My default assumption these days is that if Trump says something, it's a lie. If I can check, and feel like bothering, I'll occasionally find I was wrong. But not usually.
I think you can fairly blame every president since Eisenhower...and possibly him.
It's a systematic problem. When some gets into a position of power, they almost inevitably try to consolidate the power. If they weren't the kind of person who would do that, they wouldn't have schemed for the power in the first place. And the election system guarantees that only those nearly psychotically driven to gain power will be willing to put themselves through the process.
So I recommend selecting government officials by lottery with minimal qualifications. (At least 2/3 of the adults in the country should be in the lottery.) We could hardly do worse than the current selection, and it would prevent "politicians" being pre-bribed before they took office. And it would ensure that all minorities were fairly represented (on the average). Then there's the need to address regulatory capture, so office holders should be forbidden from any gainful employment after retiring... which means they need a decent retirement package...say, twice the median income.
Given the currently known evidence, it actually does appear that in the 1960's the NSA was partially on the side of secure communications. It's true they argued for a key short enough that they could break it, but they also argued for some program changes that nobody else understood, but which eventually turned out to patch the program to make it more difficult to break.
The problem is that the NSA is inherently two different organizations with conflicting goals. One is supposed to secure communications, and the other is supposed to spy on them. (Nevermind that it's only supposed to spy on foreigners. That's irrelevant to the point.) Unfortunately the spys are more adept at politics than the security researchers, so they appear have come to totally dominate the agency...and as a result nobody sensible trusts anything related to it.
OK, that makes sense. I've never gotten the various versions of Spectre distinguished in my mind...or memory. I tend to think of them all as variant 1.
It sounds like AMD should come out of this quite well.
I can't decide whether variant 1 sounds "possibly dangerous" or not. I suppose it depends on how applications segment their data. But I'm really skeptical about speculative execution in hyperthreads in any case. I think that it's an indication of overly complex processors, where simpler and more would be a better choice. (OTOH, given the way applications are currently written, I can see why they did it, I just think it's a poor local optimum. Yes, it's the top of the local hill, but the mountain is over there... Hill climbing often gets stuck at poor local optimums.)
Of course, MS wasn't expecting Meltdown to show up, but that their patches should disable it on fixed systems should be a reason to put them out of business.
While I agree with your sentiments, that doesn't address *this* problem. This is a hardware (well, at least microcode) problem, and all OSes are vulnerable.
The first part of your comment I agree with, but Intel probably *can't* provide compatible fixed versions of their CPUs except by disabling speculative execution, which would slow things down considerably, so just about nobody would want them. (And they could probably do that with a downloadable microcode update.)
The unfortunate thing about this current set of news is that it's not just Meltdown that's being targeted, but also Spectre. If that can be successfully exploited, then it's a much more serious problem, as it affects nearly everything more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.
Yes, but since the shareholders don't have any effective control over the actions of the corporation, they basically can't be held responsible for the criminal actions of the corporation. Only for their own. This is, I believe, set aside if you own more that some amount (10%?) of the stock of the corporation, at which point you are considered to exercise some degree of control.
If I read the summary correctly, the proposed law doesn't charge the incompetent police at all, only the person who makes the misleading call.
The summary seems to garble together two different actions, one aimed at police incompetence and the other aimed at making prank phone calls...although "prank" is not exactly the correct term for a call that can be expected to lead to, if not death, at least severe property damage. Still, there's often too little actual intelligence involved to call it malicious, and idiotic doesn't imply destructive. A more appropriate punishment would be to deny the perpetrator all use of electronic communications for a decade on penalty of actual confinement in prison (with continued denial of electronic communication) for an additional decade if they break the prohibition.
Actually it doesn't mean that, it means that the investors won't. The executives are, in theory, subject to criminal punishment with jail time. Isn't it strange how rarely that happens.
It's as if those enforcing the laws don't want them to hurt wealthy individuals (except an extremely occasional designated fall-guy).
Sorry, I haven't trusted Wells Fargo since around 1968 when they froze some customers accounts because a politico asked them to do so. It was illegal, but doing anything about it would have been both expensive and problematic, because the political power was instigating the action. And expensive is difficult to handle when your bank account is frozen.
It's not highly regulated if the regulated get to choose who regulates them and how the laws are enforced. There needs to be a firewall between the regulators and those that are regulated, and *one* of the components of that wall needs to be that the regulators are from time of appointment forwards until death and beyond forbidden to accept any form of remuneration from the regulated. I'm also dubious about giving them *any* input into who would be an appropriate regulator, but since this needs to be a public process, that's probably unconstitutional. So just forbid them spending any corporate money to campaign either in favor or against any candidate.
It's not true that it has nothing to do with Trump being president. It *is* unfortunately true that the Democrats wouldn't have been any better. And judging by some of the nominee's comments right before the election, the Greens wouldn't have been any better either. If you want to think the "Libertarians" would have been better, be my guest...but don't expect me to believe it.
On *this* issue there were four, apparently identical, choices. Up until slightly before the election I had thought that the Greens might be different, but the nominee disabused me. There were issues that distinguished their public positions (would they have kept their commitments?), but this wasn't one of them. They were ALL soft on prosecution of business crimes.
Somebody or other asserts that this guy has a history of incompetence. That may or may not be true. If true, it justifies firing him, as well as those who are responsible, but not instead of those who are responsible.
The real problem was that there was no way to cancel the alert. A secondary problem what the the drill included the phrase "This is not a drill". The guy who wrote the script should be demoted and moved to a position where he is not in charge of writing messages to others. But the main problem was that there was not way to cancel the alert.
*Did* he screw up? Or did he do precisely what he was supposed to do in the presence of the received messages? "This is not a drill" is not something anyone sensible would add to a drill unless they intended to cause people to believe it was not a drill.
And *why* wasn't there any way to cancel, override, etc. the message? That's the real totally horrible oversight. Everything else is relatively minor...though I'd sure rake the guy who wrote that script over the coals.
And unattributed transactions doesn't work either. Perhaps anonymous transactions.
And it has been asserted (by implication) that I made another mistake in my estimate of the amount of energy required for transactions. If the cost of the computation is really related to the volume of transactions in such a way that it's not monotonically increasing then I severely overestimated the potential eventual energy cost.
If most of the jobs are automated (i.e., if AIs destroy more jobs than they create) how will retaining help? The jobs aren't there no matter how you're trained.
The proposed option makes sense if the AIs change the nature of the available jobs, but not if they actually replace them.
FWIW, I expect the AIs to replace the jobs to a large extent, creating only a very few new jobs that only exist for a short period of time and require significant training. The jobs will need to be done, but they'll require enough background that very few who aren't already employed in a closely related area will be competent without LOTS of training. And half of them will be automated away by the next generation of AIs. It's not like we aren't talking about a moving target.
There's a real problem here, which already exists, but is getting worse. There are jobs that need to be done, but there are more people around that there are jobs that need to be done. However, in order to keep the people doing the essential jobs moderately satisfied, it's necessary to require that everyone either hold down a job or live in misery. And nobody who holds down a job is willing to admit that their job is unnecessary, so they make lots of waves that cause people to notice them working. The more important their job, the less they feel they need to make waves, but some people just like making others do things, so even if their job *is* important they're likely to do so.
The result is in increasingly coercive civilization, which only needs to be that way because it's the result of the way chosen to get the necessary jobs done. As more and more jobs become unnecessary, this process causes the civilization to become more coercive.
I wish I saw a way out of this before full automation, because it seems likely that even full automation won't get rid of the unnecessary coerciveness.
You remarks are spot on. For most of those you don't need just an AI, you need a robot. And good robot bodies aren't as well developed as are AIs.
Of course, the current AIs couldn't do those things yet even with a good body...well, not all of them. Certainly the tree trimming doesn't seem beyond them...it's the body that's missing. They could certainly fix *my* air conditioning, as I don't have any...which means I've got no idea what would be involved in fixing yours...but again I suspect that the major problem is the lack of a good body. Why wouldn't they be able to talk to you about your investments...perhaps what you mean is you wouldn't take their advice. Etc.
So you're spot on, but it doesn't mean what you think it means. And, of course, that AIs are getting better rapidly. (Not as rapidly as people expect in the short term, but more rapidly than they believe in the long term. This is a problem that people have with diverse concurrent change in general.)
As for the bodies, those are getting better too. I'm a lot less opinionated, however, about how quickly those are improving. But expect the first real robots to have stationary brains controlling by radio their robot bodies. Which will limit their mobility. (Unless you count things like cars and trucks as robots. It would be fairly easy and reasonable to mount some arms and hands on an automated truck so that [dedesigned loads] wouldn't need fork lifts at either the loading dock or the delivery dock.)
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Read the constitution. Treason has a definition, and neither the states nor Trump have committed it. But Trump's come a lot closer.
My default assumption these days is that if Trump says something, it's a lie. If I can check, and feel like bothering, I'll occasionally find I was wrong. But not usually.
I think you can fairly blame every president since Eisenhower...and possibly him.
It's a systematic problem. When some gets into a position of power, they almost inevitably try to consolidate the power. If they weren't the kind of person who would do that, they wouldn't have schemed for the power in the first place. And the election system guarantees that only those nearly psychotically driven to gain power will be willing to put themselves through the process.
So I recommend selecting government officials by lottery with minimal qualifications. (At least 2/3 of the adults in the country should be in the lottery.) We could hardly do worse than the current selection, and it would prevent "politicians" being pre-bribed before they took office. And it would ensure that all minorities were fairly represented (on the average). Then there's the need to address regulatory capture, so office holders should be forbidden from any gainful employment after retiring ... which means they need a decent retirement package...say, twice the median income.
Rather than "spineless", I would say "complicit".
Given the currently known evidence, it actually does appear that in the 1960's the NSA was partially on the side of secure communications. It's true they argued for a key short enough that they could break it, but they also argued for some program changes that nobody else understood, but which eventually turned out to patch the program to make it more difficult to break.
The problem is that the NSA is inherently two different organizations with conflicting goals. One is supposed to secure communications, and the other is supposed to spy on them. (Nevermind that it's only supposed to spy on foreigners. That's irrelevant to the point.) Unfortunately the spys are more adept at politics than the security researchers, so they appear have come to totally dominate the agency...and as a result nobody sensible trusts anything related to it.
In it's current state the only way Intel can screw up the technology is by getting patents...so you're right, you can trust Intel to do that.
OK, that makes sense. I've never gotten the various versions of Spectre distinguished in my mind...or memory. I tend to think of them all as variant 1.
It sounds like AMD should come out of this quite well.
I can't decide whether variant 1 sounds "possibly dangerous" or not. I suppose it depends on how applications segment their data. But I'm really skeptical about speculative execution in hyperthreads in any case. I think that it's an indication of overly complex processors, where simpler and more would be a better choice. (OTOH, given the way applications are currently written, I can see why they did it, I just think it's a poor local optimum. Yes, it's the top of the local hill, but the mountain is over there... Hill climbing often gets stuck at poor local optimums.)
Yii! Did they really do *that*?
Of course, MS wasn't expecting Meltdown to show up, but that their patches should disable it on fixed systems should be a reason to put them out of business.
Is AMD less vulnerable to Spectre? Really? That's not what I've gathered up until now. Meltdown is specific (essentialy) to Intel, but not Spectre.
While I agree with your sentiments, that doesn't address *this* problem. This is a hardware (well, at least microcode) problem, and all OSes are vulnerable.
The first part of your comment I agree with, but Intel probably *can't* provide compatible fixed versions of their CPUs except by disabling speculative execution, which would slow things down considerably, so just about nobody would want them. (And they could probably do that with a downloadable microcode update.)
The unfortunate thing about this current set of news is that it's not just Meltdown that's being targeted, but also Spectre. If that can be successfully exploited, then it's a much more serious problem, as it affects nearly everything more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.
Yes, but since the shareholders don't have any effective control over the actions of the corporation, they basically can't be held responsible for the criminal actions of the corporation. Only for their own. This is, I believe, set aside if you own more that some amount (10%?) of the stock of the corporation, at which point you are considered to exercise some degree of control.
Look up "Corporate Death Penalty". I think you're misunderstanding the whole discussion.
If I read the summary correctly, the proposed law doesn't charge the incompetent police at all, only the person who makes the misleading call.
The summary seems to garble together two different actions, one aimed at police incompetence and the other aimed at making prank phone calls...although "prank" is not exactly the correct term for a call that can be expected to lead to, if not death, at least severe property damage. Still, there's often too little actual intelligence involved to call it malicious, and idiotic doesn't imply destructive. A more appropriate punishment would be to deny the perpetrator all use of electronic communications for a decade on penalty of actual confinement in prison (with continued denial of electronic communication) for an additional decade if they break the prohibition.
Actually it doesn't mean that, it means that the investors won't. The executives are, in theory, subject to criminal punishment with jail time. Isn't it strange how rarely that happens.
It's as if those enforcing the laws don't want them to hurt wealthy individuals (except an extremely occasional designated fall-guy).
How about it's they design of the system where the regulatory bodies are controlled by those they are supposed to regulate.
Sorry, I haven't trusted Wells Fargo since around 1968 when they froze some customers accounts because a politico asked them to do so. It was illegal, but doing anything about it would have been both expensive and problematic, because the political power was instigating the action. And expensive is difficult to handle when your bank account is frozen.
It may not be the solution, but it's and appropriate intermediate step.
It's not highly regulated if the regulated get to choose who regulates them and how the laws are enforced. There needs to be a firewall between the regulators and those that are regulated, and *one* of the components of that wall needs to be that the regulators are from time of appointment forwards until death and beyond forbidden to accept any form of remuneration from the regulated. I'm also dubious about giving them *any* input into who would be an appropriate regulator, but since this needs to be a public process, that's probably unconstitutional. So just forbid them spending any corporate money to campaign either in favor or against any candidate.
It's not true that it has nothing to do with Trump being president. It *is* unfortunately true that the Democrats wouldn't have been any better. And judging by some of the nominee's comments right before the election, the Greens wouldn't have been any better either. If you want to think the "Libertarians" would have been better, be my guest...but don't expect me to believe it.
On *this* issue there were four, apparently identical, choices. Up until slightly before the election I had thought that the Greens might be different, but the nominee disabused me. There were issues that distinguished their public positions (would they have kept their commitments?), but this wasn't one of them. They were ALL soft on prosecution of business crimes.
Somebody or other asserts that this guy has a history of incompetence. That may or may not be true. If true, it justifies firing him, as well as those who are responsible, but not instead of those who are responsible.
The real problem was that there was no way to cancel the alert. A secondary problem what the the drill included the phrase "This is not a drill". The guy who wrote the script should be demoted and moved to a position where he is not in charge of writing messages to others. But the main problem was that there was not way to cancel the alert.
*Did* he screw up? Or did he do precisely what he was supposed to do in the presence of the received messages? "This is not a drill" is not something anyone sensible would add to a drill unless they intended to cause people to believe it was not a drill.
And *why* wasn't there any way to cancel, override, etc. the message? That's the real totally horrible oversight. Everything else is relatively minor...though I'd sure rake the guy who wrote that script over the coals.
And unattributed transactions doesn't work either. Perhaps anonymous transactions.
And it has been asserted (by implication) that I made another mistake in my estimate of the amount of energy required for transactions. If the cost of the computation is really related to the volume of transactions in such a way that it's not monotonically increasing then I severely overestimated the potential eventual energy cost.
If most of the jobs are automated (i.e., if AIs destroy more jobs than they create) how will retaining help? The jobs aren't there no matter how you're trained.
The proposed option makes sense if the AIs change the nature of the available jobs, but not if they actually replace them.
FWIW, I expect the AIs to replace the jobs to a large extent, creating only a very few new jobs that only exist for a short period of time and require significant training. The jobs will need to be done, but they'll require enough background that very few who aren't already employed in a closely related area will be competent without LOTS of training. And half of them will be automated away by the next generation of AIs. It's not like we aren't talking about a moving target.
There's a real problem here, which already exists, but is getting worse. There are jobs that need to be done, but there are more people around that there are jobs that need to be done. However, in order to keep the people doing the essential jobs moderately satisfied, it's necessary to require that everyone either hold down a job or live in misery. And nobody who holds down a job is willing to admit that their job is unnecessary, so they make lots of waves that cause people to notice them working. The more important their job, the less they feel they need to make waves, but some people just like making others do things, so even if their job *is* important they're likely to do so.
The result is in increasingly coercive civilization, which only needs to be that way because it's the result of the way chosen to get the necessary jobs done. As more and more jobs become unnecessary, this process causes the civilization to become more coercive.
I wish I saw a way out of this before full automation, because it seems likely that even full automation won't get rid of the unnecessary coerciveness.
You remarks are spot on. For most of those you don't need just an AI, you need a robot. And good robot bodies aren't as well developed as are AIs.
Of course, the current AIs couldn't do those things yet even with a good body...well, not all of them. Certainly the tree trimming doesn't seem beyond them...it's the body that's missing. They could certainly fix *my* air conditioning, as I don't have any...which means I've got no idea what would be involved in fixing yours...but again I suspect that the major problem is the lack of a good body. Why wouldn't they be able to talk to you about your investments...perhaps what you mean is you wouldn't take their advice. Etc.
So you're spot on, but it doesn't mean what you think it means. And, of course, that AIs are getting better rapidly. (Not as rapidly as people expect in the short term, but more rapidly than they believe in the long term. This is a problem that people have with diverse concurrent change in general.)
As for the bodies, those are getting better too. I'm a lot less opinionated, however, about how quickly those are improving. But expect the first real robots to have stationary brains controlling by radio their robot bodies. Which will limit their mobility. (Unless you count things like cars and trucks as robots. It would be fairly easy and reasonable to mount some arms and hands on an automated truck so that [dedesigned loads] wouldn't need fork lifts at either the loading dock or the delivery dock.)