Which is why much of the development in nuclear reactor technology has focused on physics-based shutdown modes rather than relying on human or even mechanical intervention when something goes wrong.
But none of that helps existing reactors that are still using previous generation technology too much.. and yeah, human error is a huge ongoing concern with those. I'm sure people are a lot more cautious in the wake of Fukushima, and will be as long a Fukushima keeps popping up in the news once in a while.. but after that dies down, there's a good chance laziness and greed will start taking over again until another disaster strikes and we rinse and repeat until the last of these ancient reactors is finally offline -- one way or another.
Yeah, what were those bastards thinking! They should have been able to foresee and use 60 years of future reactor technology development to ensure plants still operating 20 years after their designed lifespan don't have problems!
Americans have plenty of new designs as well. The problem is the existing reactors that were supposed to be decommissioned 20 years ago but just get continually retrofitted instead because money >> lives or the environment.
There's an easier solution to rising water -- move further inland. Its not like the 6 or 10 or whatever it is these days foot rise will happen over night.
The bigger issue is things like food shortage -- all those plants and animals we like to eat have a good chance of not being able to survive in a significantly changed climate. It likely won't kill humans off (we'll find the species that can survive and farm the hell out of them..) but it will significantly reduce our quality of life when the only things left on the menu are horse meat and GMO algae blooms. And only enough of that to feed a billion people, leaving the other (by that time) 8 or 9 billion to slowly starve to death.
I'm guessing by your tone that you were mostly joking but still.. there are serious issues to consider and we're absolutely looking at a mass extinction event if we don't find a way to undo the damage, and just hoping that we're not among the species to disappear.
I'd say not having children just because you're scared of the future is the wrong approach. Sure if you have a kid they may not have a pleasant future ahead of them. But if you don't have a kid then they definitely have no future ahead of them.
And you never know, their kid might have been the one that figures out how to solve the problem. Or at least figures out how to engineer a biodome for us to hide in for a few millennia while the earth recovers.
(Of course I don't know you or your friends or whether that's really why they don't have kids..)
"Simple" is questionable (lot of politics there, especially with regards to land ownership) but even if you could replant the entire rain forest, I'm not sure there would be enough carbon extraction happening in a short enough time frame to correct the problem.
There's also a couple of other things to consider: 1) Anything we do has generate less carbon than its removing, or its not helpful. That includes any carbon produced from mining and manufacturing the materials and products needed as well as transportation of those things to the site(s) that they'll be operating and finally (and most obviously) the operation itself. In the case of tree planting for example, that involves all of the transportation involved in getting both the saplings and the planters to the location as well as the production of any fertilizers used to grow the saplings and so on.
2) While CO2 is the big issue due to how much of it we produce, there are other greenhouse gases (and some much more powerful than CO2.) So we need to ensure that anything we do to reduce CO2 doesn't inadvertently boost something else (for example if we replaced gasoline say, hydrogen fuel.. we're increasing the atmospheric H2O which could actually be worse than CO2 if it stays up there rather than just creating heavier rainfall.)
3) CO2 levels being "high" means, right now, a bit over 0.04%. That may be enough to cause climate change, but its still way too sparse to do something like atmospheric scraping and expect to have any useful effect.
4) Or we could try to use some other chemical to bind to CO2 and precipitate it out of the air.. but most such chemicals are even worse, either for climate change or more directly for the health of humans, plants and/or animals. Not to mention the (dollar) cost involved.
You mean cost of bandwidth, not cost of information as such
No I mean the source-to-destination cost of everything -- the author's time, the hosting service they distribute from (even if that's just a reddit post saying "here's my torrent!", reddit servers aren't free either,) the ISP equipment between all of these points, your own internet and electricity bill, etc.
The cost of making a copy of popular information is trivial
Its very low yes, if you discount all of the costs mentioned above.. which a lot of people do because they aren't directly obvious as a dollar amount cost. But every ad you ignore on TPB when you're looking for that torrent for example, is paying a little bit toward the cost of TPB's servers.
trying to push artificial scarcity in age of near-free bandwidth is going contrary to this
Yes and no. The pure bandwidth is dirt cheap yes, but most of the rest of it isn't. The biggest chunk (and the most scarce aspect) is simply having good ideas in the first place -- general ideas are a dime a dozen of course but good ideas are rare and therefore valuable. The problem here is that there's a disconnect between production (true scarcity) and distribution (artificial scarcity) which publishers try to work around by subsidizing the former using the latter.
I'm not going to claim that's the only or best way to do that, and there's no question that the publishers and other middlemen add a huge layer of greed on there driving the costs up far beyond what (true) scarcity aspect deserves, but there has to be some system in place to fund the development and publishing of ideas and that's the one we've got, for better or worse.
They can't stop all these people with a screw loose
No, but if they can stop 80% of such people I still call that a big win.
they'll just drive a truck over a curb
This one is going to be a big problem sooner or later. Unlike your other stupid examples, its very easy to kill or injure lots of people in a short time with a vehicle. But unlike guns, vehicles have other quite useful functions that we don't really want to restrict. I guess we'll probably just start seeing a whole lot more of those concrete protection posts and other vehicle barriers popping up. Be a bit of an eyesore but reduces the problem without too much impact on legitimate vehicle use.
bullshit of blaming the gun laws for this
I'm going to assume you mean blaming the lack of gun laws. But even then you're wrong. Nobody blames the gun. Crazy people are crazy whether they have a gun or not. What we want is laws that restrict the ability for crazy people to get guns. Will they be 100% absolutely successful? Of course not. But again, I'd call 80% a big win. Hell I'd call a 30% reduction in mass shootings at least a pretty good win.
lock up the truly crazy people
And who are they? Sure in this instance there was a failure on the part of law enforcement but most of these guys are adept at keeping themselves hidden. The shooter in Las Vegas even kept his proclivities hidden from his family and girlfriend -- how the hell is anyone else supposed to figure it out? Sure they can (and do) lock up the crazies after they've gone on their shooting spree -- at least the few who survive -- but at that point its a little too damned late to worry about whether they should have had a gun.
otherwise this child killer could have gotten away
"Could have." If guns were harder to obtain, then this child killer "could have" not had the opportunity to go on a shooting spree in the first place and the vigilante wouldn't have had to shoot him at all. Never mind the fact that even with the shooting spree, there's nothing to say the cops wouldn't have picked him up a block away if the vigilante had pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911 rather than his firearm and started shooting.
Or the guy walking out of the church could have been another vigilante that already got the bad guy and just hadn't put his gun down yet, and we'd have not just another innocent but the "hero" murdered as well. There's a near infinite number of "could be" if you want to play that game.
They think the NRA is the problem?
The NRA is a problem, but not this problem. The problem with the NRA is that they (primarily) represent the gun manufacturers, not the gun owners, and therefore their main incentive is to sell more guns no matter the outcome of doing so. So yeah, they want the crazies to buy more guns, and then you to buy more guns to "combat" the crazies, and then your neighbor to buy a gun in case you're actually the now-armed crazy and so on down the line.
licensed NRA firearm safety instructor
Licensed being the operative word there. There is a whole hell of a lot of gun owners out there who don't know the first thing about gun safety. Even a law as loose as "you have to get licensed" is a good step in the right direction. It would at least reduce a large number of the accidental gun deaths even if it doesn't solve the crazy guy problem.
Sign me up
Solving the problem of gun violence by buying more guns is like trying to drain your pool by putting the garden hose in it and hoping the water system happens to have negative pressure when you turn it on. Sure its theoretically possible and maybe even will happen once in a while, but its far more likely that you're just going to make the problem worse.
Again, show me the scenario where a cell phone user intentionally causes the death of 25+ people and the injury of dozens more.
But yes, distracted driving is a problem and its somewhat telling that we're able to implement laws and educate the public about the dangers of distracted driving with little opposition (politically at least) yet we're unwilling to even open the discussion when it comes to a tool whose sole purpose is to cause harm.
everyone has a reasonable expectation of their own thoughts being a secret
No, US law gives the reasonable expectation of your thoughts being a secret. And it was written specifically because torture and other coercive techniques were being used to draw information out of suspects.
If you live in not-the-US (and well, not-other-countries with similar anti-torture laws,) you can expect your thoughts to be secret for only as long as you can stand up to waterboarding or bamboo under the fingernails or whatever other horrific things people have come up with to cause maximum suffering without death over the millennia. This is a large part of why Gitmo is not on US soil -- they get to play a little fast and loose with things like "human rights" where nobody on the outside gets to see what's happening.
They already have all the information -- its on that phone they're trying to unlock. There are two questions here:
1) Can Apple be legally obligated to unlock phones at the behest of the FBI? If so, what sort of precedent does that set? Will we start seeing mass fishing expeditions and having your phone unlocked any time you're caught jaywalking? How much burden are they going to be allowed to place on Apple just in terms of the amount of time it takes to process and respond to all these unlock requests? At what point would it be considered undue burden?
2) Can Apple actually unlock the phones? The last time this came up the answer turned out to be "sort of." They had the ability to disable the bricking after too many failed unlock attempts, which meant sure some intern at the FBI had to sit there punching in 10,000 codes one at a time until they got it.. but they could do so. Are newer versions of iOS susceptible to that attack? Even if they are, how does it apply if the phone was locked with that doodle grid, or worse a long password, rather than just a 4 digit numeric code? Even without the bricking mechanism that's going to take a long time to break.
OK each of my "questions" had a lot of sub-questions but you get the idea. And that's not even getting into implications against the 4th amendment (and perhaps 1st as well.) That's purely just the argument between the FBI and Apple without considering the rights of the phone's owner or the rights of anyone they communicated with.
Or the second shooter is in Iowa and just biding his time until he lights up another church.
Its rather unlikely given the nature of the attack but its not impossible that he was.. perhaps not conspiring directly, but at least discussing plans with other people who may share similar motivations and may be planning similar attacks given how "successful" this one was.
If you're worried about law enforcement then that's a bad idea since (at least in the US) there's no question about whether you can be compelled to open a biometric lock such as a fingerprint scanner.
Passwords on the other hand are still hinging on the 5th amendment protections about incriminating yourself. I'm not sure how that one will play out. On one hand, what's the difference between a password and a fingerprint in terms of just unlocking your phone? They both do the same job so why wouldn't they fall under the same rules? But the other side is that there's no way for law enforcement to make you tell them your password (in the physical sense rather than the legal) which leads to the potential for forceful coercion or torture and other such tactics that the 5th was written to try and protect you from.
We probably won't see a conclusion to that argument until such time as we have a live suspect who owns a phone that literally can't be unlocked at all, even with the full assistance of the manufacturer (which could happen regardless of what Apple does if the suspect has written their own encryption scheme, or uses a third party system from another country that isn't bound by US law even a US-based company that simply gave themselves no possibility of a back door at all, or so forth.)
We might have already seen it if Apple hadn't left themselves the ability to force a firmware flash on a locked phone like they did, allowing for at least a potential back door even if its not a simple one.
As I understand it from the (rather loose) details that came out last time.. the idea is basically to force a flash on the firmware (which Apple can do whether the phone is locked or not) that disables the lockout after a failed unlock attempt. So it doesn't directly unlock the phone, but it means the FBI or whoever can then just go through all 10000 possibilities until they get it right without risking the phone permanently bricking itself and making the data truly unobtainable.
As soon as you show me the example where someone defenestrates 25 people in a church, or 52 people at an outdoor concert, we can talk about window violence.
Guns are singled out because a) their entire purpose for existing is to do harm and b) they're designed to do as much harm as possible, as quickly as possible.
build their own cars
Even if you build your own car, you're expected, if not legally obligated, to have a drivers license (and in many states insurance as well) in order to drive it on public roads. Not because anyone gives a shit what you do to yourself, but because of the potential harm you can enact on someone else.
we expect to have a ban on making their own weapons to be effective?
Yes, but of course you're intentionally using a very black-and-white definition of "effective" where you mean 100% reduction in guns. In the real world, most of us would be happy to see even an 70-80% reduction in guns. And by that looser definition, a well-written and well-enforced ban could well be effective. Of course few people are calling for an outright ban anyway, so your argument is already bogus right from the start.
We can make it illegal to make a gun but people will just figure out how to do it on their own
Sure, just like the liquor industry failed 6 millennia ago because people can just make their own wine and beer. Yes the people who really want to skirt the law can always find a way. But I'd much rather have one crazy person with the time, desire and skill to make their own gun of questionable quality than having a 100 people just go out and buy a professionally engineered, produced and QA-tested gun off the shelf at their local Walmart and a dozen of them being crazy.
I have to somewhat disagree with all of that. While the ideas may not be limited by scarcity, transmitting and storing those ideas is. Free software isn't "free" -- the guy who writes it is paying for it with his time, github and Sourceforge pay for their servers to host that free software via ads and the such, and so on. Now of course its much much closer to free (when dividing the author's time by all of the users) thanks to the lack of profit motive, but somebody, somewhere is still paying for it.
The question is.. we have this ridiculous intellectual property nonsense
Primarily because the people who profit the most from doing so, are also the people who write the laws making it happen. But even if we got rid of IP laws, software (and music and whatever else) would still demand some price because again, somebody has to be paying the price for turning ideas into copies.
is artificial scarcity in the digital realm just a cultural meme carried over from the physical world
Mostly this, but also partly because the digital realm is built on top of the physical realm. Servers cost money. Hosting services cost money. Internet access costs money. Electricity costs money. Somebody has to pay all for that. Frequently that somebody is actually you but just not in a form that's easily recognizable (collecting and selling your personal information, for example.)
If we get to a stage where the cost of servers and electricity is near zero (and I mean on a large scale -- like for example when an entire AWS warehouse costs near $0 to construct,) then we might be able to have a discussion about truly free information. I'm not sure that day will ever come, or whether its even a possibility (no matter how clever we get with nanobots and whatnot, there's only so many molecules on the planet and only so much surface area to construct giant server warehouses and so forth. There may simply be a fundamental limit on our ability to extract resources from the world, leaving some level of a scarcity problem in its wake.)
I'd go ahead and disagree there.. mostly: - Economics: Modern economics exists purely because of scarcity. Nobody really knows what the world would look like if scarcity wasn't an issue. For a rather silly analogy, consider Minecraft: The real world is kind of like survival -- you have to face challenges and collect resources in order to progress and do what you want. A scarcity-free world is more like creative -- you just have as much of everything you want and everyone can do whatever they want. Sure, some people build pretty impressive buildings and such in survival but you go to creative and find things like scale replicas of all of Westeros or the Death Star or the like. Time and creativity are the only limitations.
- Human nature: Here's the "sort of" part of my disagreement. I would say that it goes against human physiology. That is, our little monkey brains simply can't cope with infinite amounts of information. That is, our own brain power becomes the scarce resource. However, I don't think it goes against what I'm sure your definition of "human nature" is -- that is, I'm pretty sure most people would be quite happy to have free everything and just be able to do whatever the hell they wanted, again limited primarily by their own time and creativity.
Of course there's a halfway point in there. For example if hamburgers were somehow completely free, but you still had to cook them yourself (or even just put the thing together,) that's a bit of time that you could potentially pay somebody else to do for you. Obviously a hamburger is a simple case but what about building a house? You go and 3D print a few dozen wall and roof panels but someone's got to stick them together into a structure and if you don't personally have the ability or desire to do that.. well we've now opened ourselves up to a scarcity economy again (a scarcity of time) but since everything physical is free, I'm not sure what the currency would be to pay someone for their time..
Its really hard to imagine what such a world would look like though or how humans would adapt to it, since none of us have ever seen such a thing (and probably never will given that the real world is fundamentally scarce and the digital world will always, at some level, be based upon real world computers built out of real world parts and sucking up real world energy to operate.)
I don't know about "most likely," given that the future of cryptocurrencies in general is constantly in flux (being unrelated to the real world has some benefits to be sure, but there's also some drawbacks.. and the capability of any old fool to invent a new cryptocurrency kind of dilutes the whole thing as well..)
That said, it would be nice to have some alternatives to ad spamming. Especially if the websites implementing such a thing were up front about it (some sort of display to indicate how the mining is progressing.. maybe even say a 1% kickback to the user if their browser happens to successfully mine a coin or something? Definitely some possibilities there.)
They won't. Free stuff is more important to people than some random company somewhere knowing that they ate a salad for lunch or whatever. We might not prefer being constantly tracked, but for the vast majority of people its a minor concern, with a few exceptions (naked pictures, medical history and the such,) and vastly eclipsed by the convenience of the modern world.
Online advertising isn't really a huge issue anymore either to be honest. Sure its annoying as hell, but Google does a pretty good job of ensuring its AdSense ads aren't too invasive (maybe not a perfect job, but far better than you'd get from the government introducing an almost-certainly-broken legal restriction) and you have AdBlock/uBlock/etc to minimize much of the rest of it.
Really, the biggest problems with the internet are no longer corporate and haven't been for a while. Sure there's still some issues coming from that camp but right now politics is by far the more dangerous beast in the pit -- countries like China that wall themselves off as a way to control their populace, countries like the US that are about to intentionally break net neutrality purely to benefit a small number of large ISPs, countries like Russia that allow and even promote hackers breaking everything (you think those people just go back to a day job between US elections?)
The internet was designed to work around physical damage, and it inherently works around data damage such as copyright restrictions due to massive redundancy, but its cracks start showing when the attackers are the major gatekeepers and ISPs since they're essentially attacking their own service. Sure in theory you could create your own off-the-grid "internet" as a workaround but even if you managed to scale it up to the level of the current internet, you'd just find that you're in the same boat and would be facing the same problems. Someone is always going to be in control of the fattest pipes, and those pipes in turn control basically everything in practice, even if not in principle.
One thing to note: There's nothing wrong with or anything illegal about having a monopoly. What's illegal is when you try to use your monopoly power to either unfairly bully potential competitors (for example, but selling lower than cost because you can afford to do that and they can't) or when you try to use your monopoly power in one industry to unfairly advantage yourself in another industry (as Microsoft was sued for back in 1998 when they used their Windows platform dominance to force Internet Explorer on users.)
In Google's case, they run a fine line on the latter, particularly with respect to their search engine dominance leading to their advertising dominance. They're also constantly being accused of prioritizing their services over others in the search rankings but most (not all) of the time its usually found that their competitors just suck and are naturally ranked lower based on the way the algorithm works without any specific bias being necessary.
1) Microsoft is currently Google's biggest competitor in the search space (albeit very very far behind.) But its not like MS is exactly lacking in talent or resources.
2) Google themselves did exactly what you're talking about -- a couple guys in a garage with a good idea ended up taking down Altavista, Webcrawler, Yahoo!, and all of the other search engines at the time. If you had made this exact same claim about Altavista in 1999, everyone would have thought you were right on the money.
No, it only matters when it benefits large Republican donors.
The Republicans are pretty happy to regulate the hell out of your bedroom, your womb (should you have one,) your faith and anything else they happen to dislike. The whole "small government" and "deregulation" catch phrases are just that -- catch phrases. Republicans want just as much government as Democrats.. they just want it focused in a different direction.
Define "operate in." That's a tricky one with the interwebs. It may well be that Google has zero physical presence in Missouri, zero legal presence in Missouri, zero financial presence in Missouri.. and yet 90% of Missouri likely uses Google because 90% of everybody does (I mean I don't know what Google happens to have in Missouri.. I'm just saying that it doesn't matter whether they do or not -- Missourites will still be using Google.)
The internet has no natural borders. It was specifically designed that way since it comes from the cold war era and the designers were intentionally creating a system that the Soviets would have a hard time breaking. Fast forward nearly half a century and we have countries (and in this case, states) explicitly wanting to break the internet and running into a problem with its fundamental design philosophy. They can either keep it in full or cut it off entirely, but trying to pick and choose what parts of it you want is very very difficult. Even China's great firewall is only moderately successful and they pour a hell of a lot more resources into it than Missouri could ever afford.
Because of course this isn't about breaking or stopping Google. I'd bet that guy Googled the information he used to file his claims. Its about trying to make Google bend to their (almost certainly) right wing ideology and fining them until they do.
I would love to see Google make an example of one of these stupid lawsuits. Take their ball and go home rather than compromise, and see how well Missouri (or France or whoever) handles a world where Bing is their only search option (it would have been even better 2 or 3 years ago when Bing was worse.) I mean I don't expect them to ever do that, especially on a country level where they almost certainly have local server complexes to reduce latency. But it would be a hell of a show if they did.
There is a form of definition: An AI is based on learning algorithms, rather than being directly programmed.
Of course there are still people who play fast and loose with the term anyway (especially in games where pretty much any non-triggered NPC behaviour is called "AI") but under the modern usage by people like Alpha and other major AI developers, what they mean is (usually) a neural network and other such learning algorithms.
Of course NN's aren't anywhere close to "true" intelligence -- even if they have the potential to reach that, we're still many many orders of magnitude too low in terms of the amount of neurons we can emulate in any sort of responsive-feeling amount of time. But they're still significantly different from a programmer manually adding more and more if/else branches to handle more and more scenarios.
No, a bunch of people sat down and wrote software that lets the computer _learn_ to play Go. AlphaGo doesn't have a big list of "if board state X then do Y." That's precisely why Go was an interesting problem for AI to tackle -- the rules are completely deterministic to be sure, but the set of board states is so astronomical that you literally can't (and never will be able to) build a computer capable of recording them all.
Chess has been the go-to for "AI" for a long time because of its large state space. However, we've pretty much mastered that using tree pruning techniques (aka "soft" AI.) But Go's state space is too large to even be amenable to tree pruning (at least if you want to beat the masters.) So rather than trying to improve the tree pruning algorithm tiny bit by tiny bit, they went the full hard AI approach and hit it with a neural net.
Sure the NN (and in particular, its training algorithms) will be tuned somewhat for the purposes of playing Go, and its not by any means a general purpose "intelligence." But its not simply a matter of "someone wrote a Go algorithm" either.
Of course, your arguments are why they're tackling games like Starcraft and League of Legends now -- games where the rule set is nowhere near strict, showing that the AIs indeed do have some form of intelligence (though again, its not general-purpose intelligence of course.)
All of that said, the whole argument is moot anyway. Sure we're probably not going to be meeting Bender any time soon, but special-purpose AIs can still potentially take over large portions of the human work force and lead to all sorts of social reform (and possibly disaster if we refuse to change for political reasons or whatever.)
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why much of the development in nuclear reactor technology has focused on physics-based shutdown modes rather than relying on human or even mechanical intervention when something goes wrong.
But none of that helps existing reactors that are still using previous generation technology too much.. and yeah, human error is a huge ongoing concern with those. I'm sure people are a lot more cautious in the wake of Fukushima, and will be as long a Fukushima keeps popping up in the news once in a while.. but after that dies down, there's a good chance laziness and greed will start taking over again until another disaster strikes and we rinse and repeat until the last of these ancient reactors is finally offline -- one way or another.
Yeah, what were those bastards thinking! They should have been able to foresee and use 60 years of future reactor technology development to ensure plants still operating 20 years after their designed lifespan don't have problems!
Americans have plenty of new designs as well. The problem is the existing reactors that were supposed to be decommissioned 20 years ago but just get continually retrofitted instead because money >> lives or the environment.
There's an easier solution to rising water -- move further inland. Its not like the 6 or 10 or whatever it is these days foot rise will happen over night.
The bigger issue is things like food shortage -- all those plants and animals we like to eat have a good chance of not being able to survive in a significantly changed climate. It likely won't kill humans off (we'll find the species that can survive and farm the hell out of them..) but it will significantly reduce our quality of life when the only things left on the menu are horse meat and GMO algae blooms. And only enough of that to feed a billion people, leaving the other (by that time) 8 or 9 billion to slowly starve to death.
I'm guessing by your tone that you were mostly joking but still.. there are serious issues to consider and we're absolutely looking at a mass extinction event if we don't find a way to undo the damage, and just hoping that we're not among the species to disappear.
I'd say not having children just because you're scared of the future is the wrong approach. Sure if you have a kid they may not have a pleasant future ahead of them. But if you don't have a kid then they definitely have no future ahead of them.
And you never know, their kid might have been the one that figures out how to solve the problem. Or at least figures out how to engineer a biodome for us to hide in for a few millennia while the earth recovers.
(Of course I don't know you or your friends or whether that's really why they don't have kids..)
"Simple" is questionable (lot of politics there, especially with regards to land ownership) but even if you could replant the entire rain forest, I'm not sure there would be enough carbon extraction happening in a short enough time frame to correct the problem.
There's also a couple of other things to consider:
1) Anything we do has generate less carbon than its removing, or its not helpful. That includes any carbon produced from mining and manufacturing the materials and products needed as well as transportation of those things to the site(s) that they'll be operating and finally (and most obviously) the operation itself. In the case of tree planting for example, that involves all of the transportation involved in getting both the saplings and the planters to the location as well as the production of any fertilizers used to grow the saplings and so on.
2) While CO2 is the big issue due to how much of it we produce, there are other greenhouse gases (and some much more powerful than CO2.) So we need to ensure that anything we do to reduce CO2 doesn't inadvertently boost something else (for example if we replaced gasoline say, hydrogen fuel.. we're increasing the atmospheric H2O which could actually be worse than CO2 if it stays up there rather than just creating heavier rainfall.)
3) CO2 levels being "high" means, right now, a bit over 0.04%. That may be enough to cause climate change, but its still way too sparse to do something like atmospheric scraping and expect to have any useful effect.
4) Or we could try to use some other chemical to bind to CO2 and precipitate it out of the air.. but most such chemicals are even worse, either for climate change or more directly for the health of humans, plants and/or animals. Not to mention the (dollar) cost involved.
You mean cost of bandwidth, not cost of information as such
No I mean the source-to-destination cost of everything -- the author's time, the hosting service they distribute from (even if that's just a reddit post saying "here's my torrent!", reddit servers aren't free either,) the ISP equipment between all of these points, your own internet and electricity bill, etc.
The cost of making a copy of popular information is trivial
Its very low yes, if you discount all of the costs mentioned above.. which a lot of people do because they aren't directly obvious as a dollar amount cost. But every ad you ignore on TPB when you're looking for that torrent for example, is paying a little bit toward the cost of TPB's servers.
trying to push artificial scarcity in age of near-free bandwidth is going contrary to this
Yes and no. The pure bandwidth is dirt cheap yes, but most of the rest of it isn't. The biggest chunk (and the most scarce aspect) is simply having good ideas in the first place -- general ideas are a dime a dozen of course but good ideas are rare and therefore valuable. The problem here is that there's a disconnect between production (true scarcity) and distribution (artificial scarcity) which publishers try to work around by subsidizing the former using the latter.
I'm not going to claim that's the only or best way to do that, and there's no question that the publishers and other middlemen add a huge layer of greed on there driving the costs up far beyond what (true) scarcity aspect deserves, but there has to be some system in place to fund the development and publishing of ideas and that's the one we've got, for better or worse.
They can't stop all these people with a screw loose
No, but if they can stop 80% of such people I still call that a big win.
they'll just drive a truck over a curb
This one is going to be a big problem sooner or later. Unlike your other stupid examples, its very easy to kill or injure lots of people in a short time with a vehicle. But unlike guns, vehicles have other quite useful functions that we don't really want to restrict. I guess we'll probably just start seeing a whole lot more of those concrete protection posts and other vehicle barriers popping up. Be a bit of an eyesore but reduces the problem without too much impact on legitimate vehicle use.
bullshit of blaming the gun laws for this
I'm going to assume you mean blaming the lack of gun laws. But even then you're wrong. Nobody blames the gun. Crazy people are crazy whether they have a gun or not. What we want is laws that restrict the ability for crazy people to get guns. Will they be 100% absolutely successful? Of course not. But again, I'd call 80% a big win. Hell I'd call a 30% reduction in mass shootings at least a pretty good win.
lock up the truly crazy people
And who are they? Sure in this instance there was a failure on the part of law enforcement but most of these guys are adept at keeping themselves hidden. The shooter in Las Vegas even kept his proclivities hidden from his family and girlfriend -- how the hell is anyone else supposed to figure it out? Sure they can (and do) lock up the crazies after they've gone on their shooting spree -- at least the few who survive -- but at that point its a little too damned late to worry about whether they should have had a gun.
otherwise this child killer could have gotten away
"Could have." If guns were harder to obtain, then this child killer "could have" not had the opportunity to go on a shooting spree in the first place and the vigilante wouldn't have had to shoot him at all. Never mind the fact that even with the shooting spree, there's nothing to say the cops wouldn't have picked him up a block away if the vigilante had pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911 rather than his firearm and started shooting.
Or the guy walking out of the church could have been another vigilante that already got the bad guy and just hadn't put his gun down yet, and we'd have not just another innocent but the "hero" murdered as well. There's a near infinite number of "could be" if you want to play that game.
They think the NRA is the problem?
The NRA is a problem, but not this problem. The problem with the NRA is that they (primarily) represent the gun manufacturers, not the gun owners, and therefore their main incentive is to sell more guns no matter the outcome of doing so. So yeah, they want the crazies to buy more guns, and then you to buy more guns to "combat" the crazies, and then your neighbor to buy a gun in case you're actually the now-armed crazy and so on down the line.
licensed NRA firearm safety instructor
Licensed being the operative word there. There is a whole hell of a lot of gun owners out there who don't know the first thing about gun safety. Even a law as loose as "you have to get licensed" is a good step in the right direction. It would at least reduce a large number of the accidental gun deaths even if it doesn't solve the crazy guy problem.
Sign me up
Solving the problem of gun violence by buying more guns is like trying to drain your pool by putting the garden hose in it and hoping the water system happens to have negative pressure when you turn it on. Sure its theoretically possible and maybe even will happen once in a while, but its far more likely that you're just going to make the problem worse.
Again, show me the scenario where a cell phone user intentionally causes the death of 25+ people and the injury of dozens more.
But yes, distracted driving is a problem and its somewhat telling that we're able to implement laws and educate the public about the dangers of distracted driving with little opposition (politically at least) yet we're unwilling to even open the discussion when it comes to a tool whose sole purpose is to cause harm.
everyone has a reasonable expectation of their own thoughts being a secret
No, US law gives the reasonable expectation of your thoughts being a secret. And it was written specifically because torture and other coercive techniques were being used to draw information out of suspects.
If you live in not-the-US (and well, not-other-countries with similar anti-torture laws,) you can expect your thoughts to be secret for only as long as you can stand up to waterboarding or bamboo under the fingernails or whatever other horrific things people have come up with to cause maximum suffering without death over the millennia. This is a large part of why Gitmo is not on US soil -- they get to play a little fast and loose with things like "human rights" where nobody on the outside gets to see what's happening.
They already have all the information -- its on that phone they're trying to unlock. There are two questions here:
1) Can Apple be legally obligated to unlock phones at the behest of the FBI? If so, what sort of precedent does that set? Will we start seeing mass fishing expeditions and having your phone unlocked any time you're caught jaywalking? How much burden are they going to be allowed to place on Apple just in terms of the amount of time it takes to process and respond to all these unlock requests? At what point would it be considered undue burden?
2) Can Apple actually unlock the phones? The last time this came up the answer turned out to be "sort of." They had the ability to disable the bricking after too many failed unlock attempts, which meant sure some intern at the FBI had to sit there punching in 10,000 codes one at a time until they got it.. but they could do so. Are newer versions of iOS susceptible to that attack? Even if they are, how does it apply if the phone was locked with that doodle grid, or worse a long password, rather than just a 4 digit numeric code? Even without the bricking mechanism that's going to take a long time to break.
OK each of my "questions" had a lot of sub-questions but you get the idea. And that's not even getting into implications against the 4th amendment (and perhaps 1st as well.) That's purely just the argument between the FBI and Apple without considering the rights of the phone's owner or the rights of anyone they communicated with.
Or the second shooter is in Iowa and just biding his time until he lights up another church.
Its rather unlikely given the nature of the attack but its not impossible that he was.. perhaps not conspiring directly, but at least discussing plans with other people who may share similar motivations and may be planning similar attacks given how "successful" this one was.
And I use my fingerprint, not a passcode
If you're worried about law enforcement then that's a bad idea since (at least in the US) there's no question about whether you can be compelled to open a biometric lock such as a fingerprint scanner.
Passwords on the other hand are still hinging on the 5th amendment protections about incriminating yourself. I'm not sure how that one will play out. On one hand, what's the difference between a password and a fingerprint in terms of just unlocking your phone? They both do the same job so why wouldn't they fall under the same rules? But the other side is that there's no way for law enforcement to make you tell them your password (in the physical sense rather than the legal) which leads to the potential for forceful coercion or torture and other such tactics that the 5th was written to try and protect you from.
We probably won't see a conclusion to that argument until such time as we have a live suspect who owns a phone that literally can't be unlocked at all, even with the full assistance of the manufacturer (which could happen regardless of what Apple does if the suspect has written their own encryption scheme, or uses a third party system from another country that isn't bound by US law even a US-based company that simply gave themselves no possibility of a back door at all, or so forth.)
We might have already seen it if Apple hadn't left themselves the ability to force a firmware flash on a locked phone like they did, allowing for at least a potential back door even if its not a simple one.
As I understand it from the (rather loose) details that came out last time.. the idea is basically to force a flash on the firmware (which Apple can do whether the phone is locked or not) that disables the lockout after a failed unlock attempt. So it doesn't directly unlock the phone, but it means the FBI or whoever can then just go through all 10000 possibilities until they get it right without risking the phone permanently bricking itself and making the data truly unobtainable.
Would you rather they were tossed from a window?
As soon as you show me the example where someone defenestrates 25 people in a church, or 52 people at an outdoor concert, we can talk about window violence.
Guns are singled out because a) their entire purpose for existing is to do harm and b) they're designed to do as much harm as possible, as quickly as possible.
build their own cars
Even if you build your own car, you're expected, if not legally obligated, to have a drivers license (and in many states insurance as well) in order to drive it on public roads. Not because anyone gives a shit what you do to yourself, but because of the potential harm you can enact on someone else.
we expect to have a ban on making their own weapons to be effective?
Yes, but of course you're intentionally using a very black-and-white definition of "effective" where you mean 100% reduction in guns. In the real world, most of us would be happy to see even an 70-80% reduction in guns. And by that looser definition, a well-written and well-enforced ban could well be effective. Of course few people are calling for an outright ban anyway, so your argument is already bogus right from the start.
We can make it illegal to make a gun but people will just figure out how to do it on their own
Sure, just like the liquor industry failed 6 millennia ago because people can just make their own wine and beer. Yes the people who really want to skirt the law can always find a way. But I'd much rather have one crazy person with the time, desire and skill to make their own gun of questionable quality than having a 100 people just go out and buy a professionally engineered, produced and QA-tested gun off the shelf at their local Walmart and a dozen of them being crazy.
I have to somewhat disagree with all of that. While the ideas may not be limited by scarcity, transmitting and storing those ideas is. Free software isn't "free" -- the guy who writes it is paying for it with his time, github and Sourceforge pay for their servers to host that free software via ads and the such, and so on. Now of course its much much closer to free (when dividing the author's time by all of the users) thanks to the lack of profit motive, but somebody, somewhere is still paying for it.
The question is .. we have this ridiculous intellectual property nonsense
Primarily because the people who profit the most from doing so, are also the people who write the laws making it happen. But even if we got rid of IP laws, software (and music and whatever else) would still demand some price because again, somebody has to be paying the price for turning ideas into copies.
is artificial scarcity in the digital realm just a cultural meme carried over from the physical world
Mostly this, but also partly because the digital realm is built on top of the physical realm. Servers cost money. Hosting services cost money. Internet access costs money. Electricity costs money. Somebody has to pay all for that. Frequently that somebody is actually you but just not in a form that's easily recognizable (collecting and selling your personal information, for example.)
If we get to a stage where the cost of servers and electricity is near zero (and I mean on a large scale -- like for example when an entire AWS warehouse costs near $0 to construct,) then we might be able to have a discussion about truly free information. I'm not sure that day will ever come, or whether its even a possibility (no matter how clever we get with nanobots and whatnot, there's only so many molecules on the planet and only so much surface area to construct giant server warehouses and so forth. There may simply be a fundamental limit on our ability to extract resources from the world, leaving some level of a scarcity problem in its wake.)
I'd go ahead and disagree there.. mostly:
- Economics: Modern economics exists purely because of scarcity. Nobody really knows what the world would look like if scarcity wasn't an issue. For a rather silly analogy, consider Minecraft: The real world is kind of like survival -- you have to face challenges and collect resources in order to progress and do what you want. A scarcity-free world is more like creative -- you just have as much of everything you want and everyone can do whatever they want. Sure, some people build pretty impressive buildings and such in survival but you go to creative and find things like scale replicas of all of Westeros or the Death Star or the like. Time and creativity are the only limitations.
- Human nature: Here's the "sort of" part of my disagreement. I would say that it goes against human physiology. That is, our little monkey brains simply can't cope with infinite amounts of information. That is, our own brain power becomes the scarce resource. However, I don't think it goes against what I'm sure your definition of "human nature" is -- that is, I'm pretty sure most people would be quite happy to have free everything and just be able to do whatever the hell they wanted, again limited primarily by their own time and creativity.
Of course there's a halfway point in there. For example if hamburgers were somehow completely free, but you still had to cook them yourself (or even just put the thing together,) that's a bit of time that you could potentially pay somebody else to do for you. Obviously a hamburger is a simple case but what about building a house? You go and 3D print a few dozen wall and roof panels but someone's got to stick them together into a structure and if you don't personally have the ability or desire to do that.. well we've now opened ourselves up to a scarcity economy again (a scarcity of time) but since everything physical is free, I'm not sure what the currency would be to pay someone for their time..
Its really hard to imagine what such a world would look like though or how humans would adapt to it, since none of us have ever seen such a thing (and probably never will given that the real world is fundamentally scarce and the digital world will always, at some level, be based upon real world computers built out of real world parts and sucking up real world energy to operate.)
I don't know about "most likely," given that the future of cryptocurrencies in general is constantly in flux (being unrelated to the real world has some benefits to be sure, but there's also some drawbacks.. and the capability of any old fool to invent a new cryptocurrency kind of dilutes the whole thing as well..)
That said, it would be nice to have some alternatives to ad spamming. Especially if the websites implementing such a thing were up front about it (some sort of display to indicate how the mining is progressing.. maybe even say a 1% kickback to the user if their browser happens to successfully mine a coin or something? Definitely some possibilities there.)
They won't. Free stuff is more important to people than some random company somewhere knowing that they ate a salad for lunch or whatever. We might not prefer being constantly tracked, but for the vast majority of people its a minor concern, with a few exceptions (naked pictures, medical history and the such,) and vastly eclipsed by the convenience of the modern world.
Online advertising isn't really a huge issue anymore either to be honest. Sure its annoying as hell, but Google does a pretty good job of ensuring its AdSense ads aren't too invasive (maybe not a perfect job, but far better than you'd get from the government introducing an almost-certainly-broken legal restriction) and you have AdBlock/uBlock/etc to minimize much of the rest of it.
Really, the biggest problems with the internet are no longer corporate and haven't been for a while. Sure there's still some issues coming from that camp but right now politics is by far the more dangerous beast in the pit -- countries like China that wall themselves off as a way to control their populace, countries like the US that are about to intentionally break net neutrality purely to benefit a small number of large ISPs, countries like Russia that allow and even promote hackers breaking everything (you think those people just go back to a day job between US elections?)
The internet was designed to work around physical damage, and it inherently works around data damage such as copyright restrictions due to massive redundancy, but its cracks start showing when the attackers are the major gatekeepers and ISPs since they're essentially attacking their own service. Sure in theory you could create your own off-the-grid "internet" as a workaround but even if you managed to scale it up to the level of the current internet, you'd just find that you're in the same boat and would be facing the same problems. Someone is always going to be in control of the fattest pipes, and those pipes in turn control basically everything in practice, even if not in principle.
One thing to note: There's nothing wrong with or anything illegal about having a monopoly. What's illegal is when you try to use your monopoly power to either unfairly bully potential competitors (for example, but selling lower than cost because you can afford to do that and they can't) or when you try to use your monopoly power in one industry to unfairly advantage yourself in another industry (as Microsoft was sued for back in 1998 when they used their Windows platform dominance to force Internet Explorer on users.)
In Google's case, they run a fine line on the latter, particularly with respect to their search engine dominance leading to their advertising dominance. They're also constantly being accused of prioritizing their services over others in the search rankings but most (not all) of the time its usually found that their competitors just suck and are naturally ranked lower based on the way the algorithm works without any specific bias being necessary.
This is all kind of beside the point.
1) Microsoft is currently Google's biggest competitor in the search space (albeit very very far behind.) But its not like MS is exactly lacking in talent or resources.
2) Google themselves did exactly what you're talking about -- a couple guys in a garage with a good idea ended up taking down Altavista, Webcrawler, Yahoo!, and all of the other search engines at the time. If you had made this exact same claim about Altavista in 1999, everyone would have thought you were right on the money.
No, it only matters when it benefits large Republican donors.
The Republicans are pretty happy to regulate the hell out of your bedroom, your womb (should you have one,) your faith and anything else they happen to dislike. The whole "small government" and "deregulation" catch phrases are just that -- catch phrases. Republicans want just as much government as Democrats.. they just want it focused in a different direction.
Define "operate in." That's a tricky one with the interwebs. It may well be that Google has zero physical presence in Missouri, zero legal presence in Missouri, zero financial presence in Missouri.. and yet 90% of Missouri likely uses Google because 90% of everybody does (I mean I don't know what Google happens to have in Missouri.. I'm just saying that it doesn't matter whether they do or not -- Missourites will still be using Google.)
The internet has no natural borders. It was specifically designed that way since it comes from the cold war era and the designers were intentionally creating a system that the Soviets would have a hard time breaking. Fast forward nearly half a century and we have countries (and in this case, states) explicitly wanting to break the internet and running into a problem with its fundamental design philosophy. They can either keep it in full or cut it off entirely, but trying to pick and choose what parts of it you want is very very difficult. Even China's great firewall is only moderately successful and they pour a hell of a lot more resources into it than Missouri could ever afford.
Because of course this isn't about breaking or stopping Google. I'd bet that guy Googled the information he used to file his claims. Its about trying to make Google bend to their (almost certainly) right wing ideology and fining them until they do.
I would love to see Google make an example of one of these stupid lawsuits. Take their ball and go home rather than compromise, and see how well Missouri (or France or whoever) handles a world where Bing is their only search option (it would have been even better 2 or 3 years ago when Bing was worse.) I mean I don't expect them to ever do that, especially on a country level where they almost certainly have local server complexes to reduce latency. But it would be a hell of a show if they did.
There is a form of definition: An AI is based on learning algorithms, rather than being directly programmed.
Of course there are still people who play fast and loose with the term anyway (especially in games where pretty much any non-triggered NPC behaviour is called "AI") but under the modern usage by people like Alpha and other major AI developers, what they mean is (usually) a neural network and other such learning algorithms.
Of course NN's aren't anywhere close to "true" intelligence -- even if they have the potential to reach that, we're still many many orders of magnitude too low in terms of the amount of neurons we can emulate in any sort of responsive-feeling amount of time. But they're still significantly different from a programmer manually adding more and more if/else branches to handle more and more scenarios.
No, a bunch of people sat down and wrote software that lets the computer _learn_ to play Go. AlphaGo doesn't have a big list of "if board state X then do Y." That's precisely why Go was an interesting problem for AI to tackle -- the rules are completely deterministic to be sure, but the set of board states is so astronomical that you literally can't (and never will be able to) build a computer capable of recording them all.
Chess has been the go-to for "AI" for a long time because of its large state space. However, we've pretty much mastered that using tree pruning techniques (aka "soft" AI.) But Go's state space is too large to even be amenable to tree pruning (at least if you want to beat the masters.) So rather than trying to improve the tree pruning algorithm tiny bit by tiny bit, they went the full hard AI approach and hit it with a neural net.
Sure the NN (and in particular, its training algorithms) will be tuned somewhat for the purposes of playing Go, and its not by any means a general purpose "intelligence." But its not simply a matter of "someone wrote a Go algorithm" either.
Of course, your arguments are why they're tackling games like Starcraft and League of Legends now -- games where the rule set is nowhere near strict, showing that the AIs indeed do have some form of intelligence (though again, its not general-purpose intelligence of course.)
All of that said, the whole argument is moot anyway. Sure we're probably not going to be meeting Bender any time soon, but special-purpose AIs can still potentially take over large portions of the human work force and lead to all sorts of social reform (and possibly disaster if we refuse to change for political reasons or whatever.)