The president is not utterly meaningless. He has significant power to effect changes. He's certainly not as independent as is normally claimed, but there's a bit gap between that and powerless.
That said, it's rare for a president to choose to use that power for the good of the people unless that concurs with the good of his financial backers. Chester A. Arthur did it. To some extent FDR did it. And most presidents exercise power that benefits the citizenry in areas where it doesn't impinge on the goals of their financial backers.
The problem is, now the financial backers have a much wider range of interests than they did even 20 years ago. And, of course, there's the additional problem that a president must stand behind his subordinates except in the case of egregious misbehavior on their part, and the people who have worked their way into charge of the various government departments are those interested in increasing their power.
All this, of course, is underlay for the fact that nobody becomes an elected federal official who isn't driven by a psychotic need for power or control.
So, all in all, evil as the financial backers of the president are, they may well be more moderate than the president himself. (It's hard to tell.) But they also may well have fewer humanitarian tendencies. (This isn't guaranteed. If Bush had any humanitarian tendencies, he kept them well hidden.)
Please don't misunderstand, it isn't only elected officials who has psychotic needs for power and control. This is obvious in the case of many top corporation managers. But it's even worse in those who set the rules for the country.
N.B.: The nature of those who become powerful politicians is determined by the system within which they operate. It acts as a selective filter, eliminating those who are less driven, and less willing to compromise their ideals. (This is often a good thing, but it always has its negative aspects.) It is for this reason that I feel that some form of majority wins voting would improve the government, though probably not as much as chosing by lot, with selective filters to eliminate as much as 10% of the population on grounds of obvious incapacity of one form or another. But this would require other changes to decentralize decision making. (This a good idea in itself, for many other reasons, despite the poor history of triumvirates. Possibly a council of 5 or 7 would be better. With decisons by secret ballot. Experiment would be needed, as I don't think theory is strong enough to decide, but it clearly needs to be small enough to reach a reasonably quick decision, so "calling the question" needs to be easy.)
What competition was there for this service? I'd never heard of it, or anything like it, before. (I don't use SMS, so that's no be surprise.)
I think that when you get to step 2 you are talking about the wrong company. Google often, perhaps usually, doesn't have any competition for their minor projects. Sometimes the competition develops AFTER they show up. If there was prior competition for Picassa, for example, I never heard of it.
Are you asserting that people shouldn't complain when they are annoyed? Because that's what it sounds like.
Sorry, but I believe that complaining when a company annoys you is a public service. It warns others. (Admittedly, it's gotten to the point where I expect Google to drop any free service without warning, but there are always people who need to be reminded.)
That said, Google also has a perfect right to drop any service that they aren't contractually obligated to maintain. But this doesn't imply that those they annoy when they do so shouldn't voice their complaints.
O, given the loose usage of the term robot to include all sorts of telefactors, the only reason you can't say that the "personal robotics revolution imminent..." is because it's already here. The way it's being used would qualify a doorbell as a robot.
OTOH, I would consider a roomba to be a valid robot. So it's happening, it's just that it's starting rather slowly. It's reasonable to expect the speed to pick up.
So. If your roomba, following the programming that you have given it, trips someone, should the law blame you? Why not? Or, if you take the other side, why? Does this same reasoning apply to your self-driving car? Justify.
The real problem is that the law seems to have totally ruled out responsibility for the results of ones actions in the case of the party suing. THAT is what needs to be changed.
My guess is that any useful definition of sentient will exclude robot butlers, self-driving cars, and any use in an unstructured environment (well, minimally to moderately structured).
Yes. I know you were just being silly. Except that "silly" is a polite word I'm using instead of stupid. Please note that your very suggestion presumes that all nations & companies would come to a common agreement and could be trusted to keep that agreement. There are also many other things wrong with it, but that suffices.
You don't actually need to do that experiment, unless you believe that mammalian neurons are intrinsicly different from other neurons. Both insects and mollusks have at least some species that are simple enough to be understood. Neurons are deterministic. Evolution has taken explicit steps to ensure that. Read up on the sphex wasp for an example that's easy to understand, but there have been other, more precise experiments, done since.
IIRC, there's one mollusk whose neural system contains exactly 17 neurons in a predefined arrangement. I'm not going to claim that that system is totally understood, but the last time I checked we were getting close to understanding it. And it's a deterministic system. There's also been a lot of good work done on fruitflies, though they have a much more complex neural system, and I don't think we're close to understanding it in detail. (Parts of it, yes. And we also understand parts of the human neural system. IIUC, the visual cortex is understood with fair completeness.)
What you meantion is a valid problem with the PGP type solution.
Unfortunately, the solution of "let joe do it" opens you up not only to joe, but also to anyone who snoops the unencrypted transmission between Gladys and joe.
In each case you evaluate how much the security matters to you, and to others. The more it matters, the closer to the origin the encryption needs to be done. (You'll have noticed I didn't encrypt this at all.) PGP is pretty good if there's enough importance for you to ensure that it's properly used. If you aren't, then "let joe do it" for, again, varying values of joe. Internal IP is probably more secure than someone outside, but you need to care enough to ensure that they do the job properly. (An easier job then ensuring that every Gladys does her encryption properly, but less easy than delegating it to someone outside.) At every step removed, the security decreases, and the ease increases. Make the trade off that YOU deem appropriate.
Additionally, Google has repeatedly dropped unpaid services without warning or alternative. Not a good match for a business. If you don't run your own e-mail server, you at least want it to be run by someone contractually obligated to meet certain expectations.
Because a lot of people remember WinModems, and others are remembering Microsoft holding the keys to the current boot system. And Microsoft suing Android vendors...extortion is what I call it, even if lawyers use a different term. And others are remembering Noika...to mention only one recent example.
I, personally, am upset because I've frequently bought equipement that I couldn't get to work on Linux, which makes me very reluctant to trust any company that's providing "windows only" drivers.
This is abetted because one can never buy in stores the models that have been tested and found to work with Linux, so one needs to buy something that's "nearly the same" and which "will probably work". I will definitely pay extra to avoid this model, but I will, at the same time, hate WD for making me pay extra. (If they only offer this model at a premium price, and continue to offer their standard models, this final comment won't apply. But I won't know that for a year or so, when they've had a chance to rev all their models.)
OK. Now you're powering the drive up and down. Another point of high wear. How significant? I sure don't know, but it's always been my assumption that the point of highest wear was when the disk was being accelerated.
To me this sounds like an argument where one side is saying "You can't show facts to support your argument!" and the other is saying "Neither can you!" and both are correct.
Already happened. I think it was in Illinois, and about a decade ago, perhaps a bit less. The only reason it was notices is that a virus got in and started messing with things.
What seems to have happened is that the reactor wasn't on the internet, but it was on a LAN, and something else on the LAN got on the internet, and the virus knew how to make the traversal. Whoops!
I presume that it was cleaned up quickly, but there I only noticed the one public news story, in the midst of lots of other things being attacked by that same virus. (Can't recally which one, as I'd already switched to Linux so I'd started to stop noticing such things. These days either I just don't notice them at all, or they've stopped happening. Now it's trojans, vulnerabilities, etc.)
You are assuming that their current business practices are otherwise in accordance with German law. I have a very strong doubt that this is the case. So to me this sounds like a requirement that they admit that they are breaking the law. But not documenting what they are doing is also breaking the law.
(In particular, I believe that it is illegal under German law for non-anonymized data to be sent from Germany to the US, due to the US lacking acequate safegards against abuse of personal information. I could be wrong about this. Or possibly Apple isn't doing this. But I believe that they are, and that it is.)
Actually, IIUC, even documenting what they do wouldn't help Apple much, as then they would be admitting to breaking the law. (That's not in the court decision, that's in Apple's mode of business.)
In particular, it is my understanding that it is illegal for Apple to collect information in Germany and transmit it to a location where the laws don't "adequately" protect the information. Like the US. And that that's one of the things they do.
So, IIUC, this court decision is a requriement that they document that their current business practices are in violation of the law. Perhaps I'm wrong about their current business practices, but I doubt it.
OTOH, I'm certainly not an expert on EU law, or even US law. So I could easily be wrong about that part of the argument.
Why not? The people who have common needs are well served (we hope) by the common distributions. People with specialized needs may refer one of the less common distributions. Nobody needs all of them, but everybody can find some distribution that is satisfactory.
Personally, I've settled on Debian, but I give occasional checks of a few other distributions to see is they're in some way better. So far the answer has been no, but that's no guarantee for the future.
As an example, I don't understand why anyone would prefer to use a distro that required that they use Gnome3 or Unity. But some people prefer that. So I'm glad that they can find a distro that serves them, even if to me it seems senseless. My use case isn't theirs.
There's more exceptions than that, and in both directions.
IIUC, the cells linking the intestines (among others) don't have a fixed number of times that they can divide. And in the other direction there've been experiments on amoeba that showed that when amoeba were dividing in an environment with limited resources, a point would come where after each division, one of the resultant cells stopped dividing, where the other continued. Then there are slime molds (actually a kind of amoeba) which when the resources get scant gather together into a sort of wormish thing that ambles along looking for a better place, but if it doesn't find it fairly soon it grows a tower that emits spores of some of the amoeba to float away. Sort of crossing the divide between single cells and multi-cellular at the same time as it crosses between unlimited division and aging. (The wormish thing typically dies after the "fruiting body" sends out the spores, though I don't know if that's always the case..)
I think that hypothesis is looking pretty shakey these days. FWIW, many cells divide without shrinking their telomere length. I believe skin cells are one example, I'm certain that the cells lining the intestines are an example. There are others.
Question: Is the telomere length restored by meiosis, or is meiosis done by cells that never had their telomeres shrink in the first place? My guess would be the second.
I think you need to either research or think a bit more carefully about how Hitler achieved totalitarian power. I will grant that what you say is factually correct, but you neglect to mention that it was only after he had manufactured crimes to charge his political enemies with.
That said, the US appears to be following a similar path in a more conservative way. And many German corporations profited greatly from their "nationalization", at least at first. (So did many US corporations. International business isn't new, it was just smaller then.) And it was a repulsively long time before Germany was considered an enemy.
At least CentOs is a Fedora derivitive (well, a Red Hat derivative) rather than a Debian derivative. Not sure about Yellow Dog. I think Scientific is also a Red Hat Derivative. And Another, White Box, may still be active.
N.B.: Starting out as the derivative of a distro doesn't guarantee that you will remain such. Mandrake started out as a derivative of Red Hat.
Well, for one thing, they are totally out gunned. Groups and individuals who try to stand up to the government tend to end up dead without trial.
The idea that an armed citizenry can stand up to the government if rooted in the idea of a huge proportion of hunters and a minimal standing army. Even if you go back to 1900 that idea was unworkably dated, though at that point perhaps most people didn't realize it.
Thaat is a high profile, but low value case. As far as the feds are concerned the whole episode may be a bonus. Nothing of real value to the government was damaged, and large numbers of people became more paranoid, and thus easier to control.
If you want an example of where it might actually be used, look at large corporations making deals with foreign governments. But it's not at all clear that this capability would become known during it's use. Perhaps it would only be used later to blackmail the negotiators into doing something the government wants that they were reluctant to do.
If you don't understand why it would be less useful if you moved it to tape, you've never dealt with tape. I know it's a lot better than it used to be, and if you've got a good hierarchical data storage system (the kind we could never afford) you can get the tapes automatically mounted when you request them. But tape is SLOW when you're talking about random access. You could bring things to a halt for 15 minutes with an average request. Still, perhaps a REALLY GOOD automated tape library could cut that down to 5 minutes average.
So, yes, you could do it. But the real problem is indexing.
They really don't want to be depending on their tape backups for any active information. And they'll probably need to spend as much time indexing it as collecting it. My guess is that for whatever size data store they manage, tape is only for backups. Even there they might prefer replacable hard disks.
Slashdot Mirror
The president is not utterly meaningless. He has significant power to effect changes. He's certainly not as independent as is normally claimed, but there's a bit gap between that and powerless.
That said, it's rare for a president to choose to use that power for the good of the people unless that concurs with the good of his financial backers. Chester A. Arthur did it. To some extent FDR did it. And most presidents exercise power that benefits the citizenry in areas where it doesn't impinge on the goals of their financial backers.
The problem is, now the financial backers have a much wider range of interests than they did even 20 years ago. And, of course, there's the additional problem that a president must stand behind his subordinates except in the case of egregious misbehavior on their part, and the people who have worked their way into charge of the various government departments are those interested in increasing their power.
All this, of course, is underlay for the fact that nobody becomes an elected federal official who isn't driven by a psychotic need for power or control.
So, all in all, evil as the financial backers of the president are, they may well be more moderate than the president himself. (It's hard to tell.) But they also may well have fewer humanitarian tendencies. (This isn't guaranteed. If Bush had any humanitarian tendencies, he kept them well hidden.)
Please don't misunderstand, it isn't only elected officials who has psychotic needs for power and control. This is obvious in the case of many top corporation managers. But it's even worse in those who set the rules for the country.
N.B.: The nature of those who become powerful politicians is determined by the system within which they operate. It acts as a selective filter, eliminating those who are less driven, and less willing to compromise their ideals. (This is often a good thing, but it always has its negative aspects.) It is for this reason that I feel that some form of majority wins voting would improve the government, though probably not as much as chosing by lot, with selective filters to eliminate as much as 10% of the population on grounds of obvious incapacity of one form or another. But this would require other changes to decentralize decision making. (This a good idea in itself, for many other reasons, despite the poor history of triumvirates. Possibly a council of 5 or 7 would be better. With decisons by secret ballot. Experiment would be needed, as I don't think theory is strong enough to decide, but it clearly needs to be small enough to reach a reasonably quick decision, so "calling the question" needs to be easy.)
They have the right. I'll consider them silly, but they do indeed have that right.
What competition was there for this service? I'd never heard of it, or anything like it, before. (I don't use SMS, so that's no be surprise.)
I think that when you get to step 2 you are talking about the wrong company. Google often, perhaps usually, doesn't have any competition for their minor projects. Sometimes the competition develops AFTER they show up. If there was prior competition for Picassa, for example, I never heard of it.
Are you asserting that people shouldn't complain when they are annoyed? Because that's what it sounds like.
Sorry, but I believe that complaining when a company annoys you is a public service. It warns others. (Admittedly, it's gotten to the point where I expect Google to drop any free service without warning, but there are always people who need to be reminded.)
That said, Google also has a perfect right to drop any service that they aren't contractually obligated to maintain. But this doesn't imply that those they annoy when they do so shouldn't voice their complaints.
O, given the loose usage of the term robot to include all sorts of telefactors, the only reason you can't say that the "personal robotics revolution imminent..." is because it's already here. The way it's being used would qualify a doorbell as a robot.
OTOH, I would consider a roomba to be a valid robot. So it's happening, it's just that it's starting rather slowly. It's reasonable to expect the speed to pick up.
So. If your roomba, following the programming that you have given it, trips someone, should the law blame you? Why not? Or, if you take the other side, why? Does this same reasoning apply to your self-driving car? Justify.
The real problem is that the law seems to have totally ruled out responsibility for the results of ones actions in the case of the party suing. THAT is what needs to be changed.
Define sentient.
My guess is that any useful definition of sentient will exclude robot butlers, self-driving cars, and any use in an unstructured environment (well, minimally to moderately structured).
Yes. I know you were just being silly. Except that "silly" is a polite word I'm using instead of stupid. Please note that your very suggestion presumes that all nations & companies would come to a common agreement and could be trusted to keep that agreement. There are also many other things wrong with it, but that suffices.
You don't actually need to do that experiment, unless you believe that mammalian neurons are intrinsicly different from other neurons. Both insects and mollusks have at least some species that are simple enough to be understood. Neurons are deterministic. Evolution has taken explicit steps to ensure that. Read up on the sphex wasp for an example that's easy to understand, but there have been other, more precise experiments, done since.
IIRC, there's one mollusk whose neural system contains exactly 17 neurons in a predefined arrangement. I'm not going to claim that that system is totally understood, but the last time I checked we were getting close to understanding it. And it's a deterministic system. There's also been a lot of good work done on fruitflies, though they have a much more complex neural system, and I don't think we're close to understanding it in detail. (Parts of it, yes. And we also understand parts of the human neural system. IIUC, the visual cortex is understood with fair completeness.)
What you meantion is a valid problem with the PGP type solution.
Unfortunately, the solution of "let joe do it" opens you up not only to joe, but also to anyone who snoops the unencrypted transmission between Gladys and joe.
In each case you evaluate how much the security matters to you, and to others. The more it matters, the closer to the origin the encryption needs to be done. (You'll have noticed I didn't encrypt this at all.) PGP is pretty good if there's enough importance for you to ensure that it's properly used. If you aren't, then "let joe do it" for, again, varying values of joe. Internal IP is probably more secure than someone outside, but you need to care enough to ensure that they do the job properly. (An easier job then ensuring that every Gladys does her encryption properly, but less easy than delegating it to someone outside.) At every step removed, the security decreases, and the ease increases. Make the trade off that YOU deem appropriate.
Additionally, Google has repeatedly dropped unpaid services without warning or alternative. Not a good match for a business. If you don't run your own e-mail server, you at least want it to be run by someone contractually obligated to meet certain expectations.
Because a lot of people remember WinModems, and others are remembering Microsoft holding the keys to the current boot system. And Microsoft suing Android vendors...extortion is what I call it, even if lawyers use a different term. And others are remembering Noika...to mention only one recent example.
I, personally, am upset because I've frequently bought equipement that I couldn't get to work on Linux, which makes me very reluctant to trust any company that's providing "windows only" drivers.
This is abetted because one can never buy in stores the models that have been tested and found to work with Linux, so one needs to buy something that's "nearly the same" and which "will probably work". I will definitely pay extra to avoid this model, but I will, at the same time, hate WD for making me pay extra. (If they only offer this model at a premium price, and continue to offer their standard models, this final comment won't apply. But I won't know that for a year or so, when they've had a chance to rev all their models.)
OK. Now you're powering the drive up and down. Another point of high wear. How significant? I sure don't know, but it's always been my assumption that the point of highest wear was when the disk was being accelerated.
To me this sounds like an argument where one side is saying "You can't show facts to support your argument!" and the other is saying "Neither can you!" and both are correct.
Depends. Free (Creative Commons, FDL, etc.) is considerably cheaper then $0. Free (gratis) can be a LOT more expensive.
I don't know how it's going, but the last I heard California was in the process of creating a large number of free (libre) college texts.
Already happened. I think it was in Illinois, and about a decade ago, perhaps a bit less. The only reason it was notices is that a virus got in and started messing with things.
What seems to have happened is that the reactor wasn't on the internet, but it was on a LAN, and something else on the LAN got on the internet, and the virus knew how to make the traversal. Whoops!
I presume that it was cleaned up quickly, but there I only noticed the one public news story, in the midst of lots of other things being attacked by that same virus. (Can't recally which one, as I'd already switched to Linux so I'd started to stop noticing such things. These days either I just don't notice them at all, or they've stopped happening. Now it's trojans, vulnerabilities, etc.)
You are assuming that their current business practices are otherwise in accordance with German law. I have a very strong doubt that this is the case. So to me this sounds like a requirement that they admit that they are breaking the law. But not documenting what they are doing is also breaking the law.
(In particular, I believe that it is illegal under German law for non-anonymized data to be sent from Germany to the US, due to the US lacking acequate safegards against abuse of personal information. I could be wrong about this. Or possibly Apple isn't doing this. But I believe that they are, and that it is.)
Actually, IIUC, even documenting what they do wouldn't help Apple much, as then they would be admitting to breaking the law. (That's not in the court decision, that's in Apple's mode of business.)
In particular, it is my understanding that it is illegal for Apple to collect information in Germany and transmit it to a location where the laws don't "adequately" protect the information. Like the US. And that that's one of the things they do.
So, IIUC, this court decision is a requriement that they document that their current business practices are in violation of the law. Perhaps I'm wrong about their current business practices, but I doubt it.
OTOH, I'm certainly not an expert on EU law, or even US law. So I could easily be wrong about that part of the argument.
That's the presumption in the US, but I'm not sure that it's a good presumption, and I'm not sure it's a globally accepted presumption.
Why not? The people who have common needs are well served (we hope) by the common distributions. People with specialized needs may refer one of the less common distributions. Nobody needs all of them, but everybody can find some distribution that is satisfactory.
Personally, I've settled on Debian, but I give occasional checks of a few other distributions to see is they're in some way better. So far the answer has been no, but that's no guarantee for the future.
As an example, I don't understand why anyone would prefer to use a distro that required that they use Gnome3 or Unity. But some people prefer that. So I'm glad that they can find a distro that serves them, even if to me it seems senseless. My use case isn't theirs.
There's more exceptions than that, and in both directions.
IIUC, the cells linking the intestines (among others) don't have a fixed number of times that they can divide. And in the other direction there've been experiments on amoeba that showed that when amoeba were dividing in an environment with limited resources, a point would come where after each division, one of the resultant cells stopped dividing, where the other continued. Then there are slime molds (actually a kind of amoeba) which when the resources get scant gather together into a sort of wormish thing that ambles along looking for a better place, but if it doesn't find it fairly soon it grows a tower that emits spores of some of the amoeba to float away. Sort of crossing the divide between single cells and multi-cellular at the same time as it crosses between unlimited division and aging. (The wormish thing typically dies after the "fruiting body" sends out the spores, though I don't know if that's always the case..)
I think that hypothesis is looking pretty shakey these days. FWIW, many cells divide without shrinking their telomere length. I believe skin cells are one example, I'm certain that the cells lining the intestines are an example. There are others.
Question: Is the telomere length restored by meiosis, or is meiosis done by cells that never had their telomeres shrink in the first place? My guess would be the second.
I think you need to either research or think a bit more carefully about how Hitler achieved totalitarian power. I will grant that what you say is factually correct, but you neglect to mention that it was only after he had manufactured crimes to charge his political enemies with.
That said, the US appears to be following a similar path in a more conservative way. And many German corporations profited greatly from their "nationalization", at least at first. (So did many US corporations. International business isn't new, it was just smaller then.) And it was a repulsively long time before Germany was considered an enemy.
At least CentOs is a Fedora derivitive (well, a Red Hat derivative) rather than a Debian derivative. Not sure about Yellow Dog. I think Scientific is also a Red Hat Derivative. And Another, White Box, may still be active.
N.B.: Starting out as the derivative of a distro doesn't guarantee that you will remain such. Mandrake started out as a derivative of Red Hat.
Well, for one thing, they are totally out gunned. Groups and individuals who try to stand up to the government tend to end up dead without trial.
The idea that an armed citizenry can stand up to the government if rooted in the idea of a huge proportion of hunters and a minimal standing army. Even if you go back to 1900 that idea was unworkably dated, though at that point perhaps most people didn't realize it.
Thaat is a high profile, but low value case. As far as the feds are concerned the whole episode may be a bonus. Nothing of real value to the government was damaged, and large numbers of people became more paranoid, and thus easier to control.
If you want an example of where it might actually be used, look at large corporations making deals with foreign governments. But it's not at all clear that this capability would become known during it's use. Perhaps it would only be used later to blackmail the negotiators into doing something the government wants that they were reluctant to do.
If you don't understand why it would be less useful if you moved it to tape, you've never dealt with tape. I know it's a lot better than it used to be, and if you've got a good hierarchical data storage system (the kind we could never afford) you can get the tapes automatically mounted when you request them. But tape is SLOW when you're talking about random access. You could bring things to a halt for 15 minutes with an average request. Still, perhaps a REALLY GOOD automated tape library could cut that down to 5 minutes average.
So, yes, you could do it. But the real problem is indexing.
They really don't want to be depending on their tape backups for any active information. And they'll probably need to spend as much time indexing it as collecting it. My guess is that for whatever size data store they manage, tape is only for backups. Even there they might prefer replacable hard disks.