I would imagine that through constant pressure you could probably "reprogram" a person to enjoy abuse you inflicted on them.
But with a robot, the scare quotes would be invalid. It would actually, factually like the abuse as much as it didn't like it before the reprogramming. No scare quotes, no qualifications. It would seek abuse out. It would completely act as if it preferred abuse over anything else, and if there's another concrete definition of "real" pleasure I haven't heard it.
Part of the problem here is the mental baggage you're carrying in with the word "abuse", which in at least one sense presupposes an action that the target will consider painful. Thus, "programming a robot to consider abuse a pleasure" is an oxymoron if you use that definition of abuse. Another sense of "abuse" actually is the actions we consider abusive, like hitting things. Up until we had robots we could program to like abuse of this form, there was no meaningful distinction between the two meanings and we could pretend they were the same thing. In a world where robots have recognized feelings, now there is a distinction.
You have to be careful with your presuppositions; you can end up in a situation where it is immoral not to hit a robot designed to like being hit, because that actually causes it pain. Again, right now that's just an philosophical argument, but in a world of robots that have recognized feelings that will be an actual, factual possibility, as real as the question of what the most moral way to treat poor people is today.
And there are other definitional traps; are you even sure it's wrong to program a robot to "like" abuse? Suppose I build a two-part robot. One part works as much like a human body as possible, and will swing a baseball bat. One part is actually a baseball. The goal of this robot is to evolve the best possible baseball swing, and one of the ways we do this is to make the robot enjoy hitting the ball part of itself with the stick part of itself. [Insert obvious joke here, or better yet, don't.] Is this "abusive"? What if the ball part frequently breaks? What if we sometimes let the human go in there and hit the ball? Things you presume to be "abusive" may not actually be if the robot was designed from day one to want to function this way.
Suppose I design a robot that tries to figure out how to survive a crash, and we actually routinely destroy its body as part of its normal functioning. The mind would of course live in something that we wouldn't destroy all the time. On the one hand, if that's not abuse, what is? And on the other hand, exactly who or what is getting hurt?
You've only moved the problem around, you haven't solved anything. Now, define "damage".
If I kick a robotic dog and totally destroy it, except for its memory, and I put that new memory into a new identical robotic dog body, and the robotic dog is either literally too stupid to understand that it is now in a new body, or completely doesn't care, did I actually damage anything? What if the robotic dog has no particular concept of pain at all?
The word "damage" carries a lot of baggage, much of which assumes many things about biology, the nature of pain, and a whole host of other assumptions, pretty much all of which are called into question by robotics and AI.
(In fact the only interesting thing about this discussion is that it seems to have penetrated into the main stream a little. Otherwise it's way behind the curve. Once you have minds that are fully separated from bodies, such as in this case, a whole host of new questions opens up; the question of what "damage" means is only one small aspect of one amazingly large kettle of fish.)
I hate to say this, but no, it's you anthropomorphizing the aliens, or at least the aliens that match the UFO claims. And not just as "human", but "humans like today", an even worse anthropomorphization.
There is neither rational nor human reason to cross the interstellar void just to buzz the locals. The opportunity cost of such a move is staggering; it's hard to guess the exact optimal computation per joule we can get but it's almost certainly comfortably within the resources necessary to simulate the entirety of human civilization as we know it (which turns out not to require all that much...); by "comfortably within" I mean "I'm giving myself several orders of magnitude of breathing room". In order to get to aliens that act the way that matches the claims of the UFO proponents requires extreme gymnastics for the sole purpose of obtaining such aliens; aliens that not only have the desire but have the precisely structured and stable society necessary for one effective entity to lay their hands on the requisite mass and energy and not be stopped by any other entity, and the exact combination of intelligence to build space ships and stupidity to actually do it.
Economics aren't a human thing; certain precise instantiations of it are, but the flow and allocation of resources that we call the "economy" can be seen everywhere in the ecosystem. The best way to understand symbiosis is as an economic transaction, and I've read papers where the predictions of economics end up quite accurate. At worst it's a terrestrial thing, but that seems pretty unlikely. My argument is from economy; UFOs are a far, far larger cost than people who have not been keeping up with science realize, and from that alone it is entirely rational to conclude that they're not just buzzing us as that would be an astonishing waste of resources, on the order of more wealth than the entire human race has generated up to this point.
Re:UFO vs. alien spacecraft
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UFOs In the News
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The reason UFOs are a crock isn't that they are fundamentally impossible in some absolute sense, it's that the line about "If there are aliens that powerful, they aren't going to just buzz us in UFOs" is far, far more true than 1950s scientists could ever have dreamed of.
Read Accelerando (free eBook available), and consider that nothing in that book is particularly physically implausible.
It is exceedingly unlikely that aliens that are just like we are now, only with spaceships, would come by and buzz us. At this point it seems far more likely that if any aliens ever do make "contact", it'll be in the form of a fully-automated colony ship that stops somewhere, maybe in the rings of Saturn or the asteroid belt, and proceeds turning our entire Solar System into computronium. All we could do is hope and pray the probe is programmed to do something nice for us, because we sure as hell couldn't stop it.
Any civilization that has the resources to cross the stars is extremely unlikely to use those resources to build a tin can capable of holding meat-bodies in it, with mass that could instead be made into enough computronium to perform mind-blowing amounts of computation, and blow unspeakable numbers of human-lifetimes worth of energy moving that across the stars, just to buzz humans for no apparently reason. (Yes; in a world of computronium, one standardized human life can be used as measurement of energy.)
The putative aliens of the UFOs are a product of a very peculiar sort of shortsightedness about the ultimate limits of technology that dates from a relatively narrow understanding of science, and are as out-of-date as the idea that the world only needs five computers. Interestingly, both ideas are out-of-date for the same basic reason...
I Am Not A Mathematician either but I'm closer than the vast majority of people on Slashdot. (I've studied this stuff in a formal setting and done some limited work in the field of handling wildly multidimensional data.)
This reply is much more reasonable, and much closer to the truth. One of the missing pieces of your first post is the problem of making attacker-resistant fingerprints. Fingerprinting is actually not so hard when you haven't got people actively trying to hurt the fingerprint and you can accept a reasonable (and small) rate of false positives. It's not even that hard to make it fairly stable under certain easy transforms like a volume modification.
Making it attacker-resistant is as hard as you say; it's not that a fingerprint function can't be created for each of the attacks you mention, it's that covering them all at once is hard. The easiest thing to do is simply make the fingerprints cover more stuff ("fuzzing" the fingerprint is a pretty good mental model), which definitely increases the false-positive rate on audio. (Video doesn't suffer from this quite so badly because it has much more data to work with, therefore videos are "farther apart", and can tolerate much more "fuzzing". The flip side is dealing with this extra data can be a pain and it does open up some other attack avenues.)
You seem to be assuming that the only "fingerprint" algorithm that exists is something like MD5.
While I'm not entirely optimistic about the existence of a fingerprint function that matches what the media companies want (although that is partially the fact that they do not really know what they want to the requisite mathematical precision, or, put another way, what they want is easy money and whatever magical tech is required for that to happen), the problem isn't as hard as you make it out to be, either, even ignoring your abuse of the word "infinite".
Great. Have fun. I won't try to talk you out of it.
But I will suggest that you keep your eyes peeled for when this causes you problems. If you never encounter it, hey, great, laugh at the arrogant prick on Slashdot. But if you do, you'll be better for having been sensitized to the problem, and seeing it more easily and sooner.
Maybe you'll come up with a better solution than keeping your namespaces nicely separated, but at the very least at least you won't be blindsided.
"Extreme Right Wing" means either that he once saw you fail to accuse Bush of being Hitler, or fail to see the war in Iraq as an absolute disaster.
It is "well known" that that is all you need to label someone as an extreme right winger, regardless of the rest of their beliefs. You can in fact otherwise be 100% liberal, but fail to be "pure"; see Lieberman for someone pretty darned close to that, if not actually there.
Python and Ruby both have roughly equivalent technical capabilities for what you call "dynamic metaprogramming".
The difference is that the Python community has a cultural value that says it's a bad idea and to be used only as a last resort, where Ruby folk seem to reach for it as a matter of course.
I am fairly certain this is a maturity thing, and I confidently predict that the Ruby community will come to view their zest for monkeypatching as a mistake in a couple of years. Ruby isn't the first language to allow it, and it's not going to have the first language community to discover just how miserable it can make your life.
If you're a Ruby programmer, I recommend you just skip this learning experience, and learn to start writing subclasses of built-in types when you need more functionality.
Re:I failed to see how this'll help
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HTML Encoded Captchas
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Oh, piffle. That's not hard either.
The "HTML renderer" in question will be either Mozilla or IE, both of which offer through Javascript the ability to find the absolute position of an element, and its absolute width and height. So the only "hard" part left is identifying the HTML location of the test, probably with something like XPath, or Mozilla's DOM Inspector which already allows you to just click on the element (and maybe go up in the hierarchy a bit.)
And I'm pretty sure the spammers already have programs to make it easy to have a human do just the hard parts, like identifying the location of the test, because I'm pretty sure that I've seen them have that sort of program to figure out the form field names easily. (Unique blogs, that is, blogs not based on any common software, have gotten blog spam too quickly and thoroughly before for any other explanation to make sense.)
You can try to move the test around, but you're right back to an arms race (which is where we already were, so no progress), and it's one where the spammers have a system that automatically notifies them of when they need to make changes.
The only spam solution is total moderation of the comment queue. If everyone did that there would be no spam anymore. (Somewhat ironically.)
I "came of age" in a fairly right-wing Christian household in the 90s, and Clinton was t3h ev1l. I still don't like him per se and still would be unlikely to vote for him, but it has become clear to me that he wasn't t3h ev1l, either. In fact he's done some things since leaving office that I have found respectworthy. (As an ex-President he is way above Jimmy. Admittedly that's not saying much, but Clinton has been a good ex-President.)
Much of what he was and what he did simply reflects the America of the time, and I mean that neither as a defense or an attack on anybody. I think documents released from his Administration shows that they understood the blooming terrorist threat, although perhaps not as much as they should have, but seriously, what could he have done more than he did, even if he wanted to? Bush had freaking 9/11 backing him up and he's been sniped at continuously since then.
It wasn't a lack of foresight with Clinton, it was a lack of foresight with America.
(It's not even clear to me that "more action" would have been a significantly better policy. There's no guarantee that 9/11 would have been averted, and while much is made of the fact the terrorist networks were building during the 90s, the fact is, so was the American economy. Relatively speaking we may be far more able to handle this now than even ten years ago.)
Incidentally, I rather strongly agree with some of the other posters to this article.
I think the idea that Bush is some sort of unique evil and that civil liberties violations must must must be connected to Bush is blinding people to the other far more real problems in the United States.
The endless actual civil liberty abuses in the name of the drug war dwarf the supposed civil liberty abuses of the war on terrorism, but those can't uniquely be laid at the feet of Bush, or even Republicans in general.
Over-zealous prosecution is a problem every year. The Duke rape case is merely one high profile example.
I don't think that there are no problems in the US, but there's always some problems. It's the idea that we are in the grip of some sort of unique crisis that I reject.
Re:My responses to the Slate article.
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2006's Bill of Wrongs
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Honestly, lists like this have what is probably the opposite of the intended effect on me: They make me feel pretty good about the United States.
The number one civil liberties problem this entire year was... hubris?!? My God, the Administration is claiming to be doing the right thing, even though their critics don't think they are? Batten down the hatches, ethnic cleansing can't be far behind!
Seriously, though, look at this list: Only two items are concrete people (Jose Padilla and Zacarias Moussaoui), and only one can I really agree with: One way or another, Jose Padilla should have been dealt with more rapidly. Moussaoui is hardly the only victim of overzealous prosecution, and he wasn't even convicted of the over-zealous charge. Who knows how many other people weren't that lucky this year?
Three of the list are basically redundant. "Slagging the X" hardly seems like a civil liberties problem; if anything I submit that insisting the Administration is somehow obligated to love the press and the courts no matter what sort of opposition they provide is an attempt to limit the civil liberties of the Administration. "Hubris" (again, the #1 problem of the year!) also fits in here.
The remainder are a laundry list of things that are admittedly concerning, but are just vague promises of threats to someday, possibly, maybe come down the pike. Only for Extraordinary Rendition can even one actual instance be named. For the rest, we are to take the fact that despite the extraordinary scrutiny this government's every move seems to come under, and despite the supposed flaming incompetence it exhibits at every turn, it has managed to hide all of its supposed wild abuses of power.
Right. Sure. Kinda convenient, don't you think?
I can't help but think that if even a tenth of the supposed Civil Liberties crises that I'm supposed to believe in actually existed, that we might be able to do better than come up with three names (none of which come even close to unambiguously innocent), a list of mostly-unspecified evils in passed laws, and the fact that the Administration has the unmitigated gall to think they are doing the right thing, and say so.
Remember that time the protesters were all locked up for six months despite doing nothing illegal? Remember that time anti-war meetings in ten cities were "mysteriously" firebombed, killing some of the biggest names in the peace movement? Remember when the Government banned the anti-war films? Remember when the Daily Kos was shut down and confiscated for sedition? Remember the Great Slashdot Roundup where everybody who has ever posted anything bad about the government on Slashdot was brought in for "questioning" and "released", with no charges but clearly implied threats?
Yeah, me neither.
Have some bad things happened? Yeah. Does the goverment have some questionable powers? Yeah. But do I believe this is some sort of unique crisis? Hell no. I think it's a case of looking at the world with blinders on. The very fact you have to look at the whole character of the United States through the window of such a mind-blowingly small set of evidence in order to support your entire worldview ought to be telling you something. My rhetorical questions is the portrait of a nation in trouble. This list of "ten most outrageous violations" is a portrait of someone stretching very scanty evidence to make a very dubious point.
Sci-fi set unrealistic expectations. Current technology can barely get us to the moon, it might get us to Mars in several months if nothing at all goes wrong, and when we get there, there's very little we can do of consequence other than bang on rocks and report back how sparkly the insides are.
This is a far cry from warping halfway across the galaxy to save the universe from a universe-threatening quantum disturbance with no particular relationship to reality.
As our capabilities grow, as they will, it might get more exciting again. For instance, even if we never get a space elevator, it is still theoretically possible to have a space age with rockets; it's "just" a matter of getting enough energy, cheaply enough, with fusion.
But until then, it's become clear to anybody who can think (and that's more people than the sometimes-somewhat-elitist Slashdot crowd will credit) that nothing terribly interesting is going to happen anytime soon in the space industry.
BTW, I don't know where the frack the whole booger-throwing theme came from. Am I trippin' on TheraFlu again?
Probably. If you weren't, you might have come up with the more accurate analogy of "feces-flinging monkeys".
Seriously, anybody who thinks Slashdot or even Digg has worthless discussion should go check out Yahoo or Digg or CNN or YouTube or anything like that. That's worthless discussion.
It's even worse than that. For any given prediction, there's probably somebody making it. For instance, this guy predicts that global warming will cause an ice age. I'm not saying that's right or wrong; my point is that combined with the traditional predictions about what global warming will do, the end result is that the entire gamut is covered; no matter what, somebody gets to be right.
The problem is that in our wonderfully complex world, being right about an event doesn't particularly imply that you are right about the causation. Certainly, all else being equal I'd say the person who is correct would seem to be more likely to be correct, but it's far, far from a guarantee.
it would give an incredible boost to VC sales if I could upload the emulators (along with the ROMs) to my Nintendo DS.
Why is this the first time I've heard this idea? That would absolutely rock. Especially if the DS could toss saved games back onto the Wii for the next download. (Downloaded content on the DS is lost at system power down. You can shut the case and it'll suspend, but if you shut it down the RAM is wiped. So, persistent saved games would have to go somewhere, and Nintendo is going to be wary about selling general-purpose memory carts.)
The only hard part would be explaining to people why you can only do that with Nintendo games, and maybe Genesis games. (At least based on what I've read about the current emulators people have written, Super Nintendo is pretty questionable, at least in the general case.)
And it's a way to integrate the DS and Wii that isn't the slightest bit contrived, like most/all of the Game Boy integration was.
Everything you mention works instantaneously, and wiretapping was hacked into the law as this utterly separate and novel activity. The original conceptions weren't changed, they were just left in their own little domain.
Now the domains are crossing, and all the old rules are breaking. Is an email more like a telegraph message or a letter? Neither; it isn't enough like either to reason about them based on telegraph messages or letters.
(This is a summary of a much more filled out point behind that link, although I notice just now the diagrams are broken.)
This is just a specific instantiation of a general problem with computers.
With old-style non-electronic messages, there is no distinction between the contents of the letter and the physical letter itself. Hundreds of years of laws and general ethical principles were written based on the assumption this will always be true. Now it's not, and it's all breaking down, but most people don't even notice this is the root of the problem because the assumption is so deeply ingrained. Instead, they want to just hack around the problem, not noticing you really need to rethink the whole system.
The internet privacy advocates mentioned in the article, which the general/. populace will probably view with more sympathy than the government, by claiming that email should be treated just like physical mail are really committing the same error as the government, who are basically acting as if they do have a place where they could grab a physical letter and therefore they can, just as if it were physically sitting somewhere.
The reality is that we need to sit down and really re-think the entire situation. The old model is broken.
I'd be satisfied that people are not crying wolf if people weren't constantly pulling stories from three years ago, but three weeks ago.
We aren't going to live in a country where no shit ever happens, anywhere. If you take the worst of the worst, and base your opinions on nothing else, you can make anywhere look like a cesspool. I'm increasingly of the opinion that's what's going on.
How many years are we supposed to hold our breath for the jackboot of fascism to fall on all the brave posters of Slashdot, before we start questioning the idea that we're in the grip of some sort of unique evil? Shouldn't we have a few million stories about people being mysteriously disappeared by the Bushitler squads, not the same ten stories repeated over and over and over and over and over?
Are you going to wake up in a cold sweat tonight, truly and honestly afraid that that bump in the night was caused by government agents coming along to disappear you as a result of posting that?
Or are you expecting to be up-modded, congratulated, and generally receive social approval?
Wake me when the answer to the first is a non-rhetorical yes.
In the meantime, while life in the US isn't perfect, after six continuous years of screeching I'm getting a serious "crying wolf" vibe.
Wow, that's pretty bad. For the non-mathematically inclined, I'd translate that to:
"If I use my own definition of space, which I slip in without either specifying it or explaining it to you, and which I probably can't really explain myself, I can demonstrate that the idea of curved space is silly." Since nobody shares that definition of space (and, like I said, he probably can't really explain it himself without repeated appeals to "common sense", which for better or worse has been shown to have no place in cosmology), who cares that the definition of space can't handle curving? Especially as it probably corresponds neither to reality nor any useful mathematical formalism.
(Mathematics requires a certain humility from those who would learn it; if you insist on elevating your "common sense" above logic and deduction, all learning math will do is annoy you. Math doesn't give a rats ass what you think is "common sense".)
The quoted explanation also has trouble with the fact that the curving of space has to do with how two straight lines relate to each other; for instance, whether lines parallel at one point by a local Euclidean measurement may cross later, or at least change their distance. Trying to understand curved space in terms of a single line is a waste of time; except for in a black hole where lines actually do curve back onto themselves all single lines are equivalent.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the problem here is the mental baggage you're carrying in with the word "abuse", which in at least one sense presupposes an action that the target will consider painful. Thus, "programming a robot to consider abuse a pleasure" is an oxymoron if you use that definition of abuse. Another sense of "abuse" actually is the actions we consider abusive, like hitting things. Up until we had robots we could program to like abuse of this form, there was no meaningful distinction between the two meanings and we could pretend they were the same thing. In a world where robots have recognized feelings, now there is a distinction.
You have to be careful with your presuppositions; you can end up in a situation where it is immoral not to hit a robot designed to like being hit, because that actually causes it pain. Again, right now that's just an philosophical argument, but in a world of robots that have recognized feelings that will be an actual, factual possibility, as real as the question of what the most moral way to treat poor people is today.
And there are other definitional traps; are you even sure it's wrong to program a robot to "like" abuse? Suppose I build a two-part robot. One part works as much like a human body as possible, and will swing a baseball bat. One part is actually a baseball. The goal of this robot is to evolve the best possible baseball swing, and one of the ways we do this is to make the robot enjoy hitting the ball part of itself with the stick part of itself. [Insert obvious joke here, or better yet, don't.] Is this "abusive"? What if the ball part frequently breaks? What if we sometimes let the human go in there and hit the ball? Things you presume to be "abusive" may not actually be if the robot was designed from day one to want to function this way.
Suppose I design a robot that tries to figure out how to survive a crash, and we actually routinely destroy its body as part of its normal functioning. The mind would of course live in something that we wouldn't destroy all the time. On the one hand, if that's not abuse, what is? And on the other hand, exactly who or what is getting hurt?
You've only moved the problem around, you haven't solved anything. Now, define "damage".
If I kick a robotic dog and totally destroy it, except for its memory, and I put that new memory into a new identical robotic dog body, and the robotic dog is either literally too stupid to understand that it is now in a new body, or completely doesn't care, did I actually damage anything? What if the robotic dog has no particular concept of pain at all?
The word "damage" carries a lot of baggage, much of which assumes many things about biology, the nature of pain, and a whole host of other assumptions, pretty much all of which are called into question by robotics and AI.
(In fact the only interesting thing about this discussion is that it seems to have penetrated into the main stream a little. Otherwise it's way behind the curve. Once you have minds that are fully separated from bodies, such as in this case, a whole host of new questions opens up; the question of what "damage" means is only one small aspect of one amazingly large kettle of fish.)
I hate to say this, but no, it's you anthropomorphizing the aliens, or at least the aliens that match the UFO claims. And not just as "human", but "humans like today", an even worse anthropomorphization.
There is neither rational nor human reason to cross the interstellar void just to buzz the locals. The opportunity cost of such a move is staggering; it's hard to guess the exact optimal computation per joule we can get but it's almost certainly comfortably within the resources necessary to simulate the entirety of human civilization as we know it (which turns out not to require all that much...); by "comfortably within" I mean "I'm giving myself several orders of magnitude of breathing room". In order to get to aliens that act the way that matches the claims of the UFO proponents requires extreme gymnastics for the sole purpose of obtaining such aliens; aliens that not only have the desire but have the precisely structured and stable society necessary for one effective entity to lay their hands on the requisite mass and energy and not be stopped by any other entity, and the exact combination of intelligence to build space ships and stupidity to actually do it.
Economics aren't a human thing; certain precise instantiations of it are, but the flow and allocation of resources that we call the "economy" can be seen everywhere in the ecosystem. The best way to understand symbiosis is as an economic transaction, and I've read papers where the predictions of economics end up quite accurate. At worst it's a terrestrial thing, but that seems pretty unlikely. My argument is from economy; UFOs are a far, far larger cost than people who have not been keeping up with science realize, and from that alone it is entirely rational to conclude that they're not just buzzing us as that would be an astonishing waste of resources, on the order of more wealth than the entire human race has generated up to this point.
The reason UFOs are a crock isn't that they are fundamentally impossible in some absolute sense, it's that the line about "If there are aliens that powerful, they aren't going to just buzz us in UFOs" is far, far more true than 1950s scientists could ever have dreamed of.
Read Accelerando (free eBook available), and consider that nothing in that book is particularly physically implausible.
It is exceedingly unlikely that aliens that are just like we are now, only with spaceships, would come by and buzz us. At this point it seems far more likely that if any aliens ever do make "contact", it'll be in the form of a fully-automated colony ship that stops somewhere, maybe in the rings of Saturn or the asteroid belt, and proceeds turning our entire Solar System into computronium. All we could do is hope and pray the probe is programmed to do something nice for us, because we sure as hell couldn't stop it.
Any civilization that has the resources to cross the stars is extremely unlikely to use those resources to build a tin can capable of holding meat-bodies in it, with mass that could instead be made into enough computronium to perform mind-blowing amounts of computation, and blow unspeakable numbers of human-lifetimes worth of energy moving that across the stars, just to buzz humans for no apparently reason. (Yes; in a world of computronium, one standardized human life can be used as measurement of energy.)
The putative aliens of the UFOs are a product of a very peculiar sort of shortsightedness about the ultimate limits of technology that dates from a relatively narrow understanding of science, and are as out-of-date as the idea that the world only needs five computers. Interestingly, both ideas are out-of-date for the same basic reason...
I Am Not A Mathematician either but I'm closer than the vast majority of people on Slashdot. (I've studied this stuff in a formal setting and done some limited work in the field of handling wildly multidimensional data.)
This reply is much more reasonable, and much closer to the truth. One of the missing pieces of your first post is the problem of making attacker-resistant fingerprints. Fingerprinting is actually not so hard when you haven't got people actively trying to hurt the fingerprint and you can accept a reasonable (and small) rate of false positives. It's not even that hard to make it fairly stable under certain easy transforms like a volume modification.
Making it attacker-resistant is as hard as you say; it's not that a fingerprint function can't be created for each of the attacks you mention, it's that covering them all at once is hard. The easiest thing to do is simply make the fingerprints cover more stuff ("fuzzing" the fingerprint is a pretty good mental model), which definitely increases the false-positive rate on audio. (Video doesn't suffer from this quite so badly because it has much more data to work with, therefore videos are "farther apart", and can tolerate much more "fuzzing". The flip side is dealing with this extra data can be a pain and it does open up some other attack avenues.)
You seem to be assuming that the only "fingerprint" algorithm that exists is something like MD5.
While I'm not entirely optimistic about the existence of a fingerprint function that matches what the media companies want (although that is partially the fact that they do not really know what they want to the requisite mathematical precision, or, put another way, what they want is easy money and whatever magical tech is required for that to happen), the problem isn't as hard as you make it out to be, either, even ignoring your abuse of the word "infinite".
Great. Have fun. I won't try to talk you out of it.
But I will suggest that you keep your eyes peeled for when this causes you problems. If you never encounter it, hey, great, laugh at the arrogant prick on Slashdot. But if you do, you'll be better for having been sensitized to the problem, and seeing it more easily and sooner.
Maybe you'll come up with a better solution than keeping your namespaces nicely separated, but at the very least at least you won't be blindsided.
"Extreme Right Wing" means either that he once saw you fail to accuse Bush of being Hitler, or fail to see the war in Iraq as an absolute disaster.
It is "well known" that that is all you need to label someone as an extreme right winger, regardless of the rest of their beliefs. You can in fact otherwise be 100% liberal, but fail to be "pure"; see Lieberman for someone pretty darned close to that, if not actually there.
Python and Ruby both have roughly equivalent technical capabilities for what you call "dynamic metaprogramming".
The difference is that the Python community has a cultural value that says it's a bad idea and to be used only as a last resort, where Ruby folk seem to reach for it as a matter of course.
I am fairly certain this is a maturity thing, and I confidently predict that the Ruby community will come to view their zest for monkeypatching as a mistake in a couple of years. Ruby isn't the first language to allow it, and it's not going to have the first language community to discover just how miserable it can make your life.
If you're a Ruby programmer, I recommend you just skip this learning experience, and learn to start writing subclasses of built-in types when you need more functionality.
Oh, piffle. That's not hard either.
The "HTML renderer" in question will be either Mozilla or IE, both of which offer through Javascript the ability to find the absolute position of an element, and its absolute width and height. So the only "hard" part left is identifying the HTML location of the test, probably with something like XPath, or Mozilla's DOM Inspector which already allows you to just click on the element (and maybe go up in the hierarchy a bit.)
And I'm pretty sure the spammers already have programs to make it easy to have a human do just the hard parts, like identifying the location of the test, because I'm pretty sure that I've seen them have that sort of program to figure out the form field names easily. (Unique blogs, that is, blogs not based on any common software, have gotten blog spam too quickly and thoroughly before for any other explanation to make sense.)
You can try to move the test around, but you're right back to an arms race (which is where we already were, so no progress), and it's one where the spammers have a system that automatically notifies them of when they need to make changes.
The only spam solution is total moderation of the comment queue. If everyone did that there would be no spam anymore. (Somewhat ironically.)
I think that's some of it.
I "came of age" in a fairly right-wing Christian household in the 90s, and Clinton was t3h ev1l. I still don't like him per se and still would be unlikely to vote for him, but it has become clear to me that he wasn't t3h ev1l, either. In fact he's done some things since leaving office that I have found respectworthy. (As an ex-President he is way above Jimmy. Admittedly that's not saying much, but Clinton has been a good ex-President.)
Much of what he was and what he did simply reflects the America of the time, and I mean that neither as a defense or an attack on anybody. I think documents released from his Administration shows that they understood the blooming terrorist threat, although perhaps not as much as they should have, but seriously, what could he have done more than he did, even if he wanted to? Bush had freaking 9/11 backing him up and he's been sniped at continuously since then.
It wasn't a lack of foresight with Clinton, it was a lack of foresight with America.
(It's not even clear to me that "more action" would have been a significantly better policy. There's no guarantee that 9/11 would have been averted, and while much is made of the fact the terrorist networks were building during the 90s, the fact is, so was the American economy. Relatively speaking we may be far more able to handle this now than even ten years ago.)
Incidentally, I rather strongly agree with some of the other posters to this article.
I think the idea that Bush is some sort of unique evil and that civil liberties violations must must must be connected to Bush is blinding people to the other far more real problems in the United States.
Baldrson points out prison rape. I'm not personally certain about the true extent of the problem, but that's a big one.
The endless actual civil liberty abuses in the name of the drug war dwarf the supposed civil liberty abuses of the war on terrorism, but those can't uniquely be laid at the feet of Bush, or even Republicans in general.
Over-zealous prosecution is a problem every year. The Duke rape case is merely one high profile example.
I don't think that there are no problems in the US, but there's always some problems. It's the idea that we are in the grip of some sort of unique crisis that I reject.
Honestly, lists like this have what is probably the opposite of the intended effect on me: They make me feel pretty good about the United States.
The number one civil liberties problem this entire year was... hubris ?!? My God, the Administration is claiming to be doing the right thing, even though their critics don't think they are? Batten down the hatches, ethnic cleansing can't be far behind!
Seriously, though, look at this list: Only two items are concrete people (Jose Padilla and Zacarias Moussaoui), and only one can I really agree with: One way or another, Jose Padilla should have been dealt with more rapidly. Moussaoui is hardly the only victim of overzealous prosecution, and he wasn't even convicted of the over-zealous charge. Who knows how many other people weren't that lucky this year?
Three of the list are basically redundant. "Slagging the X" hardly seems like a civil liberties problem; if anything I submit that insisting the Administration is somehow obligated to love the press and the courts no matter what sort of opposition they provide is an attempt to limit the civil liberties of the Administration. "Hubris" (again, the #1 problem of the year!) also fits in here.
The remainder are a laundry list of things that are admittedly concerning, but are just vague promises of threats to someday, possibly, maybe come down the pike. Only for Extraordinary Rendition can even one actual instance be named. For the rest, we are to take the fact that despite the extraordinary scrutiny this government's every move seems to come under, and despite the supposed flaming incompetence it exhibits at every turn, it has managed to hide all of its supposed wild abuses of power.
Right. Sure. Kinda convenient, don't you think?
I can't help but think that if even a tenth of the supposed Civil Liberties crises that I'm supposed to believe in actually existed, that we might be able to do better than come up with three names (none of which come even close to unambiguously innocent), a list of mostly-unspecified evils in passed laws, and the fact that the Administration has the unmitigated gall to think they are doing the right thing, and say so.
Remember that time the protesters were all locked up for six months despite doing nothing illegal? Remember that time anti-war meetings in ten cities were "mysteriously" firebombed, killing some of the biggest names in the peace movement? Remember when the Government banned the anti-war films? Remember when the Daily Kos was shut down and confiscated for sedition? Remember the Great Slashdot Roundup where everybody who has ever posted anything bad about the government on Slashdot was brought in for "questioning" and "released", with no charges but clearly implied threats?
Yeah, me neither.
Have some bad things happened? Yeah. Does the goverment have some questionable powers? Yeah. But do I believe this is some sort of unique crisis? Hell no. I think it's a case of looking at the world with blinders on. The very fact you have to look at the whole character of the United States through the window of such a mind-blowingly small set of evidence in order to support your entire worldview ought to be telling you something. My rhetorical questions is the portrait of a nation in trouble. This list of "ten most outrageous violations" is a portrait of someone stretching very scanty evidence to make a very dubious point.
Sci-fi set unrealistic expectations. Current technology can barely get us to the moon, it might get us to Mars in several months if nothing at all goes wrong, and when we get there, there's very little we can do of consequence other than bang on rocks and report back how sparkly the insides are.
This is a far cry from warping halfway across the galaxy to save the universe from a universe-threatening quantum disturbance with no particular relationship to reality.
As our capabilities grow, as they will, it might get more exciting again. For instance, even if we never get a space elevator, it is still theoretically possible to have a space age with rockets; it's "just" a matter of getting enough energy, cheaply enough, with fusion.
But until then, it's become clear to anybody who can think (and that's more people than the sometimes-somewhat-elitist Slashdot crowd will credit) that nothing terribly interesting is going to happen anytime soon in the space industry.
Seriously, anybody who thinks Slashdot or even Digg has worthless discussion should go check out Yahoo or Digg or CNN or YouTube or anything like that. That's worthless discussion.
So, the patent boils down to "Instead of doing this thing five ways in five programs, we're going to do this in one way."
If only programmers around the world had this idea to do things in one way, instead of many different ways, before...
It's even worse than that. For any given prediction, there's probably somebody making it. For instance, this guy predicts that global warming will cause an ice age. I'm not saying that's right or wrong; my point is that combined with the traditional predictions about what global warming will do, the end result is that the entire gamut is covered; no matter what, somebody gets to be right.
The problem is that in our wonderfully complex world, being right about an event doesn't particularly imply that you are right about the causation. Certainly, all else being equal I'd say the person who is correct would seem to be more likely to be correct, but it's far, far from a guarantee.
The only hard part would be explaining to people why you can only do that with Nintendo games, and maybe Genesis games. (At least based on what I've read about the current emulators people have written, Super Nintendo is pretty questionable, at least in the general case.)
And it's a way to integrate the DS and Wii that isn't the slightest bit contrived, like most/all of the Game Boy integration was.
Everything you mention works instantaneously, and wiretapping was hacked into the law as this utterly separate and novel activity. The original conceptions weren't changed, they were just left in their own little domain.
Now the domains are crossing, and all the old rules are breaking. Is an email more like a telegraph message or a letter? Neither; it isn't enough like either to reason about them based on telegraph messages or letters.
(This is a summary of a much more filled out point behind that link, although I notice just now the diagrams are broken.)
This is just a specific instantiation of a general problem with computers.
/. populace will probably view with more sympathy than the government, by claiming that email should be treated just like physical mail are really committing the same error as the government, who are basically acting as if they do have a place where they could grab a physical letter and therefore they can, just as if it were physically sitting somewhere.
With old-style non-electronic messages, there is no distinction between the contents of the letter and the physical letter itself. Hundreds of years of laws and general ethical principles were written based on the assumption this will always be true. Now it's not, and it's all breaking down, but most people don't even notice this is the root of the problem because the assumption is so deeply ingrained. Instead, they want to just hack around the problem, not noticing you really need to rethink the whole system.
Copyright has the exact same problem.
The internet privacy advocates mentioned in the article, which the general
The reality is that we need to sit down and really re-think the entire situation. The old model is broken.
Flip your point around. When are things good enough not to panic?
If you end up proposing a standard that can't be met, then why should I care?
If you propose a standard that can be met, are you sure that it isn't already met?
I'd be satisfied that people are not crying wolf if people weren't constantly pulling stories from three years ago, but three weeks ago.
We aren't going to live in a country where no shit ever happens, anywhere. If you take the worst of the worst, and base your opinions on nothing else, you can make anywhere look like a cesspool. I'm increasingly of the opinion that's what's going on.
How many years are we supposed to hold our breath for the jackboot of fascism to fall on all the brave posters of Slashdot, before we start questioning the idea that we're in the grip of some sort of unique evil? Shouldn't we have a few million stories about people being mysteriously disappeared by the Bushitler squads, not the same ten stories repeated over and over and over and over and over?
Are you going to wake up in a cold sweat tonight, truly and honestly afraid that that bump in the night was caused by government agents coming along to disappear you as a result of posting that?
Or are you expecting to be up-modded, congratulated, and generally receive social approval?
Wake me when the answer to the first is a non-rhetorical yes.
In the meantime, while life in the US isn't perfect, after six continuous years of screeching I'm getting a serious "crying wolf" vibe.
Wow, that's pretty bad. For the non-mathematically inclined, I'd translate that to:
"If I use my own definition of space, which I slip in without either specifying it or explaining it to you, and which I probably can't really explain myself, I can demonstrate that the idea of curved space is silly." Since nobody shares that definition of space (and, like I said, he probably can't really explain it himself without repeated appeals to "common sense", which for better or worse has been shown to have no place in cosmology), who cares that the definition of space can't handle curving? Especially as it probably corresponds neither to reality nor any useful mathematical formalism.
(Mathematics requires a certain humility from those who would learn it; if you insist on elevating your "common sense" above logic and deduction, all learning math will do is annoy you. Math doesn't give a rats ass what you think is "common sense".)
The quoted explanation also has trouble with the fact that the curving of space has to do with how two straight lines relate to each other; for instance, whether lines parallel at one point by a local Euclidean measurement may cross later, or at least change their distance. Trying to understand curved space in terms of a single line is a waste of time; except for in a black hole where lines actually do curve back onto themselves all single lines are equivalent.