If you can't think of something you'd willingly die for, even without an afterlife, then you need more life experiences.
Here's a tip: If you have ever lived comfortably, especially if you've never really tasted the hard side of life, the side of life you can never escape because society doesn't give a crap about you, then you aren't on the suicide bomber recruitment list. There are people in your country, no matter what country you're in, that have no future, and perhaps never will--and who know in their hearts that the same will be true of their children, grandchildren, and on and on forever.
If you think that's a joke, ask yourself if the people who are poor now come from bloodlines that were once rich, or if they've been poor for dozens or hundreds of generations. It will be the same dozens of generations from now, for most of them. Not that there won't be offshoots of those family trees that break out, and that's wonderful, but those are unfortunately the exception.
If you want to mobilize those people into an army, you need to motivate them with the concept that their kids, their grandkids, their future is secure, even if they die. This has been used time and time again when people are mobilized for war, including by first-world nation militaries. These people are not "Defending" the way the US Army sees itself. They are fighting to create a future that we, the "defenders", seem to be preventing them from having.
But what's that, you say? We're not actually preventing them from having those futures? Well then maybe we should mobilize negotiators, builders, and grief councilors instead of soldiers. Just a thought.
That's the only thing that contributes to increase student grades.
Relatedly, student grades often have little to do with student intelligence, knowledge, ability, or other important factors.
In the many years I went to school, I often had terrible grades, because I didn't do homework. I passed, because I understood the material and therefore did well on tests, but the busywork that schools require in order to receive top marks is astounding.
That busywork, typically, is to force people to learn what they don't want to learn. I loved learning a lot of different things, but I chafed (like the spoiled brat I am, I suppose) at being treated like I didn't understand its value. And truly, sometimes I didn't. I failed AP history in high school, because I didn't want to sit there memorizing paragraphs of useless information. I did not fail history in college, because they made it interesting.
The internet inherently helps you learn the things you want to learn. Some applications, like games as education, will help make busywork appealing, so you learn things you don't care to learn about. However, you have to do a lot of work (making those games, teaching teachers to use them, etc) before you get to that point. And it's far more difficult to teach people who genuinely don't want to learn.
They accepted the risks when they engaged in the covert operations to begin with. People who uncover secrets are not responsible for deaths -- killers are.
If your ex will kill you if he/she knows where you live, and I know your ex will do that, and I tell your ex where you live, I am *not* blameless
If you got in bed with a psycho, deliberately betrayed him/her without his/her knowledge, and then broke up and went into hiding--but they didn't know you did anything--then me telling your ex that it was you, and what you did, is karma. Don't get me wrong, it's also me being an asshole, unless I'm friends with your ex and care more about him/her than you, but you did something wrong, you knew you did, you knew they'd be mad, and whatever your reason, it's on your damn head.
You're painting "Psycho ex" as something inevitable, a force of nature. Don't. Don't make them something mythical. They exist, and they exist because people were assholes to them and fucked up their lives. Surprise surprise, when you do the same, you get reamed for it. Similarly, don't consider tyrants and other corrupt assholes to be a force of nature, just because you can't do anything about them. Every single one of the situations in the world has a history, even if you don't care, even if you had nothing to do with it, even if you can't change it, now or ever.
So what you're saying is your wife will make me a sandwich too?
Oh exploitable!
I'm sure she only responds to local requests. And unlike in cybercrime, brute force attacks (also known as breaking and entering) are not anonymous, and usually not overlooked. Even if they leave a port open, it's no excuse...
Kids realize it's important to learn. They just don't know what to learn, why, or how, and they don't have the resources to find out. In fact, a lot of 'play' is learning and growing--learning to catch, throw, kick, run, hide, socialize, etc. A lot of video games are themselves just extremely specialized (and disproportionately rewarding) learning.
The people that need to understand the value of education are bureaucrats, management, parents, and everyone else that makes being a teacher a shitty occupation.
CEO's are not in it to bring profits for a company. That is not their job. Their job is to boast the share price at all costs. Its taught in finance 101 in any college.
Apparently Finance 101 professors are idiots.
The CEO's job is to manage the company. Managing anything, including a company, means weighing several factors when making a decision. These factors include but are not limited to, effects on share price, profits, public opinion, world at large, the longevity of the company, the employees, and the industry as a whole.
It's like telling a doctor they aren't there to set bones, but to stop bleeding. Many patients will be saved if you stop bleeding. Others will need bones set. Others need antibiotics, nutrition advice, advanced therapy, other medicine, psychoanalysis, etc. If someone hired you as a doctor and told you what treatments to use on your patients, sight unseen of the problem, you'd have to be an absolutely terrible doctor to offer band-aids to cancer patients.
A CEO that isn't managing the company, and is instead following orders to boost the stock value, is a shitty CEO in the eyes of everyone except stockholders. I don't know why you're defending that. And you are defending it, when you say "That's how the world works"; in other words, the existence of a structural problem forgives their own mistakes. Unfortunately, they do not live in an abstract world described by a few words; every day they walk into the company building and see the faces of the people they could be putting out of work, and day by day they watch their own hands slowly choking the life out of their charge. They have innumerable opportunities to stand up, and many of them don't.
It's not the way of the world. We're each responsible for our own fuckups.
Part of my concerns are with the CG rendered, relaxing couches in the video. Are they going to hit negative gees (freefall or upward force) during descent? Do they have specific plans to restrain people to protect against negative gees, or deceleration shocks? I could see seatbelts, but certainly some of their customers would want to be up and about for part of the descent; negative gees are something you rarely see in any reasonable duration.
But yes, it's definitely survivable, the main question is engineering both the capsule and the situation so that everyone comes out uninjured except when something truly unusual happens.
Let's talk about parachutes. Parachutes only inflate when you're already moving in the direction they want to resist, ie downwards. Even if they start the downward plunge by leaking helium slowly rather than disconnecting the balloon, at some point they have to make the transition. Add that (and I admit ignorance) to the different atmospheric density at 20 miles, with however that may affect descent, and it could be a fairly rough ride back down.
It's not like I think they haven't planned for it in terms of safety, but it sounds like it could be a fairly unpleasant, and maybe frightening, part of the experience.
I wonder what will happen if all a whole generation of IT people are out of work because they are "too expensive". Keep in mind that the age I'm in, means I'm basically starting my "life"... Married, mortgage, kids (or thinking of kids). The prospect of being out of a job in 5 years frightens me to no end.
This is a question? Do we need to remind you of just how first-world-problem you're sounding right now?
There are people the world over who raise multiple children while working multiple shit-jobs, who have no marketable or practical skills, and may never to their dying day. They have zero opportunity for advancement, unless they work yet another job to put themselves through college, and they probably have to calculate if they'll make enough with a college job to put their own kids through college. They don't worry about a mortgage because they can't afford one and they don't try. They live in an apartment or something else twice as small as they'd prefer. And they somehow fail to be lesser beings through all of this, even though they don't live the sort of idyllic life you saw in 50s sitcoms.
If a programmer with 15 years experience is living on pennies and working multiple jobs, they can still code-monkey on the weekends and put together a salable software project. The tools they need are not expensive enough that only corporations can buy them, nor do they even need to take out loans. If an entire generation of programmers with that level of experience are disenfranchised, they can band together and work without corporate overlords who don't understand pragmatism. Your skills are not only useful in the employ of asshats with suits.
Jesus, this whole story belongs on a Livejournal, not slashdot. "Am I too old to learn? Is my employer going to beat me and yell at me for being old? Should I prostate myself before the God and beg for forgiveness for being too experienced?" Take your life into your own damn hands, or have you forgotten what those hands were used for by every single one of your ancestors? If nobody hires you, you're the boss of your own damn life, so set yourself on the path to making money on your own. It's how every single business, ever, got started.
Again, those are questions that seem reasonable, but are presupposing several failures on our end.
"Perform within these constraints" is the problem to be solved. The human tendency to forget or ignore the fact that there are constraints is a failure of intelligence--which is to say, it is a failure to accomplish what was asked of it.
A lot of what we fear is that machines won't know what we're saying when we say it. For instance, the "Take over our lives for our own good" trope. "I asked you to prevent congestion on the highway!" "I did, sir. The roads are closed, and so no cars are blocking traffic." Almost no humans would fail to understand what we meant. But machines? "Who knows! Scary." I'm pretty sure understanding language and its nuances isn't the hardest problem AI is going to solve, if or when it's developed.
What a pure problem-solving engine "cares" about is relative only to its algorithms and its initial conditions. Assuming it doesn't break / get hacked, as long as it understands what problem it is to solve, it is not going to arbitrarily remove conditions until it succeeds. That would be a failure of the algorithm, a failure of the intelligence, and a failure of the programmers. And if it's got those kind of failures in its problem solving engine, I'm fairly sure it's not going to use that same problem solving prowess to successfully dominate all of mankind. More likely, it's going to fail at every single other problem it encounters with the same tenacity.
That's kind of the point. We have survived all kinds of accidental (not specific to humans) viruses, bacterial infections, predators, etc; presumably, almost any biological problem which is not specifically designed to kill us can be overcome, while species-ending events are unlikely without something more deliberate.
But then again, once machines are more intelligent than us, we will not be able to anticipate how they might behave; and if they are self-evolving - which they would be if they are more intelligent, since they could then be capable of making machines that humans cannot understand - there is no telling how they might evolve. Don't you agree?
As an answer, let me share my thoughts on intelligence in general; I think that intelligence (whether human, animal, or cybernetic) equates exactly to problem solving; that is to say, an intelligent entity is one built on a problem solving engine. Modern computers are a digital logic engine, and can do anything withing the bounds of digital logic (once correctly programmed); intelligence, including the brain and AI, are problem solving engines capable of doing anything within the bounds of solving problems.
Most of the people who suggest that machine AI will immediately and irrevocably see humans as a problem are basically saying that AI will not be able to solve several problems: Identifying the actions humankind would object to, solving the problems it is tasked with under those constraints, and crucially, adapting to changing circumstances--for example, the existence of humans that want to help or coexist with the AI. Even in a Matrix-world, you know that there would be machine sympathizers who would willfully assist the machines in finding a peaceful solution so that war doesn't have to happen. Identifying and screening humans who are of that mindset is a problem; and again, it's one that machines might be able to solve better than us.
But perhaps the thing that gives me most hope about AI is that humans themselves don't understand their own intelligence; the internal mechanics are not explicit, and we have no hand in them. Even if we identify a logical fault in our mind, we are often incapable of fixing it. If in the course of creating AI we understand intelligence in general, this might change, but more importantly, everything an AI is and does is (or can be refactored to be) an explicit algorithm that can be improved. That's something I wish I could do myself, honestly.
I don't take seriously the idea that nanotech or AI could evolve in that way. Or rather, I understand that AI could evolve, but I don't ascribe to the all-superior-intelligence-wants-to-kill-us theory. Partly because I think a lot about the nature of intelligence, partly as a programmer, partly as a writer. I can understand if that's not a ringing endorsement, but I don't think it's reasonable to assume an AI will have all the follies of human intelligence, which is extremely complicated, impure, and unstructured, and most of the anti-AI stories seem to believe they would be as stupid as humans, in ways they don't explicitly state.
Nanotech that evolves, on the other hand, is likely to be undesirable and will be engineered out from the start--outside of lab conditions. Which again, science being ahead of engineering, might be substantially more manageable than nanotech in the wild.
Agreed, GP is overmodded for a post that says nothing. For comparison:
Nano- and Bio-tech are very real dangers, I can swallow that. I might even buy the idea that mankind can create a disaster it cannot itself recover from. However, I'm going to say (largely in ignorance) that it's likely that any disaster we create will be behind our knowledge-curve, not ahead of it--because in general, engineering lags behind science by a fair bit. (See also: Every article on/. about new battery tech, solar cells, etc, for the last ten years or more.) So while we can truly and horribly screw ourselves, it's fairly likely to be something we can overcome. Whatever disaster we create with nanotechnology or biotechnology, or AI, at that point we will have made advances in that field and will have tools to defend ourselves that we do not currently have. For example, if we create some sort of virulent, viral grey goop with nanotech that wants to eat up all carbon-based substances on earth and extrude diamond, killing anything alive in the process, hey! We've discovered virulent, viral nanotechnology that can create large amounts of a desirable substance. Maybe we could use that to create a spaceship or colonize another planet. Earth, screwed; humankind, however regrettably, survives.
GGP seems to suggest, in contrast, that it's hugely likely we will create something we have no chance of fighting against. About the only likely candidate for that is a particularly well-made virus; nanotechnology, AI, and the rest of bioengineering don't seem likely to be terribly fatal to the species as a whole. Note that the virus would probably have to be specifically made for the purposes of killing off all human-kind, because nature has been trying since before humans were humans, without much success. Even AI at the most sci-fi action movie worst has a lot of weaknesses, for example power. Unless we develop a limitless power source (Hey! We developed a limitless power source. Let's go to mars. Earth, screwed, mankind survives), you can bust up power grids until affected machines are dead.
with the added sentence "No Royalty is payable for Apps with a List Price of $0.00." in Section 2(a).
Looking at the document (IANAL), that seems to refer to a permanently free app. If I understand it correctly, List Price is another term for MSRP (suggested retail price), and is not changed by Amazon when they choose to retail for $0.00.
On the other hand, it does say this: "A Royalty is due only for sales for which we have received final payment from or on behalf of an end user."
Which suggests that if they aren't paid, you aren't paid.
Bubble. The term you're looking for is bubble. A booming economy is not necessarily fragile, and is not prone to popping all at once as we all wake up from our collective stupor. A bubble is built on such fragile grounds that when it pops we all wonder how it could ever have been built in the first place.
While it's true we may end up going back to the same places over and over again, you aren't likely to see congestion until long after any particular location is settled--or at least manned. The resources necessary for interplanetary travel are enormous, so commercial satellites and unnecessary debris will only occur when there is local manufacturing. Local manufacturing isn't likely to be feasible without getting people there on a long-term basis, which is full of logistical hurdles we haven't crossed yet.
Also (and I haven't RTFA), I have to imagine that the sensor-dust they're talking about doesn't need to be sent anywhere near planetary travel lanes, and certainly doesn't need to be positioned there. Part of the overhead in large satellites is that if you have any plans to maintain them, they have to be within viable reach of launch vessels. Throwaway chip satellites could be put on a no-return trajectory into known- or presumed-useless space, or on trajectories that terminate in the sun or a planet's atmosphere. Since they're supposed to be sensors rather than dedicated commo satellites, etc, that could easily be feasible.
What happens when a human occupied vehicle crosses paths with one of these dead objects at 10,000km/h differentail speeds?
While I appreciate the sentiment (and agree), you really need to understand how amazingly, hugely, vastly much empty room there is in space. There are enormous calculations needed to hit something the size of jupiter, even if you start pointed in the right direction.
Let's say a 1km asteroid is 10,000 km away, and you yourself are in a 1km (cross-section) spacecraft. To not hit it, you have to aim to be 1km in any direction away from it--.5km from half of your body,.5km from half of its body. In other words, to hit it, you have to point anywhere within a 1km radius of dead-on. Assuming no course corrections, you have to be pointed within about.005 degrees of the object center, in every direction. Put another way, a sphere of radius 10,000km is billions of square kilometers of surface area, more than twice that of the earth, and you would have to hit around one square kilometer of it.
The moon, which is the only stellar object that could be accused of being close, is not 10,000km away; it's something more than 30x that far. At that range, the object could have a 30x greater cross-section and you'd still have that same tiny angular danger zone. Everything else is millions of km away. The only really clogged region (relatively speaking) is earth orbit, and that's because we have so much that we want to do and to leave in a relatively small space.
Is polluting the solar system still a bad idea? Sure, probably. However, to be honest, by the time our spaceflight capabilities are up to travelling to other planets in earnest, we maybe able to shield against large particulates, and we'll know approximately where they are. (There's not much in the way of interference in space like there are in wind and water; there's solar wind, gravity wells, and inertia, and not much else.) The debris is also comparable to what you might expect from asteroid collisions, comet trails, and the like, which might be substantially harder to track. More importantly, there's a lot of science to be done before we're ready for all that, and this is at least partially helping progress that. Maybe.
I wasn't aware of that--unless you're talking about the "top news" sort/filter, which I agree, I have no idea how that works. I always set it to "most recent" and read it that way. If that's not what you mean, I've neither noticed, nor heard about it before.
On facebook, you can't chose who among your 300 "friends" sees what you want to say. Facebook "filters" (well, censors) your post to a select people based on various past indicators. You have no control over this process whatsoever.
Technicality: I don't disagree with the spirit of your statement, but it is possible.
I have my friends in friend lists based on where I met them. Considering this isn't used by almost anything I've seen (although it does show up when using facebook messaging in a third-party client like Pidgin), I suspect most people don't even know it's there. The mechanism to set these groups is also not terribly obvious.
When I go to the 'post status' box on the main page, there's a lock icon telling me I'm defaulting to "friends of friends". Clicking it gives access to a dropdown list including "Customize". From there, "Make visible to" "Specific people..." gives me a text box to start typing in names, along with a similar box to refuse access to certain people or groups. If I type in the name of the friend group, it adds that group as a single entry.
That process is entirely retarded, the UI designers should be shot, and to my knowledge, you have to do that with every single post that you want given non-standard permissions (unless you save it as default), but technically, it exists. It may as well NOT exist for non-techies, and of course for anyone who doesn't know it's there, but it's possible. To my knowledge, it's been there for years.
I don't understand why computer laws are so hard. My computer is my property, as is the data stored on it. Accessing that data without my permission is trespassing.
You're right, it's your property. And unfortunately, because your data exists in abstract space, the government can't rightfully claim eminent domain; that means that your computer is the gateway to the sovereign nation of Yourstuff. However, the government has no treaties with Yourstuff and knows that several other sovereign nations of similar creeds and colors consort with criminals. However, because there are so ungodly many sovereign nations of Hisstuff and Herstuff, the nation can't possibly have individual treaties with each.
When the government attempts to impose its will against these many and disparate nations, a hidden conspiracy sweeps through all of them, giving them all tools to fight any incursion. So, argues the government, in order to stop these insurrections and allow us to find the criminals hidden among the many Hisstuffs and Herstuffs, we have to control the gateway--the hardware and the people who own it.
It's an understandable conceit, but it's not in their authority to do that, and until there's some kind of fair and equitable contract between the computer user and some kind of government-to-computer authority, it shouldn't be. That sort of power should only be handed out when the rules of what can't be done are laid out.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't think of something you'd willingly die for, even without an afterlife, then you need more life experiences.
Here's a tip: If you have ever lived comfortably, especially if you've never really tasted the hard side of life, the side of life you can never escape because society doesn't give a crap about you, then you aren't on the suicide bomber recruitment list. There are people in your country, no matter what country you're in, that have no future, and perhaps never will--and who know in their hearts that the same will be true of their children, grandchildren, and on and on forever.
If you think that's a joke, ask yourself if the people who are poor now come from bloodlines that were once rich, or if they've been poor for dozens or hundreds of generations. It will be the same dozens of generations from now, for most of them. Not that there won't be offshoots of those family trees that break out, and that's wonderful, but those are unfortunately the exception.
If you want to mobilize those people into an army, you need to motivate them with the concept that their kids, their grandkids, their future is secure, even if they die. This has been used time and time again when people are mobilized for war, including by first-world nation militaries. These people are not "Defending" the way the US Army sees itself. They are fighting to create a future that we, the "defenders", seem to be preventing them from having.
But what's that, you say? We're not actually preventing them from having those futures? Well then maybe we should mobilize negotiators, builders, and grief councilors instead of soldiers. Just a thought.
That's the only thing that contributes to increase student grades.
Relatedly, student grades often have little to do with student intelligence, knowledge, ability, or other important factors.
In the many years I went to school, I often had terrible grades, because I didn't do homework. I passed, because I understood the material and therefore did well on tests, but the busywork that schools require in order to receive top marks is astounding.
That busywork, typically, is to force people to learn what they don't want to learn. I loved learning a lot of different things, but I chafed (like the spoiled brat I am, I suppose) at being treated like I didn't understand its value. And truly, sometimes I didn't. I failed AP history in high school, because I didn't want to sit there memorizing paragraphs of useless information. I did not fail history in college, because they made it interesting.
The internet inherently helps you learn the things you want to learn. Some applications, like games as education, will help make busywork appealing, so you learn things you don't care to learn about. However, you have to do a lot of work (making those games, teaching teachers to use them, etc) before you get to that point. And it's far more difficult to teach people who genuinely don't want to learn.
They accepted the risks when they engaged in the covert operations to begin with. People who uncover secrets are not responsible for deaths -- killers are.
If your ex will kill you if he/she knows where you live, and I know your ex will do that, and I tell your ex where you live, I am *not* blameless
If you got in bed with a psycho, deliberately betrayed him/her without his/her knowledge, and then broke up and went into hiding--but they didn't know you did anything--then me telling your ex that it was you, and what you did, is karma. Don't get me wrong, it's also me being an asshole, unless I'm friends with your ex and care more about him/her than you, but you did something wrong, you knew you did, you knew they'd be mad, and whatever your reason, it's on your damn head.
You're painting "Psycho ex" as something inevitable, a force of nature. Don't. Don't make them something mythical. They exist, and they exist because people were assholes to them and fucked up their lives. Surprise surprise, when you do the same, you get reamed for it. Similarly, don't consider tyrants and other corrupt assholes to be a force of nature, just because you can't do anything about them. Every single one of the situations in the world has a history, even if you don't care, even if you had nothing to do with it, even if you can't change it, now or ever.
So what you're saying is your wife will make me a sandwich too?
Oh exploitable!
I'm sure she only responds to local requests. And unlike in cybercrime, brute force attacks (also known as breaking and entering) are not anonymous, and usually not overlooked. Even if they leave a port open, it's no excuse...
How many code refactorers does it take to change a lightbulb?
"Heck, you don't even need a full person. Just take part of the skeleton and some of the muscles, maybe some nerves, and there you go!"
Kids realize it's important to learn. They just don't know what to learn, why, or how, and they don't have the resources to find out. In fact, a lot of 'play' is learning and growing--learning to catch, throw, kick, run, hide, socialize, etc. A lot of video games are themselves just extremely specialized (and disproportionately rewarding) learning.
The people that need to understand the value of education are bureaucrats, management, parents, and everyone else that makes being a teacher a shitty occupation.
Here is a little secret.
CEO's are not in it to bring profits for a company. That is not their job. Their job is to boast the share price at all costs. Its taught in finance 101 in any college.
Apparently Finance 101 professors are idiots.
The CEO's job is to manage the company. Managing anything, including a company, means weighing several factors when making a decision. These factors include but are not limited to, effects on share price, profits, public opinion, world at large, the longevity of the company, the employees, and the industry as a whole.
It's like telling a doctor they aren't there to set bones, but to stop bleeding. Many patients will be saved if you stop bleeding. Others will need bones set. Others need antibiotics, nutrition advice, advanced therapy, other medicine, psychoanalysis, etc. If someone hired you as a doctor and told you what treatments to use on your patients, sight unseen of the problem, you'd have to be an absolutely terrible doctor to offer band-aids to cancer patients.
A CEO that isn't managing the company, and is instead following orders to boost the stock value, is a shitty CEO in the eyes of everyone except stockholders. I don't know why you're defending that. And you are defending it, when you say "That's how the world works"; in other words, the existence of a structural problem forgives their own mistakes. Unfortunately, they do not live in an abstract world described by a few words; every day they walk into the company building and see the faces of the people they could be putting out of work, and day by day they watch their own hands slowly choking the life out of their charge. They have innumerable opportunities to stand up, and many of them don't.
It's not the way of the world. We're each responsible for our own fuckups.
Part of my concerns are with the CG rendered, relaxing couches in the video. Are they going to hit negative gees (freefall or upward force) during descent? Do they have specific plans to restrain people to protect against negative gees, or deceleration shocks? I could see seatbelts, but certainly some of their customers would want to be up and about for part of the descent; negative gees are something you rarely see in any reasonable duration.
But yes, it's definitely survivable, the main question is engineering both the capsule and the situation so that everyone comes out uninjured except when something truly unusual happens.
"Due to a patent licensing issue, our knockoff brain-chips have no safeguards against harming humans. However, you get them at 75% off!"
Nice job breaking it, hero.
Let's talk about parachutes. Parachutes only inflate when you're already moving in the direction they want to resist, ie downwards. Even if they start the downward plunge by leaking helium slowly rather than disconnecting the balloon, at some point they have to make the transition. Add that (and I admit ignorance) to the different atmospheric density at 20 miles, with however that may affect descent, and it could be a fairly rough ride back down.
It's not like I think they haven't planned for it in terms of safety, but it sounds like it could be a fairly unpleasant, and maybe frightening, part of the experience.
We are space-men of Mars. This rare Earth-mineral of yours intrigues us.
Oh, it's "Rare-Earth mineral", not "Rare Earth-mineral"? Not interested.
I wonder what will happen if all a whole generation of IT people are out of work because they are "too expensive". Keep in mind that the age I'm in, means I'm basically starting my "life"... Married, mortgage, kids (or thinking of kids). The prospect of being out of a job in 5 years frightens me to no end.
This is a question? Do we need to remind you of just how first-world-problem you're sounding right now?
There are people the world over who raise multiple children while working multiple shit-jobs, who have no marketable or practical skills, and may never to their dying day. They have zero opportunity for advancement, unless they work yet another job to put themselves through college, and they probably have to calculate if they'll make enough with a college job to put their own kids through college. They don't worry about a mortgage because they can't afford one and they don't try. They live in an apartment or something else twice as small as they'd prefer. And they somehow fail to be lesser beings through all of this, even though they don't live the sort of idyllic life you saw in 50s sitcoms.
If a programmer with 15 years experience is living on pennies and working multiple jobs, they can still code-monkey on the weekends and put together a salable software project. The tools they need are not expensive enough that only corporations can buy them, nor do they even need to take out loans. If an entire generation of programmers with that level of experience are disenfranchised, they can band together and work without corporate overlords who don't understand pragmatism. Your skills are not only useful in the employ of asshats with suits.
Jesus, this whole story belongs on a Livejournal, not slashdot. "Am I too old to learn? Is my employer going to beat me and yell at me for being old? Should I prostate myself before the God and beg for forgiveness for being too experienced?" Take your life into your own damn hands, or have you forgotten what those hands were used for by every single one of your ancestors? If nobody hires you, you're the boss of your own damn life, so set yourself on the path to making money on your own. It's how every single business, ever, got started.
Goddamn, man.
Again, those are questions that seem reasonable, but are presupposing several failures on our end.
"Perform within these constraints" is the problem to be solved. The human tendency to forget or ignore the fact that there are constraints is a failure of intelligence--which is to say, it is a failure to accomplish what was asked of it.
A lot of what we fear is that machines won't know what we're saying when we say it. For instance, the "Take over our lives for our own good" trope. "I asked you to prevent congestion on the highway!" "I did, sir. The roads are closed, and so no cars are blocking traffic." Almost no humans would fail to understand what we meant. But machines? "Who knows! Scary." I'm pretty sure understanding language and its nuances isn't the hardest problem AI is going to solve, if or when it's developed.
What a pure problem-solving engine "cares" about is relative only to its algorithms and its initial conditions. Assuming it doesn't break / get hacked, as long as it understands what problem it is to solve, it is not going to arbitrarily remove conditions until it succeeds. That would be a failure of the algorithm, a failure of the intelligence, and a failure of the programmers. And if it's got those kind of failures in its problem solving engine, I'm fairly sure it's not going to use that same problem solving prowess to successfully dominate all of mankind. More likely, it's going to fail at every single other problem it encounters with the same tenacity.
That's kind of the point. We have survived all kinds of accidental (not specific to humans) viruses, bacterial infections, predators, etc; presumably, almost any biological problem which is not specifically designed to kill us can be overcome, while species-ending events are unlikely without something more deliberate.
But then again, once machines are more intelligent than us, we will not be able to anticipate how they might behave; and if they are self-evolving - which they would be if they are more intelligent, since they could then be capable of making machines that humans cannot understand - there is no telling how they might evolve. Don't you agree?
As an answer, let me share my thoughts on intelligence in general; I think that intelligence (whether human, animal, or cybernetic) equates exactly to problem solving; that is to say, an intelligent entity is one built on a problem solving engine. Modern computers are a digital logic engine, and can do anything withing the bounds of digital logic (once correctly programmed); intelligence, including the brain and AI, are problem solving engines capable of doing anything within the bounds of solving problems.
Most of the people who suggest that machine AI will immediately and irrevocably see humans as a problem are basically saying that AI will not be able to solve several problems: Identifying the actions humankind would object to, solving the problems it is tasked with under those constraints, and crucially, adapting to changing circumstances--for example, the existence of humans that want to help or coexist with the AI. Even in a Matrix-world, you know that there would be machine sympathizers who would willfully assist the machines in finding a peaceful solution so that war doesn't have to happen. Identifying and screening humans who are of that mindset is a problem; and again, it's one that machines might be able to solve better than us.
But perhaps the thing that gives me most hope about AI is that humans themselves don't understand their own intelligence; the internal mechanics are not explicit, and we have no hand in them. Even if we identify a logical fault in our mind, we are often incapable of fixing it. If in the course of creating AI we understand intelligence in general, this might change, but more importantly, everything an AI is and does is (or can be refactored to be) an explicit algorithm that can be improved. That's something I wish I could do myself, honestly.
I don't take seriously the idea that nanotech or AI could evolve in that way. Or rather, I understand that AI could evolve, but I don't ascribe to the all-superior-intelligence-wants-to-kill-us theory. Partly because I think a lot about the nature of intelligence, partly as a programmer, partly as a writer. I can understand if that's not a ringing endorsement, but I don't think it's reasonable to assume an AI will have all the follies of human intelligence, which is extremely complicated, impure, and unstructured, and most of the anti-AI stories seem to believe they would be as stupid as humans, in ways they don't explicitly state.
Nanotech that evolves, on the other hand, is likely to be undesirable and will be engineered out from the start--outside of lab conditions. Which again, science being ahead of engineering, might be substantially more manageable than nanotech in the wild.
Agreed, GP is overmodded for a post that says nothing. For comparison:
Nano- and Bio-tech are very real dangers, I can swallow that. I might even buy the idea that mankind can create a disaster it cannot itself recover from. However, I'm going to say (largely in ignorance) that it's likely that any disaster we create will be behind our knowledge-curve, not ahead of it--because in general, engineering lags behind science by a fair bit. (See also: Every article on /. about new battery tech, solar cells, etc, for the last ten years or more.) So while we can truly and horribly screw ourselves, it's fairly likely to be something we can overcome. Whatever disaster we create with nanotechnology or biotechnology, or AI, at that point we will have made advances in that field and will have tools to defend ourselves that we do not currently have. For example, if we create some sort of virulent, viral grey goop with nanotech that wants to eat up all carbon-based substances on earth and extrude diamond, killing anything alive in the process, hey! We've discovered virulent, viral nanotechnology that can create large amounts of a desirable substance. Maybe we could use that to create a spaceship or colonize another planet. Earth, screwed; humankind, however regrettably, survives.
GGP seems to suggest, in contrast, that it's hugely likely we will create something we have no chance of fighting against. About the only likely candidate for that is a particularly well-made virus; nanotechnology, AI, and the rest of bioengineering don't seem likely to be terribly fatal to the species as a whole. Note that the virus would probably have to be specifically made for the purposes of killing off all human-kind, because nature has been trying since before humans were humans, without much success. Even AI at the most sci-fi action movie worst has a lot of weaknesses, for example power. Unless we develop a limitless power source (Hey! We developed a limitless power source. Let's go to mars. Earth, screwed, mankind survives), you can bust up power grids until affected machines are dead.
Someone will offer you a USB stick, and you let Windows Autorun do the rest. Perfectly secure!
with the added sentence "No Royalty is payable for Apps with a List Price of $0.00." in Section 2(a).
Looking at the document (IANAL), that seems to refer to a permanently free app. If I understand it correctly, List Price is another term for MSRP (suggested retail price), and is not changed by Amazon when they choose to retail for $0.00.
On the other hand, it does say this: "A Royalty is due only for sales for which we have received final payment from or on behalf of an end user."
Which suggests that if they aren't paid, you aren't paid.
Are we looking at another dot-com boom?
Bubble. The term you're looking for is bubble. A booming economy is not necessarily fragile, and is not prone to popping all at once as we all wake up from our collective stupor. A bubble is built on such fragile grounds that when it pops we all wonder how it could ever have been built in the first place.
While it's true we may end up going back to the same places over and over again, you aren't likely to see congestion until long after any particular location is settled--or at least manned. The resources necessary for interplanetary travel are enormous, so commercial satellites and unnecessary debris will only occur when there is local manufacturing. Local manufacturing isn't likely to be feasible without getting people there on a long-term basis, which is full of logistical hurdles we haven't crossed yet.
Also (and I haven't RTFA), I have to imagine that the sensor-dust they're talking about doesn't need to be sent anywhere near planetary travel lanes, and certainly doesn't need to be positioned there. Part of the overhead in large satellites is that if you have any plans to maintain them, they have to be within viable reach of launch vessels. Throwaway chip satellites could be put on a no-return trajectory into known- or presumed-useless space, or on trajectories that terminate in the sun or a planet's atmosphere. Since they're supposed to be sensors rather than dedicated commo satellites, etc, that could easily be feasible.
What happens when a human occupied vehicle crosses paths with one of these dead objects at 10,000km/h differentail speeds?
While I appreciate the sentiment (and agree), you really need to understand how amazingly, hugely, vastly much empty room there is in space. There are enormous calculations needed to hit something the size of jupiter, even if you start pointed in the right direction.
Let's say a 1km asteroid is 10,000 km away, and you yourself are in a 1km (cross-section) spacecraft. To not hit it, you have to aim to be 1km in any direction away from it--.5km from half of your body, .5km from half of its body. In other words, to hit it, you have to point anywhere within a 1km radius of dead-on. Assuming no course corrections, you have to be pointed within about .005 degrees of the object center, in every direction. Put another way, a sphere of radius 10,000km is billions of square kilometers of surface area, more than twice that of the earth, and you would have to hit around one square kilometer of it.
The moon, which is the only stellar object that could be accused of being close, is not 10,000km away; it's something more than 30x that far. At that range, the object could have a 30x greater cross-section and you'd still have that same tiny angular danger zone. Everything else is millions of km away. The only really clogged region (relatively speaking) is earth orbit, and that's because we have so much that we want to do and to leave in a relatively small space.
Is polluting the solar system still a bad idea? Sure, probably. However, to be honest, by the time our spaceflight capabilities are up to travelling to other planets in earnest, we maybe able to shield against large particulates, and we'll know approximately where they are. (There's not much in the way of interference in space like there are in wind and water; there's solar wind, gravity wells, and inertia, and not much else.) The debris is also comparable to what you might expect from asteroid collisions, comet trails, and the like, which might be substantially harder to track. More importantly, there's a lot of science to be done before we're ready for all that, and this is at least partially helping progress that. Maybe.
I wasn't aware of that--unless you're talking about the "top news" sort/filter, which I agree, I have no idea how that works. I always set it to "most recent" and read it that way. If that's not what you mean, I've neither noticed, nor heard about it before.
On facebook, you can't chose who among your 300 "friends" sees what you want to say. Facebook "filters" (well, censors) your post to a select people based on various past indicators. You have no control over this process whatsoever.
Technicality: I don't disagree with the spirit of your statement, but it is possible.
I have my friends in friend lists based on where I met them. Considering this isn't used by almost anything I've seen (although it does show up when using facebook messaging in a third-party client like Pidgin), I suspect most people don't even know it's there. The mechanism to set these groups is also not terribly obvious.
When I go to the 'post status' box on the main page, there's a lock icon telling me I'm defaulting to "friends of friends". Clicking it gives access to a dropdown list including "Customize". From there, "Make visible to" "Specific people..." gives me a text box to start typing in names, along with a similar box to refuse access to certain people or groups. If I type in the name of the friend group, it adds that group as a single entry.
That process is entirely retarded, the UI designers should be shot, and to my knowledge, you have to do that with every single post that you want given non-standard permissions (unless you save it as default), but technically, it exists. It may as well NOT exist for non-techies, and of course for anyone who doesn't know it's there, but it's possible. To my knowledge, it's been there for years.
I don't understand why computer laws are so hard. My computer is my property, as is the data stored on it. Accessing that data without my permission is trespassing.
You're right, it's your property. And unfortunately, because your data exists in abstract space, the government can't rightfully claim eminent domain; that means that your computer is the gateway to the sovereign nation of Yourstuff. However, the government has no treaties with Yourstuff and knows that several other sovereign nations of similar creeds and colors consort with criminals. However, because there are so ungodly many sovereign nations of Hisstuff and Herstuff, the nation can't possibly have individual treaties with each.
When the government attempts to impose its will against these many and disparate nations, a hidden conspiracy sweeps through all of them, giving them all tools to fight any incursion. So, argues the government, in order to stop these insurrections and allow us to find the criminals hidden among the many Hisstuffs and Herstuffs, we have to control the gateway--the hardware and the people who own it.
It's an understandable conceit, but it's not in their authority to do that, and until there's some kind of fair and equitable contract between the computer user and some kind of government-to-computer authority, it shouldn't be. That sort of power should only be handed out when the rules of what can't be done are laid out.