I guess it depends on how powerful the influence of the genes are on aggression.
There are legal defenses that can be made if the person has a medically diagnosed mental illness. It isn't something they can control.
I suppose if more research were done that found out that a person with genes A,B,C had an 80% chance once a month of experiencing an overwhelming urge to be violent, then society would have to make a decision about how to handle that.
Would it be treated as a mental illness if the medical community could show that it is nearly impossible to overcome the urge? Or would we train the person to notice the symptoms (hair growth, growling, , howling, etc..) and require them to lock themselves up?:)
I don't know, but it is going to be very interesting watching the progress of gene research intertwine with the notions of free will and the law.
"Poverty is very often linked to ethnicity *specifically*"
More generically, it is linked to immigration date plus the ability to integrate in society.
There used to be Irish ghettos in America. There wasn't as much resistance to their integration, so those ghettos disappeared.
The resistance to African American integration due to racism, and the very long duration of that resistance, meant that the African American community (inner cities, etc..) had created a new city culture, that sadly, is largely stuck in a vicious cycle of poverty.
I've watched many documentaries on that vicious cycle, and at this point, it has very little to do with racism. That culture that was created, almost as a defense mechanism to racism, seems to be now holding itself back.
From what gather, the most effective programs in the ghettos tend to get kids involved at a very early age in community development and pride, and tend to try to help the family as a whole, not just the kid. Unfortunately, those inner city programs are very underfunded for the task they have in front of them.
I understand that apple sells hardware+software as a single package. That is their business model, and it is fairly successful keeping quality high and guaranteeing "the apple experience".
What I don't understand, is how apple intends to increase market share by continually, intentionally, limiting the ways that a non-apple user can experience their software.
Except the scribes really couldn't compete with the speed and accuracy of the printing press.
The media industry could EASILY out class the ease of pirating something if they'd get off their asses.
My TV, for example, should be able to play any TV show ever created for some nominal price per episode. Say.. 50 cents. 20 episodes, they get 10 bucks. Instead if I want to watch an older show, I can either order the DVD if it possible to find it, or pirate it.
It took Tivo and and a secondary distributor/rentor like Blockbuster and Netflicks to get on demand movies to our tv's.
Why the heck wasn't this coming from large deals between cable companies and major studios at the dawn of broadband?
Especially when it comes to the rare good sci fi show or movie, I want to vote with my dollars that I liked it, or want to support an ongoing tv show.
Hulu is great and meeting a need, but it is far from complete. Last night I got the urge to watch Farscape. I had never seen it, but a friend said it was an OK sci fi series. Hulu, nope. SyFy, nope. There is no way, even paying, to watch it.
Pirate bay, 30 minutes, done. (I'm still going to buy the dvd's)
On demand video and music is the future, and they better get with it.
Tivo has started, like hooking up Blockbuster and Amazon movie rentals to the Tivo. Thats great and all, but the first time I try to use it, it asks me to enter my blockbuster account. I didn't feel like dealing with it, so I watched something on Hulu.
a) I don't have a blockbuster account and don't want one. b) I already have a Tivo account, why isn't Tivo charging my existing account and sending blockbuster the money?
Something as simple as that can cost a sale. The future is all about service and ease of use. If DRM, locked in view times, and other means of creating artificial scarcity are the business model that entertainment wants to keep using, they will fail.
If you have 5 minutes of ads for every 10 minutes of content, I won't watch any of them. If you have one 30 second add, I won't bother to skip it. I might glance at a magazine or grab a beer, but I won't skip it. If you have one 15 second add, chances are, I'll watch it. Not enough time to do much else.
One alternative would be learning algorithms, where we don't exactly know what the code is at any given moment, and one day, hardware becomes fast enough, parallel enough, and the input/output of the machine fast enough that it begins learning exponentially and "wakes up".
I'm not sure that everyone would agree that it is merely mechanical if it sort of 'grew' and wasn't line by line hand coded. Even more abstractly, what if the growing was done in a virtual biological environment exactly duplicating conditions in real life, a virtual human? What if the learning algorithms were instructed to create the virtual environment and check it against real biological input (monitoring animals nervous systems by producing light, sound smells, being given more and more tools that the computer could actually use and experiment with).
I think some of Moravec's charts seem a bit off. The last I heard, the brain was estimated to do 10^16th calculations per second, in parallel. And as brain scanning technology gets more refined, people are finding more and more subtle layers of calculation. (From varying analog to even possible quantum effects).
Is there a super computer that can do 10^16 in parallel? Last I looked, weren't most of them just cresting a petaflop at 10^15? It will probably be another decade or two before brain level computing power is commonplace and in the hands of most AI researchers.
And in addition, in order to simulate a brain, a lot of people think you might need to deal with things on an analog level, or at least vary the strength of neurons firing. So in addition to the total firings occuring at once, you'd need additional calculations to determine what strength each one should fire at, etc.. Probably orders of magnitude beyond 10^16th.
But that is just if you wanted to completely simulate a brain from models. It might be more efficient to work on learning algorithms and just keep it digital and let something 'grow up' inside the computer without attempting to model biology.
Thats why we need to take the money out of campaigns. Anyone who is able to get X signatures is allowed to run for an office. You get a set amount of tax payer cash to spend as you wish on the campaign, and a set amount of air time, and a set amount of public debates.
This is one area where free speech needs to be curtailed for the good of elections. No independent groups (single person, corporation, etc..) can advertise or otherwise spend money advertising for a candidate.
Donations can be made to a campaign, but only small amounts, say, 100 dollars per person. If "big oil" or whatever wants to donate to a politician, feel free. They can donate 100 dollars only.
That would take the corporate influence out of politics overnight.
The single only way to have real change in our political system is deep campaign finance reform.
While I don't know the details of what happened shortly after the industrial revolution, you can't seriously consider empowered property rights as the best defense against corporate pollution.
Whats to stop a group of home owners from being bought off in exchange for letting the company pollute around them?
Pollution must be regulated at a state and federal level, not by individual property holders.
No, I'd be actively encouraging the police to go after offenders in my park.
If I had a torrent site, I'd tell the police and copyright holders, sure, go after the illegal uploaders.
If I'm never at the park, say I live out of town, I have no knowledge of whats going on, but could still give the police permission to hunt for individual law breakers.
There is nothing the pirate bay does that prevents copyright/police from tracking down individual downloaders. Download the torrent and start download the file, and you know which IP's are uploading the copyrighted material to you. Go after the IP's.
What I find interesting, is that wind turbines really are not that high tech. You can google and find 100's of sites showing you how to make basic ones from readily available parts.
Fine tuning their efficiency might reach high tech levels though. And I'm with you, why isn't this being built in country? There are tons of these mega turbines being built in oregon and along the columbia gorge area: http://blog.oregonlive.com/news_impact/2009/03/wind3.JPG
I'm pretty sure those are built in country. I wonder they just can't make them fast enough?
That took a lot of reading to get to the simple answer hehe.
Sintered Ferrite magnets, as opposed to rare earth magnets, perform better at higher speeds due to lower flux, when taking cost of the magnet into account.
I doubt many wind turbines will be running fast often. But since they are cheaper, you could always buy 10x the number of them (vs rare earth) per wind turbine and have many more disc layers turning to produce the energy.
"You can't hold me responsible for a murder on my property that I had no idea was going on, didn't see, didn't intentionally facilitate and would have attempted to stop had I known about it.. But when on any given day (in fact several thousand times EVERYDAY), I can look out my window and watch it happening, while I sit and drink my coffee, its a slightly different story. When the exclusive reason people come to my property is because I'll provide them with information on how to find victims, and then look the other way while they strangle those victims, I am most certainly responsible for the murders as much as the guy doing it. They can't even say 'I was just following orders', unless you think that was a valid excuse for Hitler as well, considering he was giving the orders, I don't think anyone would go that far would they?"
If I open a park in a city, with a swimming pool, that has changing rooms, and drug dealers start using those rooms to sell/use, am I facilitating the sale/use of drugs?
Is there any legal way to build infrastructure to allow people to share files, with intent that they be legal files, without placing the burden of policing that infrastructure on the site owner?
If not, then the law is broke. The police should go after the drug dealers (copy right infringers), not the park owner (infrastructure owner).
If enough things became 'free' there would be a change in the methods creating artificial scarcity to in order to keep costs high.
I think it was the book "Forever Peace" (probably many more) that talked about a world with Nano-Forges. Throw dirt in it, and out comes whatever you want. Gold, diamonds, a new car, etc..
Instead of everyone in the world having everything they wanted, governments gave everyone ration cards. Free, but a limited amount. You could ask for anything you wanted, and different things cost different amounts of ration cards. The Nano-Forges could only produce so much, so fast, as limited by the government.
Now if everyone had their own personal Nano-Forge, I'm sure that the free market/governments/somebody would limit something else. Perhaps the electricity they use, or a law to put a regulator on them, or or or.
I hope something like Nano-Forges happens in my lifetime. That would be very interesting watching how things turned out. What if the 'blueprint' of something was the only way to control if a nano forge could make something. Say the blueprint for a mercedes car was 'leaked' onto the internet and everyone in built one over night in their personal nano forges. How would mercedes respond? Heh.
I often wonder how the law would treat a site with a less jaded intention?
Say I open a site called "www.legaldownloads.com", "a place to share content you have created or content that is legally public, please don't abuse the system". Would that be immune merely because it has a different intent? Historically, that doesn't seem to be the case, however, consider a real world example.
Say I buy up 4 blocks in a city, and create a park. I advertise it, as anyone is welcome, and provide all sorts of infrastructure like swings, monkey bars, etc.. most of the 'play' is initially legal. I also have a public swimming pool, and provide infrastructure to allow someone to change clothes (a booth/hut). Over time, drug dealers start moving in, and the park becomes notorious for illegal activities. Drug dealers/users start using my infrastructure, the private booths, to sell and use.
Am I know liable for facilitating drug sales or drug use? Shouldn't the cops be going after the drug users individually and not the person who created the infrastructure?
I really disagree with any site being taken down just for creating infrastructure that allows the sharing of files. Go after the users, they are the ones engaged in illegal activity.
I'm trying to picture a sports bar type place, only...
It is the Nobel Bar. The TV's would play years past and current Nobel Award ceremonies, and the "big event" night, like Monday night football, would be filming inside some guy's lab watching his centrifuge spin;)
"Well-roundedness is only necessary for people who don't play sports."
I would modify that to say "Well-roundedness is only necessary for people who do not have an interest in what the majority of other people have interests in".
What you need to "fit in" completely changes based on where you find yourself. I remember years back, visiting various colleges trying to decide on which one to attend. At one, I felt like a jock, at another, a nerd.
But if we are going to use the high school experience as the place where jock, nerd, geek, etc.. are defined, then of course, sports is that thing that "everyone likes", so to fit in, you should either play it or like it, or have other interests in common with the people involved in it.
But honestly, looking back, it seems that the issue wasn't "sports", but the confidence it gives people. Confidence that can usually be hard to come by in high school for many kids. Confidence to stand up for yourself, get the girl, etc..
I knew many kids that weren't into sports, but had talents that other kids appreciated and so gave them confidence to go to the parties, hang out with the football team from time to time, etc.. For instance, one group of really good writers had an 'underground newspaper' that made fun of the school and teachers. They were popular. No 'jockiness' needed.
It comes down to confidence, and being able to socialize, which is largely related to the former.
"without it we would all still be living the agrarian lifestyle."
It is interesting you choose the world agrarian. The rise of agriculture in the fertile crescent thousand of years ago, is largely considered the driving factor in that region being able to support specialists for the first time. The rise of city states, large scale irrigation, scholars, tax collectors, etc.., all were possible due to this new discovery: farming.
"Or more likely the internet provides a convenient place to get opinions that agree perfectly with mine, so why should I read a newspaper that I sometimes disagree with and that is therefore stupid and wrong and biased?"
That might happen with some closed minded people sure....
But you can't really be arguing that having 1 news source, say your towns local newspaper, is more informing than having multiple sources, are you?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess it depends on how powerful the influence of the genes are on aggression.
There are legal defenses that can be made if the person has a medically diagnosed mental illness. It isn't something they can control.
I suppose if more research were done that found out that a person with genes A,B,C had an 80% chance once a month of experiencing an overwhelming urge to be violent, then society would have to make a decision about how to handle that.
Would it be treated as a mental illness if the medical community could show that it is nearly impossible to overcome the urge? Or would we train the person to notice the symptoms (hair growth, growling, , howling, etc..) and require them to lock themselves up?:)
I don't know, but it is going to be very interesting watching the progress of gene research intertwine with the notions of free will and the law.
"Poverty is very often linked to ethnicity *specifically*"
More generically, it is linked to immigration date plus the ability to integrate in society.
There used to be Irish ghettos in America. There wasn't as much resistance to their integration, so those ghettos disappeared.
The resistance to African American integration due to racism, and the very long duration of that resistance, meant that the African American community (inner cities, etc..) had created a new city culture, that sadly, is largely stuck in a vicious cycle of poverty.
I've watched many documentaries on that vicious cycle, and at this point, it has very little to do with racism. That culture that was created, almost as a defense mechanism to racism, seems to be now holding itself back.
From what gather, the most effective programs in the ghettos tend to get kids involved at a very early age in community development and pride, and tend to try to help the family as a whole, not just the kid. Unfortunately, those inner city programs are very underfunded for the task they have in front of them.
I understand that apple sells hardware+software as a single package. That is their business model, and it is fairly successful keeping quality high and guaranteeing "the apple experience".
What I don't understand, is how apple intends to increase market share by continually, intentionally, limiting the ways that a non-apple user can experience their software.
Except the scribes really couldn't compete with the speed and accuracy of the printing press.
The media industry could EASILY out class the ease of pirating something if they'd get off their asses.
My TV, for example, should be able to play any TV show ever created for some nominal price per episode. Say.. 50 cents. 20 episodes, they get 10 bucks. Instead if I want to watch an older show, I can either order the DVD if it possible to find it, or pirate it.
It took Tivo and and a secondary distributor/rentor like Blockbuster and Netflicks to get on demand movies to our tv's.
Why the heck wasn't this coming from large deals between cable companies and major studios at the dawn of broadband?
Exactly.
Especially when it comes to the rare good sci fi show or movie, I want to vote with my dollars that I liked it, or want to support an ongoing tv show.
Hulu is great and meeting a need, but it is far from complete. Last night I got the urge to watch Farscape. I had never seen it, but a friend said it was an OK sci fi series. Hulu, nope. SyFy, nope. There is no way, even paying, to watch it.
Pirate bay, 30 minutes, done. (I'm still going to buy the dvd's)
On demand video and music is the future, and they better get with it.
Tivo has started, like hooking up Blockbuster and Amazon movie rentals to the Tivo. Thats great and all, but the first time I try to use it, it asks me to enter my blockbuster account. I didn't feel like dealing with it, so I watched something on Hulu.
a) I don't have a blockbuster account and don't want one.
b) I already have a Tivo account, why isn't Tivo charging my existing account and sending blockbuster the money?
Something as simple as that can cost a sale. The future is all about service and ease of use. If DRM, locked in view times, and other means of creating artificial scarcity are the business model that entertainment wants to keep using, they will fail.
Hello Sponsor!
If you have 5 minutes of ads for every 10 minutes of content, I won't watch any of them.
If you have one 30 second add, I won't bother to skip it. I might glance at a magazine or grab a beer, but I won't skip it.
If you have one 15 second add, chances are, I'll watch it. Not enough time to do much else.
Good post. I wouldn't doubt that scenario.
One alternative would be learning algorithms, where we don't exactly know what the code is at any given moment, and one day, hardware becomes fast enough, parallel enough, and the input/output of the machine fast enough that it begins learning exponentially and "wakes up".
I'm not sure that everyone would agree that it is merely mechanical if it sort of 'grew' and wasn't line by line hand coded. Even more abstractly, what if the growing was done in a virtual biological environment exactly duplicating conditions in real life, a virtual human? What if the learning algorithms were instructed to create the virtual environment and check it against real biological input (monitoring animals nervous systems by producing light, sound smells, being given more and more tools that the computer could actually use and experiment with).
Who knows, its fun to think about though:)
I think some of Moravec's charts seem a bit off. The last I heard, the brain was estimated to do 10^16th calculations per second, in parallel. And as brain scanning technology gets more refined, people are finding more and more subtle layers of calculation. (From varying analog to even possible quantum effects).
Is there a super computer that can do 10^16 in parallel? Last I looked, weren't most of them just cresting a petaflop at 10^15? It will probably be another decade or two before brain level computing power is commonplace and in the hands of most AI researchers.
And in addition, in order to simulate a brain, a lot of people think you might need to deal with things on an analog level, or at least vary the strength of neurons firing. So in addition to the total firings occuring at once, you'd need additional calculations to determine what strength each one should fire at, etc.. Probably orders of magnitude beyond 10^16th.
But that is just if you wanted to completely simulate a brain from models. It might be more efficient to work on learning algorithms and just keep it digital and let something 'grow up' inside the computer without attempting to model biology.
Thats why we need to take the money out of campaigns. Anyone who is able to get X signatures is allowed to run for an office. You get a set amount of tax payer cash to spend as you wish on the campaign, and a set amount of air time, and a set amount of public debates.
This is one area where free speech needs to be curtailed for the good of elections. No independent groups (single person, corporation, etc..) can advertise or otherwise spend money advertising for a candidate.
Donations can be made to a campaign, but only small amounts, say, 100 dollars per person. If "big oil" or whatever wants to donate to a politician, feel free. They can donate 100 dollars only.
That would take the corporate influence out of politics overnight.
The single only way to have real change in our political system is deep campaign finance reform.
http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=4773857
While I don't know the details of what happened shortly after the industrial revolution, you can't seriously consider empowered property rights as the best defense against corporate pollution.
Whats to stop a group of home owners from being bought off in exchange for letting the company pollute around them?
Pollution must be regulated at a state and federal level, not by individual property holders.
If you are in your car, wouldn't power be the least concern? You have a plugin for power in front of you.
No, I'd be actively encouraging the police to go after offenders in my park.
If I had a torrent site, I'd tell the police and copyright holders, sure, go after the illegal uploaders.
If I'm never at the park, say I live out of town, I have no knowledge of whats going on, but could still give the police permission to hunt for individual law breakers.
There is nothing the pirate bay does that prevents copyright/police from tracking down individual downloaders. Download the torrent and start download the file, and you know which IP's are uploading the copyrighted material to you. Go after the IP's.
Well, and the huge wind turbines are a good distance from each other. It would be entirely feasible to grow crops under them.
What I find interesting, is that wind turbines really are not that high tech. You can google and find 100's of sites showing you how to make basic ones from readily available parts.
Fine tuning their efficiency might reach high tech levels though. And I'm with you, why isn't this being built in country? There are tons of these mega turbines being built in oregon and along the columbia gorge area:
http://blog.oregonlive.com/news_impact/2009/03/wind3.JPG
I'm pretty sure those are built in country. I wonder they just can't make them fast enough?
That took a lot of reading to get to the simple answer hehe.
Sintered Ferrite magnets, as opposed to rare earth magnets, perform better at higher speeds due to lower flux, when taking cost of the magnet into account.
I doubt many wind turbines will be running fast often. But since they are cheaper, you could always buy 10x the number of them (vs rare earth) per wind turbine and have many more disc layers turning to produce the energy.
"You can't hold me responsible for a murder on my property that I had no idea was going on, didn't see, didn't intentionally facilitate and would have attempted to stop had I known about it.. But when on any given day (in fact several thousand times EVERYDAY), I can look out my window and watch it happening, while I sit and drink my coffee, its a slightly different story. When the exclusive reason people come to my property is because I'll provide them with information on how to find victims, and then look the other way while they strangle those victims, I am most certainly responsible for the murders as much as the guy doing it. They can't even say 'I was just following orders', unless you think that was a valid excuse for Hitler as well, considering he was giving the orders, I don't think anyone would go that far would they?"
If I open a park in a city, with a swimming pool, that has changing rooms, and drug dealers start using those rooms to sell/use, am I facilitating the sale/use of drugs?
Is there any legal way to build infrastructure to allow people to share files, with intent that they be legal files, without placing the burden of policing that infrastructure on the site owner?
If not, then the law is broke. The police should go after the drug dealers (copy right infringers), not the park owner (infrastructure owner).
If enough things became 'free' there would be a change in the methods creating artificial scarcity to in order to keep costs high.
I think it was the book "Forever Peace" (probably many more) that talked about a world with Nano-Forges. Throw dirt in it, and out comes whatever you want. Gold, diamonds, a new car, etc..
Instead of everyone in the world having everything they wanted, governments gave everyone ration cards. Free, but a limited amount. You could ask for anything you wanted, and different things cost different amounts of ration cards. The Nano-Forges could only produce so much, so fast, as limited by the government.
Now if everyone had their own personal Nano-Forge, I'm sure that the free market/governments/somebody would limit something else. Perhaps the electricity they use, or a law to put a regulator on them, or or or.
I hope something like Nano-Forges happens in my lifetime. That would be very interesting watching how things turned out. What if the 'blueprint' of something was the only way to control if a nano forge could make something. Say the blueprint for a mercedes car was 'leaked' onto the internet and everyone in built one over night in their personal nano forges. How would mercedes respond? Heh.
I often wonder how the law would treat a site with a less jaded intention?
Say I open a site called "www.legaldownloads.com", "a place to share content you have created or content that is legally public, please don't abuse the system". Would that be immune merely because it has a different intent? Historically, that doesn't seem to be the case, however, consider a real world example.
Say I buy up 4 blocks in a city, and create a park. I advertise it, as anyone is welcome, and provide all sorts of infrastructure like swings, monkey bars, etc.. most of the 'play' is initially legal. I also have a public swimming pool, and provide infrastructure to allow someone to change clothes (a booth/hut). Over time, drug dealers start moving in, and the park becomes notorious for illegal activities. Drug dealers/users start using my infrastructure, the private booths, to sell and use.
Am I know liable for facilitating drug sales or drug use? Shouldn't the cops be going after the drug users individually and not the person who created the infrastructure?
I really disagree with any site being taken down just for creating infrastructure that allows the sharing of files. Go after the users, they are the ones engaged in illegal activity.
I'm trying to picture a sports bar type place, only...
It is the Nobel Bar. The TV's would play years past and current Nobel Award ceremonies, and the "big event" night, like Monday night football, would be filming inside some guy's lab watching his centrifuge spin;)
"Well-roundedness is only necessary for people who don't play sports."
I would modify that to say "Well-roundedness is only necessary for people who do not have an interest in what the majority of other people have interests in".
What you need to "fit in" completely changes based on where you find yourself. I remember years back, visiting various colleges trying to decide on which one to attend. At one, I felt like a jock, at another, a nerd.
But if we are going to use the high school experience as the place where jock, nerd, geek, etc.. are defined, then of course, sports is that thing that "everyone likes", so to fit in, you should either play it or like it, or have other interests in common with the people involved in it.
But honestly, looking back, it seems that the issue wasn't "sports", but the confidence it gives people. Confidence that can usually be hard to come by in high school for many kids. Confidence to stand up for yourself, get the girl, etc..
I knew many kids that weren't into sports, but had talents that other kids appreciated and so gave them confidence to go to the parties, hang out with the football team from time to time, etc.. For instance, one group of really good writers had an 'underground newspaper' that made fun of the school and teachers. They were popular. No 'jockiness' needed.
It comes down to confidence, and being able to socialize, which is largely related to the former.
"without it we would all still be living the agrarian lifestyle."
It is interesting you choose the world agrarian. The rise of agriculture in the fertile crescent thousand of years ago, is largely considered the driving factor in that region being able to support specialists for the first time. The rise of city states, large scale irrigation, scholars, tax collectors, etc.., all were possible due to this new discovery: farming.
I know what you meant though:)
"Maybe money isn't the sole motivator"
And then you go on to discuss money for the rest of your post. Did I miss something?
http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=4773591
If you are concerned about it, read up on common cause's site and support them if you like what you read.
"Or more likely the internet provides a convenient place to get opinions that agree perfectly with mine, so why should I read a newspaper that I sometimes disagree with and that is therefore stupid and wrong and biased?"
That might happen with some closed minded people sure....
But you can't really be arguing that having 1 news source, say your towns local newspaper, is more informing than having multiple sources, are you?
I haven't read up on 9.10 yet, but I'm hoping it supports
03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV516 [Radeon X1300/X1550 Series]
Better than 9.04 did. That was a complete mess, and left older radeon card users scrambling for the best solution.