All this talk of going on/off the gold standard also belies another aspect to current money which is that there is only about 10-30% of the money in circulation in any country actually exists as cash. The rest of it only exists as data in bank computers.
The way I understand it, part of the reasons for going off the gold standard was to give the Federal government more control over the economy. When you're tied to only issuing as much money as you have gold in stockpile, then there's a limit to your control over that aspect of the economy. But when you are working in a money-market type situation, you can look at the given value of your currency in the money market, and then decide to either print / issue more money and see how the markets react to you.
Anyone read "Cryptonomicon"? Remember the absurdity of the chinese banks in the first chapter, running about demanding of each other to see the gold? This is another aspect to the money-market situation that makes it advantageous not to use gold. In the case of a serious economic downturn, you can prevent the 'run on the bank' in which everyone dashes to their local bank and demands gold for their money - which can't happen when you're off the gold standard. It also prevents 'goldrush' type phenomena, which is bad when you find rich new gold deposits somewhere and the market is flooded with gold which devalues all currencies around the world.
DeBeers has been artificially controlling the diamond market for years to prevent exactly this sort of thing. They have huge stockpiles of diamonds from south africa and russia, but only release them in small quantities to keep the prices up. Apparently if they released them all then diamonds would be worth about as much as - I don't know really, but not worth much anyway.
This isn't the only example of an artificial market: aluminum ( or aluminium if you prefer ), is actually 'worth' a whole lot more than we normally think. The only way to extract aluminum from other metals is with powerful electric currents, which makes it very costly to produce, but governments subsidize the aluminum industry so heavily that it keeps the consumer price very low. This is why the first thing government wants to get out of a recycling program in any city is lots of aluminum.
As an aside, being off the gold standard is not always a bad thing for all countries. Switzerland for example has had a currency that over the last 100 years or so has been more stable than the gold market - so its actually a better investment ( if you want stability ) to put your money in a swiss bank than to buy gold.
No, bad, *grumble* bad very bad *mumble* no real freedom, all illusion *mumble* [ insert depressed post-modern mumbling here ] *grumble* too corporate, *mumble* no utopia *sniff* stupid wired magazine, they
LIED to me *mumble*...
Yes, this is what's known as a 'Trans-Atlantic' accent. You here the same thing from New Englanders who want to pretend to be sophisticated snobs.
And given that Keanu Reeves can't even say "there is no spoon" without sounding stupid, do you really expect him to be able to do anything in a foreign accent decently?
Um - There IS reasonable expectation of privacy
on
Carnivore To Die?
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· Score: 5
I'm sorry - but you are just totally wrong.
There has ALWAYS been a reasonable assurance of privacy in human affairs. This comes from the simple fact that people simply cannot know everything that is going on to everyone else. If you live in a world where it is fundamentally unlikely that other people know what is going on in your life, than you have a reasonable assurance of privacy. Call it ignorance if you like, but it has always existed, and people have grown ( I might go so far as to say evolved ) to depend upon it.
Communications is used by all social animals to counteract this inherent social ignorance. As communications technology increases our abilities to share information, it must naturally erode that reasonable sense of privacy.
At one point it was possible to simply travel a few dozen miles to another town and one could recreate oneself with a totally new identity and life. As communications and transportation technology has made it easier to travel and communicate, and effectively made the world "smaller", one must travel further and further to gain that kind of anonymity that was once very simple.
You also say that privacy is merely a social way of hiding the abuse of men upon women. This is a very simplistic view of the matter IMHO. But it is a more specific rephrasing of the general notion that privacy is only used to conceal criminal or improper deeds, that only those with something to hide need privacy.
This notion is false because it is based upon two false assumptions. Firstly it assumes that privacy is defense against the general public, which is not at all true - privacy is mainly a defense against small groups of individuals, whether they be neighbours or the police, or anyone else. Very few people worry about having their homes invaded by a camera crew from CNN for live broadcast, but it might be a very real worry that a neighbour, or the police, or that someone with a grudge might invade their homes.
Secondly it assumes that all private actions are going to be treated as fairly in the eyes of anyone who observes them. This is plainly false. For every opportunity to use privacy to hide criminal or improper behaviour there is also an opportunity to use a lack of privacy to falsely or improperly accuse someone of such an activity. What you might consider to be perfectly acceptable behaviour in private, another person could think of as being totally unacceptable, and vice-versa.
As the famous Franklin / Jefferson quote says: "he who sacrifices freedom for security will neither have, nor deserver either" ( or something along those lines )
Stop and think for a moment about a society where everyone is comfortable in their sense of privacy and private security, compared to one in which everyone is in fear of constantly being watched. Which society is really the more secure? Naturally it is the first. Social fear, and fear for ones person, whether it be physical or not, is definitely one of the quickest routes to acts of violence. Totalitarian states are much more prone to social unrest and violent upheaval than are democratic ones.
Claiming that privacy is a morally bankrupt concept created by artifical means belies a huge misunderstanding on your part of human nature. Privacy is one of the most morally important institutions that we have - and it is related strongly to the respect for individuals which would IMHO be exactly what a society needs more of to prevent violence against women, not less. Removing the respect for privacy from public life does not give any more security, but rather simply replaces one insecurity with another, and adds to the mix increased tension and unease which can only lead to more problems, not less.
It occurs to me that the concept of using solar sails to deliver anything to an alien species is a bit absurd. Lets think about this for a moment:
A ships sails catch wind to carry it off, solar sails catch solar wind and carry it off - away from stars. The predominant winds in our solar system will carry the craft out into interstellar space - but then what?
If it begins to drift towards another star, won't the winds of that star just push it away? Won't this thing just end up in deep space forever far away from any potential civilizations?
No, actually you're older than me ( 23 ) =).
But yes, I used to watch it on PBS too, likely for the same reasons, it came on about the time other shows I liked was on - but despite the fact that it often really disturbed me, it was always one of my favourites - although some of the scenes still haunt me today - like when the Doctor's young assistant with the black hair was captured by the Master and trapped to some weird geodesic jungle-gym like thing somewhere in the twisted maze of the tardis. Ooooh - I have irrational fears of jungle gyms to this day.
Its too bad its only audio,
I really would love to see how the pull off more of their fine tradition of cheesy special effects.
I don't know about anyone else, but I watched Dr. Who as a small kid, and was really scared by lots of it. Mostly I think it was scary because the props and special effects were so bad. You'd see some monster that was just a guy dressed in green garbage bags, but you KNEW that it was just a guy in green garbage bags. I used to sit in front of the TV at my grandmother's eating french fries going: "oh geez! that's a guy shambling around in cut up green garbage bags trying to take over the universe! That's really freaking me out!"
Just imagine the new educational opportunities this opens up: young school children can now write letters to undercover agents, special forces members, and secret government think tanks.
They can also gain a valuable jump-start on children in other countries by starting young to learn about data analysis and retrieval, surveillance and the ins-and-outs of the military-industrial complexe.
This could be the best strategy to educate american children in the face of the growing espionage-publicity gap caused by the recent spade of british agents "losing" their laptops.
I wonder what kind of precautions they're taking against looting at this site.
It must be difficult to police a 1 square mile area of sea 6 miles from shore, and prevent looters from making off with stuff. Now that the site has been found, there's sure to be treasure hunters after relics they can sell.
Shhhhh...
That's just what they want you to believe. Really it was destroyed by aliens to destroy the esotericly encoded spaceship designs contained in the ancient books there.
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... as he walked down the hallway and heard the actions of the rifles of the Ministry of Love agents click behind his head, he realized that he truly loved Big Bill...
Fatal OE exception caught in room101.vxd:
Your brave new world may be corrupt or inoperable. Please reinstall from your original windows84 media.
This is unlikely to work - because the smart tags would be added at the level of the browser, when it interprets the html. However it is unusual for operations at this level to be updated in the browsers own cache of the page's original html, which is what a javascript call would be looking at.
Think of the document.write() function in javascript. You can have it write all kinds of html dynamically into a page that will make new layout elements in the browser's view of the page - but if you go to view the html you see the original code downloaded from the server - not the code as updated by all the inserted text from document.write(). This is because javascript code is run directly upon the browser's internal datasctructure of the page and not the html itself.
I think the main issue in the design of such computer systems is whether they are as an assistant to human decision making or a replacement for human decision making. A computer system that simply collects votes into a database for example is an assistant to human decision making, and makes it easy and practical to perform frequent and accurate polling of a large population.
A system which scans a database to identify potential abusers / criminals whatever is essentially a replacement for human decision making. It is a search based on implicit or explicit assumptions and a specific psychological theory. Any biases that is in the design, and in the underlying psychological theory will bias the results of the search - furthermore if the humans interpreting the results hold similar biases, than these biases will be amplified, not reduced. And all this could be made to appear as an unbiased computational result.
It is true that computers do their work without bias or prejudice, but that does not mean that the work they do is not prejudiced because of its inherent design. Certain well-defined administrative issues might be better implemented by a computer than by humans ( such as scanning a database to assign health-care benefits / surgery time based upon severity and time-sensitive nature of the illness ), but others which deal with poorly understood issues ( such as criminality and social behaviour ) can't be implemented in code.
Yes, I agree with you on the education issue very much.
I've been living in Switzerland for a year now, and I'm amazed at how extensive their democracy is. They have elections at all 3 levels of government ( city, state, federal ) every 3 months in which the public is polled on specific issues ( even things like building a bridge or awarding a construction contract ) - the government is bound to obey the results of these elections. They also send out information to all the voters on the various issues involved with the different perspectives and opinions being expressed, and also what the current government recommends. So this level of democracy is totally workable even without computers.
Even the police will be scrutinized. In 1995, the Chicago police department, using software called BrainMaker, tried to predict which officers were potential candidates for misbehavior.
A question that strikes me in this fanaticism of replacing humans with automated systems in areas of public concern is where is the public review of this software?
In a democratic society, the people have ( in theory ) the right to review public policy and to express an informed opinion on that policy. As computer software begins to replace human implemented systems, essentially that software becomes public policy. The decisions that an AI system makes in such a data mining search like the one described above becomes an extension of public policy. The public needs an open and transparent way of auditing such software and agreeing upon whether it is suitable. Any software which is kept hidden from public scrutiny through any means ( ie a closed-source licence ) robs us of democratic rights.
Furthermore, it always surprises me that in all forms of futurism, whether it be from cranks, kooks, or ( reputedly ) accurate technological prophets, there is huge talk about how life will be better/worse because machines will remove more and more of our decisions from us. We are told that life will become oppressive because machines will remove our powers of decision and identity, and we will live in a 1984-like society of our own tech-desirous devising. Conversely we are told that we will live in a virtual utopian society where machines like obediant and thankful children take the burdens of society from us and simply give us everything we really want.
Basically futurists would have us believe that the only choice before us is whether we want to view the future as "1984" or as "brave new world". The future is coming they tell us and we have no choice in what it will be, you can just decide what perspective you want to take on it. I ask, where is the increase in freedom and democratic rights that computers can give us in all these visions?
Why isn't anyone talking about abolishing representational democracy in favour of computer-supported direct democracy? With the increase of communications technology their is no longer the need to have elected officials ( or at least a very reduced need ), when the public can be directly polled on issues, when the public can propose their own initatives, and have them reviewed publicly for increased attention.
Naturally the opportunities for stuffing the ballotbox becomes easier with a computer database. However, given a well-designed system subject to public review, should be able to solve issues of authenticating voters and preventing fraudulent votes. In fact the level of accuracy should be increased overall ( *cough* Palm Beach *cough* ).
The NSA and the Pentagon have spent huge amounts of public money developing systems that are virtually impregnable to false use - why should we not get them to prove how devoted they are to democracy by providing the public with a secure openly reviewable system for increasing our abilities to take more control over how our world is run?
Wow, cool. Yet another step towards _anonymous_ portable communication. Cell phones are already more dificult for police & other agencies to tap, because it requires identifying the numbers the phones use to identify themselves to the cell companies. No problem if your surveillance team does it the legal way and gets a court order that the cell provider must cooperate with.
In addition to this, here in europe, pay-as-you-go type cell plans are very very popular - you can walk into any radio-shack equivalent store and for the equivalent of $28 ( USD ) you can buy a package over the counter that gives you a number on your choice of the local services. Basically its just a smart-card chip you pop into your phone. No sign-up is required. You don't give your name or any details to anybody about who you are - just hand over the cash and get yourself a number. You have a limited amount of money on the card, and you can 'recharge' it buy buying a card with a code number from any convenience store that you punch into the phone to get more talk-time. Want a new number? Just buy a new smart-chip. There is nothing to prevent you from having a dozen of these.
These are full-service plans too, complete with voice-mail, and all the cool services. They also have roaming so that if you have a tri-band phone you can use this pretty much anywhere in the world ( price per minute goes up a lot of course ). But clever use of this system could mean totally anonymous world-wide phone service.
Now if you can combine this with medium-level encryption ( lets face it, 128-bit is not high these days, and a good cryptanalyst can certainly break this much easier than the claim of a thousand pentiums for a thousand years), we're really starting to see good secure private personal communications become and industry standard. I like it.
The beauty of neural nets is that the person feeding the data in need not know the exact patterns.
You could think of this as beauty - or as a real pain in the @$$ - depending on your job with the N.Net. Often the common denominators that nets get trained to recognize is some feature that the humans controlling the training have no idea is even there. This can be very frustrating and waste a lot of time and effort.
A story comes to mind of a US military project to train N.Nets to identify tanks from aerial images so as to make better smart-bombs. They fed them lots of pictures with tanks, and lots of pictures without tanks, and they performed beautifully - then took them out to try on the real thing and they all failed miserably. It turned out that the pictures of tanks were taken in the morning and the pictures without in the afternoon, and all the N.Nets had learned was to recognize different luminosity values. DOH !!!
But this illustrates nicely the inherent problems underlying N.Nets as a type of AI, and why there's no real intelligence going on. The conditions of training have to be perfectly tailored to the desired resulting test situations, otherwise the net won't work as desired. But in constraining the training, and controlling the dataset to rule out all factors other than the ones to train for, you essentially remove all the "intelligent" issues from the situation, and leave only mindless pattern matching for the machine. All the intelligent work has been done for the machine by its trainers - and none is left for the machine to do on its own.
Well unfortunately the term "Artificial Intelligence" is used interchangeably in two very different contexts, and this often causes a lot of confusion. Basically the difference is between "strong AI" and "weak AI" ( or type "A" and type "B" if you read Haugeland ).
Strong AI is the "holy grail" of AI research, a truly sentient machine. The purpose behind AI work and cognitive science in general is to create such a machine - not for the sake of doing it, but rather because we want to understand cognition in a mechanical manner. Nobody has ever achieved this goal, nor are their any theories of how to do it.
Weak AI is what we have in computing today. This basically just means a cool algorithm or system which performs particular narrowly defined tasks in some manner that gives similar results to those an intelligent person would arrive at. This is the kind of AI used in games, expert systems, neural nets, fuzzy logic machines, micro-worlds etc.
Personally I much prefer Neal Stephenson's terminology for this weaker category - which he called "Pseudo-Intelligence" or PI in "Diamond Age". To me this has always seemed a much apter description, and keeps the distinction between this and the theoretical AI.
In February 1945 the emperor met with a group of senior statesmen to discuss steps that might be taken. When U.S. landings were made on Okinawa in April, the Koiso government fell. The problem of the new premier, Admiral Suzuki Kantaro , was not whether to end the war but how best to do it. The first plan advanced was to ask the Soviet Union, which was still at peace with Japan, to intercede with the Allies. The Soviet government had agreed, however, to enter the war; consequently, its reply was delayed while Soviet leaders participated in the Potsdam Conference in July.
(
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=109547&hoo k=319735#319735.hook )
and:
Postwar investigators concluded that neither the atomic bombs nor the Soviet entry into the war was central to the decision to surrender, although they probably helped to advance the date. It was determined that submarine blockade of the Japanese islands had brought economic defeat by preventing exploitation of Japan's new colonies, sinking merchant tonnage, and convincing Japanese leaders of the hopelessness of the war. Bombing brought the consciousness of defeat to the people. The destruction of the Japanese navy and air force jeopardized the home islands. Japan's largest armies, however, were never defeated, and this was responsible for the army's eagerness to fight on. By the end of the war, Japan's cities were destroyed, its stockpiles exhausted, and its industrial capacity gutted. The government stood without prestige or respect. An alarming shortage of food and rising inflation threatened what remained of national strength.
( same page as above )
and:
As the conference neared its conclusion, Truman, Attlee, and representatives of the Chinese Nationalist government issued the Potsdam Declaration , an ultimatum that called on Japan to surrender or face "prompt and utter destruction." Although it promised a peaceful government in accordance with "the freely expressed will of the Japanese people," the declaration did not specifically threaten the use of an atomic bomb or provide clear assurances that the emperor could retain his throne. Still gridlocked, the government in Tokyo responded with a statement by Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro (who privately sought an end to the war) dismissing the ultimatum.
(
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=369910&hoo k=714681#714681.hook
)
I haven't found any mention of specific requests for peace negotiations from the Japanese to the Americans as I had claimed. I may have been mistaken in this. Although as I said before, this was the way the events had been presented to me both in school and in WW2 documentaries, so I remain unsure. However, I think it is clear that there was no necessity to use the bomb to bring about the surrender and even the occupation of japan.
As is mentioned above, the japanese did reject the ultimatum given to them at the Potsdam conference, but I think from all the other evidence it was pretty aparent that they would have very quickly sought some kind of end to the war.
I don't think that anyone can really lay blame on the american decision makers, but I think given the hindsight of history we can agree that the bomb was not necessary.
First, please tell me where you learned that the U.S. Started Negotiations one week before dropping the bomb. If that is true, then the situation changes. To my knowledge that is not true.
You've mistaken what I said. What I said was that the Japanese Gov't. requested peace negotiations a week before the bomb was dropped, but they were ignored.
This was simply the way the history of the war was taught to us in school, I have also heard the same version of events in several documentaries about the war, but unfortunately I don't remember their names. I'll see if I can find some links to some more authoritative material on the subject.
You're also not looking at all the possibilities. You're assuming that a full scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was the only possible course of action, which it wasn't. The Japanese navy was completely destroyed by this point in the war, and without the necessary resources from its conquered possessions, it would have had no way to rebuild it. An embargo and siege of the Japanese home islands would have been very effective.
This is only one possible course that could have been taken, there are always others.
As for a deterministic view of history, I think you're confusing with a different post i did, in response to someone else. Or maybe I confused my posts and responded to the wrong one.
Well I'm sorry, but I think that all of your arguments are just besides the point. It is really meaningless how many people where killed in other places, by other means, or what theoretically might have happened.
The issue is this. In a war you risk losing something, it is a contest of sorts. When you no longer risk losing anything, but just kill thousands, it is no longer war, just murder. The U.S. did not risk anything by dropping a bomb on Hiroshima, a single flight crew perhaps, but totally inconsequential to the deaths inflicted. I don't consider the firebombing of civilians in Tokyo much better, but the issue about what constitutes war and what constitutes murder is really the key for me. If you don't risk losing anything, its not war, and your actions can't be justified by the context of war in this case.
it was inevitable that once created, the bomb would be used.
Sadly, I think this is true. Normally I am not one to preach about the morality of science and technology, because I value the quest for knowledge above many other things. But in this case I really do think that's its a very unfortunate thing that it was made in the first place. And I know that Oppenheimer and many other scientists who worked on the project thought similarly.
As for all the other circumstantial evidence for using the bomb. While I can agree that as a historical diagnosis, all you say is true, I don't see how you can cry "mitigating circumstances" over the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. There has to be a line somewhere in the sand of morality, and for me mass murder is definitely far to the wrong side of that line. No matter what the circumstances involved, I don't think that anybody can justify that kind of thing.
that's an interesting and unusual definition for "oldest". But granted that definition, it still comes down to when you consider a real democracy to begin. Doesn't universal suffrage come into the picture anywhere? Because in Switzerland up until the advent of Napoleon, there was no universal suffrage. There was no common assembly at the federal level - just a very twisted and complex mess of inter-cantonal treaties. And from canton to canton there was no standard of representation - many were governed by "elders" or pseudo-noblemen. Many areas remained under the authority of the church for a long time while still a part of the swiss confederation. While its true that traditionally there was always much more consensus and community input involved than in most feudal states, don't confuse it with full-fleged democracy.
That being the case, the United States, France and even Great Britain would contend with Switzerland for being the "oldest" democracies.
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The way I understand it, part of the reasons for going off the gold standard was to give the Federal government more control over the economy. When you're tied to only issuing as much money as you have gold in stockpile, then there's a limit to your control over that aspect of the economy. But when you are working in a money-market type situation, you can look at the given value of your currency in the money market, and then decide to either print / issue more money and see how the markets react to you.
Anyone read "Cryptonomicon"? Remember the absurdity of the chinese banks in the first chapter, running about demanding of each other to see the gold? This is another aspect to the money-market situation that makes it advantageous not to use gold. In the case of a serious economic downturn, you can prevent the 'run on the bank' in which everyone dashes to their local bank and demands gold for their money - which can't happen when you're off the gold standard. It also prevents 'goldrush' type phenomena, which is bad when you find rich new gold deposits somewhere and the market is flooded with gold which devalues all currencies around the world.
DeBeers has been artificially controlling the diamond market for years to prevent exactly this sort of thing. They have huge stockpiles of diamonds from south africa and russia, but only release them in small quantities to keep the prices up. Apparently if they released them all then diamonds would be worth about as much as - I don't know really, but not worth much anyway.
This isn't the only example of an artificial market: aluminum ( or aluminium if you prefer ), is actually 'worth' a whole lot more than we normally think. The only way to extract aluminum from other metals is with powerful electric currents, which makes it very costly to produce, but governments subsidize the aluminum industry so heavily that it keeps the consumer price very low. This is why the first thing government wants to get out of a recycling program in any city is lots of aluminum.
As an aside, being off the gold standard is not always a bad thing for all countries. Switzerland for example has had a currency that over the last 100 years or so has been more stable than the gold market - so its actually a better investment ( if you want stability ) to put your money in a swiss bank than to buy gold.
Hey Jon look, its Lara Croft!
And given that Keanu Reeves can't even say "there is no spoon" without sounding stupid, do you really expect him to be able to do anything in a foreign accent decently?
There has ALWAYS been a reasonable assurance of privacy in human affairs. This comes from the simple fact that people simply cannot know everything that is going on to everyone else. If you live in a world where it is fundamentally unlikely that other people know what is going on in your life, than you have a reasonable assurance of privacy. Call it ignorance if you like, but it has always existed, and people have grown ( I might go so far as to say evolved ) to depend upon it.
Communications is used by all social animals to counteract this inherent social ignorance. As communications technology increases our abilities to share information, it must naturally erode that reasonable sense of privacy.
At one point it was possible to simply travel a few dozen miles to another town and one could recreate oneself with a totally new identity and life. As communications and transportation technology has made it easier to travel and communicate, and effectively made the world "smaller", one must travel further and further to gain that kind of anonymity that was once very simple.
You also say that privacy is merely a social way of hiding the abuse of men upon women. This is a very simplistic view of the matter IMHO. But it is a more specific rephrasing of the general notion that privacy is only used to conceal criminal or improper deeds, that only those with something to hide need privacy.
This notion is false because it is based upon two false assumptions. Firstly it assumes that privacy is defense against the general public, which is not at all true - privacy is mainly a defense against small groups of individuals, whether they be neighbours or the police, or anyone else. Very few people worry about having their homes invaded by a camera crew from CNN for live broadcast, but it might be a very real worry that a neighbour, or the police, or that someone with a grudge might invade their homes.
Secondly it assumes that all private actions are going to be treated as fairly in the eyes of anyone who observes them. This is plainly false. For every opportunity to use privacy to hide criminal or improper behaviour there is also an opportunity to use a lack of privacy to falsely or improperly accuse someone of such an activity. What you might consider to be perfectly acceptable behaviour in private, another person could think of as being totally unacceptable, and vice-versa.
As the famous Franklin / Jefferson quote says:
"he who sacrifices freedom for security will neither have, nor deserver either" ( or something along those lines )
Stop and think for a moment about a society where everyone is comfortable in their sense of privacy and private security, compared to one in which everyone is in fear of constantly being watched. Which society is really the more secure? Naturally it is the first. Social fear, and fear for ones person, whether it be physical or not, is definitely one of the quickest routes to acts of violence. Totalitarian states are much more prone to social unrest and violent upheaval than are democratic ones.
Claiming that privacy is a morally bankrupt concept created by artifical means belies a huge misunderstanding on your part of human nature. Privacy is one of the most morally important institutions that we have - and it is related strongly to the respect for individuals which would IMHO be exactly what a society needs more of to prevent violence against women, not less. Removing the respect for privacy from public life does not give any more security, but rather simply replaces one insecurity with another, and adds to the mix increased tension and unease which can only lead to more problems, not less.
A ships sails catch wind to carry it off, solar sails catch solar wind and carry it off - away from stars. The predominant winds in our solar system will carry the craft out into interstellar space - but then what?
If it begins to drift towards another star, won't the winds of that star just push it away? Won't this thing just end up in deep space forever far away from any potential civilizations?
No, actually you're older than me ( 23 ) =).
But yes, I used to watch it on PBS too, likely for the same reasons, it came on about the time other shows I liked was on - but despite the fact that it often really disturbed me, it was always one of my favourites - although some of the scenes still haunt me today - like when the Doctor's young assistant with the black hair was captured by the Master and trapped to some weird geodesic jungle-gym like thing somewhere in the twisted maze of the tardis. Ooooh - I have irrational fears of jungle gyms to this day.
I really would love to see how the pull off more of their fine tradition of cheesy special effects.
I don't know about anyone else, but I watched Dr. Who as a small kid, and was really scared by lots of it. Mostly I think it was scary because the props and special effects were so bad. You'd see some monster that was just a guy dressed in green garbage bags, but you KNEW that it was just a guy in green garbage bags. I used to sit in front of the TV at my grandmother's eating french fries going: "oh geez! that's a guy shambling around in cut up green garbage bags trying to take over the universe! That's really freaking me out!"
Ahh - the memories...
They can also gain a valuable jump-start on children in other countries by starting young to learn about data analysis and retrieval, surveillance and the ins-and-outs of the military-industrial complexe.
This could be the best strategy to educate american children in the face of the growing espionage-publicity gap caused by the recent spade of british agents "losing" their laptops.
It must be difficult to police a 1 square mile area of sea 6 miles from shore, and prevent looters from making off with stuff. Now that the site has been found, there's sure to be treasure hunters after relics they can sell.
That's just what they want you to believe. Really it was destroyed by aliens to destroy the esotericly encoded spaceship designs contained in the ancient books there.
Narf!
javascript alert: You have been found browsing unofficial media while under the influence of anti-social neuronal activity.
Fatal OE exception caught in room101.vxd:
Your brave new world may be corrupt or inoperable. Please reinstall from your original windows84 media.
Think of the document.write() function in javascript. You can have it write all kinds of html dynamically into a page that will make new layout elements in the browser's view of the page - but if you go to view the html you see the original code downloaded from the server - not the code as updated by all the inserted text from document.write(). This is because javascript code is run directly upon the browser's internal datasctructure of the page and not the html itself.
Its a nice idea, but unlikely to work.
A system which scans a database to identify potential abusers / criminals whatever is essentially a replacement for human decision making. It is a search based on implicit or explicit assumptions and a specific psychological theory. Any biases that is in the design, and in the underlying psychological theory will bias the results of the search - furthermore if the humans interpreting the results hold similar biases, than these biases will be amplified, not reduced. And all this could be made to appear as an unbiased computational result.
It is true that computers do their work without bias or prejudice, but that does not mean that the work they do is not prejudiced because of its inherent design. Certain well-defined administrative issues might be better implemented by a computer than by humans ( such as scanning a database to assign health-care benefits / surgery time based upon severity and time-sensitive nature of the illness ), but others which deal with poorly understood issues ( such as criminality and social behaviour ) can't be implemented in code.
I've been living in Switzerland for a year now, and I'm amazed at how extensive their democracy is. They have elections at all 3 levels of government ( city, state, federal ) every 3 months in which the public is polled on specific issues ( even things like building a bridge or awarding a construction contract ) - the government is bound to obey the results of these elections. They also send out information to all the voters on the various issues involved with the different perspectives and opinions being expressed, and also what the current government recommends. So this level of democracy is totally workable even without computers.
A question that strikes me in this fanaticism of replacing humans with automated systems in areas of public concern is where is the public review of this software?
In a democratic society, the people have ( in theory ) the right to review public policy and to express an informed opinion on that policy. As computer software begins to replace human implemented systems, essentially that software becomes public policy. The decisions that an AI system makes in such a data mining search like the one described above becomes an extension of public policy. The public needs an open and transparent way of auditing such software and agreeing upon whether it is suitable. Any software which is kept hidden from public scrutiny through any means ( ie a closed-source licence ) robs us of democratic rights.
Furthermore, it always surprises me that in all forms of futurism, whether it be from cranks, kooks, or ( reputedly ) accurate technological prophets, there is huge talk about how life will be better/worse because machines will remove more and more of our decisions from us. We are told that life will become oppressive because machines will remove our powers of decision and identity, and we will live in a 1984-like society of our own tech-desirous devising. Conversely we are told that we will live in a virtual utopian society where machines like obediant and thankful children take the burdens of society from us and simply give us everything we really want.
Basically futurists would have us believe that the only choice before us is whether we want to view the future as "1984" or as "brave new world". The future is coming they tell us and we have no choice in what it will be, you can just decide what perspective you want to take on it. I ask, where is the increase in freedom and democratic rights that computers can give us in all these visions?
Why isn't anyone talking about abolishing representational democracy in favour of computer-supported direct democracy? With the increase of communications technology their is no longer the need to have elected officials ( or at least a very reduced need ), when the public can be directly polled on issues, when the public can propose their own initatives, and have them reviewed publicly for increased attention.
Naturally the opportunities for stuffing the ballotbox becomes easier with a computer database. However, given a well-designed system subject to public review, should be able to solve issues of authenticating voters and preventing fraudulent votes. In fact the level of accuracy should be increased overall ( *cough* Palm Beach *cough* ). The NSA and the Pentagon have spent huge amounts of public money developing systems that are virtually impregnable to false use - why should we not get them to prove how devoted they are to democracy by providing the public with a secure openly reviewable system for increasing our abilities to take more control over how our world is run?
"Zu dem" and "An dem" is usually contracted to "Zum" and "Am"
In addition to this, here in europe, pay-as-you-go type cell plans are very very popular - you can walk into any radio-shack equivalent store and for the equivalent of $28 ( USD ) you can buy a package over the counter that gives you a number on your choice of the local services. Basically its just a smart-card chip you pop into your phone. No sign-up is required. You don't give your name or any details to anybody about who you are - just hand over the cash and get yourself a number. You have a limited amount of money on the card, and you can 'recharge' it buy buying a card with a code number from any convenience store that you punch into the phone to get more talk-time. Want a new number? Just buy a new smart-chip. There is nothing to prevent you from having a dozen of these.
These are full-service plans too, complete with voice-mail, and all the cool services. They also have roaming so that if you have a tri-band phone you can use this pretty much anywhere in the world ( price per minute goes up a lot of course ). But clever use of this system could mean totally anonymous world-wide phone service.
Now if you can combine this with medium-level encryption ( lets face it, 128-bit is not high these days, and a good cryptanalyst can certainly break this much easier than the claim of a thousand pentiums for a thousand years), we're really starting to see good secure private personal communications become and industry standard. I like it.
You could think of this as beauty - or as a real pain in the @$$ - depending on your job with the N.Net. Often the common denominators that nets get trained to recognize is some feature that the humans controlling the training have no idea is even there. This can be very frustrating and waste a lot of time and effort.
A story comes to mind of a US military project to train N.Nets to identify tanks from aerial images so as to make better smart-bombs. They fed them lots of pictures with tanks, and lots of pictures without tanks, and they performed beautifully - then took them out to try on the real thing and they all failed miserably. It turned out that the pictures of tanks were taken in the morning and the pictures without in the afternoon, and all the N.Nets had learned was to recognize different luminosity values. DOH !!!
But this illustrates nicely the inherent problems underlying N.Nets as a type of AI, and why there's no real intelligence going on. The conditions of training have to be perfectly tailored to the desired resulting test situations, otherwise the net won't work as desired. But in constraining the training, and controlling the dataset to rule out all factors other than the ones to train for, you essentially remove all the "intelligent" issues from the situation, and leave only mindless pattern matching for the machine. All the intelligent work has been done for the machine by its trainers - and none is left for the machine to do on its own.
Strong AI is the "holy grail" of AI research, a truly sentient machine. The purpose behind AI work and cognitive science in general is to create such a machine - not for the sake of doing it, but rather because we want to understand cognition in a mechanical manner. Nobody has ever achieved this goal, nor are their any theories of how to do it.
Weak AI is what we have in computing today. This basically just means a cool algorithm or system which performs particular narrowly defined tasks in some manner that gives similar results to those an intelligent person would arrive at. This is the kind of AI used in games, expert systems, neural nets, fuzzy logic machines, micro-worlds etc.
Personally I much prefer Neal Stephenson's terminology for this weaker category - which he called "Pseudo-Intelligence" or PI in "Diamond Age". To me this has always seemed a much apter description, and keeps the distinction between this and the theoretical AI.
LOL - funny.
In February 1945 the emperor met with a group of senior statesmen to discuss steps that might be taken. When U.S. landings were made on Okinawa in April, the Koiso government fell. The problem of the new premier, Admiral Suzuki Kantaro , was not whether to end the war but how best to do it. The first plan advanced was to ask the Soviet Union, which was still at peace with Japan, to intercede with the Allies. The Soviet government had agreed, however, to enter the war; consequently, its reply was delayed while Soviet leaders participated in the Potsdam Conference in July.o k=319735#319735.hook )
( http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=109547&ho
and:
Postwar investigators concluded that neither the atomic bombs nor the Soviet entry into the war was central to the decision to surrender, although they probably helped to advance the date. It was determined that submarine blockade of the Japanese islands had brought economic defeat by preventing exploitation of Japan's new colonies, sinking merchant tonnage, and convincing Japanese leaders of the hopelessness of the war. Bombing brought the consciousness of defeat to the people. The destruction of the Japanese navy and air force jeopardized the home islands. Japan's largest armies, however, were never defeated, and this was responsible for the army's eagerness to fight on. By the end of the war, Japan's cities were destroyed, its stockpiles exhausted, and its industrial capacity gutted. The government stood without prestige or respect. An alarming shortage of food and rising inflation threatened what remained of national strength.
( same page as above )
and:
As the conference neared its conclusion, Truman, Attlee, and representatives of the Chinese Nationalist government issued the Potsdam Declaration , an ultimatum that called on Japan to surrender or face "prompt and utter destruction." Although it promised a peaceful government in accordance with "the freely expressed will of the Japanese people," the declaration did not specifically threaten the use of an atomic bomb or provide clear assurances that the emperor could retain his throne. Still gridlocked, the government in Tokyo responded with a statement by Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro (who privately sought an end to the war) dismissing the ultimatum.o k=714681#714681.hook
)
( http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=369910&ho
I haven't found any mention of specific requests for peace negotiations from the Japanese to the Americans as I had claimed. I may have been mistaken in this. Although as I said before, this was the way the events had been presented to me both in school and in WW2 documentaries, so I remain unsure. However, I think it is clear that there was no necessity to use the bomb to bring about the surrender and even the occupation of japan.
As is mentioned above, the japanese did reject the ultimatum given to them at the Potsdam conference, but I think from all the other evidence it was pretty aparent that they would have very quickly sought some kind of end to the war.
I don't think that anyone can really lay blame on the american decision makers, but I think given the hindsight of history we can agree that the bomb was not necessary.
You've mistaken what I said. What I said was that the Japanese Gov't. requested peace negotiations a week before the bomb was dropped, but they were ignored.
This was simply the way the history of the war was taught to us in school, I have also heard the same version of events in several documentaries about the war, but unfortunately I don't remember their names. I'll see if I can find some links to some more authoritative material on the subject.
You're also not looking at all the possibilities. You're assuming that a full scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was the only possible course of action, which it wasn't. The Japanese navy was completely destroyed by this point in the war, and without the necessary resources from its conquered possessions, it would have had no way to rebuild it. An embargo and siege of the Japanese home islands would have been very effective.
This is only one possible course that could have been taken, there are always others.
As for a deterministic view of history, I think you're confusing with a different post i did, in response to someone else. Or maybe I confused my posts and responded to the wrong one.
The issue is this. In a war you risk losing something, it is a contest of sorts. When you no longer risk losing anything, but just kill thousands, it is no longer war, just murder. The U.S. did not risk anything by dropping a bomb on Hiroshima, a single flight crew perhaps, but totally inconsequential to the deaths inflicted. I don't consider the firebombing of civilians in Tokyo much better, but the issue about what constitutes war and what constitutes murder is really the key for me. If you don't risk losing anything, its not war, and your actions can't be justified by the context of war in this case.
Sadly, I think this is true. Normally I am not one to preach about the morality of science and technology, because I value the quest for knowledge above many other things. But in this case I really do think that's its a very unfortunate thing that it was made in the first place. And I know that Oppenheimer and many other scientists who worked on the project thought similarly.
As for all the other circumstantial evidence for using the bomb. While I can agree that as a historical diagnosis, all you say is true, I don't see how you can cry "mitigating circumstances" over the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. There has to be a line somewhere in the sand of morality, and for me mass murder is definitely far to the wrong side of that line. No matter what the circumstances involved, I don't think that anybody can justify that kind of thing.
That being the case, the United States, France and even Great Britain would contend with Switzerland for being the "oldest" democracies.