My wife's grandfather passed away due to complications from Parkinson's. I never got to meet him before the disease started, but it was heartbreaking to see him go from able to walk on his own using a walker to being unable to move a leg without help. He would fall down and being unable to help you life him back up. (FYI, it can really hurt your back trying to lift up a 150 or so pound man who can't help by supporting his own weight at all.) In the end, he couldn't even get out of bed.
I'm not sure which is worse, Parkinson's or Alzheimer's (where you slowly lose chunks of your memory/yourself until there's just an empty shell left). Any progress towards treating these disorders is fantastic.
Documentaries don't use actors to play the people they're about. The people are in them.
So any documentary about the Civil War or WW2 or other historical events only use people who lived through that time? They can never reenact the events to visually show what happened? Or do they bring the people back from the dead. Zombies help make documentaries much more interesting though they sacrifice accuracy a bit when Zombie Lincoln tries to eat the cameraman's brains.
Lions were the first example I thought of also. A male lion taking over a pride will also kill all cubs that aren't his own to ensure that the females only raise his own offspring. Nature isn't a rainbow-sunshine world of peace and harmony. It's a nasty world of kill or be killed and eaten. Anyone who thinks that humans are the only ones who kill really hasn't seen much of nature.
Not that, but my wife once had an undergarment trigger the TSA sensors as an "anomaly" and had to be subjected to the full pat down routine. By a female employee who, I hope, wasn't just doing this because she found my wife attractive. This likely wouldn't let a male TSA agent pat down a female in the line as I believe they have rules in place that only the same-sex individual must do the pat down. Then again, this IS the TSA we're talking about, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was abused as well. They have been caught sending attractive females through the "naked scanner" and ogling the resulting images.
The TSA: Protecting Us Against Imaginary Terrorists*
I don't see society losing all knowledge, but I could envision a society where being a scientist is either
A) A secretive, priest-hood type profession - In this case, most people would see science and technology as magic. How does the car run? Nobody knows but the Scientist and he's not telling.
or
B) A reviled profession with people practicing it in secret, if at all - Think of this as the extreme version of the religious extremists' "science is a war on religion" view with religion winning. Study of science is banned and public sentiment is manipulated to make people who study science into outcasts. Technological development freezes and then backslides as those with knowledge can't even repair what we have.
A couple generations of this could easily result in a populace who wouldn't know what to do with a fully charged laptop with a local copy of Wikipedia if you gave it to them - or worse, a populace who would smash the laptop and hang you for heresy.
I mean a teaching degree. Where the person studies education, childhood development, and other subjects that make that person capable to educate growing minds. The "5 week course" is analogous to taking someone whose computer experience is launching Word, giving them a 5 week course on server administration and then making them your sysadmin. Yes, the person might be able to go some of the motions of server administration, but they'll never be as good as someone with years of server administration under their belt.
I'm not sure if this is a general trend across the country, but where I am teachers with actual degrees are being targeted so that they (and the public schools in which they teach) can be replaced with business-run charter schools and "teachers" who took a five week online course. The good teachers are fleeing the profession and I've heard more than one teacher tell people they wouldn't recommend that students choose becoming a teacher as their career.
Montessori schools do that. They let the students decide what they want to learn and at what pace. Personally, I don't buy this educational philosophy. I think kids can often be very short-sighted and might not try to learn an essential subject or might shy away from a subject as "boring/hard" when they would really love it if forced to study it for a bit. K-12 should be about 1) getting a child's educational foundation in place and 2) giving the child exposure to a wide variety of topics so they can decide which ones they like if/when they go to college.
I think it's more along the lines of: Internet Radio came along and the music industry wanted them to pay royalties because "Internet" equals "One Step Away From Piracy." They wouldn't let their music near the "PiracyNet" unless they were compensated first. Fine, so the Internet Radio companies paid them. Now, however, the executives got greedier and noticed that Internet Radio was paying them while Non-Internet Radio wasn't. Greedy executives saw dollar signs and decided that this couldn't stand so they got their buddies in Congress to put forward legislation to force everyone to pay them royalties. (Oops. I mean every Radio company. The "everyone needs to pay $X a month to the music industry no matter what you do" legislation is still being ironed out.)
The more I look into state politics here in NY, especially when it comes to Cuomo, the more I understand that Vermonter's comment isn't tinfoil hattery, but day-to-day politics here.
This is, after all, the state where state senators approved a budget "with a heavy heart" while saying that it was horrible so that our governor could have a fifth on-time budget in a row. And this is the state where said budget tore apart the educational system but gave tax breaks if you want to buy a yacht.
In short: Want to buy a yacht and send your kids to private school? Come to New York. Can't afford a yacht and need to send your kids to public school? Your legislators' hearts are heavy for you but they won't actually do anything to help.
For a second, I thought you were arguing that the moral conflict should be built into the weapon. I envisioned a weapon version of Clippy. "It looks like you are trying to kill someone. Do you want me to help?"
On the plus side, building Clippy into every weapon would ensure that they are never used. (On the minus side, using the weapons as clubs until the weapons were destroyed would increase a thousand fold.)
An autonomous cars' job is "don't hit those people, other cars, or other obstacles in the road." It doesn't need to know Person A is fine to hit but avoid Person B or else. Autonomous weapons need to make this decision and might decide that the wrong person is OK to kill.
I'm saying that the tests are structured such that students are all but guaranteed to fail. Only by coaching their kids constantly on how to take the test, can the teacher possibly hope to have their kids pass. This leads to teachers who only teach how to take tests, not teachers who actually teach.
Being able to take a test and knowing the material are two very different things. Then there's the argument about learning related topics that might not be on the test, but might be interesting and spark a love of learning. The most effective teachers I had when I was in school weren't the ones who taught me how to pass a test, but were the ones who were creative and willing to take detours (staying within the general subject but veering from the path slightly).
This doesn't even get into the politicians setting the bar AFTER the tests to decide just how much progress is deemed acceptable. Because they might decide that a 10 percentage point increase isn't enough and teachers will be deemed ineffective if they don't get a 20 percentage point increase. The whole system is designed to result in failing kids and teachers so the politicians' donors can step in to "save" everyone (and earn a profit).
That transforming robot was clearly a Decepticon in disguise and how is surely gathering all of the energy in Fukushima to convert to Energon for Megatron! Someone call the Autobots.
My question would be: How would they identify this?
Say I sign up to Red State as ObamaForever2016 and post heavily pro-Obama links/comments. I quickly get banned. Now, I sign up to Pro Tea Party Forums as BObamaFan and post different pro-Obama links/comments. How would the algorithm determine that those two accounts were the same person (banned from one site) and not two different people with similar political views?
I have a personal rule not to read comment sections. There are a small number of exceptions, but, in general, whenever I ignore the rule and browse the comments, I invariably encounter some insanely stupid comments that make me want to bang my head into my desk repeatedly. Too many people seem to be able to operate their brain or their fingers/mouth, but not both at once.
Politics also comes into play way more than it should. In an elementary school in our district, a principal was fired (he sexually harassed multiple teachers). Instead of just being fired, though, he was transferred to a position where he could keep his pay while doing nothing for a few years. The district didn't want the bad publicity of a lawsuit, so they hushed everything up as much as they could and kept him on the payroll.
Another example: New York awarded a $26 million contract over 8 years to Pearson to administer high stakes tests. There are no signs that the tests actually return any data and the passing mark has been artificially set so that less than 40% of students pass. (I believe now you need to get a B to pass. C or D are considered failing grades.) There is no oversight to make sure the tests are age appropriate or even that they are graded right. It's just give the test (no peaking for teachers or they get in trouble), ship them back where they are graded and then destroyed. Want to contest a grade? Sorry, it's been destroyed already. There has been a big outcry against this sort of thing, but the politicians keep pushing it because a) they like "data" (even if the data isn't accurate or helpful in any way), b) they get lobbying money from Pearson and other companies who profit off this kind of thing. Sometimes, state/local officials even have direct financial ties to these organizations.
Meanwhile, they keep claiming that it's the teachers' fault and the teachers get paid too much. My wife is a teacher - though not in the classroom now - she got paid less than minimum wage when you considered how many hours she worked.
That and what money we are spending on education is directed towards "kids need to pass this series of tests or a) they won't be said to have learned anything and b) the teachers that taught them will be fired." So teachers are forced to teach to the test (lest they be fired*) and real education is tossed aside.
* In New York State, they just passed a budget. Part of the educational "reform" enacted was that students had to show "growth" on the tests. If they didn't show enough growth (an amount determined AFTER the test scores come in), then teachers would get an ineffective rating. If a teacher got 2 ineffective ratings in a row, they could be fired within 90 days. If a teacher gets 3 ineffective ratings in a row, they MUST be fired in 90 days. (Their only defense in the latter case is fraud and good luck proving that.) It's all part of our governor's War on Public Schools and Public School Teachers.
A government body gets the whole key and then has it stolen from them and we're all left with our trousers down in a changing room made of glass.
Or a hacker finds a way to break in without the "keys."
It doesn't matter how many "pieces" you split the key up into if someone can just busy down the door and take whatever they want. Adding a back door to an encryption product is just asking for someone to break that back door down.
Much as I'd love to see Rand Paul as the Republican nominee, I doubt he'll be nominated. He doesn't appeal to the Christian right and nowadays you need their blessing to be the GOP nominee.
The problem underlying this fight is the big ISPs are realizing the connection will be the valuable piece in the future, and not merely a profitable Haddon to there cable business. As Apple, Amazon, Netflix et. al. chip away at the core cable business they (the cable companies / ISP) are looking for ways to protect revenue steams. Preventing others from entering the ISP space is critical to maintaining that revenue stream; and why they are willing to spend big dollars on lawyers, lobbyists and campaign contributions to do so.
Sadly, since they control the ISP space, they are also realizing that they can protect themselves against Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc by instituting bandwidth caps. If you have a 250GB cap, you can only watch so much Internet video before you need to pay overage fees. Then you can either keep paying the overage fees (giving money to the ISP) or switch to traditional TV (likely giving money to the TV service that the ISP owns). Win-win for them. Lose-lose for consumers.
Creating an ISP is a huge investment. You need to physically lay out wire to each subscriber's house which in the beginning might mean laying a lot of wire just to reach one or two houses in scattered areas. If you wanted to compete with Google, you would just need to write a better search engine and then get people to use it. Tricky, perhaps, but doable. You wouldn't need to "wire" each person to your new search engine. Competing with the big ISPs, however, would mean outlaying a huge investment. Then, you'd get into situations where the companies either didn't give you access to their poles (like AT&T did to Google Fiber in Austin) or can tie you up in litigation until you are bankrupt. (They can afford to sue a small ISP for a few years. Let's see a small ISP survive while battling Comcast in court, though.)
ISPs should be treated like natural monopolies. If you can have competition, great. However, the companies need to be closely watched for signs that they are abusing their monopoly power.
My view of the lack of OTT cable TV (or the barest beginnings of it if you count SlingTV) is that it's a competition issue.
The big cable providers have divided the US up into zones. Each company controls a zone and there's little if any overlap. Comcast even tried using this to their advantage during the TWC merger by claiming that them gobbling up TWC won't limit competition because the two don't operate in the same market.
Let's suppose that one cable company launches an OTT Cable TV platform. Suddenly, their market expands to the entire US. They don't need to keep within their limited area anymore since nothing would stop them from signing up users from other areas.
Once one cable company offered this, the rest would scramble to provide their own solution. (I wouldn't be surprised if some of them had solutions developed and ready just in case.) The result would be that you could choose your cable TV from TWC, Comcast, Charter, etc no matter where you lived.
Sounds good, right? After all, this would mean much more competition. Except the cable providers don't WANT more competition. They like the comfortable monopolies they enjoy now and don't want anything to change on that front. They'll do everything in their power (control over content companies, colluding with other cable companies, lobbying government officials) to protect their monopolies.
I agree that the FCC's rules aren't going to stop all abuses. They are a good start and should stop much of the "Internet companies are using our pipes for free so we need to charge them" talk. (Hint: Internet companies pay their OWN ISPs for bandwidth. They aren't sneaking into their neighbor's house and plugging a network cord into their neighbor's router.) The FCC should definite focus a close eye on data caps - especially when they are used by monopoly cable ISPs to negatively impact Internet video so that users will be more likely to use the cable companies' TV offerings.
Better performance? No. This wasn't Comcast saying "Hey, Netflix, we noticed your performance is lagging a bit. Pay us X and we'll improve it." It was Comcast saying "Hey, Netflix,, we've allowed our peering connections to flood to degrade your performance. If you want to get it back to where it was before, you'll fork over some cash. If not? Well, there are other streaming video providers, but we don't have any competition."
It's essentially the cable ISP version of a mobster telling a shop owner "This is a nice store you have here. It'd be a shame if something were to happen to it."
Slashdot Mirror
My wife's grandfather passed away due to complications from Parkinson's. I never got to meet him before the disease started, but it was heartbreaking to see him go from able to walk on his own using a walker to being unable to move a leg without help. He would fall down and being unable to help you life him back up. (FYI, it can really hurt your back trying to lift up a 150 or so pound man who can't help by supporting his own weight at all.) In the end, he couldn't even get out of bed.
I'm not sure which is worse, Parkinson's or Alzheimer's (where you slowly lose chunks of your memory/yourself until there's just an empty shell left). Any progress towards treating these disorders is fantastic.
So any documentary about the Civil War or WW2 or other historical events only use people who lived through that time? They can never reenact the events to visually show what happened? Or do they bring the people back from the dead. Zombies help make documentaries much more interesting though they sacrifice accuracy a bit when Zombie Lincoln tries to eat the cameraman's brains.
Lions were the first example I thought of also. A male lion taking over a pride will also kill all cubs that aren't his own to ensure that the females only raise his own offspring. Nature isn't a rainbow-sunshine world of peace and harmony. It's a nasty world of kill or be killed and eaten. Anyone who thinks that humans are the only ones who kill really hasn't seen much of nature.
Not that, but my wife once had an undergarment trigger the TSA sensors as an "anomaly" and had to be subjected to the full pat down routine. By a female employee who, I hope, wasn't just doing this because she found my wife attractive. This likely wouldn't let a male TSA agent pat down a female in the line as I believe they have rules in place that only the same-sex individual must do the pat down. Then again, this IS the TSA we're talking about, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was abused as well. They have been caught sending attractive females through the "naked scanner" and ogling the resulting images.
The TSA: Protecting Us Against Imaginary Terrorists*
* But Not Real Ones**
** Also, who protects us against the TSA?
I don't see society losing all knowledge, but I could envision a society where being a scientist is either
A) A secretive, priest-hood type profession - In this case, most people would see science and technology as magic. How does the car run? Nobody knows but the Scientist and he's not telling.
or
B) A reviled profession with people practicing it in secret, if at all - Think of this as the extreme version of the religious extremists' "science is a war on religion" view with religion winning. Study of science is banned and public sentiment is manipulated to make people who study science into outcasts. Technological development freezes and then backslides as those with knowledge can't even repair what we have.
A couple generations of this could easily result in a populace who wouldn't know what to do with a fully charged laptop with a local copy of Wikipedia if you gave it to them - or worse, a populace who would smash the laptop and hang you for heresy.
I mean a teaching degree. Where the person studies education, childhood development, and other subjects that make that person capable to educate growing minds. The "5 week course" is analogous to taking someone whose computer experience is launching Word, giving them a 5 week course on server administration and then making them your sysadmin. Yes, the person might be able to go some of the motions of server administration, but they'll never be as good as someone with years of server administration under their belt.
I'm not sure if this is a general trend across the country, but where I am teachers with actual degrees are being targeted so that they (and the public schools in which they teach) can be replaced with business-run charter schools and "teachers" who took a five week online course. The good teachers are fleeing the profession and I've heard more than one teacher tell people they wouldn't recommend that students choose becoming a teacher as their career.
Montessori schools do that. They let the students decide what they want to learn and at what pace. Personally, I don't buy this educational philosophy. I think kids can often be very short-sighted and might not try to learn an essential subject or might shy away from a subject as "boring/hard" when they would really love it if forced to study it for a bit. K-12 should be about 1) getting a child's educational foundation in place and 2) giving the child exposure to a wide variety of topics so they can decide which ones they like if/when they go to college.
I think it's more along the lines of: Internet Radio came along and the music industry wanted them to pay royalties because "Internet" equals "One Step Away From Piracy." They wouldn't let their music near the "PiracyNet" unless they were compensated first. Fine, so the Internet Radio companies paid them. Now, however, the executives got greedier and noticed that Internet Radio was paying them while Non-Internet Radio wasn't. Greedy executives saw dollar signs and decided that this couldn't stand so they got their buddies in Congress to put forward legislation to force everyone to pay them royalties. (Oops. I mean every Radio company. The "everyone needs to pay $X a month to the music industry no matter what you do" legislation is still being ironed out.)
The more I look into state politics here in NY, especially when it comes to Cuomo, the more I understand that Vermonter's comment isn't tinfoil hattery, but day-to-day politics here.
This is, after all, the state where state senators approved a budget "with a heavy heart" while saying that it was horrible so that our governor could have a fifth on-time budget in a row. And this is the state where said budget tore apart the educational system but gave tax breaks if you want to buy a yacht.
In short: Want to buy a yacht and send your kids to private school? Come to New York. Can't afford a yacht and need to send your kids to public school? Your legislators' hearts are heavy for you but they won't actually do anything to help.
For a second, I thought you were arguing that the moral conflict should be built into the weapon. I envisioned a weapon version of Clippy. "It looks like you are trying to kill someone. Do you want me to help?"
On the plus side, building Clippy into every weapon would ensure that they are never used. (On the minus side, using the weapons as clubs until the weapons were destroyed would increase a thousand fold.)
An autonomous cars' job is "don't hit those people, other cars, or other obstacles in the road." It doesn't need to know Person A is fine to hit but avoid Person B or else. Autonomous weapons need to make this decision and might decide that the wrong person is OK to kill.
I'm saying that the tests are structured such that students are all but guaranteed to fail. Only by coaching their kids constantly on how to take the test, can the teacher possibly hope to have their kids pass. This leads to teachers who only teach how to take tests, not teachers who actually teach.
Being able to take a test and knowing the material are two very different things. Then there's the argument about learning related topics that might not be on the test, but might be interesting and spark a love of learning. The most effective teachers I had when I was in school weren't the ones who taught me how to pass a test, but were the ones who were creative and willing to take detours (staying within the general subject but veering from the path slightly).
This doesn't even get into the politicians setting the bar AFTER the tests to decide just how much progress is deemed acceptable. Because they might decide that a 10 percentage point increase isn't enough and teachers will be deemed ineffective if they don't get a 20 percentage point increase. The whole system is designed to result in failing kids and teachers so the politicians' donors can step in to "save" everyone (and earn a profit).
That transforming robot was clearly a Decepticon in disguise and how is surely gathering all of the energy in Fukushima to convert to Energon for Megatron! Someone call the Autobots.
My question would be: How would they identify this?
Say I sign up to Red State as ObamaForever2016 and post heavily pro-Obama links/comments. I quickly get banned. Now, I sign up to Pro Tea Party Forums as BObamaFan and post different pro-Obama links/comments. How would the algorithm determine that those two accounts were the same person (banned from one site) and not two different people with similar political views?
I have a personal rule not to read comment sections. There are a small number of exceptions, but, in general, whenever I ignore the rule and browse the comments, I invariably encounter some insanely stupid comments that make me want to bang my head into my desk repeatedly. Too many people seem to be able to operate their brain or their fingers/mouth, but not both at once.
Politics also comes into play way more than it should. In an elementary school in our district, a principal was fired (he sexually harassed multiple teachers). Instead of just being fired, though, he was transferred to a position where he could keep his pay while doing nothing for a few years. The district didn't want the bad publicity of a lawsuit, so they hushed everything up as much as they could and kept him on the payroll.
Another example: New York awarded a $26 million contract over 8 years to Pearson to administer high stakes tests. There are no signs that the tests actually return any data and the passing mark has been artificially set so that less than 40% of students pass. (I believe now you need to get a B to pass. C or D are considered failing grades.) There is no oversight to make sure the tests are age appropriate or even that they are graded right. It's just give the test (no peaking for teachers or they get in trouble), ship them back where they are graded and then destroyed. Want to contest a grade? Sorry, it's been destroyed already. There has been a big outcry against this sort of thing, but the politicians keep pushing it because a) they like "data" (even if the data isn't accurate or helpful in any way), b) they get lobbying money from Pearson and other companies who profit off this kind of thing. Sometimes, state/local officials even have direct financial ties to these organizations.
Meanwhile, they keep claiming that it's the teachers' fault and the teachers get paid too much. My wife is a teacher - though not in the classroom now - she got paid less than minimum wage when you considered how many hours she worked.
That and what money we are spending on education is directed towards "kids need to pass this series of tests or a) they won't be said to have learned anything and b) the teachers that taught them will be fired." So teachers are forced to teach to the test (lest they be fired*) and real education is tossed aside.
* In New York State, they just passed a budget. Part of the educational "reform" enacted was that students had to show "growth" on the tests. If they didn't show enough growth (an amount determined AFTER the test scores come in), then teachers would get an ineffective rating. If a teacher got 2 ineffective ratings in a row, they could be fired within 90 days. If a teacher gets 3 ineffective ratings in a row, they MUST be fired in 90 days. (Their only defense in the latter case is fraud and good luck proving that.) It's all part of our governor's War on Public Schools and Public School Teachers.
Or a hacker finds a way to break in without the "keys."
It doesn't matter how many "pieces" you split the key up into if someone can just busy down the door and take whatever they want. Adding a back door to an encryption product is just asking for someone to break that back door down.
Much as I'd love to see Rand Paul as the Republican nominee, I doubt he'll be nominated. He doesn't appeal to the Christian right and nowadays you need their blessing to be the GOP nominee.
Sadly, since they control the ISP space, they are also realizing that they can protect themselves against Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc by instituting bandwidth caps. If you have a 250GB cap, you can only watch so much Internet video before you need to pay overage fees. Then you can either keep paying the overage fees (giving money to the ISP) or switch to traditional TV (likely giving money to the TV service that the ISP owns). Win-win for them. Lose-lose for consumers.
Creating an ISP is a huge investment. You need to physically lay out wire to each subscriber's house which in the beginning might mean laying a lot of wire just to reach one or two houses in scattered areas. If you wanted to compete with Google, you would just need to write a better search engine and then get people to use it. Tricky, perhaps, but doable. You wouldn't need to "wire" each person to your new search engine. Competing with the big ISPs, however, would mean outlaying a huge investment. Then, you'd get into situations where the companies either didn't give you access to their poles (like AT&T did to Google Fiber in Austin) or can tie you up in litigation until you are bankrupt. (They can afford to sue a small ISP for a few years. Let's see a small ISP survive while battling Comcast in court, though.)
ISPs should be treated like natural monopolies. If you can have competition, great. However, the companies need to be closely watched for signs that they are abusing their monopoly power.
My view of the lack of OTT cable TV (or the barest beginnings of it if you count SlingTV) is that it's a competition issue.
The big cable providers have divided the US up into zones. Each company controls a zone and there's little if any overlap. Comcast even tried using this to their advantage during the TWC merger by claiming that them gobbling up TWC won't limit competition because the two don't operate in the same market.
Let's suppose that one cable company launches an OTT Cable TV platform. Suddenly, their market expands to the entire US. They don't need to keep within their limited area anymore since nothing would stop them from signing up users from other areas.
Once one cable company offered this, the rest would scramble to provide their own solution. (I wouldn't be surprised if some of them had solutions developed and ready just in case.) The result would be that you could choose your cable TV from TWC, Comcast, Charter, etc no matter where you lived.
Sounds good, right? After all, this would mean much more competition. Except the cable providers don't WANT more competition. They like the comfortable monopolies they enjoy now and don't want anything to change on that front. They'll do everything in their power (control over content companies, colluding with other cable companies, lobbying government officials) to protect their monopolies.
I agree that the FCC's rules aren't going to stop all abuses. They are a good start and should stop much of the "Internet companies are using our pipes for free so we need to charge them" talk. (Hint: Internet companies pay their OWN ISPs for bandwidth. They aren't sneaking into their neighbor's house and plugging a network cord into their neighbor's router.) The FCC should definite focus a close eye on data caps - especially when they are used by monopoly cable ISPs to negatively impact Internet video so that users will be more likely to use the cable companies' TV offerings.
Better performance? No. This wasn't Comcast saying "Hey, Netflix, we noticed your performance is lagging a bit. Pay us X and we'll improve it." It was Comcast saying "Hey, Netflix,, we've allowed our peering connections to flood to degrade your performance. If you want to get it back to where it was before, you'll fork over some cash. If not? Well, there are other streaming video providers, but we don't have any competition."
It's essentially the cable ISP version of a mobster telling a shop owner "This is a nice store you have here. It'd be a shame if something were to happen to it."