There are two important questions: - Does it fail less than people? - When it fails, who is liable?
From a manufacturer's perspective, a thousand accidents due to driver error are better than a single accident due to onboard computer error, because in the latter case they have to deal with big compensation payout and a lot of bad press. Manufacturers are happy to add things that assist a driver, but they aren't going to release a fully-automonous car until there is some law limiting their liability in the event, however unlikely, that it glitches and hits someone.
Not all number-crunching loads take well to GPGPU. Branching really hurts on that architecture. It also needs a programmer who knows how to use it - not a problem if you've got a decent budget, but a serious concern for the hobbyist - it comes down to a question of either spending hundreds of pounds on hardware, or tens of hours on learning a new programming skill. I went the former route myself and got a dual-socket workstation, but that was when I had money.
Is it really that hard to build safeguards in? Just make sure there is no way to determine before the execution who the organs will go to. Make it a lottery or something - take the next few hundred people in line, pick one at random.
But as computers take over more, the scope for computer-related accidents broadens. Can you be sure the computer will handle all possible inputs correctly? What if the play of shadow from a tree happens to resemble, to machine vision, the shape of a 'stop' sign? Can you be sure that if there is a transient power glitch due to after-market modifications like a ridiculously-overpowered sound system that the computer will continue to operate without even a few miliseconds interuption?
From what I read, the robots were designed in such a way that they could not violate the laws, because doing so would require them to be operating so far out of normal paramaters that they could not function at all. A robot forced to violate the laws would just burn out the circuits in its positronic brain and cease operation. Throughout all of the short stories, no robot actually broke the laws - they followed them to the letter, though often in ways and circumstances the original designers had no anticipated. I vaguely remember something in one of the series about military robots being used to attack civilian passanger ships by the simple technique of telling them the targets were unmanned drones.
They still wouldn't resemble the classic dream of flying cars though. I imagine there would be no option for manual control - it'd just be too dangerous. You'd tell the car where you want to go. It'd check that this is an approved landing spot, make a reservation to be sure that space is available to land on arrival, and fly there on autopilot. You can get some work done during the journey, once the novelty of the view from the windows wears off.
Not likely? If you're looking for a processor with serious number-crunching ability, there are only two manufacturers around: Intel and AMD. No others are going to come along because the start-up cost would be so great as to make it an unworkable business plan.
Then why is 'America's Dumbest Criminals' not just allowed, but shown on television? There's a big difference between criminalising an act and criminalising posession of a recording of an act.
Or to look at it another way: If speech of any type is to be banned, then this ban must be enforceable. Somewhere, someone has to have the power to declare the law violated and have sites closed, documents destroyed and perhaps people jailed to keep them from talking. Technologies which can be used to circumvent this, like Freenet, must also be prohibited. Otherwise the law becomes unenforceable.
That someone isn't going to be you. If you're lucky it'll be a sensible judge acting in the directions of a sensible legislature. More likely the power to ban speech will fall into the hands of oppressive state leaders, corporations desperate to silence threats to their profits and do-gooders eager to rid the world of whatever they regard as evil, heretical or perverse. You're probably in one of the lucky countries, where this is largely an academic debate - but now try going to North Korea and telling the people just how many people Kim Jong-Il had executed.
The power to silence speech is too great to be entrusted to anyone, no matter how good their intentions.
Would you rather just let the organs rot or burn, when they could potentially save many lives and reduce suffering for a few more? Seems a terrible waste.
How would one go about creating a world-dominating AI?
Because if someone is going to do it, I'd perfer it were me. I'd at least be able to give it some objective more interesting than 'destroy all humans.'
Reliability. Fireing squads miss. They are also rather messy. Not sure what is wrong with a single massive overdose, though. I'm sure the idea was considered, so there must be some reason it was rejected.
Personally, if the condemned is free from disease, I'd want to at least put the organs to use. The problem there is that almost all doctors in the US are prohibited by oath and professional association membership rules from involvement in executions, and you'd need a doctor to perform a transplant. Plus the difficulty in getting a condemned criminal securely and without public protest into a hospital. The lethal injection process is administered by medical technicians: You don't need three years of med-school to learn how to put an IV in.
Everyone has the cookbook. It's historic. Everyone also has a slightly different version, due to the nature of the text. A living document for some decades.
Really? Do you think it'd be evident to a jury of non-gamers? When the prosecution has only submitted the searches as evidence that support their case, dismissing all the obviously game-related searches as unimportant?
Useful things those index.dat files. We used to use them at work when someone was accused of looking at porn when they should be working (happened a lot). That was before we got a decent proxy server.
I have a vision of her doing a little dance while waving her behind in the prosecution's face and chanting 'double je-par-dee-A!, double je-per-dee-A!"
But that isn't how the lethal injection works for humans. It's a much lengthier process involving three seperate drugs. It's supposed to be painless, but there's a lot of debate about that - certainly the final drug, potassium chloride, hurts like hell, but by that point the prisoner is supposed to be unconscious. The problem is that the first drug used is the anasthetic, and the second a paralytic: If the anasthetic doesn't work (equipment fault, unusually resistant prisoner, sheer bad luck) then it'd go unnoticed, as the paralysed prisoner would have no means to express the pain. And there would be pain: The reason for that paralytic is that without it, even an unconscious and heavily sedated prisoner would be writheing around just from reflexive responses to pain, much to the distress of the witnesses.
You may wonder why the method you saw on the pets isn't used on humans. That's because it's too unreliable. There's a chance the 'dead' prisoner won't be quite dead. There are completly reliable, painless methods - aspixiation with nitrogen is easy - but there face political opposition. The very fact that they are painless ensures they are resisted by the hardcore pro-death-penalty crowd, who feel that a painless death (Or even worse, aspixiation euphoria) does not serve justice properly.
An MMORPG needs to be crafted in such a way that the players feel challenged, but never actually like they are losing. They need to always be progressing to greater things, higher levels, better gear. And never going backwards.
Contrast to, say, EVE Online. How many players do you think ragequit forever after spending their fortune on an utterly awesome ship, only to then lose it all due to a mistake or sheer bad luck?
Most players I know get tired of singleplayer quickly - but once they join a multiplayer server there's a social aspect. Also, Tekkit greatly extends the novelty.
I'm working on an HV solar panel to power my mass fab on one server. Three MVs down, seven more to go! The HV is the most resource-intensive item in IC2, perhaps in any mod. I've got a whole factory dedicated to processing a stream of input from quarries and producing fuel to keep them running, almost entirely automated.
I know it exists on Freenet. The major indexers refuse to carry links, and the pedophiles are polite enough not to post images openly anywhere, so as a typical user you won't run into it unless you go looking - but every now and then you'll see a link advertising a freesite as containing kiddie porn. If the cost of free, unregulatable speech is the existance of some unobtrusive kiddie porn sites, then I'd consider that an acceptable cost.
It could be argued that they could use the hash to more effectively police infringing content: Once a file is reported, they could have pulled all uploads of that hash and blocked new ones. But this would be a poor idea, because it'd be trivial for pirates to circumvent by just changing one byte (Like a padding file in a rar archive, or a new password), so all it'd really do is raise their cost of storage substantially in return for delaying pirates by about three minutes.
Only a few. It also discourages new ones very effectively. Unlike a p2p network, a person can't throw together a filelocker in their bedroom. It takes money to get it going, to set up the servers and pay for storage and bandwidth until the income starts - and only a fool is going to invest their money in a filelocker business now it's apparent that any successful filelocker is likely to be shut down and all assets siezed.
In an ideal world the job of the police and prosecution would be to enforce accurate justice and determine the facts. But this isn't an ideal world. There's a lot of political pressure, and a lot of time and resource pressure, so in practice a lot of it gets run like a production line: The suspects come in, and must be quickly processed. It's also hugely embarassing to arrest someone and not get *something* out of it, and there's a serious conflict of interest in some countries where police departments are part-funded by fines and asset seizure.
There was a big outrage here in the UK a few years back about speed cameras. A lot of them were being hidden away in places where speeding was frequent but accidents rare, mostly at the bottom of hills where drivers picked up a little extra speed coming down, because the speeding fines went straight to the operating police departments. The practice was only stopped when one of our tabloid newspapers ran a campaign against them. This is still part of the reason police in the US are so eager to grab anything and everything not nailed down as 'evidence.' It'll end up in the police auction eventually.
Not exactly. From what I know of past precidents, it applies if you've *memorised* the keys. But if the keys are written down anywhere, or stored on any physical media, then they are simply considered physical evidence and subject to the usual search-and-seizure method. They'll just grab every piece of storage you own, right down to your cellphone and games consoles, and search them all. Even the computer monitors, just in case. Even if found innocent, you're unlikely to ever get anything back. That's just standard policing procedure: Make the accused's life hell, thus applying pressure to confess or agree to a plea bargin.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two important questions:
- Does it fail less than people?
- When it fails, who is liable?
From a manufacturer's perspective, a thousand accidents due to driver error are better than a single accident due to onboard computer error, because in the latter case they have to deal with big compensation payout and a lot of bad press. Manufacturers are happy to add things that assist a driver, but they aren't going to release a fully-automonous car until there is some law limiting their liability in the event, however unlikely, that it glitches and hits someone.
Not all number-crunching loads take well to GPGPU. Branching really hurts on that architecture. It also needs a programmer who knows how to use it - not a problem if you've got a decent budget, but a serious concern for the hobbyist - it comes down to a question of either spending hundreds of pounds on hardware, or tens of hours on learning a new programming skill. I went the former route myself and got a dual-socket workstation, but that was when I had money.
Is it really that hard to build safeguards in? Just make sure there is no way to determine before the execution who the organs will go to. Make it a lottery or something - take the next few hundred people in line, pick one at random.
But as computers take over more, the scope for computer-related accidents broadens. Can you be sure the computer will handle all possible inputs correctly? What if the play of shadow from a tree happens to resemble, to machine vision, the shape of a 'stop' sign? Can you be sure that if there is a transient power glitch due to after-market modifications like a ridiculously-overpowered sound system that the computer will continue to operate without even a few miliseconds interuption?
From what I read, the robots were designed in such a way that they could not violate the laws, because doing so would require them to be operating so far out of normal paramaters that they could not function at all. A robot forced to violate the laws would just burn out the circuits in its positronic brain and cease operation. Throughout all of the short stories, no robot actually broke the laws - they followed them to the letter, though often in ways and circumstances the original designers had no anticipated. I vaguely remember something in one of the series about military robots being used to attack civilian passanger ships by the simple technique of telling them the targets were unmanned drones.
They still wouldn't resemble the classic dream of flying cars though. I imagine there would be no option for manual control - it'd just be too dangerous. You'd tell the car where you want to go. It'd check that this is an approved landing spot, make a reservation to be sure that space is available to land on arrival, and fly there on autopilot. You can get some work done during the journey, once the novelty of the view from the windows wears off.
Not likely? If you're looking for a processor with serious number-crunching ability, there are only two manufacturers around: Intel and AMD. No others are going to come along because the start-up cost would be so great as to make it an unworkable business plan.
Then why is 'America's Dumbest Criminals' not just allowed, but shown on television? There's a big difference between criminalising an act and criminalising posession of a recording of an act.
Or to look at it another way: If speech of any type is to be banned, then this ban must be enforceable. Somewhere, someone has to have the power to declare the law violated and have sites closed, documents destroyed and perhaps people jailed to keep them from talking. Technologies which can be used to circumvent this, like Freenet, must also be prohibited. Otherwise the law becomes unenforceable.
That someone isn't going to be you. If you're lucky it'll be a sensible judge acting in the directions of a sensible legislature. More likely the power to ban speech will fall into the hands of oppressive state leaders, corporations desperate to silence threats to their profits and do-gooders eager to rid the world of whatever they regard as evil, heretical or perverse. You're probably in one of the lucky countries, where this is largely an academic debate - but now try going to North Korea and telling the people just how many people Kim Jong-Il had executed.
The power to silence speech is too great to be entrusted to anyone, no matter how good their intentions.
Would you rather just let the organs rot or burn, when they could potentially save many lives and reduce suffering for a few more? Seems a terrible waste.
How would one go about creating a world-dominating AI?
Because if someone is going to do it, I'd perfer it were me. I'd at least be able to give it some objective more interesting than 'destroy all humans.'
Reliability. Fireing squads miss. They are also rather messy. Not sure what is wrong with a single massive overdose, though. I'm sure the idea was considered, so there must be some reason it was rejected.
Personally, if the condemned is free from disease, I'd want to at least put the organs to use. The problem there is that almost all doctors in the US are prohibited by oath and professional association membership rules from involvement in executions, and you'd need a doctor to perform a transplant. Plus the difficulty in getting a condemned criminal securely and without public protest into a hospital. The lethal injection process is administered by medical technicians: You don't need three years of med-school to learn how to put an IV in.
Everyone has the cookbook. It's historic. Everyone also has a slightly different version, due to the nature of the text. A living document for some decades.
Really? Do you think it'd be evident to a jury of non-gamers? When the prosecution has only submitted the searches as evidence that support their case, dismissing all the obviously game-related searches as unimportant?
Useful things those index.dat files. We used to use them at work when someone was accused of looking at porn when they should be working (happened a lot). That was before we got a decent proxy server.
Incidentially: Smoothwall, win. RM Smartcache, fail.
I have a vision of her doing a little dance while waving her behind in the prosecution's face and chanting 'double je-par-dee-A!, double je-per-dee-A!"
But that isn't how the lethal injection works for humans. It's a much lengthier process involving three seperate drugs. It's supposed to be painless, but there's a lot of debate about that - certainly the final drug, potassium chloride, hurts like hell, but by that point the prisoner is supposed to be unconscious. The problem is that the first drug used is the anasthetic, and the second a paralytic: If the anasthetic doesn't work (equipment fault, unusually resistant prisoner, sheer bad luck) then it'd go unnoticed, as the paralysed prisoner would have no means to express the pain. And there would be pain: The reason for that paralytic is that without it, even an unconscious and heavily sedated prisoner would be writheing around just from reflexive responses to pain, much to the distress of the witnesses.
You may wonder why the method you saw on the pets isn't used on humans. That's because it's too unreliable. There's a chance the 'dead' prisoner won't be quite dead. There are completly reliable, painless methods - aspixiation with nitrogen is easy - but there face political opposition. The very fact that they are painless ensures they are resisted by the hardcore pro-death-penalty crowd, who feel that a painless death (Or even worse, aspixiation euphoria) does not serve justice properly.
One MV down, rather, before anyone points out that you only need eight MVs to make an HV. I got numbers confused.
An MMORPG needs to be crafted in such a way that the players feel challenged, but never actually like they are losing. They need to always be progressing to greater things, higher levels, better gear. And never going backwards.
Contrast to, say, EVE Online. How many players do you think ragequit forever after spending their fortune on an utterly awesome ship, only to then lose it all due to a mistake or sheer bad luck?
Most players I know get tired of singleplayer quickly - but once they join a multiplayer server there's a social aspect. Also, Tekkit greatly extends the novelty.
I'm working on an HV solar panel to power my mass fab on one server. Three MVs down, seven more to go! The HV is the most resource-intensive item in IC2, perhaps in any mod. I've got a whole factory dedicated to processing a stream of input from quarries and producing fuel to keep them running, almost entirely automated.
I know it exists on Freenet. The major indexers refuse to carry links, and the pedophiles are polite enough not to post images openly anywhere, so as a typical user you won't run into it unless you go looking - but every now and then you'll see a link advertising a freesite as containing kiddie porn. If the cost of free, unregulatable speech is the existance of some unobtrusive kiddie porn sites, then I'd consider that an acceptable cost.
It could be argued that they could use the hash to more effectively police infringing content: Once a file is reported, they could have pulled all uploads of that hash and blocked new ones. But this would be a poor idea, because it'd be trivial for pirates to circumvent by just changing one byte (Like a padding file in a rar archive, or a new password), so all it'd really do is raise their cost of storage substantially in return for delaying pirates by about three minutes.
Only a few. It also discourages new ones very effectively. Unlike a p2p network, a person can't throw together a filelocker in their bedroom. It takes money to get it going, to set up the servers and pay for storage and bandwidth until the income starts - and only a fool is going to invest their money in a filelocker business now it's apparent that any successful filelocker is likely to be shut down and all assets siezed.
In an ideal world the job of the police and prosecution would be to enforce accurate justice and determine the facts. But this isn't an ideal world. There's a lot of political pressure, and a lot of time and resource pressure, so in practice a lot of it gets run like a production line: The suspects come in, and must be quickly processed. It's also hugely embarassing to arrest someone and not get *something* out of it, and there's a serious conflict of interest in some countries where police departments are part-funded by fines and asset seizure.
There was a big outrage here in the UK a few years back about speed cameras. A lot of them were being hidden away in places where speeding was frequent but accidents rare, mostly at the bottom of hills where drivers picked up a little extra speed coming down, because the speeding fines went straight to the operating police departments. The practice was only stopped when one of our tabloid newspapers ran a campaign against them. This is still part of the reason police in the US are so eager to grab anything and everything not nailed down as 'evidence.' It'll end up in the police auction eventually.
Not exactly. From what I know of past precidents, it applies if you've *memorised* the keys. But if the keys are written down anywhere, or stored on any physical media, then they are simply considered physical evidence and subject to the usual search-and-seizure method. They'll just grab every piece of storage you own, right down to your cellphone and games consoles, and search them all. Even the computer monitors, just in case. Even if found innocent, you're unlikely to ever get anything back. That's just standard policing procedure: Make the accused's life hell, thus applying pressure to confess or agree to a plea bargin.
Fracked or not, that natural gas turns into the same amount of carbon when you burn it.