I may dislike systemd, and the direction that it is pushing things, but that isn't sufficient to justify calling it a bug. A flat head screw isn't a bug instead of a phillips, it's just designed for different applications.
You mean where he shot someone he claimed was an attacker? There usually isn't any proof besides his word, and the honesty of police reports is often questionable.
My ideal law would not prevent gun manufacture or ownership, but rather advertising and commercial sale (as opposed to private sale). Take the profit out of it an much of the problem would go away. Besides, it might encourage people to study metal fabrication, which would be no bad thing.
P.S.: I feel similarly about alcohol. Forbid advertising and commercial sale. Individuals should be able to do what they want.
The thing about guns is that they make quick overreaction easier. And you can do it from a distance. So they *do* change the picture, though, admittedly, not radically.
This idea that they are a protection against an abusive government has been rather soundly refuted in the last couple of decades. It's hard to even claim the oppression would have been worse if fewer people had guns. And a significant fraction of those who collect large numbers of weapons are sufficiently unbalanced to be a public danger. It's a small fraction, but guns are such an amplifier of violence that that small fraction is excessively dangerous...though not to the government.
The proliferation of guns in dense clusters of people leads to increased violence. I'm not sure this applies where they are useful tools, such as where rattlesnakes are common, or when used for hunting...but in metropolitan areas it appears to. Official collection of statistics, however, has been suppressed, though not censored.
What happened while you were growing up wasn't that there weren't mass shootings, is was that the news was more localized, so you didn't hear what was happening over in the next state. You often didn't hear what was happening in the next county. Now you hear about an outrage anywhere in the country, and often anywhere in the world.
If you think Republicans aren't statists when judged by actions as opposed to rhetoric, then you need to check your news sources. It *is* true that they tend to oppose state control over the rich and powerful more than the Democrats do, but that's not exactly evidence that they aren't statists, when they embrace government control over other parts of the system.
Outside of quibbling about the definition... If they're offering translation services, then they are clearly sending what they hear back to the central servers. That kind of computation can't be done without a huge database and significant computation. And this can only work (and be improved) if they retain the information and continue processing it.
So clearly they are sending the information back to their servers and retaining it. And if you don't realize this is happening, you don't understand at all how they're offering the service.
What we don't know is if they're doing anything else with the information, to what extent they are aggregating it in processed form, etc. I doubt if they're saving it in raw form for very long, as that would quickly get expensive.
That's a foolish argument. China has as many foreign bases as it wants to have. If they want more, they can easily get them. But they're more interested in economic dominance, and they're pretty much there. In fact, in a lot of areas they *are* there. Military is only one aspect, and it's not the most important beyond the ability to defend your turf...which China has.
It's been clear that the US was on a downhill slide for decades, but it's been unclear who would be the successor power. China is better than many, because it historically has not been territorially aggressive, and because it's a very introverted culture. (As in, the rest of the world doesn't matter. *WE* are the important ones.) I'd prefer a country with more respect for human rights, but there doesn't seem to be one on offer. Japan seems pretty maxed out, and it's still got a lot of regional hate from the militaristic recent past. I had at one point hoped that India might step forwards, but they seem to have nearly stalled. The EU has potential, but it seems to be fading also. There's also a Historic Trend that points to *some* Asian country to be the successor. I had hoped that the US would last long enough for us to really get into space, but realistically no space colony in the next 50 years will be able to be a democracy. It will need to be a technological autocracy, and China may be better at that...though they are so historically introverted that I'm not at all sure.
If it doesn't have goals and a motive then it's not a robot, it's a telefactor. It's fair to call a self-driving car a robot, but not to call a remote control machine gun, because in the case of the remote control machine gun the control is from a separate entity (which could, to be fair, be a robot).
Now I'm not sure that we don't have murderous autonomous robots currently. Reports of an armed automatic sentry built in Japan have been a bit vague, but it could be a real robot. But currently the military hasn't been willing to give up the right to claim the kill itself.
Question: To what extent should one consider an artillery shell with a proximity fuse a robot? It can only make one decision, but it makes that decision, to explode or not, independent of human choice (at the time...I believe the distance can be set prior to firing). It's true it doesn't have much more intelligence than a thermostat, which I have long considered the thing corresponding to a bit in the frame of AI, but it makes a life or death decision.
Answer: Well, seriously that would need to be considered a misuse of the word, because it's too far from the central meaning, but it's a good example that concepts don't really have sharp edges. It's at the edge of the penumbra of the concept of robot.
If you say there's only one superpower, I'd say that one is China. The US has been declining rapidly. China may not use it's power in the same way, but it's been using it globally for quite awhile, and without (yet) building up the same kinds of enmity that the US has been.
That said, China is primarily an economic power rather than a military power. It's military power probably currently is below that of the US. It would probably need to purchase assistance from Russia to match us. But Russia would probably think that acceptable, for the right price. And in 5 years China is likely to be the military superior to the US in most kinds of conflict. (Who do you think *makes* the parts for the drones?) That the current Chinese standard of living is below that of the US is not a strike against them as a power. It means that it's easier for them to get workers for this and that, and it's cheaper to pacify unhappy provinces. And they could destroy the US (at considerable cost to themselves) by selling the US debt they hold on an open market.
A book about the Democratic party is pretty much guaranteed to be PR, either by a party supporter or by an opponent. In neither case should it be believed. Instead watch what it does and how it acts. The same is true for the other parties.
A Democratic event is more revealing, but attending at more than a low level event requires approval by those higher up in the party. While there are obvious reasons why this is necessary, it mitigates against trusting what you see as being an accurate mirror of the intentions of those in control. So again, watch what it does and how it acts.
And, of course, watching means that your reports come from trustworthy sources. So don't believe what you see reported easily. Require multiple sources with differing biases.
Have you started to notice that this is a lot of work? That's why people usually pick someone they trust to form their opinions. Too bad people are so bad at picking trustworthy people.
And another thing is, even if they truly intend to protect your privacy, never get hacked, never leak, and don't make any mistakes, they can still go bankrupt.
After bankruptcy, all that data is going to end up with the highest bidder, who won't have made any promises about how the data will be used.
And that first paragraph was a sort of unbelievably optimistic hope.
Sorry, but whether "British English" is the default English depends on which country you are in. I *have* heard the language that Canadians speak called "Canadian", or even "Canuk", but normally one would say "English", and if one wanted to be specific "Canadian English". "English" is the generic term which includes, e.g., "Austrailian English", and even "Delhi English".
If I want to emphasize the dialect I speak (or write), then I may say "American English". Certainly if I'm contrasting it with another variety of English. (I don't, however, write or say "The Queen's English", though I'm aware that the British used to do so. [I don't know current usage.] Instead I'll say "British English". Maybe I'm just a lazy typist.)
I disagree about the "orderly", as I feel that's a recipe for stagnation, but there needs to be some way to handle "fake news". Unfortunately, trusting someone in authority to decide what is fake has always been a bad idea.
Odd, it doesn't do that for me. I generally leave it up for weeks at a time. Of course, I do have javascript blocked by default, and don't have flash even installed. Perhaps your problem, well, *that* problem, isn't actually with FireFox.
Every recent Firefox update has caused problems with a redesigned GUI. Admittedly up until now I've been able to work around it, but having to work around it is not something I enjoy. If there were a decent alternative I'd use it. Unfortunately, the closest thing I've found to a decent alternative is Konqueror, and that's not great. But if they cripple the bookmarks in the sidebar or make the menubar even more unusable I may be forced to change.
Well, I'm no expert either, I was merely (as I said) repeating what someone had told me. But your statement is the first I've ever heard that called it into question.
It would be nice if a German or Dane could speak to this point.
AI won't be alive no matter how smart it is, unless we build it via biological engineering. And so what.
Who can really say whether we have conscious programs now. We don't have an good definition of consciousness. Waving your hands and saying "people are conscious, and petunias aren't" isn't a definition. Give me a good definition and I'll be able to tell you whether we have conscious programs, and possibly whether you are conscious. Don't get hypnotized by undefined words.
And why do you presume that an AI will think the same way we do? That's almost certainly a false assumption. But even different people have different ways of being intelligent, and so what. Nothing in "intelligent" says "do things the way people do". In fact often it seems that people do things in quite stupid ways. E.g., I'm having a horrible time losing weight, but I can clearly point out actions that I take that are contributing to the problem, however this doesn't cause me to avoid them.
Also don't mistake the current state of the art for the state of the art a decade from now. It *will* be different. Just how it will be different neither of us can tell, but it sure won't be the same.
Actually, also don't mistake current commercial products for current state of the art.
Additionally, one thing we can be certain of is that any AI we build will have a very different motivational structure than we do, so you're right about his arguments being silly. But he never claimed we currently have an AI, just that we will eventually get one, which I find extremely plausible. I'm still predicting around 2035, but it probably won't be human level...i.e., it will be better than humans at some things (already true) and poorer than humans at others. It will probably not be as good as humans at generalizing, but that's a guess.
Well, the question is really how mutually intelligible are they. IIUC Portuguese is almost intelligible as Latin, but the rest have drifted more.
A better comparison might be German and Dutch vs. German and Danish. Dutch is clearly a separate language...though also clearly closely related. Danish, though, could almost be considered a German dialect. And at least one source has told me that there is a continual "mutual intelligibility of neighbors" that runs from Switzerland down to Alps to Denmark and across the sea to Sweden. They may be exaggerating, of course.
OTOH, part of the distinction between British and American English is due to the decision of one person, Noah Webster, who thought the new country needed a separate language, so he wrote a dictionary with several new spellings. So the choices of prominent individuals can shape the way things develop in unpredictable ways.
They aren't the ones that matter to me. I find the Firefox the best current browser with Konqueror as an abysmal second best.
But I don't follow web standards. "What the hell is \"Web Assembly\"?", "Why should I care?", and "How can I disable it?" are the three major questions that pop into my mind. Presumably there'll be some way to disable it. My feeling is that the web has been going downhill ever since they introduced JavaScript. I already run a script blocker on most sites, and if I can't see the site through the script blocker, I'll usually just skip it.
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I may dislike systemd, and the direction that it is pushing things, but that isn't sufficient to justify calling it a bug. A flat head screw isn't a bug instead of a phillips, it's just designed for different applications.
You mean where he shot someone he claimed was an attacker? There usually isn't any proof besides his word, and the honesty of police reports is often questionable.
My ideal law would not prevent gun manufacture or ownership, but rather advertising and commercial sale (as opposed to private sale). Take the profit out of it an much of the problem would go away. Besides, it might encourage people to study metal fabrication, which would be no bad thing.
P.S.: I feel similarly about alcohol. Forbid advertising and commercial sale. Individuals should be able to do what they want.
The thing about guns is that they make quick overreaction easier. And you can do it from a distance. So they *do* change the picture, though, admittedly, not radically.
This idea that they are a protection against an abusive government has been rather soundly refuted in the last couple of decades. It's hard to even claim the oppression would have been worse if fewer people had guns. And a significant fraction of those who collect large numbers of weapons are sufficiently unbalanced to be a public danger. It's a small fraction, but guns are such an amplifier of violence that that small fraction is excessively dangerous...though not to the government.
The proliferation of guns in dense clusters of people leads to increased violence. I'm not sure this applies where they are useful tools, such as where rattlesnakes are common, or when used for hunting...but in metropolitan areas it appears to. Official collection of statistics, however, has been suppressed, though not censored.
What happened while you were growing up wasn't that there weren't mass shootings, is was that the news was more localized, so you didn't hear what was happening over in the next state. You often didn't hear what was happening in the next county. Now you hear about an outrage anywhere in the country, and often anywhere in the world.
If you think Republicans aren't statists when judged by actions as opposed to rhetoric, then you need to check your news sources. It *is* true that they tend to oppose state control over the rich and powerful more than the Democrats do, but that's not exactly evidence that they aren't statists, when they embrace government control over other parts of the system.
Outside of quibbling about the definition...
If they're offering translation services, then they are clearly sending what they hear back to the central servers. That kind of computation can't be done without a huge database and significant computation. And this can only work (and be improved) if they retain the information and continue processing it.
So clearly they are sending the information back to their servers and retaining it. And if you don't realize this is happening, you don't understand at all how they're offering the service.
What we don't know is if they're doing anything else with the information, to what extent they are aggregating it in processed form, etc. I doubt if they're saving it in raw form for very long, as that would quickly get expensive.
That's a foolish argument. China has as many foreign bases as it wants to have. If they want more, they can easily get them. But they're more interested in economic dominance, and they're pretty much there. In fact, in a lot of areas they *are* there. Military is only one aspect, and it's not the most important beyond the ability to defend your turf...which China has.
It's been clear that the US was on a downhill slide for decades, but it's been unclear who would be the successor power. China is better than many, because it historically has not been territorially aggressive, and because it's a very introverted culture. (As in, the rest of the world doesn't matter. *WE* are the important ones.) I'd prefer a country with more respect for human rights, but there doesn't seem to be one on offer. Japan seems pretty maxed out, and it's still got a lot of regional hate from the militaristic recent past. I had at one point hoped that India might step forwards, but they seem to have nearly stalled. The EU has potential, but it seems to be fading also. There's also a Historic Trend that points to *some* Asian country to be the successor. I had hoped that the US would last long enough for us to really get into space, but realistically no space colony in the next 50 years will be able to be a democracy. It will need to be a technological autocracy, and China may be better at that...though they are so historically introverted that I'm not at all sure.
If it doesn't have goals and a motive then it's not a robot, it's a telefactor. It's fair to call a self-driving car a robot, but not to call a remote control machine gun, because in the case of the remote control machine gun the control is from a separate entity (which could, to be fair, be a robot).
Now I'm not sure that we don't have murderous autonomous robots currently. Reports of an armed automatic sentry built in Japan have been a bit vague, but it could be a real robot. But currently the military hasn't been willing to give up the right to claim the kill itself.
Question: To what extent should one consider an artillery shell with a proximity fuse a robot? It can only make one decision, but it makes that decision, to explode or not, independent of human choice (at the time...I believe the distance can be set prior to firing). It's true it doesn't have much more intelligence than a thermostat, which I have long considered the thing corresponding to a bit in the frame of AI, but it makes a life or death decision.
Answer: Well, seriously that would need to be considered a misuse of the word, because it's too far from the central meaning, but it's a good example that concepts don't really have sharp edges. It's at the edge of the penumbra of the concept of robot.
Odd, my first reaction was "What would you expect someone in his position to say? Follow the money."
I guess I'm a bit more cynical.
But what you're describing isn't a robot, it's an armed telefactor.
If you say there's only one superpower, I'd say that one is China. The US has been declining rapidly. China may not use it's power in the same way, but it's been using it globally for quite awhile, and without (yet) building up the same kinds of enmity that the US has been.
That said, China is primarily an economic power rather than a military power. It's military power probably currently is below that of the US. It would probably need to purchase assistance from Russia to match us. But Russia would probably think that acceptable, for the right price. And in 5 years China is likely to be the military superior to the US in most kinds of conflict. (Who do you think *makes* the parts for the drones?) That the current Chinese standard of living is below that of the US is not a strike against them as a power. It means that it's easier for them to get workers for this and that, and it's cheaper to pacify unhappy provinces. And they could destroy the US (at considerable cost to themselves) by selling the US debt they hold on an open market.
Not this year. Give it 5 years or a decade. They still won't be competent, but better than the current controllers is a pretty low bar.
A book about the Democratic party is pretty much guaranteed to be PR, either by a party supporter or by an opponent. In neither case should it be believed. Instead watch what it does and how it acts. The same is true for the other parties.
A Democratic event is more revealing, but attending at more than a low level event requires approval by those higher up in the party. While there are obvious reasons why this is necessary, it mitigates against trusting what you see as being an accurate mirror of the intentions of those in control. So again, watch what it does and how it acts.
And, of course, watching means that your reports come from trustworthy sources. So don't believe what you see reported easily. Require multiple sources with differing biases.
Have you started to notice that this is a lot of work? That's why people usually pick someone they trust to form their opinions. Too bad people are so bad at picking trustworthy people.
And another thing is, even if they truly intend to protect your privacy, never get hacked, never leak, and don't make any mistakes, they can still go bankrupt.
After bankruptcy, all that data is going to end up with the highest bidder, who won't have made any promises about how the data will be used.
And that first paragraph was a sort of unbelievably optimistic hope.
Sorry, but whether "British English" is the default English depends on which country you are in. I *have* heard the language that Canadians speak called "Canadian", or even "Canuk", but normally one would say "English", and if one wanted to be specific "Canadian English". "English" is the generic term which includes, e.g., "Austrailian English", and even "Delhi English".
If I want to emphasize the dialect I speak (or write), then I may say "American English". Certainly if I'm contrasting it with another variety of English. (I don't, however, write or say "The Queen's English", though I'm aware that the British used to do so. [I don't know current usage.] Instead I'll say "British English". Maybe I'm just a lazy typist.)
I disagree about the "orderly", as I feel that's a recipe for stagnation, but there needs to be some way to handle "fake news". Unfortunately, trusting someone in authority to decide what is fake has always been a bad idea.
Odd, it doesn't do that for me. I generally leave it up for weeks at a time. Of course, I do have javascript blocked by default, and don't have flash even installed. Perhaps your problem, well, *that* problem, isn't actually with FireFox.
Every recent Firefox update has caused problems with a redesigned GUI. Admittedly up until now I've been able to work around it, but having to work around it is not something I enjoy. If there were a decent alternative I'd use it. Unfortunately, the closest thing I've found to a decent alternative is Konqueror, and that's not great. But if they cripple the bookmarks in the sidebar or make the menubar even more unusable I may be forced to change.
Well, I'm no expert either, I was merely (as I said) repeating what someone had told me. But your statement is the first I've ever heard that called it into question.
It would be nice if a German or Dane could speak to this point.
AI won't be alive no matter how smart it is, unless we build it via biological engineering. And so what.
Who can really say whether we have conscious programs now. We don't have an good definition of consciousness. Waving your hands and saying "people are conscious, and petunias aren't" isn't a definition. Give me a good definition and I'll be able to tell you whether we have conscious programs, and possibly whether you are conscious. Don't get hypnotized by undefined words.
And why do you presume that an AI will think the same way we do? That's almost certainly a false assumption. But even different people have different ways of being intelligent, and so what. Nothing in "intelligent" says "do things the way people do". In fact often it seems that people do things in quite stupid ways. E.g., I'm having a horrible time losing weight, but I can clearly point out actions that I take that are contributing to the problem, however this doesn't cause me to avoid them.
Also don't mistake the current state of the art for the state of the art a decade from now. It *will* be different. Just how it will be different neither of us can tell, but it sure won't be the same.
Actually, also don't mistake current commercial products for current state of the art.
Additionally, one thing we can be certain of is that any AI we build will have a very different motivational structure than we do, so you're right about his arguments being silly. But he never claimed we currently have an AI, just that we will eventually get one, which I find extremely plausible. I'm still predicting around 2035, but it probably won't be human level...i.e., it will be better than humans at some things (already true) and poorer than humans at others. It will probably not be as good as humans at generalizing, but that's a guess.
Well, the question is really how mutually intelligible are they. IIUC Portuguese is almost intelligible as Latin, but the rest have drifted more.
A better comparison might be German and Dutch vs. German and Danish. Dutch is clearly a separate language...though also clearly closely related. Danish, though, could almost be considered a German dialect. And at least one source has told me that there is a continual "mutual intelligibility of neighbors" that runs from Switzerland down to Alps to Denmark and across the sea to Sweden. They may be exaggerating, of course.
OTOH, part of the distinction between British and American English is due to the decision of one person, Noah Webster, who thought the new country needed a separate language, so he wrote a dictionary with several new spellings. So the choices of prominent individuals can shape the way things develop in unpredictable ways.
Well, if they do all they'll get is a bunch of phone numbers, because to me it's just a phone.
They aren't the ones that matter to me. I find the Firefox the best current browser with Konqueror as an abysmal second best.
But I don't follow web standards. "What the hell is \"Web Assembly\"?", "Why should I care?", and "How can I disable it?" are the three major questions that pop into my mind. Presumably there'll be some way to disable it. My feeling is that the web has been going downhill ever since they introduced JavaScript. I already run a script blocker on most sites, and if I can't see the site through the script blocker, I'll usually just skip it.