The income tax rates are higher than some "socialist countries."
US income tax rates are among the lowest in the world (http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/taxes/p148855.asp). Sales tax is also much lower than in the rest of the world, where it is usually in the 15-25% range.
Taxes were too high around the time of JFK and they've been come down ever since, starting with Kennedy's reforms. They have been ridiculously low since the mid 80s, but every one likes the sound of the "taxes are too high" meme so it gets passed along, truth be damned.
or taxpayers, which is even worse. It tries to argue that the main relationship between government and subject is tax collection. In a normal State that relationship would be provider of social services and keeper of the public order.
A consequence of this is the absurd situation of Americans screaming for less taxes (already among lowest in the world) while streets are full of potholes, police can't respond to calls, public schools are a disgrace and the debt is ballooning.
Slowly we are creating a type of uber-citizen called a corporation. The Supreme Court has ruled they have all the rights of a regular citizen, but few of the regular avenues for punishment. When was the last time a company was sentenced to the equivalent of 10 years in prison? to the death penalty?
They are a band aid for the fact that not everything in Java is an object.
I'd say they are a band aid for the fact that in Java everything has to be an object to be treated as a first class citizen. What primitive types abundantly show is that object scaffolding can be excessive for simple data types and data structures.
As for inconsistencies, how many mutually incompatible versions of Java are there? How many revamps compared to languages stewarded by standardization bodies or other neutral actors? (C has, what, 3 over it's 40 years of history?)
This is one of the biggest drawbacks of old languages. Because they are updated so rarely, even the biggest, dumbest mistakes that every one acknowledges are there live for 10-15 years before they get fixed. My pet peeve in C is that sqrt(2) would silently return garbage in pre-ANSI versions of C.
Actually, if you use the company's mailbox for snail mail the courts have already ruled that companies *cannot* access your mail. This ruling seems to be the natural extension of that.
Ancient people were just as intelligent as we are.
If by this you mean people 10K years ago, you might be correct. If you are thinking anything beyond that there seems to be evidence for active selection for intelligence around the time of the discovery of agriculture, 10-30K years ago.
The tools in the study (no pun intended) are 130K years old.
If you look at actual release dates as opposed to press release dates Intel was always ahead of the curve. As I wrote in another posting, a while back we got the data for all releases from both Moto/IBM and Intel, and Intel was always ahead, though by varying degrees (sometimes by a lot sometimes by very little).
Really? Intel's current chip at the time was the 486DX2
Yes really. A while back we plotted price/performance ratio of the x86 line versus the PowerPC line and Intel was always ahead.
Plus the CISC nature of the 486 was a bad mate for the 68040 emulator that Apple needed.
This is the only reason why the could possibly consider staying with the dead-end powerPC architecture, but even this isn't enough. Back then I claimed that Apple would have to switch to Intel regardless and was only delaying the inevitable.
Apple likes to swim upstream in too many markets. You should do that in the few places where it makes sense and differentiates you from the crowd. If you do it in too many instances you end up with a 3% market share as Apple did in the past.
By the time Apple adopted the PowerPC it had become clear that Intel would remain ahead of the curve in the processor wars. Yes, the powerPC design was cleaner, but Intel's massive R&D resources and silent adoption of RISC principles ensured their dominance in the microprocessor market.
If you are a struggling football team do you hitch your wagon to a falling star (Jay Cutler) or to a rising one (Drew Brees, highest rated QB in the last four years)?
An affirmative defense does affirm the prima facie case.
Without any admission of guilty or "breaking the law".
In order to assert an affirmative defense, it must be the case that the law has been broken.
You keep on stating this without providing any evidence for it. Just repeating it does not make it any more true. For example, assumption of risk is one of the forms of affirmative defense. To use assumption of risk there is no claim that any law was broken. It simply argues that even if the facts as stated are correct the fault lies on the claimant as he/she knowingly engaged in a risky activity. As you can see, there is no "it must be the case that the law is broken" there.
Moreover, in both of the examples you cite, the defendant has broken the law and is arguing for a lesser punishment.
No so. Affirmative defenses do not necessarily carry an admission of guilt. The typical example is entrapment, in which the Third Circuit (US v Hill 1981) claimed that entrapment (and entrapment alone) carries an assumption of guilt. At the same time, the Ninth Circuit court ruled "that a defendant may assert entrapment without being required to concede that he committed the crime charged or any of its elements" (US v. Demma, 1975). This ruling is based on precedent from the US supreme court in which Chief Justice Hughes "expressly rejects the Government's contention that a claim of entrapment necessarily involved an admission of guilt."
In most cases an affirmative defense argues that "even if the plaintiff's claim is proven" there was no crime committed/no liability incurred because of some other reason such as insanity, necessity or assumption of risk (in civil liability cases).
grave injury
This is not the same as life or death. For example, loss of limb can be considered "grave injury".
There must be clear and convincing evidence that the harm to the trespasser would have been great, and that the only reasonable alternative was to trespass.
There you go. You see, your life-or-death has become "grave injury" which is now "great harm to the trespasser".
This is a higher standard than you make it seem, a very different scenario than the one given, and a defense that effectively never would apply in a copyright infringement scenario, so the argument by analogy accomplishes nothing for you.
I've never claimed that necessity defense applies in copyright cases (nor did I state the contrary). I simply took issue with your misrepresentation of the legal facts surrounding a necessity defense.
An affirmative defense is "yes, I broke the law, but punish me less because...".
You keep on making this mistake of assuming that an affirmative defense affirms the crime. For one an affirmative defense applies also in civil liabilities, where there is no crime. Second it affirms the facts and introduces new evidence that--so the defense claims--will negate the criminal nature or liability from the facts.
The best known example of an affirmative defense is killing in self-defense. The next best known one is insanity defense. In both of those cases the typical verdict is not guilty, not "punish me less".
Second, necessity is a criminal defense, not a defense to the tort of trespass. Trespass on a private citizen's property is almost never criminal absent some other aggravation, such as trespass for the purpose of committing crime. That goes far beyond the example given.
That is correct. It exculpates the criminal act, but restitution must be made.
Third, while criminal trespass may indeed be met with a necessity argument, but "I was hurt and it was faster for me to get to the doctor by trespassing" is not necessity.
This is something that is ruled on a case by case basis. In your example would depend on how badly hurt you were, and how much time you saved by trespassing.
Necessity at law generally requires an actual, immediate, and life-threateningly serious harm
Not so. It varies by jurisdiction. Some require life-threatening conditions, in others it simply suffices that the alternative was sufficiently worse than the otherwise illegal course of action ("choice-of-evils" doctrine).
If you trespass, you are liable for damages should the owner wish to pursue them... Now maybe you were injured and had a reasonable justification to trespass in order to get timely medical assistance. That's something that can be considered in the weighing of damages, but it doesn't change the fact that what you did was unlawful.
This is incorrect. Mod parent down.
If you had a good reason you can use an affirmative defense on the basis of necessity. Under such circumstances you may well be found not guilty, depending on the specifics of the case [1,2]. You should check your local jurisdiction laws, to see if they allow an affirmative defense and exactly what are the necessities that justify it.
Did that happen? No, the industrial capitalists just found new ways to put us (and now our wives too, who are no longer required for housework thanks to all these appliances) to work for their own insatiable greed.
Only because you choose to be part of the rat race and buy that 3,000 sq. ft. McMansion you don't really need. Do you know who are the most productive workers on earth? the French. How come they are not the richest economy in the world, you say? because they choose to work the shortest number of hours in the developed world.
The choice is there. It is up to society to make it.
What else do you expect a computer to do if not execute an algorithm? It's a *computer*. It *computes*. The question is if a large enough collection of such simple algorithms interacting with each other will create the illusion of intelligence. When it comes to chess the answer is yes, so much so that Kasparov insisted Deep Blue was fed moves by a human.
You speak of a mythical "intelligence" when for all we know we ourselves might well be a collection of simple algorithms being executed in our heads.
Machine Learning engines are getting to be good enough that they can be deployed "off the shelf" to learn patterns, say, from a query stream. These are general purpose tools which can be used in more than one task.
situations that are more than a simple mathematical representation of some state.
Computers must operate over representations of the world. Since computers *compute* even when (or if) they show intelligence they will be operating over simple mathematical representations of the world.
You are making the mistake of many of the AI strong types which is asking for a lofty goal and demanding that it be solved at once. We first need to understand simple problems, then simple games like chess, and eventually will do more.
I agree that generalization is a requirement for intelligence. I.e. the ability to go beyond the simple if-this-then-do-that built in rules by the programmer. In this sense Deep Blue was able to generalize and go beyond the rules given. It used an exploration of the space on here-to-fore unseen positions to devise moves. Positions which deep blue programmers themselves would have been unable to solve.
Please show me how any of these represent major advances in AI, as opposed to just more processing power and some programming trickery.
There were technical breakthroughs. I should include chess here, in which Deep Blue had a series of heuristic improvements which allowed it to beat Kasparov. Deep Blue wasn't just hitech (the previous chess champion) with more processors.
Just having large amounts of data is not enough to translate, you then need to realize what features to extract from that data to have something that approximates intelligent translation.
The point is that the role of the human would be much smaller in the future, and requiring significantly less insight. Say, think of Deep Blue. While it had knowledge programmed in by its creators it far outperformed the level of chess than any of its programmers and trainers had.
They have been extremely rare, in fact. I do not know of a single major breakthrough that has been made in the last 20 years.
Computer translation, while not perfect has made great strides in the last 20 years. Interestingly it succeeded by doing the opposite of "build intelligence into the machine" researchers advocated. Theorem proving is also much improved. Mathematicians now routinely check their proofs using theorem proving systems such as Coq (insert juvenile joke here, preferably using the words "insert" and Coq). They have now resolved several long standing conjectures using computer assisted proofs, and at least one of them was largely unguided (Robinson's conjecture).
Precisely, we can spend enormous amounts of time creating a robot that screws a small plate onto a car, but a human with a drill is fairly economical and hard to beat at that.
The best automotive robots are the ones that flip a chassis over, drop and engine in the hood and hold the door panel while you screw the hinges: robots are their best when they do non-human things.
I highly doubt anything like as many would predict nobel-prize-winning AIs in 10-20 years, or even ever.
Actually, while I'm a skeptic of short term success of strong AI, this one prediction is among the likeliest to come through. It is not hard to envision a machine learning mechanism poring over the LHC (large hadron collider) data and discovering some unknown correlation, interaction or particle which, had it been found by a human would be considered deserving of the Nobel Prize.
Same for medicine and chemistry, in which bioinformatics software and computational chemistry programs could easily produce breakthroughs by using semi-clever exhaustive search algorithms.
Slashdot Mirror
The income tax rates are higher than some "socialist countries."
US income tax rates are among the lowest in the world (http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/taxes/p148855.asp). Sales tax is also much lower than in the rest of the world, where it is usually in the 15-25% range.
Taxes were too high around the time of JFK and they've been come down ever since, starting with Kennedy's reforms. They have been ridiculously low since the mid 80s, but every one likes the sound of the "taxes are too high" meme so it gets passed along, truth be damned.
or taxpayers, which is even worse. It tries to argue that the main relationship between government and subject is tax collection. In a normal State that relationship would be provider of social services and keeper of the public order.
A consequence of this is the absurd situation of Americans screaming for less taxes (already among lowest in the world) while streets are full of potholes, police can't respond to calls, public schools are a disgrace and the debt is ballooning.
I was using ICQ back in 1998, and it had the option of displaying each chat character as it was typed.
This is called naked typing. Google wave has it by default and is very off-putting.
Slowly we are creating a type of uber-citizen called a corporation. The Supreme Court has ruled they have all the rights of a regular citizen, but few of the regular avenues for punishment. When was the last time a company was sentenced to the equivalent of 10 years in prison? to the death penalty?
They are a band aid for the fact that not everything in Java is an object.
I'd say they are a band aid for the fact that in Java everything has to be an object to be treated as a first class citizen. What primitive types abundantly show is that object scaffolding can be excessive for simple data types and data structures.
As for inconsistencies, how many mutually incompatible versions of Java are there? How many revamps compared to languages stewarded by standardization bodies or other neutral actors? (C has, what, 3 over it's 40 years of history?)
This is one of the biggest drawbacks of old languages. Because they are updated so rarely, even the biggest, dumbest mistakes that every one acknowledges are there live for 10-15 years before they get fixed. My pet peeve in C is that sqrt(2) would silently return garbage in pre-ANSI versions of C.
Actually, if you use the company's mailbox for snail mail the courts have already ruled that companies *cannot* access your mail. This ruling seems to be the natural extension of that.
Ancient people were just as intelligent as we are.
If by this you mean people 10K years ago, you might be correct. If you are thinking anything beyond that there seems to be evidence for active selection for intelligence around the time of the discovery of agriculture, 10-30K years ago.
The tools in the study (no pun intended) are 130K years old.
If you look at actual release dates as opposed to press release dates Intel was always ahead of the curve. As I wrote in another posting, a while back we got the data for all releases from both Moto/IBM and Intel, and Intel was always ahead, though by varying degrees (sometimes by a lot sometimes by very little).
Really? Intel's current chip at the time was the 486DX2
Yes really. A while back we plotted price/performance ratio of the x86 line versus the PowerPC line and Intel was always ahead.
Plus the CISC nature of the 486 was a bad mate for the 68040 emulator that Apple needed.
This is the only reason why the could possibly consider staying with the dead-end powerPC architecture, but even this isn't enough. Back then I claimed that Apple would have to switch to Intel regardless and was only delaying the inevitable.
Apple likes to swim upstream in too many markets. You should do that in the few places where it makes sense and differentiates you from the crowd. If you do it in too many instances you end up with a 3% market share as Apple did in the past.
By the time Apple adopted the PowerPC it had become clear that Intel would remain ahead of the curve in the processor wars. Yes, the powerPC design was cleaner, but Intel's massive R&D resources and silent adoption of RISC principles ensured their dominance in the microprocessor market.
If you are a struggling football team do you hitch your wagon to a falling star (Jay Cutler) or to a rising one (Drew Brees, highest rated QB in the last four years)?
An affirmative defense does affirm the prima facie case.
Without any admission of guilty or "breaking the law".
In order to assert an affirmative defense, it must be the case that the law has been broken.
You keep on stating this without providing any evidence for it. Just repeating it does not make it any more true. For example, assumption of risk is one of the forms of affirmative defense. To use assumption of risk there is no claim that any law was broken. It simply argues that even if the facts as stated are correct the fault lies on the claimant as he/she knowingly engaged in a risky activity. As you can see, there is no "it must be the case that the law is broken" there.
Moreover, in both of the examples you cite, the defendant has broken the law and is arguing for a lesser punishment.
No so. Affirmative defenses do not necessarily carry an admission of guilt. The typical example is entrapment, in which the Third Circuit (US v Hill 1981) claimed that entrapment (and entrapment alone) carries an assumption of guilt. At the same time, the Ninth Circuit court ruled "that a defendant may assert entrapment without being required to concede that he committed the crime charged or any of its elements" (US v. Demma, 1975). This ruling is based on precedent from the US supreme court in which Chief Justice Hughes "expressly rejects the Government's contention that a claim of entrapment necessarily involved an admission of guilt."
In most cases an affirmative defense argues that "even if the plaintiff's claim is proven" there was no crime committed/no liability incurred because of some other reason such as insanity, necessity or assumption of risk (in civil liability cases).
grave injury
This is not the same as life or death. For example, loss of limb can be considered "grave injury".
There must be clear and convincing evidence that the harm to the trespasser would have been great, and that the only reasonable alternative was to trespass.
There you go. You see, your life-or-death has become "grave injury" which is now "great harm to the trespasser".
This is a higher standard than you make it seem, a very different scenario than the one given, and a defense that effectively never would apply in a copyright infringement scenario, so the argument by analogy accomplishes nothing for you.
I've never claimed that necessity defense applies in copyright cases (nor did I state the contrary). I simply took issue with your misrepresentation of the legal facts surrounding a necessity defense.
An affirmative defense is "yes, I broke the law, but punish me less because...".
You keep on making this mistake of assuming that an affirmative defense affirms the crime. For one an affirmative defense applies also in civil liabilities, where there is no crime. Second it affirms the facts and introduces new evidence that--so the defense claims--will negate the criminal nature or liability from the facts.
The best known example of an affirmative defense is killing in self-defense. The next best known one is insanity defense. In both of those cases the typical verdict is not guilty, not "punish me less".
Second, necessity is a criminal defense, not a defense to the tort of trespass. Trespass on a private citizen's property is almost never criminal absent some other aggravation, such as trespass for the purpose of committing crime. That goes far beyond the example given.
That is correct. It exculpates the criminal act, but restitution must be made.
Third, while criminal trespass may indeed be met with a necessity argument, but "I was hurt and it was faster for me to get to the doctor by trespassing" is not necessity.
This is something that is ruled on a case by case basis. In your example would depend on how badly hurt you were, and how much time you saved by trespassing.
Necessity at law generally requires an actual, immediate, and life-threateningly serious harm
Not so. It varies by jurisdiction. Some require life-threatening conditions, in others it simply suffices that the alternative was sufficiently worse than the otherwise illegal course of action ("choice-of-evils" doctrine).
If you trespass, you are liable for damages should the owner wish to pursue them... Now maybe you were injured and had a reasonable justification to trespass in order to get timely medical assistance. That's something that can be considered in the weighing of damages, but it doesn't change the fact that what you did was unlawful.
This is incorrect. Mod parent down.
If you had a good reason you can use an affirmative defense on the basis of necessity. Under such circumstances you may well be found not guilty, depending on the specifics of the case [1,2]. You should check your local jurisdiction laws, to see if they allow an affirmative defense and exactly what are the necessities that justify it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_defense
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity
IANAL, this is not legal advice, YMMV, all standard disclaimers apply.
we know fully well that we are not a simple conglomeration of algorithms,
I don't think we know this to any certainty.
please note I see an AI as not the mere illusion of intelligence, but true intelligence, created artificially
Is there really a difference?
what it means to be intelligent in the first place. And I suspect we don't.
I agree, which makes the prediction by the AGI guys all the more silly.
Did that happen? No, the industrial capitalists just found new ways to put us (and now our wives too, who are no longer required for housework thanks to all these appliances) to work for their own insatiable greed.
Only because you choose to be part of the rat race and buy that 3,000 sq. ft. McMansion you don't really need. Do you know who are the most productive workers on earth? the French. How come they are not the richest economy in the world, you say? because they choose to work the shortest number of hours in the developed world.
The choice is there. It is up to society to make it.
What else do you expect a computer to do if not execute an algorithm? It's a *computer*. It *computes*. The question is if a large enough collection of such simple algorithms interacting with each other will create the illusion of intelligence. When it comes to chess the answer is yes, so much so that Kasparov insisted Deep Blue was fed moves by a human.
You speak of a mythical "intelligence" when for all we know we ourselves might well be a collection of simple algorithms being executed in our heads.
Machine Learning engines are getting to be good enough that they can be deployed "off the shelf" to learn patterns, say, from a query stream. These are general purpose tools which can be used in more than one task.
I agree with most of what you say...
situations that are more than a simple mathematical representation of some state.
Computers must operate over representations of the world. Since computers *compute* even when (or if) they show intelligence they will be operating over simple mathematical representations of the world.
You are making the mistake of many of the AI strong types which is asking for a lofty goal and demanding that it be solved at once. We first need to understand simple problems, then simple games like chess, and eventually will do more.
I agree that generalization is a requirement for intelligence. I.e. the ability to go beyond the simple if-this-then-do-that built in rules by the programmer. In this sense Deep Blue was able to generalize and go beyond the rules given. It used an exploration of the space on here-to-fore unseen positions to devise moves. Positions which deep blue programmers themselves would have been unable to solve.
Please show me how any of these represent major advances in AI, as opposed to just more processing power and some programming trickery.
There were technical breakthroughs. I should include chess here, in which Deep Blue had a series of heuristic improvements which allowed it to beat Kasparov. Deep Blue wasn't just hitech (the previous chess champion) with more processors.
Just having large amounts of data is not enough to translate, you then need to realize what features to extract from that data to have something that approximates intelligent translation.
The point is that the role of the human would be much smaller in the future, and requiring significantly less insight. Say, think of Deep Blue. While it had knowledge programmed in by its creators it far outperformed the level of chess than any of its programmers and trainers had.
They have been extremely rare, in fact. I do not know of a single major breakthrough that has been made in the last 20 years.
Computer translation, while not perfect has made great strides in the last 20 years. Interestingly it succeeded by doing the opposite of "build intelligence into the machine" researchers advocated. Theorem proving is also much improved. Mathematicians now routinely check their proofs using theorem proving systems such as Coq (insert juvenile joke here, preferably using the words "insert" and Coq). They have now resolved several long standing conjectures using computer assisted proofs, and at least one of them was largely unguided (Robinson's conjecture).
Precisely, we can spend enormous amounts of time creating a robot that screws a small plate onto a car, but a human with a drill is fairly economical and hard to beat at that.
The best automotive robots are the ones that flip a chassis over, drop and engine in the hood and hold the door panel while you screw the hinges: robots are their best when they do non-human things.
I highly doubt anything like as many would predict nobel-prize-winning AIs in 10-20 years, or even ever.
Actually, while I'm a skeptic of short term success of strong AI, this one prediction is among the likeliest to come through. It is not hard to envision a machine learning mechanism poring over the LHC (large hadron collider) data and discovering some unknown correlation, interaction or particle which, had it been found by a human would be considered deserving of the Nobel Prize.
Same for medicine and chemistry, in which bioinformatics software and computational chemistry programs could easily produce breakthroughs by using semi-clever exhaustive search algorithms.