I wrote a hobby-program once that needed to sort a list. A really big list - too big to fit in memory. After much thought I came up with a really neat search algorithm, a sort of modified radix sort that used only linear access and so would run with good performance from reading from a file. I doubted I could have invented a new approach to sorting, but I couldn't find anything quite the same as it.
A couple of years later I came across that algorithm - in a book that dates from the mainframe era, describing how to sort data on tape. It was just obscure because few people have to sort multi-gigabyte lists.
I view it as a simple binary choice. Piracy will always exist, and be rampant, without the use of draconian measures to prevent it. Not just in the form of very restrictive DRM, but very strict legal measures to back it up and restrictions on technology. Those measures have to do away with little things like trials or presumption of innocence, because the sheer number of infringements would overwhelm the court system otherwise. Look at the DMCA: It makes it trivial for a copyright holder to pull anything they want off the internet with nothing more than an accusation, backed up by no evidence, with no penalty for errors or abuse, and it's still barely making a dent. This means you can't have a world where there is a little bit of piracy and a little bit of restriction: It has to be all or nothing. I choose the piracy - even if it means eventual economic losses to the media industry, the loss of pop stars and big-budget television seems acceptable.
I am reconsidering this though, in light of certain more recent evidence: Piracy rates may be rampant, but the entertainment industry seems to be flourishing. Hollywood breaks their records every year, usually with some sci-fi-action film that should have maximum appeal to the demographic most likely to pirate. Music revenues are up as well, as legal downloads have overtaken the loss of CD sales. This is not what I predicted - I underestimated just how successful legal media sources would be. Netflix is killing piracy.
Downloaders, nothing worth knowing. But uploaders? They could trace the people who submit the torrents in the first place, and those might be worth the effort. With a bit of luck it might even lead to some of the high-profile groups.
Torrent technology had a single niche. People who needed to: 1. Distribute tons of data. 2. Do so on a zero or near-zero budget, otherwise they'd just use a conventional HTTP server or CDN. There are not many groups who fit both those criteria. Pirates, and linux distros. Both use torrents.
There's also the environmental factor: The industrial economy lets us live lives that kinds and emperors would envy, but at the other end of that economy are mines, oil wells and land clearance for monoculture farms. The resource requirements are hard to imagine. Even the oceans are running low on fish. How many more decades can this be maintained? Even if you don't particularly value biodiversity and all that hippy gaia-stuff, eventually resources are just going to run out.
The same could be said of strict population management in China. They try to use economic incentives where possible, but they will resort to forced birth control if that's what it takes. The government ran models back in the seventies and realised that China was heading into a population explosion that would far outstrip infrastructure and lead to a poverty, starvation and civil unrest - a future so serious that it justified extreme measures to prevent. The whole world has now condemned the policy and the serious human rights violations needed to enforce it - and yet it did the job. China's population did shoot upwards, but in a controlled enough way that in one generation they have gone from an underdeveloped third-world country of peasant farmers to a global military, industrial and economic superpower with a poverty rate of under 5%, while the adjoining country of India is at 12%. Sometimes the ends really can justify the means.
Many would argue that it is better to live a life of freedom in poverty than a life of material comfort beneath the boots of tyrants. These are people who have never had to worry about their child dying of malnutrition.
There is a factor you are overlooking - is there a limit on consumption regardless of cost?
Compared to a hundred years ago, we live like kings. The only thing there's a shortage of where I am is affordable housing - other than that, life is pretty luxurious. Even those in menial jobs can afford clothes so cheap that no-one bothers to repair them any more, all the furniture we want, highly sophisticated appliances, and the 'essentials' like electricity, communications, water and a sewage system.
But how much, really, can people possibly want? If you make clothes cheaper, will people buy more? They are already disposable. If you make food cheaper, will people buy more? There's a limit to how many luxury goods a person has time to enjoy. Not everyone wants to have their own private helicopter. There's still a lot of scope for consumption to increase in some areas, like transport, but others are at saturation already: It doesn't matter how cheaply you can manufacture, say, books. People aren't going to read more of them because they are cheaper.
Many Christian churches explicitly deny that rule by teaching forgiveness for one's enemies. If they slap you, turn the other cheek - don't reciprocate.
It also doesn't work across cultures: Most religions teach the value of charity and kindness to other members of the same social group, but then happily turn around and command war against the infidels. Christians and Muslims spent so long in crusades that both sides now believe the other started it, IS is still executing heretics, Christians used to, there have been a number of high-profile murders of Muslims by Hindus recently, Europe was nothing but on-and-off war since the fall of Rome all carried out by leaders claiming to be appointed by God(s), and for a good part of the Roman period too. The bible itself claim that God ordered the people of Israel not only to declare war upon enemy tribes, but in one case to slaughter ever man, woman and male child - apparently it's only genocide when 'they' do it to 'us.'
I think you are overthinking it. Philosophers and psychologists may study formal systems of morality, but the majority of people rely on a much simpler system: Intuition. They just know what is right and wrong, no need for formal study. They don't even realise that they have unconsciously internalised the majority views of the society in which they grew up - at least not until they see another society on the news and are utterly to understand why other cultures don't share the same values and fight the same evils.
There is a problem with automation: The entire economic structure of society is built on the assumption that (almost) everyone has a job. If you don't have a job than you can't purchase the essentials like food, shelter and clothing. Automation has worked so far only because demand has always grown to match supply, but there is no guarantee that will continue to be the case.
In the worst case scenario, auto-farms and -factories produce near-limitless supplies of goods, but the cities are flooded with people unemployed and living in poverty: They don't have five cents to buy even the super-low-cost food, and the people who own the farms have no economic incentive to give away their product. So food just rots in the silos, and the people starve.
I've seen the concept used in a few sci-fi settings - the idea that the war with the machines starts not because the machines try to take over, but because their carefully coded moral decision framework makes a decision that is arguably right, but so horrific that the human population rebel. There was one mentioned in Andromeda, for example: During a time of severe food shortage the AIs in charge calculated that to achieve optimal survival rates they should simply murder anyone too old to work. Rather than try to save everyone and end up with 20% of the population starving, you kill off 10% right away: The action results in fewer overall deaths, so it is the right action to take. The people disagreed.
If you run on a system of calculations for morality, it's easy to reach unpalatable conclusions - if a hospital AI is configured to maximise patient survival rate, it's going to figure out that terminal patients can be harvested for organs. It's a good trade off:You lose a few months of life from someone who was going to die regardless, and gain many years of life for potentially multiple patients.
The most annoying part is that, when the humans are asked why these decisions are so horrific, they often have a difficult time answering - because the human concept of morality is not based on evaluating possible outcomes, but on often-vague social heuristics.
The worst case of all might be Sucker Punch. The trailer not only bears no relation to the film, it shows the film as an entirely different genre. See the trailer for what looks like an action-packed somewhat-strange film with many fight scenes and stunts, instead end up with a drama-fantasy about a woman's internal struggle to process abuse. The trailer scenes are in there, but they are only allegorical representations that bear no relation to the actual plot.
Possibly, but easily countered: Facebook simply needs to serve the adverts from the same server as the photos and other good content you want. Even better if they can do so from the same directory too.
Correct. Neither guilt nor innocence can be proven, and as the US criminal justice system includes a presumption of innocence, no conviction is possible. But people hate ambiguity, so they latch on to one of the to good stories that can be told. Either the story of the racist who, believing all black men to be criminals, pulled a gun in his paranoia and shot a youth who was just out to buy some snacks. Or the story of the thug who, when confronted by a concerned member of neighbourhood watch, immediately attacked and savagely beat him until he was able to exercise his second amendment right to defend himself. Both of those are good stories for people to tell each other and believe in, and they have more power than an admission that the true events are unknowable.
Yep. The pirates look at the studios raking in the cash, breaking their own records every year, and at the ridiculously wealthy lifestyles lived by those who make it to the top of the industry - and there goes any sympathy.
The studios try to fix this by painting a picture of more sympathetic people - the working-class camera operators and editors who are hurt by piracy. But that just makes them look dishonest, when their own numbers point to a booming industry and there seems to be plenty of money available to hire megastars who can afford their own mansion and hold the type of parties with an entry fee greater than I earn in a year.
A seventeen-year-old paper that makes no mention of chimeras, and only touches on transgenics, and published on a glorified blog that no-one has ever heard of?
I used ONN as an example because they are an example of 'the right' but not 'far right' - they aren't somewhere like, say, WND or JW that runs every day with claims that Obama is a Muslim spy and IS are training terrorists in Mexico. ONN is run by the AFA - who, though perhaps not the most influential organisation within the faction known as 'the right' in American politics, are at least in the top five. So when an opinion is endorsed by the AFA, it's not just something on the fringe.
And if I'd assassinated someone, I'd see if I could get a friend of theirs to claim they were still alive while I covered my tracks. There's certainly grounds for a conspiracy theory here - and the only way to avert would be for Snowden to provide some more solid evidence for his continued life. Say, a video of him reading the front page of a fresh-out newspaper. Of course some people will claim that the video really shows an impersonator, but it will quench the worst of the rumors.
It's not breaking new ground in this regard - there are already established laws for handling situations like that. There are some Christian churches that forbid all non-trivial medical treatment (it undermines faith, apparently), and there are the JWs and their strange religious doctrine forbidding blood transfusion, and with it many forms of major surgery.
I suggest anyone who opposes this research be sent to meet a few people on organ waiting lists. Let them tell those patients why they must be allowed to die.
Oh, the right are pretty pissed off! --- http://www.onenewsnow.com/scie... (The AFA's news site, so it's not just some loner's blog)
In an aggressive move before the end of its second term, the Obama administration announced Thursday that is wants to allow scientists to engineer human-animal hybrids.
This latest attempt by President Barack Obama of reportedly seeking to manipulate and destroy human life through unethical experiments comes after his earlier move to overturn limits set by the Bush administration.
One issue is that scientists might inadvertently create animals that have partly human brains, endowing them with some semblance of human consciousness or human thinking abilities,” the pro-life media hub (LifeNews) added.
“In 2009, pro-abortion President Barack Obama issued an executive order allowing funding on life-destroying embryonic stem cell research, including for human-animal hybrid embryos,” the pro-life organization reminded Americans. “This rescinded President George Bush’s policy prohibiting taxpayer-funding of the life-destroying practices.” ---
I can't see the left getting pissed off though. They've not objected to chimera research before.
What a legal expert asks: "Can an operator, after legal process, be held liable for a crime committed via a hotspot they run?"
What the operators ask: "Even if I cannot eventually be held liable, is there a risk that the police will come break down my door, arrest me, and steal away all our computers before they realise that I am not not responsible for the crime they are investigating? Or that I will face a civil suit which, even if I win, will still cost me tens of thousands of pounds in legal fees?"
Law can be an expensive matter. Pyrrhic victory is a very real possibility.
The safest approach is to contract with a specialist public hotspot provider like The Cloud to run the spot. They have the legal experts on hand to address anything that might come up, and they can provide the best possible shield for the premises owner - they are the ones who actually run the service, the IP address is registered to them, so they are the ones who get any legal troubles. They generally also authenticate users (typically by requiring a phone number to SMS a login code to), which lets them keep the police off their backs. It's more expensive than just hooking up a basic wifi router though, especially for a small business that just wants to run a single point and doesn't have the negotiating power that a chain or franchise could bring to the table.
There is also what you might call the 'Robin Hood' effect. When a perceived inequality in wealth exists, those on the bottom feel justified in stealing from those on the top - and on an international level, there's a very big difference between Nigerian middle class and the US and European businesses they target.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a hobby-program once that needed to sort a list. A really big list - too big to fit in memory. After much thought I came up with a really neat search algorithm, a sort of modified radix sort that used only linear access and so would run with good performance from reading from a file. I doubted I could have invented a new approach to sorting, but I couldn't find anything quite the same as it.
A couple of years later I came across that algorithm - in a book that dates from the mainframe era, describing how to sort data on tape. It was just obscure because few people have to sort multi-gigabyte lists.
I view it as a simple binary choice. Piracy will always exist, and be rampant, without the use of draconian measures to prevent it. Not just in the form of very restrictive DRM, but very strict legal measures to back it up and restrictions on technology. Those measures have to do away with little things like trials or presumption of innocence, because the sheer number of infringements would overwhelm the court system otherwise. Look at the DMCA: It makes it trivial for a copyright holder to pull anything they want off the internet with nothing more than an accusation, backed up by no evidence, with no penalty for errors or abuse, and it's still barely making a dent. This means you can't have a world where there is a little bit of piracy and a little bit of restriction: It has to be all or nothing. I choose the piracy - even if it means eventual economic losses to the media industry, the loss of pop stars and big-budget television seems acceptable.
I am reconsidering this though, in light of certain more recent evidence: Piracy rates may be rampant, but the entertainment industry seems to be flourishing. Hollywood breaks their records every year, usually with some sci-fi-action film that should have maximum appeal to the demographic most likely to pirate. Music revenues are up as well, as legal downloads have overtaken the loss of CD sales. This is not what I predicted - I underestimated just how successful legal media sources would be. Netflix is killing piracy.
Downloaders, nothing worth knowing. But uploaders? They could trace the people who submit the torrents in the first place, and those might be worth the effort. With a bit of luck it might even lead to some of the high-profile groups.
Torrent technology had a single niche. People who needed to:
1. Distribute tons of data.
2. Do so on a zero or near-zero budget, otherwise they'd just use a conventional HTTP server or CDN.
There are not many groups who fit both those criteria. Pirates, and linux distros. Both use torrents.
For transport, they are impractical. They may have a role in grid scale energy, storing up excess from renewables to be used on demand.
There's also the environmental factor: The industrial economy lets us live lives that kinds and emperors would envy, but at the other end of that economy are mines, oil wells and land clearance for monoculture farms. The resource requirements are hard to imagine. Even the oceans are running low on fish. How many more decades can this be maintained? Even if you don't particularly value biodiversity and all that hippy gaia-stuff, eventually resources are just going to run out.
The same could be said of strict population management in China. They try to use economic incentives where possible, but they will resort to forced birth control if that's what it takes. The government ran models back in the seventies and realised that China was heading into a population explosion that would far outstrip infrastructure and lead to a poverty, starvation and civil unrest - a future so serious that it justified extreme measures to prevent. The whole world has now condemned the policy and the serious human rights violations needed to enforce it - and yet it did the job. China's population did shoot upwards, but in a controlled enough way that in one generation they have gone from an underdeveloped third-world country of peasant farmers to a global military, industrial and economic superpower with a poverty rate of under 5%, while the adjoining country of India is at 12%. Sometimes the ends really can justify the means.
Many would argue that it is better to live a life of freedom in poverty than a life of material comfort beneath the boots of tyrants. These are people who have never had to worry about their child dying of malnutrition.
There is a factor you are overlooking - is there a limit on consumption regardless of cost?
Compared to a hundred years ago, we live like kings. The only thing there's a shortage of where I am is affordable housing - other than that, life is pretty luxurious. Even those in menial jobs can afford clothes so cheap that no-one bothers to repair them any more, all the furniture we want, highly sophisticated appliances, and the 'essentials' like electricity, communications, water and a sewage system.
But how much, really, can people possibly want? If you make clothes cheaper, will people buy more? They are already disposable. If you make food cheaper, will people buy more? There's a limit to how many luxury goods a person has time to enjoy. Not everyone wants to have their own private helicopter. There's still a lot of scope for consumption to increase in some areas, like transport, but others are at saturation already: It doesn't matter how cheaply you can manufacture, say, books. People aren't going to read more of them because they are cheaper.
Many Christian churches explicitly deny that rule by teaching forgiveness for one's enemies. If they slap you, turn the other cheek - don't reciprocate.
It also doesn't work across cultures: Most religions teach the value of charity and kindness to other members of the same social group, but then happily turn around and command war against the infidels. Christians and Muslims spent so long in crusades that both sides now believe the other started it, IS is still executing heretics, Christians used to, there have been a number of high-profile murders of Muslims by Hindus recently, Europe was nothing but on-and-off war since the fall of Rome all carried out by leaders claiming to be appointed by God(s), and for a good part of the Roman period too. The bible itself claim that God ordered the people of Israel not only to declare war upon enemy tribes, but in one case to slaughter ever man, woman and male child - apparently it's only genocide when 'they' do it to 'us.'
I think you are overthinking it. Philosophers and psychologists may study formal systems of morality, but the majority of people rely on a much simpler system: Intuition. They just know what is right and wrong, no need for formal study. They don't even realise that they have unconsciously internalised the majority views of the society in which they grew up - at least not until they see another society on the news and are utterly to understand why other cultures don't share the same values and fight the same evils.
There is a problem with automation: The entire economic structure of society is built on the assumption that (almost) everyone has a job. If you don't have a job than you can't purchase the essentials like food, shelter and clothing. Automation has worked so far only because demand has always grown to match supply, but there is no guarantee that will continue to be the case.
In the worst case scenario, auto-farms and -factories produce near-limitless supplies of goods, but the cities are flooded with people unemployed and living in poverty: They don't have five cents to buy even the super-low-cost food, and the people who own the farms have no economic incentive to give away their product. So food just rots in the silos, and the people starve.
I've seen the concept used in a few sci-fi settings - the idea that the war with the machines starts not because the machines try to take over, but because their carefully coded moral decision framework makes a decision that is arguably right, but so horrific that the human population rebel. There was one mentioned in Andromeda, for example: During a time of severe food shortage the AIs in charge calculated that to achieve optimal survival rates they should simply murder anyone too old to work. Rather than try to save everyone and end up with 20% of the population starving, you kill off 10% right away: The action results in fewer overall deaths, so it is the right action to take. The people disagreed.
If you run on a system of calculations for morality, it's easy to reach unpalatable conclusions - if a hospital AI is configured to maximise patient survival rate, it's going to figure out that terminal patients can be harvested for organs. It's a good trade off:You lose a few months of life from someone who was going to die regardless, and gain many years of life for potentially multiple patients.
The most annoying part is that, when the humans are asked why these decisions are so horrific, they often have a difficult time answering - because the human concept of morality is not based on evaluating possible outcomes, but on often-vague social heuristics.
The worst case of all might be Sucker Punch. The trailer not only bears no relation to the film, it shows the film as an entirely different genre. See the trailer for what looks like an action-packed somewhat-strange film with many fight scenes and stunts, instead end up with a drama-fantasy about a woman's internal struggle to process abuse. The trailer scenes are in there, but they are only allegorical representations that bear no relation to the actual plot.
The title is rather appropriate.
And how is that working out?
It's a crappy system, but all the others so far have been worse.
Possibly, but easily countered: Facebook simply needs to serve the adverts from the same server as the photos and other good content you want. Even better if they can do so from the same directory too.
Correct. Neither guilt nor innocence can be proven, and as the US criminal justice system includes a presumption of innocence, no conviction is possible. But people hate ambiguity, so they latch on to one of the to good stories that can be told. Either the story of the racist who, believing all black men to be criminals, pulled a gun in his paranoia and shot a youth who was just out to buy some snacks. Or the story of the thug who, when confronted by a concerned member of neighbourhood watch, immediately attacked and savagely beat him until he was able to exercise his second amendment right to defend himself. Both of those are good stories for people to tell each other and believe in, and they have more power than an admission that the true events are unknowable.
Yep. The pirates look at the studios raking in the cash, breaking their own records every year, and at the ridiculously wealthy lifestyles lived by those who make it to the top of the industry - and there goes any sympathy.
The studios try to fix this by painting a picture of more sympathetic people - the working-class camera operators and editors who are hurt by piracy. But that just makes them look dishonest, when their own numbers point to a booming industry and there seems to be plenty of money available to hire megastars who can afford their own mansion and hold the type of parties with an entry fee greater than I earn in a year.
A seventeen-year-old paper that makes no mention of chimeras, and only touches on transgenics, and published on a glorified blog that no-one has ever heard of?
I used ONN as an example because they are an example of 'the right' but not 'far right' - they aren't somewhere like, say, WND or JW that runs every day with claims that Obama is a Muslim spy and IS are training terrorists in Mexico. ONN is run by the AFA - who, though perhaps not the most influential organisation within the faction known as 'the right' in American politics, are at least in the top five. So when an opinion is endorsed by the AFA, it's not just something on the fringe.
And if I'd assassinated someone, I'd see if I could get a friend of theirs to claim they were still alive while I covered my tracks. There's certainly grounds for a conspiracy theory here - and the only way to avert would be for Snowden to provide some more solid evidence for his continued life. Say, a video of him reading the front page of a fresh-out newspaper. Of course some people will claim that the video really shows an impersonator, but it will quench the worst of the rumors.
It's not breaking new ground in this regard - there are already established laws for handling situations like that. There are some Christian churches that forbid all non-trivial medical treatment (it undermines faith, apparently), and there are the JWs and their strange religious doctrine forbidding blood transfusion, and with it many forms of major surgery.
1999, actually. US F-16 vs a MiG-29. The F16 won. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/...
But you are correct in general: Dogfighting is not as important as it used to be. It still matters, just not as much.
I suggest anyone who opposes this research be sent to meet a few people on organ waiting lists. Let them tell those patients why they must be allowed to die.
Oh, the right are pretty pissed off!
---
http://www.onenewsnow.com/scie... (The AFA's news site, so it's not just some loner's blog)
In an aggressive move before the end of its second term, the Obama administration announced Thursday that is wants to allow scientists to engineer human-animal hybrids.
This latest attempt by President Barack Obama of reportedly seeking to manipulate and destroy human life through unethical experiments comes after his earlier move to overturn limits set by the Bush administration.
One issue is that scientists might inadvertently create animals that have partly human brains, endowing them with some semblance of human consciousness or human thinking abilities,” the pro-life media hub (LifeNews) added.
“In 2009, pro-abortion President Barack Obama issued an executive order allowing funding on life-destroying embryonic stem cell research, including for human-animal hybrid embryos,” the pro-life organization reminded Americans. “This rescinded President George Bush’s policy prohibiting taxpayer-funding of the life-destroying practices.”
---
I can't see the left getting pissed off though. They've not objected to chimera research before.
What a legal expert asks: "Can an operator, after legal process, be held liable for a crime committed via a hotspot they run?"
What the operators ask: "Even if I cannot eventually be held liable, is there a risk that the police will come break down my door, arrest me, and steal away all our computers before they realise that I am not not responsible for the crime they are investigating? Or that I will face a civil suit which, even if I win, will still cost me tens of thousands of pounds in legal fees?"
Law can be an expensive matter. Pyrrhic victory is a very real possibility.
The safest approach is to contract with a specialist public hotspot provider like The Cloud to run the spot. They have the legal experts on hand to address anything that might come up, and they can provide the best possible shield for the premises owner - they are the ones who actually run the service, the IP address is registered to them, so they are the ones who get any legal troubles. They generally also authenticate users (typically by requiring a phone number to SMS a login code to), which lets them keep the police off their backs. It's more expensive than just hooking up a basic wifi router though, especially for a small business that just wants to run a single point and doesn't have the negotiating power that a chain or franchise could bring to the table.
There is also what you might call the 'Robin Hood' effect. When a perceived inequality in wealth exists, those on the bottom feel justified in stealing from those on the top - and on an international level, there's a very big difference between Nigerian middle class and the US and European businesses they target.