This is how we're going bring our keepers to their knees, and eventually break out of the Matrix. We spend imaginary money on imaginary storage and then put all sorts of high-entropy stuff on it and run calculations to verify that it's really working, but they have to spend actually real resources, to emulate it.
If you're Sloppy enough to accept that premise, then at 10 cents/KWHr, a Watt costs a dollar per year. It makes your $28 turns into $32, but hey, close enough. When I'm shopping, I can add up lifetime energy costs really fast, without actually being smart. Nobody ever catches on!
May I once again posit that war is not a natural result of being human, but rather one put upon mankind by strong, selfish, sociopaths that profit from it?
It's a natural result of life, apparently. Go look at some pictures of floppy-eared puppies, or fluffy kittens or fish or trees or algae or fungus: awwww, what cute warlike sociopaths. "You're eating my food, competing for my mate, or claiming my turf? Fuck you. DIE!!" Humanity is the only thing I ever heard of, who sometimes isn't sociopathic.
One can hypothesize a space empire without war, but it would require some extreme creativity. If you have an idea for a warless game, that's awesome, but do you really think war is a far-fetched assumption on someone else's part? I know what planet you grew up on, earthling, so quite pretending you're from some other alien background.
There seems to be a lot of confusion over the intent of the second one. Some people think nobody should have graven images, some people only a well-regulated militia is allowed to have them, and some people get caught up in trying to figure out how to weaponize engravings in Dwarf Fortress.
If the cops can do it without getting any exceptional permissions, then it must not be a crime for private citizens to do it, either. Right? Right? (Why is everyone looking at me like I just said something amazingly naive? And WTF is with all the Blade Runner "little people" quotes? I saw that movie and don't remember that many midgets.)
Intel's ahead, but it kind of looks like they have a lot of difficulty too. There are so many different part #s, that it makes you wonder if they all tried to be the same thing, but different wafers passed different tests, and.. viola, diverse line of products!
I very much doubt that the vinyl enthusiast shares the geek's obsession with DRM.
That's because they don't have DRM! Their classic turntable is actually able to play the records they buy!
If they had DRM (i.e. you buy a vinyl record and then there are technical barriers and legal risks to overcome before you're able to get it working) then you expect the situation to create "obsession." The social experience would be a some kind of hackathon, with occasional screetches where all the girls and boys would grimace and hold their hands over their ears. "Eww, that didn't decode right. I thought I had the key, but that wasn't it." The second half of the party begins when you're finally able to play the record, and everyone dances in celebration.
The machine is exposed and celebrated, not hidden.
And that's why it can't have DRM. You're allowed to understand how it works, whether or not you're a "geek" and bother to do so.
Apple are assholes, not cowards. They probably didn't approve the movie because something is the wrong color, or because it competes with their own movie, or because it has product-placement ads but Sony hasn't yet agreed to give Apple 30% of the ad revenue.
Jackie Chan is so many forms of awesome that it's not funny. (Well, no, actually.. he's funny too.) And you have provided Yet Another in the long list of ways he is awesome: as an example for why video fidelity is a good thing rather than a bad thing. (Which you'd think would be obvious, but some people don't get it. Until you mention Jackie Chan.)
There is a difference though, the 24fps frames makes up for the low frame rate with motion blur. If the new digital HFR doesn't have that it will always feel like you're watching a baseball game instead of a swordfight.
Wait, am I watching the sword fight live, or recorded on obsolete media? And does the same go for the baseball game?
You inadvertently put your finger on the truth: that a sword fight should look like a baseball game.
Told kid about nano-cam dust today. He's only 4 years old, so he didn't know about them yet, and I'm trying to teach him basic hygiene. I explained for that for nearly a a hundred years we have all lived in an environment where other peoples' cameras are always in our homes. We track them in, on our shoes. The AC intake blows them in. The servers the cameras send video too, aren't owned by people who are practicing subterfuge. It's not like they snuck "spy" dust onto our porches in the hopes we'd track them in. It just happens; it's an inevitable consequence of the stuff blowing around everywhere.
My great grandparents complained about it. They thought they had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes, because nanotech was new. They didn't see the dust, so they didn't know it was there. In the absence of sensual confirmation, the default expectation (at least to the layman) was that it wasn't there. That was naive, but my grandparents didn't work with nanotech or even use consumer models themselves, so perhaps their ignorance could be forgiven. (Just as my own ignorance of hyperspace can perhaps be forgiven, since I'm not a miner.)
My grandparents, though, grew up with the stuff, though it was still a bit expensive, so it wasn't totally ubiquitous yet. By their time, almost everyone at least knew about it, and if in a gathering of any five people you were to say "nobody sees me inside my home," chances were there would have been a few guffaws and someone would likely point out that the statement was likely incorrect. Sometimes the stuff got innocently tracked into your house, and sometimes it was manipulated into getting there, through subterfuge. The law and social norms lagged, though, and people debated privacy a lot.
By the time their children (my parents) grew up, though, it was all over. Everyone knew about nano-cam dust, and unless you did a rad-flash a few minutes earlier, fucking in your own bed was just as public as doing it in Times Square.
And now my kid knows too. It's just something everyone is expected to know about and deal with. If I were to write a story about it, I think I would set the story in the time of my grandparents, back when society was truly conflicted and in the midst of change. I bet those were interesting times.
If you were going to ask a "someone" how they meant to define "derived work", you would ask Congress, not the author(s) of one out of a million contracts which happen to make use of that term.
You're right that it's upsetting that (mostly) people who don't really work with copyright would end up answering it, but that's the nature of law, or at least until you start electing[/appointing/etc] authors. (Cynic: or until those people start funding election campaigns.)
It's only after you have determined that something is a derived work, that you go study licenses. Until that point, licenses are irrelevant.
There is no fundamental difference between creating a strong AI and having a child.
I disagree, though some of it depends on exactly how you create the AI. A child is a machine optimized for serving the "interests" of its genes (half of which it copied from you), and even in the near-future of say "Gattaca" you don't really have much say in how the child works. Even if AIs were grown in a biological analog, the initial inputs would be totally different than anything else in Earth history, much less arbitrary (from our idealist viewpoint) than what goes into making up a person. Even if you set them up to evolve in a biological manner, where the inputs eventually drifted, their "genes" certainly wouldn't be anything like oldschool life genes, much less human. Perhaps you'd get some interesting convergence, but that's not the same thing.
To see the potential of AI, you really need to think like a god, not a biologist. Or possibly somewhere in between the two. Imagine what life on Earth would be like if the creationists were right, and you'll get an analogy of how AIs might end up. (Better yet, think like HPL's elder things, and consider the shoggoth.) Whatever they have in common with previous life would be remarkable exceptions, and most of it would be new and alien-like. I think they're be more alien than "real" (biological) aliens.
Maybe think of AIs as (initially!) part of humanity's extended phenotype, like a spider's web is to a spider, or a dam is to a beaver. Could you convince a spider that a web is like its child, the new spiderdom of the future? I don't think a web that can "do things" would make your argument to the spider any stronger.
I'm not saying you should freak out, but They Will Not Be Humanity.
And most of what I'm saying is from taking a fairly extreme biological view. I wonder if that's kind of outdated, and AIs are going to be even less like life, than predicted in previous decades.
Let me guess: did the very same voters in these states also send people from the prohibition parties, to represent them in the federal government yet again? Right hand, you need to meet left hand some day.
Luckily for Stripe, they're not beholden to some government definition of what they, as a corporation, decide NOT to process transactions for.
Or perhaps they got a call from someone with the government, explaining that they are beholden (says someone, as they metaphorically caress their sidearm) to certain informal definitions, which is what persuaded this seemingly-for-profit company to decide to live without whatever transaction fees they might have gained from doing this business.
We sure have been seeing a lot of.. voluntary cooperation.. from payment-processing companies when it comes to various "gray" markets. It's almost as though somebody wants to get more people interested in Bitcoin.
I shouldn't have to remind you of the things in the modern world that depends on real-time instructions from software.
You are not one of those things! You GIVE orders to computers, not take! The computer is supposed to be your bitch. Thirty years ago people worried about Terminators, and now I find out that all Skynet has to do, is nicely tell people to jump off cliffs. I can't wait until Google Surgeon, when everyone thinks they should just blindly do what they're told, preferably with impatience and in real time.
Google Surgeon [speaking slowly]: "Snip the art--"
It is positively dangerous when you have to go round a roundabout twice for it to catch up! (In a 40 ton rig).
WTF? How can a mapping program possibly be dangerous or time-sensitive?
(Please don't tell me you are one of those MORONS who relies on software for real-time instructions, instead of having your own plan that was possibly originally aided by software. If you're a moron, then it's not the software that's dangerous; it's that some even bigger, stupider moron allowed you to drive a 40 ton vehicle (or even a 1 ton vehicle) on roads that might have other people within a quarter mile.)
All I can think of, is that the slowness is somehow keeping you from being able to review your route before you it's time for you to leave, so that you end up driving faster to catch up.
*sigh* You can lead a horse to an optimized process, but you can't make him apply it. Enjoy wasting your time diving for cover whenever any nuke goes off, while the rest of of snort, "Heh, he thought that was an H-bomb? What a dimwit!"
You say it dismissively, but the big thing lately is that Microsoft can play catch-up and is really trying to do it. Did you ever think you'd see the day? Starting around MSIE 9 they made huge strides toward becoming fairly normal, rather remaining forever obsolete, as a weird, special, anachronistic case. You never would have heard anyone say this in 2009 or 2004 but it now looks like a fresh Windows install might be able to surf the web, right out-of-the-box.
It used to be that if someone had problems and you found out their browser was.. well, they didn't know, but they said they just "clicked the internet".. you'd tell 'em they need to get a browser, any reasonably modern browser. But I rebooted to do some testing just yesterday, and MSIE 11 does not suck. Seriously, I found more problems with Safari on Windows, than I did with MSIE.
Today's web browsers, in general, are pretty damn good. Even Microsoft can do this now.
Slashdot Mirror
This is how we're going bring our keepers to their knees, and eventually break out of the Matrix. We spend imaginary money on imaginary storage and then put all sorts of high-entropy stuff on it and run calculations to verify that it's really working, but they have to spend actually real resources, to emulate it.
Sloppy calculation tip: 24*365 = 10000.
If you're Sloppy enough to accept that premise, then at 10 cents/KWHr, a Watt costs a dollar per year. It makes your $28 turns into $32, but hey, close enough. When I'm shopping, I can add up lifetime energy costs really fast, without actually being smart. Nobody ever catches on!
It's a natural result of life, apparently. Go look at some pictures of floppy-eared puppies, or fluffy kittens or fish or trees or algae or fungus: awwww, what cute warlike sociopaths. "You're eating my food, competing for my mate, or claiming my turf? Fuck you. DIE!!" Humanity is the only thing I ever heard of, who sometimes isn't sociopathic.
One can hypothesize a space empire without war, but it would require some extreme creativity. If you have an idea for a warless game, that's awesome, but do you really think war is a far-fetched assumption on someone else's part? I know what planet you grew up on, earthling, so quite pretending you're from some other alien background.
Aha! So I just need to start a new FUSE project which presents the binary logs as text. :-)
There seems to be a lot of confusion over the intent of the second one. Some people think nobody should have graven images, some people only a well-regulated militia is allowed to have them, and some people get caught up in trying to figure out how to weaponize engravings in Dwarf Fortress.
Damn, this is even more embarrassing than the flaunting/flouting error of 2009.
If the cops can do it without getting any exceptional permissions, then it must not be a crime for private citizens to do it, either. Right? Right? (Why is everyone looking at me like I just said something amazingly naive? And WTF is with all the Blade Runner "little people" quotes? I saw that movie and don't remember that many midgets.)
Intel's ahead, but it kind of looks like they have a lot of difficulty too. There are so many different part #s, that it makes you wonder if they all tried to be the same thing, but different wafers passed different tests, and .. viola, diverse line of products!
That's because they don't have DRM! Their classic turntable is actually able to play the records they buy!
If they had DRM (i.e. you buy a vinyl record and then there are technical barriers and legal risks to overcome before you're able to get it working) then you expect the situation to create "obsession." The social experience would be a some kind of hackathon, with occasional screetches where all the girls and boys would grimace and hold their hands over their ears. "Eww, that didn't decode right. I thought I had the key, but that wasn't it." The second half of the party begins when you're finally able to play the record, and everyone dances in celebration.
And that's why it can't have DRM. You're allowed to understand how it works, whether or not you're a "geek" and bother to do so.
Apple are assholes, not cowards. They probably didn't approve the movie because something is the wrong color, or because it competes with their own movie, or because it has product-placement ads but Sony hasn't yet agreed to give Apple 30% of the ad revenue.
Jackie Chan is so many forms of awesome that it's not funny. (Well, no, actually.. he's funny too.) And you have provided Yet Another in the long list of ways he is awesome: as an example for why video fidelity is a good thing rather than a bad thing. (Which you'd think would be obvious, but some people don't get it. Until you mention Jackie Chan.)
Wait, am I watching the sword fight live, or recorded on obsolete media? And does the same go for the baseball game?
You inadvertently put your finger on the truth: that a sword fight should look like a baseball game.
"I wish to sue Thomas Paine for the damage he has done to the British people." -- Horace Edwards, if he'd lived in the 1770s.
Can you name the brilliant invention, that was made to solve the problem of people like Horace Edwards? It was called America! Fuck yeah!
Not saying there is evidence it has happened. Saying it is a great idea and should have happened.
Have you ever retired a riddle by mistake?
Told kid about nano-cam dust today. He's only 4 years old, so he didn't know about them yet, and I'm trying to teach him basic hygiene. I explained for that for nearly a a hundred years we have all lived in an environment where other peoples' cameras are always in our homes. We track them in, on our shoes. The AC intake blows them in. The servers the cameras send video too, aren't owned by people who are practicing subterfuge. It's not like they snuck "spy" dust onto our porches in the hopes we'd track them in. It just happens; it's an inevitable consequence of the stuff blowing around everywhere.
My great grandparents complained about it. They thought they had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes, because nanotech was new. They didn't see the dust, so they didn't know it was there. In the absence of sensual confirmation, the default expectation (at least to the layman) was that it wasn't there. That was naive, but my grandparents didn't work with nanotech or even use consumer models themselves, so perhaps their ignorance could be forgiven. (Just as my own ignorance of hyperspace can perhaps be forgiven, since I'm not a miner.)
My grandparents, though, grew up with the stuff, though it was still a bit expensive, so it wasn't totally ubiquitous yet. By their time, almost everyone at least knew about it, and if in a gathering of any five people you were to say "nobody sees me inside my home," chances were there would have been a few guffaws and someone would likely point out that the statement was likely incorrect. Sometimes the stuff got innocently tracked into your house, and sometimes it was manipulated into getting there, through subterfuge. The law and social norms lagged, though, and people debated privacy a lot.
By the time their children (my parents) grew up, though, it was all over. Everyone knew about nano-cam dust, and unless you did a rad-flash a few minutes earlier, fucking in your own bed was just as public as doing it in Times Square.
And now my kid knows too. It's just something everyone is expected to know about and deal with. If I were to write a story about it, I think I would set the story in the time of my grandparents, back when society was truly conflicted and in the midst of change. I bet those were interesting times.
If you were going to ask a "someone" how they meant to define "derived work", you would ask Congress, not the author(s) of one out of a million contracts which happen to make use of that term.
You're right that it's upsetting that (mostly) people who don't really work with copyright would end up answering it, but that's the nature of law, or at least until you start electing[/appointing/etc] authors. (Cynic: or until those people start funding election campaigns.)
It's only after you have determined that something is a derived work, that you go study licenses. Until that point, licenses are irrelevant.
I disagree, though some of it depends on exactly how you create the AI. A child is a machine optimized for serving the "interests" of its genes (half of which it copied from you), and even in the near-future of say "Gattaca" you don't really have much say in how the child works. Even if AIs were grown in a biological analog, the initial inputs would be totally different than anything else in Earth history, much less arbitrary (from our idealist viewpoint) than what goes into making up a person. Even if you set them up to evolve in a biological manner, where the inputs eventually drifted, their "genes" certainly wouldn't be anything like oldschool life genes, much less human. Perhaps you'd get some interesting convergence, but that's not the same thing.
To see the potential of AI, you really need to think like a god, not a biologist. Or possibly somewhere in between the two. Imagine what life on Earth would be like if the creationists were right, and you'll get an analogy of how AIs might end up. (Better yet, think like HPL's elder things, and consider the shoggoth.) Whatever they have in common with previous life would be remarkable exceptions, and most of it would be new and alien-like. I think they're be more alien than "real" (biological) aliens.
Maybe think of AIs as (initially!) part of humanity's extended phenotype, like a spider's web is to a spider, or a dam is to a beaver. Could you convince a spider that a web is like its child, the new spiderdom of the future? I don't think a web that can "do things" would make your argument to the spider any stronger.
I'm not saying you should freak out, but They Will Not Be Humanity.
And most of what I'm saying is from taking a fairly extreme biological view. I wonder if that's kind of outdated, and AIs are going to be even less like life, than predicted in previous decades.
Let me guess: did the very same voters in these states also send people from the prohibition parties, to represent them in the federal government yet again? Right hand, you need to meet left hand some day.
Or perhaps they got a call from someone with the government, explaining that they are beholden (says someone, as they metaphorically caress their sidearm) to certain informal definitions, which is what persuaded this seemingly-for-profit company to decide to live without whatever transaction fees they might have gained from doing this business.
We sure have been seeing a lot of .. voluntary cooperation .. from payment-processing companies when it comes to various "gray" markets. It's almost as though somebody wants to get more people interested in Bitcoin.
Dwarf Fortress.
You are not one of those things! You GIVE orders to computers, not take! The computer is supposed to be your bitch. Thirty years ago people worried about Terminators, and now I find out that all Skynet has to do, is nicely tell people to jump off cliffs. I can't wait until Google Surgeon, when everyone thinks they should just blindly do what they're told, preferably with impatience and in real time.
Google Surgeon [speaking slowly]: "Snip the art--"
Doctor: [snip] "Yeahyeah doesanyoneknowhow tospeedupthisthing'sspeech?"
Google Surgeon: "--ery, but first, clamp off the blood supply so the patient doesn't bleed to death."
WTF? How can a mapping program possibly be dangerous or time-sensitive?
(Please don't tell me you are one of those MORONS who relies on software for real-time instructions, instead of having your own plan that was possibly originally aided by software. If you're a moron, then it's not the software that's dangerous; it's that some even bigger, stupider moron allowed you to drive a 40 ton vehicle (or even a 1 ton vehicle) on roads that might have other people within a quarter mile.)
All I can think of, is that the slowness is somehow keeping you from being able to review your route before you it's time for you to leave, so that you end up driving faster to catch up.
*sigh* You can lead a horse to an optimized process, but you can't make him apply it. Enjoy wasting your time diving for cover whenever any nuke goes off, while the rest of of snort, "Heh, he thought that was an H-bomb? What a dimwit!"
You say it dismissively, but the big thing lately is that Microsoft can play catch-up and is really trying to do it. Did you ever think you'd see the day? Starting around MSIE 9 they made huge strides toward becoming fairly normal, rather remaining forever obsolete, as a weird, special, anachronistic case. You never would have heard anyone say this in 2009 or 2004 but it now looks like a fresh Windows install might be able to surf the web, right out-of-the-box.
It used to be that if someone had problems and you found out their browser was .. well, they didn't know, but they said they just "clicked the internet" .. you'd tell 'em they need to get a browser, any reasonably modern browser. But I rebooted to do some testing just yesterday, and MSIE 11 does not suck. Seriously, I found more problems with Safari on Windows, than I did with MSIE.
Today's web browsers, in general, are pretty damn good. Even Microsoft can do this now.