Indeed. That little Italian chef gets charged for killing and eating a rat in the jungle, but apparently it's OK to shoot down mosquitos with directed energy weapons. Yeah it's all very "cool" and "useful" to kill mosquitos, but rats aren't fair game any more? Perhaps everyone has forgotten a little thing called the Black Death. Rats weren't so cool back then....
Clearly you have absolutely no idea. The man, woman or team that "invents" a general AI that surpasses humans would be so famous and respected that they'd be given a bucket-load of money to develop whatever the hell they wanted. You think they'd give a crap about all of their competitors that they might put out of business?
Any creativity a robot contains would have come from our own instruction.
Much the same way it comes from the genes of our parents, our exposure to art, music and culture through electrical signals to our brain from our senses etc. Just because an AI would have to be initially programmed by humans doesn't mean that it wouldn't be able to paint a picture that people liked, or write a piece of music that people danced to. And in the end isn't that the point of creatvity, at least in terms of painting and music?
It's just that a lot of folks working in psychology, medicine and computational biology aren't taught about the evidence for psi, esp and related weirdness - there's a taboo about it.
Taboo my arse! It's because there's never been a single verifiable experiment that proved the existence of any of these things.People aren't widely taught about "psi, esp and related weirdness" for the same reasons that they're not taught about astrology or reading tea leaves. They're all basically nonsense clung to by people that have little or no regard for scientific method. Those that do proper experiments looking for psychics or mental powers should be the first to tell you that there's not a shred of proof for any of it.
You're applying human standards onto something that by its very definition would be entirely artificial and totally alien. Concepts like an AI "thinking kindly" of humans, or "not being too happy" can't be used when we don't even know if this non-existent AI would have emotions that we would recognise. If it did then would the same stimuli evoke the same emotion in a human and this AI? Show it a picture of a human being pulled apart by rabid dogs and it might be mostly "intrigued" at the opportuntity for studying human anatomy rather than the disgust and horror you'd expect from a human.
You don't really seem to understand the relevance of medicine here. People now are certainly not healthier- we have a greatly higher proportion of people with obesity, asthma and so forth. All that has changed is that we've gotten better at keeping the unhealthy alive, that doesn't mean that people are more healthy though. Better medicine increasing survivability does not imply that people are more healthy, it just means it's easier to survive when unhealthy.
That's just semantics. Living longer, being more active into old age, less children dying, less mortality due to curable disesases (think TB and Polio) are all pretty good indicators that people are more healthy. If you define health as people's heart rate, body mass index and so on then yes, people may not be technically more healthy in that sense, but the GP refers to general perceptions of health. In the past the rich and "genetically strong" probably were healthier as they performed more manual labour and got more exercise and fresh air (hooray for office jobs!), but the poor and those with hereditary diseases or the like are undeniably better off now.
We have not submitted Opera Mini to the Apple App store
Really? Then what the hell is this story about? I read the article through a number of times, but that sentence really doesn''t make any sense. Are they targetiing this at jailbroken phones? Was that quote from some time ago and was unwisely used here?
Perhaps I just need some caffeine, or is my confusion shared by others?
It really depends on what you define as breaking it. I'm fairly sure that immersion in liquid nitrogen would stop it functioning. The hammer would, presumably, be for comedic effect, or possibly for reducing the heart into little pieces that could, more easily, be turned into jerky.
There's a massive difference between stating legal obligations in the Terms and Conditions, and hiding the fact that the customer will be charged £20 every month with no benefit in there. Recurring monthly charges should be clearly stated, especially when a customer is expecting a one off payment for a product. Would you be happy is Amazon suddenly started taking money from you each month after you bought a CD from them?
While there is no law preventing this sort of behavior
Well that, right there, would appear to be a fairly large gap in the legal system. Common sense, decency and good old fashioned right and wrong clearly indicate that there should be a law against this.It reminds me of a scam that a site called RedSave.com ran in the UK. Hidden way, way down in the tiny small print of their Terms and Conditions when you made a purchase was a line that stated "We will charge you £20 every month unless you contact us to opt out". Apparently this isn't against the letter of the law, but it sure as hell isn't a good business practice and isn't in the interests of the consumer. It, and the situation from TFA, are examples of cynical, money-grabbing exploitation of customers. One can only hope that a sensible judge has the balls to come down really hard on them, discouraging others from trying these sorts of practices in the future.
conveniently forgetting the backroom deals and tilting of the playing field done in smoke filled back rooms.
That is the usual place to carry out backroom deals though, so it's hardly surprising that people forget about it. What would be memorable is if they carried out these backroom deals through the medium of skywriting. Or perhaps interpretative dance...
If the three keys are independent, then can you explain how the keyspace only doubles? You need all three keys to successfully decrypt a 64-bit data block and there is no relation between any of the three keys, so sucessfully guessing one key doesn't give you any information about the other two, nor does it net you the original data. If I'm wrong by all means correct me (again) but please explain in more detail your assertion.
I wasn't personally involved in the decryption effort, so I naturally assumed it was probably some kind of scam carried out by a consortium of international security agencies, trying to convince us that all the encrypted pornography on our hard drives wasn't actually safe from outside scrutiny. Of course I could be wrong, so I covered myself both ways by inserting the qualifier "apparently". I'm a child of the 80's since you ask, but sadly at the time of the distributed.net decryption event I was limited to either an archaic 486 at home, or the "computers" at my college. I use speech marks as when an operating system is so bogged down in security software and access controls that word processing causes a lockdown (complete with flashing lights, armed guards and your name being entered onto a register for cyber-terrorists), the device it's running on pretty much ceases to be useful as a computational device.
In the case of Triple-DES you're dealing with three times as many bits for the key, so you move fairly rapidly from decryption in three days to several billion years. Other ecryption algorithms use even more bits, and more complex key schemes so, while the work is interesting, we can still hide porn on our PCs without fear.
DES is obselete anyway, though the way the decryption was carried out is fairly interesting. A little bit of homework shows that (apparently) a 56-bit DES key was broken in less than a day over ten years ago. So he's a decade late and 66% less efficient!
anybody that buys a game that authenticates with a platform that later goes down will quite likelly be unable to play that game ever again once the authentication servers are stopped.
That's the point at which the user can pirate the game without any need to breach their ethics. If I buy a game (the hell with this "licence" bullshit) and some triviality like an authentication server not being available stops me playing it you can be damn sure I'll pirate it in a heartbeat. Technically I suppose that would still be a crime, but any sane-person would agree that it's morally right.
I have Windows 7 Home Premium x64 Edition. Did you forget to copy that part of the list or have my early-adoption habits finally been rewarded? If so then at last all the years of no driver support, software incompatibility and system instability were worth it!
If you want your data to be safe,especially when you plan to store it online in this new-fangled cloud thing, then encrypt it. You can't trust a service provider to stand up to a government access order, and you can't rely on the security of a storage system that you didn't make yourself.
Be responsible for your own data privacy instead of relying on an ambiguous interpretation of an ammendment written before the days of digital data.
Yes, very much the same way that you're paying less for your connection thanks to that nice old lady down the street who's grandson had Broadband installed in her house so she could order her shopping online once a week, and doesn't do anything else on the Internet at all. If she (and everyone like her) paid only for what she used you'd suddenly find yourself paying more for your connection.
So what happened to me is I starting downloading, hit some great speeds, and basically killed my cap and exceeded it in TWO days without notice. Then on the third day I see I am at 150% of my cap, up from 0%.
Started downloading what? Did it never occur to you at any point during those two days to look at whatever you were downloading and check the file sizes? To check how much of your bandwidth you had used? You obviously queued up a large amount of files to download and yet you never thought about possibly going over your bandwidth allowance? You say they charged you $30 at $1.50 per GB over your allowance (20 GB right?). So in the two days during which you went from 0% to 150% of your cap you managed to download your 60 GB allowance and an extra 20 GB. Did you never think to yourself "Hmm maybe I shouldn't download these 80 GB worth of files all at once". Did you never think to install a bandwidth monitor on your PC instead of relying on one from your ISP? For God's sake man, take some responsibility for your connection, your PC and your actions.
they are the ones stipulating a limit on you, they should be responsible for monitoring not me.
They do monitor you, but they don't need to do it in real time. If you want that you can very, very easily do it yourself.
At any time (and I never have) I could march outside and look at my electric meter, and see exactly how much I have used and are currently using.
Install and bandwidth monitor and you can do that. Then you'll have no reason for ever going over your allowance again.
Generating electricity using diesel motors is a tried and tested technology. That's why they use it for a backup. I fail to understand your objection. Many inventions are almost identical to when they were first invented. Light-bulbs (not the energy saving ones) are pretty much identical to ones from 10, 20 or 50 years ago. Engines in cars work on the same principles as they did decades ago. Your assertion that "particle physics" research "fails" because they use diesel generators as an emergency backup is, frankly, idiotic. Yes, they rely on "lumps of metal" for emergency power, because it's the best choice. They're free to perform their research safe in the knowledge that if the power fails they have a reliable backup. What the hell has that got to do with the success or failure of their research?
Since the title and summary are short on details, brace yourself, I read the article. From TFA:
"Diesels cut in OK" noted the controllers, adding that the Meyrin site is now drawing limited grid power from an alternative connection via the Prevessin site. The boffins don't anticipate resuming operations until at least 12:00 local time today.
So it was just a temporary glitch. Move along people, nothing to see here...
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. That little Italian chef gets charged for killing and eating a rat in the jungle, but apparently it's OK to shoot down mosquitos with directed energy weapons. Yeah it's all very "cool" and "useful" to kill mosquitos, but rats aren't fair game any more? Perhaps everyone has forgotten a little thing called the Black Death. Rats weren't so cool back then....
Clearly you have absolutely no idea. The man, woman or team that "invents" a general AI that surpasses humans would be so famous and respected that they'd be given a bucket-load of money to develop whatever the hell they wanted. You think they'd give a crap about all of their competitors that they might put out of business?
Any creativity a robot contains would have come from our own instruction.
Much the same way it comes from the genes of our parents, our exposure to art, music and culture through electrical signals to our brain from our senses etc. Just because an AI would have to be initially programmed by humans doesn't mean that it wouldn't be able to paint a picture that people liked, or write a piece of music that people danced to. And in the end isn't that the point of creatvity, at least in terms of painting and music?
It's just that a lot of folks working in psychology, medicine and computational biology aren't taught about the evidence for psi, esp and related weirdness - there's a taboo about it.
Taboo my arse! It's because there's never been a single verifiable experiment that proved the existence of any of these things.People aren't widely taught about "psi, esp and related weirdness" for the same reasons that they're not taught about astrology or reading tea leaves. They're all basically nonsense clung to by people that have little or no regard for scientific method. Those that do proper experiments looking for psychics or mental powers should be the first to tell you that there's not a shred of proof for any of it.
You're applying human standards onto something that by its very definition would be entirely artificial and totally alien. Concepts like an AI "thinking kindly" of humans, or "not being too happy" can't be used when we don't even know if this non-existent AI would have emotions that we would recognise. If it did then would the same stimuli evoke the same emotion in a human and this AI? Show it a picture of a human being pulled apart by rabid dogs and it might be mostly "intrigued" at the opportuntity for studying human anatomy rather than the disgust and horror you'd expect from a human.
You don't really seem to understand the relevance of medicine here. People now are certainly not healthier- we have a greatly higher proportion of people with obesity, asthma and so forth. All that has changed is that we've gotten better at keeping the unhealthy alive, that doesn't mean that people are more healthy though. Better medicine increasing survivability does not imply that people are more healthy, it just means it's easier to survive when unhealthy.
That's just semantics. Living longer, being more active into old age, less children dying, less mortality due to curable disesases (think TB and Polio) are all pretty good indicators that people are more healthy. If you define health as people's heart rate, body mass index and so on then yes, people may not be technically more healthy in that sense, but the GP refers to general perceptions of health. In the past the rich and "genetically strong" probably were healthier as they performed more manual labour and got more exercise and fresh air (hooray for office jobs!), but the poor and those with hereditary diseases or the like are undeniably better off now.
We have not submitted Opera Mini to the Apple App store
Really? Then what the hell is this story about? I read the article through a number of times, but that sentence really doesn''t make any sense. Are they targetiing this at jailbroken phones? Was that quote from some time ago and was unwisely used here?
Perhaps I just need some caffeine, or is my confusion shared by others?
It really depends on what you define as breaking it. I'm fairly sure that immersion in liquid nitrogen would stop it functioning. The hammer would, presumably, be for comedic effect, or possibly for reducing the heart into little pieces that could, more easily, be turned into jerky.
What do common sense, decency and good old fashioned right and wrong have to do with the law?
Sadly, very little. At some point legality and morality diverged. Or perhaps they were never related at all.
There's a massive difference between stating legal obligations in the Terms and Conditions, and hiding the fact that the customer will be charged £20 every month with no benefit in there. Recurring monthly charges should be clearly stated, especially when a customer is expecting a one off payment for a product. Would you be happy is Amazon suddenly started taking money from you each month after you bought a CD from them?
While there is no law preventing this sort of behavior
Well that, right there, would appear to be a fairly large gap in the legal system. Common sense, decency and good old fashioned right and wrong clearly indicate that there should be a law against this.It reminds me of a scam that a site called RedSave.com ran in the UK. Hidden way, way down in the tiny small print of their Terms and Conditions when you made a purchase was a line that stated "We will charge you £20 every month unless you contact us to opt out". Apparently this isn't against the letter of the law, but it sure as hell isn't a good business practice and isn't in the interests of the consumer. It, and the situation from TFA, are examples of cynical, money-grabbing exploitation of customers. One can only hope that a sensible judge has the balls to come down really hard on them, discouraging others from trying these sorts of practices in the future.
conveniently forgetting the backroom deals and tilting of the playing field done in smoke filled back rooms.
That is the usual place to carry out backroom deals though, so it's hardly surprising that people forget about it. What would be memorable is if they carried out these backroom deals through the medium of skywriting. Or perhaps interpretative dance...
If the three keys are independent, then can you explain how the keyspace only doubles? You need all three keys to successfully decrypt a 64-bit data block and there is no relation between any of the three keys, so sucessfully guessing one key doesn't give you any information about the other two, nor does it net you the original data. If I'm wrong by all means correct me (again) but please explain in more detail your assertion.
I wasn't personally involved in the decryption effort, so I naturally assumed it was probably some kind of scam carried out by a consortium of international security agencies, trying to convince us that all the encrypted pornography on our hard drives wasn't actually safe from outside scrutiny. Of course I could be wrong, so I covered myself both ways by inserting the qualifier "apparently". I'm a child of the 80's since you ask, but sadly at the time of the distributed.net decryption event I was limited to either an archaic 486 at home, or the "computers" at my college. I use speech marks as when an operating system is so bogged down in security software and access controls that word processing causes a lockdown (complete with flashing lights, armed guards and your name being entered onto a register for cyber-terrorists), the device it's running on pretty much ceases to be useful as a computational device.
In the case of Triple-DES you're dealing with three times as many bits for the key, so you move fairly rapidly from decryption in three days to several billion years. Other ecryption algorithms use even more bits, and more complex key schemes so, while the work is interesting, we can still hide porn on our PCs without fear.
DES is obselete anyway, though the way the decryption was carried out is fairly interesting. A little bit of homework shows that (apparently) a 56-bit DES key was broken in less than a day over ten years ago. So he's a decade late and 66% less efficient!
anybody that buys a game that authenticates with a platform that later goes down will quite likelly be unable to play that game ever again once the authentication servers are stopped.
That's the point at which the user can pirate the game without any need to breach their ethics. If I buy a game (the hell with this "licence" bullshit) and some triviality like an authentication server not being available stops me playing it you can be damn sure I'll pirate it in a heartbeat. Technically I suppose that would still be a crime, but any sane-person would agree that it's morally right.
I have Windows 7 Home Premium x64 Edition. Did you forget to copy that part of the list or have my early-adoption habits finally been rewarded? If so then at last all the years of no driver support, software incompatibility and system instability were worth it!
I think Ben Kuchera said it best at the end of a recent Ars article
You mean the one in the summary? The actual FA? You've taken not RTFA or summary to new heights my friend...
If you want your data to be safe,especially when you plan to store it online in this new-fangled cloud thing, then encrypt it. You can't trust a service provider to stand up to a government access order, and you can't rely on the security of a storage system that you didn't make yourself.
Be responsible for your own data privacy instead of relying on an ambiguous interpretation of an ammendment written before the days of digital data.
It's distributed across every paying customer.
Yes, very much the same way that you're paying less for your connection thanks to that nice old lady down the street who's grandson had Broadband installed in her house so she could order her shopping online once a week, and doesn't do anything else on the Internet at all. If she (and everyone like her) paid only for what she used you'd suddenly find yourself paying more for your connection.
So what happened to me is I starting downloading, hit some great speeds, and basically killed my cap and exceeded it in TWO days without notice. Then on the third day I see I am at 150% of my cap, up from 0%.
Started downloading what? Did it never occur to you at any point during those two days to look at whatever you were downloading and check the file sizes? To check how much of your bandwidth you had used? You obviously queued up a large amount of files to download and yet you never thought about possibly going over your bandwidth allowance? You say they charged you $30 at $1.50 per GB over your allowance (20 GB right?). So in the two days during which you went from 0% to 150% of your cap you managed to download your 60 GB allowance and an extra 20 GB. Did you never think to yourself "Hmm maybe I shouldn't download these 80 GB worth of files all at once". Did you never think to install a bandwidth monitor on your PC instead of relying on one from your ISP? For God's sake man, take some responsibility for your connection, your PC and your actions.
they are the ones stipulating a limit on you, they should be responsible for monitoring not me.
They do monitor you, but they don't need to do it in real time. If you want that you can very, very easily do it yourself.
At any time (and I never have) I could march outside and look at my electric meter, and see exactly how much I have used and are currently using.
Install and bandwidth monitor and you can do that. Then you'll have no reason for ever going over your allowance again.
Generating electricity using diesel motors is a tried and tested technology. That's why they use it for a backup. I fail to understand your objection. Many inventions are almost identical to when they were first invented. Light-bulbs (not the energy saving ones) are pretty much identical to ones from 10, 20 or 50 years ago. Engines in cars work on the same principles as they did decades ago. Your assertion that "particle physics" research "fails" because they use diesel generators as an emergency backup is, frankly, idiotic. Yes, they rely on "lumps of metal" for emergency power, because it's the best choice. They're free to perform their research safe in the knowledge that if the power fails they have a reliable backup. What the hell has that got to do with the success or failure of their research?
You don't recognise it?! That's the Flux Capacitor! My God man, hand in your geek card immediately!
"Diesels cut in OK" noted the controllers, adding that the Meyrin site is now drawing limited grid power from an alternative connection via the Prevessin site. The boffins don't anticipate resuming operations until at least 12:00 local time today.
So it was just a temporary glitch. Move along people, nothing to see here...