (Don't they sell stroke mags at convenience stores anymore for the wankers?)
I think Microsoft already made the argument that free/open source software was a threat to the commercial software industry and needed to be reined in, that using Microsoft's typical FUD wasn't going to be enough, and that they now needed to be fighting standard protocols, using tactics such as "embrace, extend, and extinguish." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents. Given the revealed and suggested tactics, its not hard to imagine that a different attack vector could be funded.
The problem could be removed, easily. Eliminate the completely artificial premise that just because a person makes a particular noise, they have the right to control all subsequent times that noise is made, and to be enriched by all subsequent times that noise is made. Will society really cease to function if that premise is no longer valid? Will all music suddenly vanish? If all corporately-produced music did vanish, would our lives be left less rich and meaningful?
Musical performers would still be able to make a living, if they are good enough, putting on live performances for other people to attend. They would probably have to adjust the cost of a live performance to account for the competition from recordings and other performers with the same music/sound... and some of them would have to find another line of work.
I think health insurance is for everyone, because the risk of having expensive health problems exists for just about everyone, especially if health issues due to accidents are included. This is similar to automobile insurance - everyone who drives carries insurance, not just the bad drivers. However, insurance companies of all types love to have reasons to divide people up into very small risk pools, and charge people more for insurance if they have even a casual relationship to some risk factor that indicates that they may make claims (or higher than average claims) against insurance. In the US, auto insurance companies are using things like people's credit score to determine how much to charge them for automobile insurance, on the basis of a belief that people with certain ranges of credit scores are more likely to be involved in accidents, apparently.
For health insurance, the risk of the health companies getting access to too much data about individuals is that they will start charging individuals for insurance according to their perception of the risk of insuring those individuals. Even if they could correctly screen people into various risk categories, this would be detrimental to the overall way insurance works in general - a large pool of people are charged for insurance based on the average risk in the pool. Everyone pays a more or less affordable rate, and when the risks materialize as claims, those claims get paid off, but the insurance company doesn't have to pay out more than they took in (if they did, they would go out of business).
If only sick/unhealthy people get health insurance, then the cost of that insurance has to be high, because they will have a higher rate of claims. Those who are fortunate enough to have great health might forego insurance, but on average most people expect to have some issue or other that might require insurance coverage, so on average most people will want insurance. So more people get insurance, and the average cost of insurance goes down because the average claims rate across the larger pool is lower.
The higher the certainty of people making claims, the less of a solution "insurance" is - insurance is intended to spread risk among a large pool. It seems to be very hard to get people to understand that on average, people cannot expect to get more out of an insurance plan than what they pay into the plan. If that were so, the insurance company would go out of business. As much as people may dislike insurance companies (and many insurance companies have earned the dislike/hatred of their customers), they provide a substantial social benefit when they perform their basic risk management function.
The only way I can think of addressing the problem of a lack of competition in the last mile of communications services is for local governments to provide the communications service as a basic utility, the same as water, sewer, trash pickup. Or maybe its provided by a utility provider like electricity or gas. Then companies like Comcast don't need to be a "monopoly" cable provider for a town or county; other companies like Verizon don't need to be a "monopoly" telephony provider either - anyone who wants to provide services (any data service, including telephony data and what we now thing of as cable television service data) can, with the services riding over the utility communications network. Perhaps that is what we are backing into, with ISPs being declared to be the utilities that they so obviously seem to be. Couple that with VoIP telephone services being broken free from cable companies and RBOCs, and the move to "cut the cord" with A/V entertainment services, and pretty soon there aren't any government-protected monopolies for phone and cable... just a basic communications utility provide by or on behalf of the local government, and a multitude of service providers, all competing openly with one another.
The Internet is a grand bazaar, forum, and meeting place, and what is needed on the parts of the absolutely necessary firms that transport our communications traffic to/from the Internet is for them to most emphatically not muck with it, whether that mucking comes in the form of "super-cookies" (injections of information into what should be inviolate virtual connections), invading people's privacy by tracking what they are doing, or trying to enhance their profits by trying to charge both ends for the same traffic.
There IS honor in providing an ordinary, plebeian transport service, albeit that honor may come with lower profit margins. Over the road truckers don't sort through our packages in order to build dossiers about what we buy, nor do they insert GPS trackers into packages in order to see where they are going. We wouldn't stand for them trying to monetize the delivery service they are already being paid to provide. We should expect no less from Internet Service Providers.
The word "robot" as used by roboticists, although not specifically defined in a way that all would accept without quibbling, does not include the requirement of "Artificial Intelligence". See, for example, the way that industrial robots are defined in ISO 8373 as "an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose, manipulator programmable in three or more axes, which may be either fixed in place or mobile for use in industrial automation applications."
Even the word "autonomous" is not synonymous with "Artificial Intelligence" (or else there would be great demand for the thousands of students creating LEGO Mindstorms-Based autonomous robots to play the FIRST LEGO League "Robot Game"). So even if the requirement for something to be a robot is for it to be autonomous (and many roboticists would disagree with that requirement) that still doesn't require the device to be imbued with Artificial Intelligence.
As pointed out in the parent posting, it is Science Fiction literature that tends to equate robotics with Artificial Intelligence, not the actual, real practice of robotics that is all around us in the world today. I interpret Asimov's fascination with the three laws of "robotics" as being an exploration of the consequences of creating sentient (or at least conscious") artificial minds, regardless of whether they are embodied (in the form of a robot), and then trying to place restrictions on those artificial minds sufficient to prevent those minds from ever turning on their creators. The ancient Greeks demonstrated in their mythology an understanding of the potential for the created to turn on and become superior to the creators (younger gods tended to rebel against and imprison/destroy the elder gods who created them). It would be silly for us humans to not be wary of the possibility of a truly sentient/conscious artificially-created mind becoming a threat to humanity, whether for our own good (as in some science fiction explorations where the robots seek to protect us from our own flawed selves) or to our detriment (such as in the Terminator series, or the Matrix movies).
The idea that a machine built for the purpose of causing pain/harming people in any way represents a serious exploration of the challenges/pitfalls of building a machine capable of harm but designed specifically to avoid harm seems odd to me at best.
The claim that I was refuting was the narrow one that CERN and the EU developed the "IP/TCP/HTTP/HTML stack", not the broader idea that Europeans were involved in the network research that contributed to the knowledge used by the people who defined the IP protocol. I provided citations to the Request For Comments that define the IP and TCP protocols, both of which emanated from US institutions being funded by the US government. Those RFCs clearly identify the source of the IP and TCP protocols that are in use today for the Internet.
Packet switching - aka ARPANET- was US funded. The IP/TCP/HTTP/HTML stack was developed at CERN, EU.
To be clear - The foundation of the Internet as we know it today, the IP protocol stack, including IP (the Internet Protocol) https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc791 and TCP (the Transmission Control Protocol) https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt, were most emphatically *not* developed at CERN or by any entity in Europe. Europe was busy working on the International Standards Organization (ISO) Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) protocol stack while the US was whipping up IP, TCP, UDP (et al.) as a follow-on to the original ARPAnet communications protocols. The ISO OSI reference model for networking survived (sort of); the OSI protocol stack largely sank beneath the waves. The Internet development model (rough consensus and running code) was a lot more productive than endless committee meetings and the attempt to put everything including the kitchen sink into a protocol stack (think of it as Agile development versus Waterfall development). I'm a bit touchy about this because I got embroiled in battles involving European agencies who tried to insist that major global communications networks should be based on ISO OSI long after TCP/IP was firmly established as the clear standard for internetworking.
This of course in no way diminishes the value of the introduction of HTTP/HTML to the Internet by Tim Berners-Lee while he worked at CERN.
I've run into a company or two that doesn't have their own website, just a Facebook page. Some of them don't even let you SEE their page unless you log into Facebook! Since I don't have a Facebook account, I couldn't do business with them.
I know lots of people who don't use Facebook, and we all get along just fine. However, we are of an age where we still remember how to make phone calls, send invitations via mail (e-mail or USPS), and make plans in advance for what we are going to do.
Are friends really friends if they neglect you in their social life just because you don't use a particular on-line social media platform? I'm truly wondering on this question, because I don't hang around in social circles where this is required. What do those who do think?
If the specification of a software interface as expressed in the manner precisely needed to make the interface operable in a given programming language is copyrightable, then wouldn't the specification of any interface as implemented in the manner to make the interface usable be copyrightable?
That could make it a copyright violation to use a non-Ford oil filter on your Ford engine, or non-OEM lightbulbs in your lighting fixture, or non-Keurig K-cups in your Keurig coffee maker unless the equipment manufacturer specifically allowed it.
Ok, so perhaps it can be claimed that software is different because it is expressed in a written form that makes its interfaces themselves specifically vulnerable to a copyright claim that can't be made against the actual interfaces of physical objects. If so, that specific vulnerability should probably be removed from copyright law unless there is a good reason for not removing it. Creating a "something" that can interface with another "somethingelse" should fundamentally be a protected act against claims from the creators of the "somethingelse", as long as the internal mechanism of the "something" doesn't steal intellectual property belonging to the creators of the "somethingelse", whether the objects are physical or virtual. The greater good lies in the interface itself being freely copy-able/re-usable by others.
Which is why buyers and sellers should limit the amount of information they share during a negotiation. Uber's ability to use the app to pull battery data from the phone essentially turns the user's phone into a spy funneling information to the other party in the negotiation.
The general principle here might be "Don't host your negotiating adversary's minions within the walls of your castle unless you can wall them off from everything except that which you wish to share."
I think your succinct dismissal of polygraphs is too hasty. Polygraphs work quite well in many circumstances. However, the misconception that they are a "lie detector" confuses a lot of people. They are an interrogation tool, not a lie detection tool. The tool "works" if the objectives of the interrogator are met.
Yes, Sprint does continue to block the free market as much as they can in the US. Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile are both Sprint brands and use the Sprint network, but a phone bought under one of the brands is either very difficult to get provisioned under another brand, or impossible to get provisioned, depending on who you listen to and what dodge they managed to work on the customer service folks. One consequence is that the used market in Sprint-network compatible phones is very fragmented.
We got our kids iPod Touches after having iPod Nanos. For those who don't know, the iPod Nanos have a built-in FM radio; the iPod Touches don't. The kids like the iPod Touches for the web access, e-mail, messaging, and streaming services, but are very frustrated that they had to give up FM radio.
I'm curious to understand why FM radio isn't available in iPod Touches, iPhones, and other smart phones. Seems like it isn't a matter of real estate, if the chip is already there.
Ultimately, we'll need fewer people. That coincides well with the need to reduce the human population in order to have a better balance in the overall ecosystem. Getting there in a humane way is the challenge.
It is my understanding that a "theory" is an explanation of observed behavior. A good theory will predict certain behavior that can be tested - i.e., a "falsifiable" hypothesis. If an experiment is carried out to test the hypothesis, it may result in a positive result that supports the hypothesis, and thus the theory. (Note - A single positive outcomes doesn't mean the hypothesis is proven - the experiment needs to be repeatable and each repetition needs to yield the same positive results. Also note that a successful experimental outcome doesn't "prove" the theory, it just shows that the theory has some explanatory power, which is the main function of a theory. The theory may have other consequences [falsifiable hypotheses] that may be found to be not true, showing that although the theory has some explanatory power, it is not the complete explanation.) The experiment may result in a negative outcome that disproves the hypothesis, and hence the theory as it is currently described. Sometimes the theory can be salvaged by adding the results of the experiment to the observed data used to develop the theory, then "refactoring" the theory to incorporate the new observations. If the new version of the theory can successfully explain the new data in a fundamental way (i.e., not just as an exception to a rule), then the new theory is probably a better explanation than the original theory.
Theories that have stood up to a lot of experimental testing are judged to be more likely and more complete explanations, while those that are relatively new and untested are considered suspect. Heuristics such as Occam's razor play a role in judging the quality of a theory as well; simple explanations are preferred over more complex explanations, all else being equal (ability to explain observed data, ability to generate falsifiable hypotheses).
A good theory will probably have generated many falsifiable hypotheses, all of which will have been experimentally validated (with repeatable experiments carried out by a number of people, not just one experiment by one person). At least, that is how I understand the interrelationship between theories and hypotheses.
The word "robots," to roboticists, means a much wider range of devices than the popular conception of a robot. Pure autonomous activity is not a requirement for something to considered a robot or a robotic device; nor is mobility for that matter.
As someone else already pointed out, the FIRST robot games (FIRST LEGO League, FIRST Tech Challenge, and FIRST Robotics Competition) all include autonomous activity as part of the game. For FLL (upper elementary school and junior high school), it *is* the whole game - no remote control is used (but robots can be retrieved from the field during game play by the "operators" at the cost of a penalty, and the environment is highly simplified). For FTC and FRC, the autonomous period is only part of the game, and it's the smaller part at present. However, all of the robotic elements for autonomous action are present in the robots - sensors, actuators, on-board controller, on-board power - and the current limit on how much of the robot's activity is autonomous and/or automated assistance to the operators is the knowledge and ability of the high school (FRC, FTC) and junior high school (FTC) designers, builders, programmers. Given the level of resources and time needed to create totally autonomous robots capable of complex activity, I'm more than willing to cut the students some slack and not rain on their parade telling them "they didn't *really* build a robot" because its not totally self-directed. Anyone who wants to rise up to the challenge of helping build a totally autonomous robot can start by finding a nearby high school or junior high school with a FIRST program and offering their time as a mentor to the student team members. If your local schools don't have a FIRST program - start one. http://www.firstinspires.org/
By volunteering as a mentor, you will get the chance to work with real robots being built to solve challenges that are closely related to real world needs, using equipment that costs anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars (at no cost to you other than your time), where the imagination and ingenuity of the students and mentors get put into concrete form and tested out in full-on competition.
Disclaimer: I'm a FIRST volunteer.
Look's like there won't be a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for humans... The marketers will know both our location and what we are doing if they get their way...
What puzzles me as how they have any belief or even foundation of a belief that this kind of data will be accessible to them. Shouldn't the makers of these devices be being bent over backwards by the consumers to ensure that the consumers data is being kept secure? Oh, wait... companies like Polar have already convinced the masses that they should upload their watch data "to the cloud" in order to analyze and record it. Sigh.
I suppose that if you focus on the "theme" of the competition (Medieval Siege Warfare) you might come away thinking that it was a festival of violence. However, if you look at the actual game play and functional requirements of the robots, you would see that it is a technically challenging team-oriented game that happens to be played with robots instead of people. It was no more focused on violence than sports such as soccer, baseball, or volleyball. The theme was purely for fun.
The robots had to be able to "cross" various types of defenses; engineering the robots for this part of the challenge required very robust and reliable construction as well as (in some cases) very interesting manipulator capabilities. The robots had to be able to carry a "boulder" (more like a foam rubber ball" over the defenses and into a courtyard, and then the robots had to shoot the boulder into either a low goal or a high goal (more points for the high goal). In the end game, the robots had to be able to "scale" the goal tower (for the most points) by pulling itself up on a horizontal rod, all while not extending any part of the robot more than 15 inches past the perimeter frame of the robot.
The robots are controlled remotely for most of the match (except for a short autonomous period at the start). This means that each robot had a driver/pair of drivers who had to play the game by proxy (through their robot). The best robots typically involve creative use of sensors and programming to optimize the behavior of the robot for scoring (such as automatically lining up shots on the high goals). The robots play in teams of three against three for each match. Aggressive behaviors intended to damage opponents robots are right out and will get a team either fouled or disqualified. As others have pointed out, Battlebots this is not.