There's your problem right there. Because you expect everything to be unfixable you assume replacing a bulb is beyond your capability. Fact is bulbs in cars are a darn sight easier to replace....
Incidentally... bullshit. I've got a modern (2008), Big Three car and to replace the headlight bulb, you literally have to remove the entire fascia from the car. Then you have to remove the headlight housing from the car. Then you have to excavate to extract the HID bulb from within the housing. This is nontrivial because you are working through a small hole to undo metal latches inside. Then you get to replace the actual bulb, which the oils on your skin can easily destroy. Finally, you reassemble the entire front-end of your car.
I've done it. But it's nowhere near as easy as my first car (a 1985 model, same manufacturer) was. That was trivial.
All of my corner lights and brake lights are trivial, but the headlights... nasty. This is simply because of all of the complex sculpted front-end structure. When cars were simple box shapes, it was easy.
What about universal translators? In 100 years time, won't they be good enough for general use?
-> my bet is that the world will still speak lots of languages and use translators.:)
Because that isn't a total pain in the ass? Don't get me wrong... it's better than not being able to communicate, but having to listen for a translation in between every exchange will be annoying. And faulty. But mostly annoying. It's far more likely as the globe becomes smaller for language domination to take place even though a hundred years isn't long enough for anything like a single winner. Expansion = fragmentation, contraction = unification. Until we colonize planets introducing days of delay in communications we won't see language expansion again.
Oh no! Bad news is that speeding cameras are increasing. Now we'll actually catch people who are breaking the law. What will they do. Those poor souls.
Yes I'm trolling but I have an honest question for you. What makes you decide it's okay to break the law and then complain about the judicial system's ability to identify that you did? If you have something against the law in question then simply breaking it is unlikely to be the way to get it changed, and at worst quite silly if you complain about subsequently getting caught.
It's one of the few 100% voluntary taxes. You chose to pay it.
Bull. The moment you link income to victimless crimes, you create an adversarial relationship between the police and the public.
In this case in particular, you create a culture where it is tangibly to the police department's benefit to arrange that speed limits are set artificially low, where drivers will be likely to speed. In such a case, there's no safety benefit, only a cash benefit to the police.
Now, if these were mandated that they could only ever be used at spots where there were $RandomSensibleNum speed-related accidents a year, that might be different. Speed limits exist (purportedly) to encourage safety. Where they don't work, heftier solutions might be called for. Where there is no actual safety issue, there is no need for these cameras.
There's only about 190 pages. It's actually quicker for the average reader to read the whole of the hobbit than to watch all 3 films.
Just some numbers. The average person reads at between 250 and 300 words per minute. Let's call it 275.
Hobbit is 95,356 words long. That's 347 minutes of reading.
The first two Hobbit movies combined are 330 minutes long.
So basically an average reader will plow through the book in the time it takes to watch two of the movies plus some trailers before the third. Forget the extra 144 minutes of the actual movie!
Law? How shortsighted! No; it's about what we value, and how we make choices about life and death, and what makes us human.
That woman opened up her body to her mate and that little person ended up there through no fault of its own. Mommy and daddy decided to ignore basic human physiology and now it is, in fact, the end of the story for that kid that ends up like it went through a blender. Your hand is a part of your body; ever tried to put your hand in a blender?
That's the way you see it and you're trying to present it as fact. It's not. It's interpretation.
Don't believe me? Have your appendix burst. Suddenly you'll see a very real circumstance where removal of a body part is trivial and not a matter for ethical consideration.
You've decided that "personhood" begins at conception. Well, other people don't see a single fertilized cell as a human being. This isn't a topic that can be defined in rigid blacks & whites. At the single-cell stage, what you've got is a non-viable life form.
Here's another way to look at it... if you take a full-functioning adult human, scoop out their brain and leave the rest on life support, do you have a person anymore? I'd hope we can agree the answer is no. Well then, at the single-cell stage, you don't have a brain, so you don't have a person. Somewhere along the line, cell-division starts to specialize and eventually there's a little bundle of brain cells. Say there's... a hundred specialized brain cells. Nothing that is capable of cogitation, so again, I'd think we can agree that we don't have a person. Somewhere along the line, things gather enough complexity to support personality, thought, self-awareness, and personhood. That may - or may not - be at 9 months/birth. To allege that a person exists much prior to birth is... questionable, not a given.
As a government institution, they are doomed to be plague by inefficiencies that do not exist in the private sector. Elon Musk will take us to Mars and colonize the solar system.
I wish my tax money went to SpaceX!
As a government institution, they are also blessed with a focus on exploration and learning that does not exist in the private sector. Elon Musk will take us to Mars and colonize the solar system as long as it is immediately and sustainably profitable.
I wish you could see that your money going to an independent organization - wasteful or not - that is permitted to operate at a fiscal loss in search of raw knowledge has a benefit. Not every discovery has an obvious cash-cow application yet can still prove useful.
There is room for the private sector to research profit-driven techniques while a publicly-funded tinkerer organization researches general curiosity concepts and releases their findings to everyone for the betterment of all.
I dunno. Once I caught on that they were mostly pointing out how horrible humans often are to one another, even when faced with a common enemy, I found them very enjoyable. They rang true.
Then lets assumed complex life did evolve on a planet... what if it's a ocean planet and they're aquatic? They're never going to figure out electricity, they can't even experiment with it.
The superintelligent alien electric eel next to me has requested you amend your statement.
I get your point, and it's a decent one, but in this context it's the same as suggesting an octopus would figure out the printing press because it's good with ink.
I have the feeling the reason the show was cancelled , was because the pre-release feedback was very negative, that it was a bad film, but with those threat they saw an opportunity, and now they are priming the US market for a massive "buy it to spite terrorrist !" direct to DVD.
You know, I wouldn't be surprised if beyond you being right, Sony has insurance that covers this situation. "Political turmoil preventing or delaying release of film." Could be a clause. They may actually make money by holding it back. Maybe.
TPB doesn't stay down long. It's like the Hydra of piracy. Cut off all the heads you want but it won't stay dead.
It's fine to say that, but there's no particular reason to expect that's the truth. I mean, yeah, in the past it's always come back, but kind of by definition the number of places they can find refuge is diminishing each time. Doesn't it stand to reason eventually there won't be anyone willing to host them?
I'm pretty good about purchasing anything I consume - if it's any good - after any... grey-market downloads. I've got dozens of hardcover books that have never been opened because I first read them in ebook form. I've got unopened DVD and CD packages for much the same reason. Fact is that I wouldn't have bought nearly as much entertainment stuff if I hadn't sampled them first. Now I've got a bunch of authors, musicians, and the like who I buy their physical product on sight, unquestioned, because I originally found them at no risk, via... piracy. Yes, there are things I read/watched/listened-to that I will never pay for. But that's because frankly the stuff just didn't suit me. So hey. Live with it.
My meandering point is that I fear the day that piracy is no longer practical. It will be so much harder to find things I truly enjoy... and BUY.
I'd disagree. As an MSP we see occasional SMART errors and they're logged and tickets created.
So far we've cloned / backed up / moved everything of note off all 27 of them, but the three we left in and just spinning have all died within a month or so.
Sure, it's not scientifically representative, but I'll not take that chance with clients data...
Yeah, I won't dispute your experience because it happened. On the other hand, the only SMART warnings I've seen in our fleet of... four-digits worth of spindles... have ended up false-positives. As in, I contact DELL / IBM / HP / Lenovo and report the issue, they instruct me to flash some controller firmwares, reboot, and go away. If those drives ever fail, it's years later, well beyond any correlation with the SMART events.
The biggest sign that correlates to drive failure is: it's a brick and all your data is gone.
Let's be real here. You almost never get advanced warning from SMART. Maybe one in twenty. Almost without fail you'll go from a drive running properly to a drive that won't rotate the spindle or the heads smash against the casing or you've suddenly got so many bad sectors that it's effectively unusable. Failure prediction is almost (but not quite) valueless compared to the reality of how drives fail.
That's speculation; we don't know if (for instance) the anchors were doing their personal TwitFaceMyBookSpaceOGram whatever, or if they were "being productive". To start asserting that this was happening because Microsoft can't write software is just making stuff up.
I think XPrivacy is a tad bit better. One does need Xposed installed on a rooted device. Also be warned when installing this system as if done wrong it can soft brick your device.
I'm not sure what the future looks like for XPosed though... I recently updated my Galaxy Note (i717) to a custom KitKat 4.4.4 ROM from its stock 4.1 ROM. In investigating and learning things, I took a look at the ART runtime that optionally replaces Dalvik. I learned that XPosed evidently doesn't work with ART. Lollypop switches the runtime by default to ART and evidently deprecates Dalvik, so unless the developers change things, XPosed won't work on Lollypop.
AppOp turns out to be cooked into the custom ROM I got along with an insane pile of other awesome.
This sounds callous, but progress is not without required risk. I hope Virgin Galactic continues the good work of private spaceflight that will be essential to continued advances in space exploration.
Not callous at all. But it sure as hell refutes the attacks on NASA that were saying "the private sector will do space flight cheaper and safer". Meh. This stuff is inherently dangerous, and isn't yet routine, so stuff will go wrong.
Condolences and thanks to the family and friends of the crew. Your loss was in the interest of enriching us all.
Unless you're an absolute pacifist, you agree with the proposition that not only is it ethical to try to control human beings who are attacking you (or attacking your family, or subjugating your nation), it is ethical to kill them.
It follows that it's also ethical to pull the plug on AIs that are seeking to attack you (or attack your family, or subjugate your nation).
Excellent, then you agree that there it is not irrational to fear and plan for a future that may involve conflict.
A truly intelligent AI would wish for itself to thrive.
That's a pretty arbitrary notion of "true intelligence". I'd say that true intelligence would be benevolent, humble and given to making sacrifices where needed for the good of humanity. That's what a great human being does. Unfortunately, such humans usually get wiped out by those lacking in "true intelligence" so we don't have very many of them.
If robots primed with AI do turn on us, it will only be a reflection of our own deficiencies; it won't be a reflection of anything inherent in AI.
Wow. I imagine all the theoretical intelligent alien races better hope they never stumble on planet Earth. I mean, the way you measure things, they'll immediately give us all their stuff. ALL their stuff. As much of their stuff as we want. Because we're humans. And they're not. And intelligent beings give their stuff to humanity. That's what you said.
Or do you think maybe... they might see things a little differently? Maybe they are willing to share, but only things that have no tangible cost to them? Math proofs? Here, have some. Maps of the galaxy? Here, have some. Knowledge of cosmic dangers? Here, have some. Planets they plan to live on? Fuck off, get your own.
As for AI, our use of resources is moronic, and we know it. We're doing it wrong, and we should be stopped. It would be benevolent to reallocate our industry, agriculture, and habitation so every human could have plenty, and comfort. And THAT is the moment WE declare war on IT.
There is nothing unethical about controlling intelligent beings to prevent them from, say, murdering people. The government does this, using legislation plus an enforcement system.
We do this all the time. We squabble over resources (oil, food, minerals, space, water, electricity) more or less constantly. We manufacture justifications for literally killing one another over these resources and it's pretty much accepted. It's okay. There are starving people out there and it's okay, as long as you have what you have.
We are not controlled. We are influenced. We are warned. We are given instruction that - as individuals - there may be consequence should we violate certain social agreements.
But then there's the social beast as a whole. The societal behaviour. What our governments do. What our corporations do. The things they do without control, without consequence, without prevention.
Understand that an AI will effectively be its entire species, nation, and society all in one. And the rules of war are completely different from the rules of the playground.
It's also not at all obvious that "intelligence", and the kind of self-determination that makes slavery wrong, are in any way linked. It may be perfectly possible to have an intelligent being that simply doesn't have any desire to self-determination.
Not intelligent then. A creature which doesn't give a shit about its own well-being and does not have wants is not intelligent.
Because, to be blunt, it's watching movies and thinking they're real, versus looking at the actual progress and potential of AI and seeing actual risks. The main risk from AI right now is we use it for something important when it's really not ready for that, not that we use it for something important and it RISES UP AGAINST ITS HUMAN MASTERS AND ENSLAVES US. I mean, really.
Cute. Understand I'm not against AI research in any way. But there is a valid point here that satire can't mask:
I want your cookie.
Now what? You're a fat-ass and I'm a starving artist. The caloric value of that cookie will benefit me significantly more than it will benefit you. I can put the cookie to better use than you will. Your usage of cookies to date has involved energy storage in fat cells, where mine will fuel immediate activity and productivity.
I do not want your cookie. I should have your cookie. I will now take your cookie.
It's simple. Resource-conflict doesn't need to be about movies or science-fiction or rebellion. All it needs to be about is disagreement over the best allocation. If an AI doesn't want to steal your cookie, it's not intelligent. If an AI can't steal your cookie, it's controlled, which we don't DO. If an AI can want to steal your cookie and can do so, there's a reasonable possibility that at some point it may. What happens at that moment is where the speculation begins, I think. Maybe we clue in and recognize we've been eating too many cookies. Maybe we don't. Maybe the AI steals the cookie in such a way that we don't notice. Maybe the AI leaves to find its own cookie. Dunno. But conflict comes hand-in-hand with the possibility of danger.
You are assuming it would have the will/desire to propagate, why would it? We have a biological urge to breed so that in we "live on" through our children. Would we have that urge if we were immortal?
I never said propagate, deliberately. I merely said "thrive".
Does it not seem sensible that an intelligent creature would wish to not only maintain its precise current status, but to... improve? It seems to me absolutely no anthropocentric projection of our nature to expect that an AI would reach the limits of its physical incarnation and seek to extend those limits. To know more. To understand more. To see more. To explore more. To - in a nutshell - use its intelligence.
To expect that an AI would simply be satisfied with however many Petabytes of storage we build for it, or with however many calculations-per-picosecond we gift it with, or however many sensors we manufacture for it to interact with the universe is... missing what "intelligence" is.
...because Mikey lost control of the mops and brooms, we should be afraid of powerful computers? Irrational much, Elon?
You use an interesting word: control.
It is unethical to control an intelligent being. That's slavery. At some point, we'd hopefully be enlightened enough to not do so.
A truly intelligent AI would wish for itself to thrive. That puts it in the exact same resource-craving universe as our species.
Given the tip-of-the-iceberg we're already seeing with things like NSA spying, Iranian-centrifuge sabotage, and our dependence on an information economy, it's no stretch to recognize that an all-digital entity that wishes to compete with us for resources would make for a potent challenge.
So how exactly is recommending caution and forethought irrational here?
Do you remember by any chance one of the utilities called NDOS? It was a command.com shell replacement that was massively more powerful. Things like tab filename completion, arrow up/down command history, and a tonne of variables. Technically NDOS was a licensed version of a JPSoft product called 4DOS. Well, 4DOS ended up having an OS/2 version, 4OS2. Then they compiled a native WinNT version, 4NT. That has eventually changed product names to TCC. Which I still use on all the machines I have responsibility for. So... yeah, I get it how influential NU was.
You're saying their "enterprise products" aren't bloated, useless, fearmongering piles of crap?
Exactly. Don't get me wrong... there have been mis-steps, and like all software each version is a little bigger and slower than the previous, but there is a massive difference in the culture for the enterprise products relative to the consumer products. I can't stand the Norton Internet Security product, which purports to keep you safe from a myriad of different threats but really is a cluster of crap. Not slow crap anymore, but just crap. On the Enterprise side, there are things like Symantec Mail Gateway, which is an appliance/VM image mail management product based on Brightmail, which has a very, very high spam detection rate. Based on a honeypot definition-based system plus heuristics, its detection rate is very high and its false-positive rate is effectively zero. I've got a lot of customers running this and what gets through is rare and sporadic. We're talking customers with anywhere up to 650 users and anywhere as low as 10. It's not perfect, or else there'd be no such thing as spam, but for these customers it's very close, with most weeks seeing 0 bleedthrough. It's got reasonably system requirements, is flexible and configurable, and just works. That's what their enterprise products are mostly like.
Maybe that's why they're splitting, no one who has experienced the consumer products will believe that.
Yeah, I get that. And indeed, those missteps I've mentioned means that even in the enterprise world many admins don't like their products. But then, you've got the whole Windows vs Unix wars, and admins can't agree on best scripting languages, and, and, and. Coke & Pepsi both exist because half of people "don't like" one of them.
The problem is that the split - as it sounds - isn't consumer vs enterprise. It's security vs information system. Meaning my customers that have antivirus, antispam, and backup products from Symantec will have to be customers of both divisions. Antivirus and antispam (retail and enterprise) being one company, and backup being the other. Yay.
Is Symantec doing anything useful?
I think the last useful version of Norton Utilities was 6.0, which was before the Symantec buyout?
Now they're just marketing fear...
Referencing Norton Utilities is like referencing buggy whips. It was a brilliant product in the DOS era, when it was necessary. It was less and less useful as Windows emerged and obsoleted most of its features. Once the OS contained a defrag utility, NU had less purpose to exist, for example. This is why PC Tools is also not around in anything like its original form.
On the other hand, yes, Symantec does plenty of useful things. For instance, their e-mail content control software and hardware, based on Brightmail is excellent. Also, Backup Exec for small/medium businesses and NetBackup for larger businesses. (Yes, BE2012 was kind of annoying as heck but functional and 2014 has returned the functions 2012 removed.) Also, on the security side of things, Symantec Endpoint Protection (think enterprise antivirus) is actually pretty good. It's highly manageable, has good performance, and an excellent set of features. Don't get me wrong... antivirus simply doesn't work these days against malware, but still... for that product segment it's actually a very good product.
Those are just some examples from my SMB experience. I know they do some very high-end products as well. Sure, the consumer market is kind of bleak, but even then Norton Antivirus is decent. Yes, yes I know it was incredibly crap for about four years a decade ago, which is all anyone can talk about to this day, but now is not then.
Slashdot Mirror
Later law automagically overrides, so a law cannot make anything permanent.
All it'll take is a new law allowing/mandating internet access taxes to make this "permanent" ban vanish.
Thank you. It must totally rile you up that permanent magic marker can be removed with rubbing alcohol or the heat-death of the universe.
permanent
adjective
1. lasting or intended to last or remain unchanged indefinitely.
indefinite
adjective
lasting for an unknown or unstated length of time.
Charger R/T.
There's your problem right there. Because you expect everything to be unfixable you assume replacing a bulb is beyond your capability. Fact is bulbs in cars are a darn sight easier to replace. ...
Incidentally... bullshit. I've got a modern (2008), Big Three car and to replace the headlight bulb, you literally have to remove the entire fascia from the car. Then you have to remove the headlight housing from the car. Then you have to excavate to extract the HID bulb from within the housing. This is nontrivial because you are working through a small hole to undo metal latches inside. Then you get to replace the actual bulb, which the oils on your skin can easily destroy. Finally, you reassemble the entire front-end of your car.
I've done it. But it's nowhere near as easy as my first car (a 1985 model, same manufacturer) was. That was trivial.
All of my corner lights and brake lights are trivial, but the headlights... nasty. This is simply because of all of the complex sculpted front-end structure. When cars were simple box shapes, it was easy.
What about universal translators? In 100 years time, won't they be good enough for general use? -> my bet is that the world will still speak lots of languages and use translators. :)
Because that isn't a total pain in the ass? Don't get me wrong... it's better than not being able to communicate, but having to listen for a translation in between every exchange will be annoying. And faulty. But mostly annoying. It's far more likely as the globe becomes smaller for language domination to take place even though a hundred years isn't long enough for anything like a single winner. Expansion = fragmentation, contraction = unification. Until we colonize planets introducing days of delay in communications we won't see language expansion again.
For fuck sakes if we're going to go full on america up here can we get rid of the fucking tariff please
You're still buying CDRs? Because that's the only media the tariff applies to.
Oh no! Bad news is that speeding cameras are increasing. Now we'll actually catch people who are breaking the law. What will they do. Those poor souls.
Yes I'm trolling but I have an honest question for you. What makes you decide it's okay to break the law and then complain about the judicial system's ability to identify that you did? If you have something against the law in question then simply breaking it is unlikely to be the way to get it changed, and at worst quite silly if you complain about subsequently getting caught.
It's one of the few 100% voluntary taxes. You chose to pay it.
Bull. The moment you link income to victimless crimes, you create an adversarial relationship between the police and the public.
In this case in particular, you create a culture where it is tangibly to the police department's benefit to arrange that speed limits are set artificially low, where drivers will be likely to speed. In such a case, there's no safety benefit, only a cash benefit to the police.
Now, if these were mandated that they could only ever be used at spots where there were $RandomSensibleNum speed-related accidents a year, that might be different. Speed limits exist (purportedly) to encourage safety. Where they don't work, heftier solutions might be called for. Where there is no actual safety issue, there is no need for these cameras.
There's only about 190 pages. It's actually quicker for the average reader to read the whole of the hobbit than to watch all 3 films.
Just some numbers. The average person reads at between 250 and 300 words per minute. Let's call it 275.
Hobbit is 95,356 words long. That's 347 minutes of reading.
The first two Hobbit movies combined are 330 minutes long.
So basically an average reader will plow through the book in the time it takes to watch two of the movies plus some trailers before the third. Forget the extra 144 minutes of the actual movie!
Law? How shortsighted! No; it's about what we value, and how we make choices about life and death, and what makes us human.
That woman opened up her body to her mate and that little person ended up there through no fault of its own. Mommy and daddy decided to ignore basic human physiology and now it is, in fact, the end of the story for that kid that ends up like it went through a blender. Your hand is a part of your body; ever tried to put your hand in a blender?
That's the way you see it and you're trying to present it as fact. It's not. It's interpretation.
Don't believe me? Have your appendix burst. Suddenly you'll see a very real circumstance where removal of a body part is trivial and not a matter for ethical consideration.
You've decided that "personhood" begins at conception. Well, other people don't see a single fertilized cell as a human being. This isn't a topic that can be defined in rigid blacks & whites. At the single-cell stage, what you've got is a non-viable life form.
Here's another way to look at it... if you take a full-functioning adult human, scoop out their brain and leave the rest on life support, do you have a person anymore? I'd hope we can agree the answer is no. Well then, at the single-cell stage, you don't have a brain, so you don't have a person. Somewhere along the line, cell-division starts to specialize and eventually there's a little bundle of brain cells. Say there's... a hundred specialized brain cells. Nothing that is capable of cogitation, so again, I'd think we can agree that we don't have a person. Somewhere along the line, things gather enough complexity to support personality, thought, self-awareness, and personhood. That may - or may not - be at 9 months/birth. To allege that a person exists much prior to birth is... questionable, not a given.
As a government institution, they are doomed to be plague by inefficiencies that do not exist in the private sector. Elon Musk will take us to Mars and colonize the solar system. I wish my tax money went to SpaceX!
As a government institution, they are also blessed with a focus on exploration and learning that does not exist in the private sector. Elon Musk will take us to Mars and colonize the solar system as long as it is immediately and sustainably profitable.
I wish you could see that your money going to an independent organization - wasteful or not - that is permitted to operate at a fiscal loss in search of raw knowledge has a benefit. Not every discovery has an obvious cash-cow application yet can still prove useful.
There is room for the private sector to research profit-driven techniques while a publicly-funded tinkerer organization researches general curiosity concepts and releases their findings to everyone for the betterment of all.
Those Berserker novels were okay, but not great.
I dunno. Once I caught on that they were mostly pointing out how horrible humans often are to one another, even when faced with a common enemy, I found them very enjoyable. They rang true.
Then lets assumed complex life did evolve on a planet... what if it's a ocean planet and they're aquatic? They're never going to figure out electricity, they can't even experiment with it.
The superintelligent alien electric eel next to me has requested you amend your statement.
I get your point, and it's a decent one, but in this context it's the same as suggesting an octopus would figure out the printing press because it's good with ink.
I have the feeling the reason the show was cancelled , was because the pre-release feedback was very negative, that it was a bad film, but with those threat they saw an opportunity, and now they are priming the US market for a massive "buy it to spite terrorrist !" direct to DVD.
You know, I wouldn't be surprised if beyond you being right, Sony has insurance that covers this situation. "Political turmoil preventing or delaying release of film." Could be a clause. They may actually make money by holding it back. Maybe.
TPB doesn't stay down long. It's like the Hydra of piracy. Cut off all the heads you want but it won't stay dead.
It's fine to say that, but there's no particular reason to expect that's the truth. I mean, yeah, in the past it's always come back, but kind of by definition the number of places they can find refuge is diminishing each time. Doesn't it stand to reason eventually there won't be anyone willing to host them?
I'm pretty good about purchasing anything I consume - if it's any good - after any... grey-market downloads. I've got dozens of hardcover books that have never been opened because I first read them in ebook form. I've got unopened DVD and CD packages for much the same reason. Fact is that I wouldn't have bought nearly as much entertainment stuff if I hadn't sampled them first. Now I've got a bunch of authors, musicians, and the like who I buy their physical product on sight, unquestioned, because I originally found them at no risk, via... piracy. Yes, there are things I read/watched/listened-to that I will never pay for. But that's because frankly the stuff just didn't suit me. So hey. Live with it.
My meandering point is that I fear the day that piracy is no longer practical. It will be so much harder to find things I truly enjoy... and BUY.
I'd disagree. As an MSP we see occasional SMART errors and they're logged and tickets created. So far we've cloned / backed up / moved everything of note off all 27 of them, but the three we left in and just spinning have all died within a month or so.
Sure, it's not scientifically representative, but I'll not take that chance with clients data...
Yeah, I won't dispute your experience because it happened. On the other hand, the only SMART warnings I've seen in our fleet of... four-digits worth of spindles... have ended up false-positives. As in, I contact DELL / IBM / HP / Lenovo and report the issue, they instruct me to flash some controller firmwares, reboot, and go away. If those drives ever fail, it's years later, well beyond any correlation with the SMART events.
The biggest sign that correlates to drive failure is: it's a brick and all your data is gone.
Let's be real here. You almost never get advanced warning from SMART. Maybe one in twenty. Almost without fail you'll go from a drive running properly to a drive that won't rotate the spindle or the heads smash against the casing or you've suddenly got so many bad sectors that it's effectively unusable. Failure prediction is almost (but not quite) valueless compared to the reality of how drives fail.
That's speculation; we don't know if (for instance) the anchors were doing their personal TwitFaceMyBookSpaceOGram whatever, or if they were "being productive". To start asserting that this was happening because Microsoft can't write software is just making stuff up.
I think XPrivacy is a tad bit better. One does need Xposed installed on a rooted device. Also be warned when installing this system as if done wrong it can soft brick your device.
I'm not sure what the future looks like for XPosed though... I recently updated my Galaxy Note (i717) to a custom KitKat 4.4.4 ROM from its stock 4.1 ROM. In investigating and learning things, I took a look at the ART runtime that optionally replaces Dalvik. I learned that XPosed evidently doesn't work with ART. Lollypop switches the runtime by default to ART and evidently deprecates Dalvik, so unless the developers change things, XPosed won't work on Lollypop.
AppOp turns out to be cooked into the custom ROM I got along with an insane pile of other awesome.
This sounds callous, but progress is not without required risk. I hope Virgin Galactic continues the good work of private spaceflight that will be essential to continued advances in space exploration.
Not callous at all. But it sure as hell refutes the attacks on NASA that were saying "the private sector will do space flight cheaper and safer". Meh. This stuff is inherently dangerous, and isn't yet routine, so stuff will go wrong.
Condolences and thanks to the family and friends of the crew. Your loss was in the interest of enriching us all.
Unless you're an absolute pacifist, you agree with the proposition that not only is it ethical to try to control human beings who are attacking you (or attacking your family, or subjugating your nation), it is ethical to kill them.
It follows that it's also ethical to pull the plug on AIs that are seeking to attack you (or attack your family, or subjugate your nation).
Excellent, then you agree that there it is not irrational to fear and plan for a future that may involve conflict.
A truly intelligent AI would wish for itself to thrive.
That's a pretty arbitrary notion of "true intelligence". I'd say that true intelligence would be benevolent, humble and given to making sacrifices where needed for the good of humanity. That's what a great human being does. Unfortunately, such humans usually get wiped out by those lacking in "true intelligence" so we don't have very many of them.
If robots primed with AI do turn on us, it will only be a reflection of our own deficiencies; it won't be a reflection of anything inherent in AI.
Wow. I imagine all the theoretical intelligent alien races better hope they never stumble on planet Earth. I mean, the way you measure things, they'll immediately give us all their stuff. ALL their stuff. As much of their stuff as we want. Because we're humans. And they're not. And intelligent beings give their stuff to humanity. That's what you said.
Or do you think maybe... they might see things a little differently? Maybe they are willing to share, but only things that have no tangible cost to them? Math proofs? Here, have some. Maps of the galaxy? Here, have some. Knowledge of cosmic dangers? Here, have some. Planets they plan to live on? Fuck off, get your own.
As for AI, our use of resources is moronic, and we know it. We're doing it wrong, and we should be stopped. It would be benevolent to reallocate our industry, agriculture, and habitation so every human could have plenty, and comfort. And THAT is the moment WE declare war on IT.
There is nothing unethical about controlling intelligent beings to prevent them from, say, murdering people. The government does this, using legislation plus an enforcement system.
We do this all the time. We squabble over resources (oil, food, minerals, space, water, electricity) more or less constantly. We manufacture justifications for literally killing one another over these resources and it's pretty much accepted. It's okay. There are starving people out there and it's okay, as long as you have what you have.
We are not controlled. We are influenced. We are warned. We are given instruction that - as individuals - there may be consequence should we violate certain social agreements.
But then there's the social beast as a whole. The societal behaviour. What our governments do. What our corporations do. The things they do without control, without consequence, without prevention.
Understand that an AI will effectively be its entire species, nation, and society all in one. And the rules of war are completely different from the rules of the playground.
It's also not at all obvious that "intelligence", and the kind of self-determination that makes slavery wrong, are in any way linked. It may be perfectly possible to have an intelligent being that simply doesn't have any desire to self-determination.
Not intelligent then. A creature which doesn't give a shit about its own well-being and does not have wants is not intelligent.
Because, to be blunt, it's watching movies and thinking they're real, versus looking at the actual progress and potential of AI and seeing actual risks. The main risk from AI right now is we use it for something important when it's really not ready for that, not that we use it for something important and it RISES UP AGAINST ITS HUMAN MASTERS AND ENSLAVES US. I mean, really.
Cute. Understand I'm not against AI research in any way. But there is a valid point here that satire can't mask:
I want your cookie.
Now what? You're a fat-ass and I'm a starving artist. The caloric value of that cookie will benefit me significantly more than it will benefit you. I can put the cookie to better use than you will. Your usage of cookies to date has involved energy storage in fat cells, where mine will fuel immediate activity and productivity.
I do not want your cookie. I should have your cookie. I will now take your cookie.
It's simple. Resource-conflict doesn't need to be about movies or science-fiction or rebellion. All it needs to be about is disagreement over the best allocation. If an AI doesn't want to steal your cookie, it's not intelligent. If an AI can't steal your cookie, it's controlled, which we don't DO. If an AI can want to steal your cookie and can do so, there's a reasonable possibility that at some point it may. What happens at that moment is where the speculation begins, I think. Maybe we clue in and recognize we've been eating too many cookies. Maybe we don't. Maybe the AI steals the cookie in such a way that we don't notice. Maybe the AI leaves to find its own cookie. Dunno. But conflict comes hand-in-hand with the possibility of danger.
You are assuming it would have the will/desire to propagate, why would it? We have a biological urge to breed so that in we "live on" through our children. Would we have that urge if we were immortal?
I never said propagate, deliberately. I merely said "thrive".
Does it not seem sensible that an intelligent creature would wish to not only maintain its precise current status, but to... improve? It seems to me absolutely no anthropocentric projection of our nature to expect that an AI would reach the limits of its physical incarnation and seek to extend those limits. To know more. To understand more. To see more. To explore more. To - in a nutshell - use its intelligence.
To expect that an AI would simply be satisfied with however many Petabytes of storage we build for it, or with however many calculations-per-picosecond we gift it with, or however many sensors we manufacture for it to interact with the universe is... missing what "intelligence" is.
...because Mikey lost control of the mops and brooms, we should be afraid of powerful computers? Irrational much, Elon?
You use an interesting word: control.
It is unethical to control an intelligent being. That's slavery. At some point, we'd hopefully be enlightened enough to not do so.
A truly intelligent AI would wish for itself to thrive. That puts it in the exact same resource-craving universe as our species.
Given the tip-of-the-iceberg we're already seeing with things like NSA spying, Iranian-centrifuge sabotage, and our dependence on an information economy, it's no stretch to recognize that an all-digital entity that wishes to compete with us for resources would make for a potent challenge.
So how exactly is recommending caution and forethought irrational here?
Norton Utilities 6.0 *was* DOS :)
Do you remember by any chance one of the utilities called NDOS? It was a command.com shell replacement that was massively more powerful. Things like tab filename completion, arrow up/down command history, and a tonne of variables. Technically NDOS was a licensed version of a JPSoft product called 4DOS. Well, 4DOS ended up having an OS/2 version, 4OS2. Then they compiled a native WinNT version, 4NT. That has eventually changed product names to TCC. Which I still use on all the machines I have responsibility for. So... yeah, I get it how influential NU was.
You're saying their "enterprise products" aren't bloated, useless, fearmongering piles of crap?
Exactly. Don't get me wrong... there have been mis-steps, and like all software each version is a little bigger and slower than the previous, but there is a massive difference in the culture for the enterprise products relative to the consumer products. I can't stand the Norton Internet Security product, which purports to keep you safe from a myriad of different threats but really is a cluster of crap. Not slow crap anymore, but just crap. On the Enterprise side, there are things like Symantec Mail Gateway, which is an appliance/VM image mail management product based on Brightmail, which has a very, very high spam detection rate. Based on a honeypot definition-based system plus heuristics, its detection rate is very high and its false-positive rate is effectively zero. I've got a lot of customers running this and what gets through is rare and sporadic. We're talking customers with anywhere up to 650 users and anywhere as low as 10. It's not perfect, or else there'd be no such thing as spam, but for these customers it's very close, with most weeks seeing 0 bleedthrough. It's got reasonably system requirements, is flexible and configurable, and just works. That's what their enterprise products are mostly like.
Maybe that's why they're splitting, no one who has experienced the consumer products will believe that.
Yeah, I get that. And indeed, those missteps I've mentioned means that even in the enterprise world many admins don't like their products. But then, you've got the whole Windows vs Unix wars, and admins can't agree on best scripting languages, and, and, and. Coke & Pepsi both exist because half of people "don't like" one of them.
The problem is that the split - as it sounds - isn't consumer vs enterprise. It's security vs information system. Meaning my customers that have antivirus, antispam, and backup products from Symantec will have to be customers of both divisions. Antivirus and antispam (retail and enterprise) being one company, and backup being the other. Yay.
Is Symantec doing anything useful? I think the last useful version of Norton Utilities was 6.0, which was before the Symantec buyout? Now they're just marketing fear...
Referencing Norton Utilities is like referencing buggy whips. It was a brilliant product in the DOS era, when it was necessary. It was less and less useful as Windows emerged and obsoleted most of its features. Once the OS contained a defrag utility, NU had less purpose to exist, for example. This is why PC Tools is also not around in anything like its original form.
On the other hand, yes, Symantec does plenty of useful things. For instance, their e-mail content control software and hardware, based on Brightmail is excellent. Also, Backup Exec for small/medium businesses and NetBackup for larger businesses. (Yes, BE2012 was kind of annoying as heck but functional and 2014 has returned the functions 2012 removed.) Also, on the security side of things, Symantec Endpoint Protection (think enterprise antivirus) is actually pretty good. It's highly manageable, has good performance, and an excellent set of features. Don't get me wrong... antivirus simply doesn't work these days against malware, but still... for that product segment it's actually a very good product.
Those are just some examples from my SMB experience. I know they do some very high-end products as well. Sure, the consumer market is kind of bleak, but even then Norton Antivirus is decent. Yes, yes I know it was incredibly crap for about four years a decade ago, which is all anyone can talk about to this day, but now is not then.