In case you have to explain this to somebody who has a cargo cult mentality towards "rules", the problem with this process is it is supposed to give certain parties a vote in the results, but the votes it gives them are worthless because they can't sway any decisions one way or another.
Under the interpretation of the rules used by the person chairing the meeting, he has the exclusive personal power to determine the result of the votes in advance. If the formality of "voting" doesn't give him what he wants, he declares them as "inconclusive", dismisses some dissenting parties, and repeats until he gets the results that he wants.
What makes this particular instance a scandal is that the process went on so long it exposed its essential nature, which is that the decision is made by one person and the "vote" is only there to hide the fact. There are many democratic processes that are undermined by the ability of special interests to out wait the public interest, whether it is the developer who can afford to go to every zoning board meeting or the lobbyist who can parlay access to national politicians into handsome fees. It's rare that they are exposed as the cheating they are.
There's always a high minded excuse, as in this case it's the idea that approving OOXML will give ISO members the power to influence the specification in the future. These excuses never stand up to objective scrutiny. What they're saying is they'll take away the parties' voting rights this time, but next time it will be different. If the voting rights meant anything at all, why not put this justification itself to a vote? "Resolved: notwithstanding any concerns with OOXML as a standard, that OOXML be adopted as a standard with the understanding that ISO will control the resolution of those concerns."
If the process doesn't allow such a resolution to be passed by vote, why would it allow it to be created by fiat?
The reason people should get angry at this is because this kind of reason is something that should never go unchallenged. We shouldn't allow ourselves to become accustomed to it.
They ignore you because you obviously don't know what you're talking about.
Then they mock you because you expect to be taken seriously without putting in the work to become informed.
Then they fight you, because you won't go away until you've had your fight, and ingrained in your thinking, so deeply you don't know it's there, is the notion that might makes right.
Then you win, because there are so many ignorant, lazy, belligerent people that sooner later sensible people, who want to get something accomplished with their lives, will sooner or later give up on picking sense out of your nonsense.
Satan worshiper? You're out of date. After extensive market testing, the Devil has been rebranded as "Stan" [sm], beating out such alternatives as "Old Nick" (too old fogey) and "POD" (too urban). Hell, is now "Brimston Lake: A Gated Community".
Most people are quite aware that being able to tell a piece of music is snappy doesn't mean they can write a hit song. But somehow the distinction between experiencing excellence and producing it is lost on people when it comes to design.
Designing something is deceptively simple. Maybe it is simple, and that's what makes it hard. It's easy to do something bad, and hard to recognize something bad when it comes out of your self.
Most person becomes that which they most rail against.
It's all the fault of those undeserving rich people! They are blight on society. Anybody with assets over a hundred million might as well quit the human race! No person could possibly deserve to command thousands of times the resources of an ordinary person, it's obscene! People like that are, morally speaking, nothing more than appendages to their own portfolios. They can all go to hell as far as I'm concerned.
Well, it probably doesn't matter if you go fishing in your town pond with worms you dug up in you yard. If you buy a big box of worms and drive north to fish in a forest with species that aren't adapted to the presence of worm, it makes a difference.
Not a big difference, but then neither does driving a fuel efficient car for a quarter mile trip. Cumulatively the effect of nearly everyone doing this things matters. The forest may be doomed, but people acting responsibly might mean it's preserved in its current form for one more generation.
Oh, certainly. I wasn't making a specific point about you.
If you've ever been on the product management end of the stick, though, the biggest danger is overestimating the number of people who think as you do or visualize their needs as you do. That's why it's dangerous for people with lots of technical knowledge to use it to guide their investments. You can overcome this, but it's a serious trap.
That's why I don't invest in tech companies at all; whenever I have it hasn't worked out.
I did pretty well in the financial services sector for some time, although I'll admit I had more than my fair share of luck. I simply chose that as one of my investments because money bores me. I'm mostly out now, but I'm thinking of getting back in now that that a disaster is making people scared of these stocks. That's the ticket: if you balance your portfolio, every time an industry goes down, you end up buying. Every time it goes up, you end up selling. Which is just another way of buying low and selling high.
It doesn't pay to get excited by a single company's brilliant potential. I'm actually contemplating getting out of stocks altogether because it's too tempting to be clever rather than patient. It's really a lot of trouble for an amateur to try to out think the market; it's better to out wait it.
You wouldn't need fail-safe AI. Do you need fail-safe AI for a smart bomb? In the case of the taser equipped bees, the limited operational time of an autonomous robot would be an advantage. You'd throw them into a building and they'd taser anything that was man sized and moved; then you go in with your troops, whose clothing transmits a shutdown message to any robots that find them.
Half an hour later, the bees are running low on juice and render themselves useless by igniting a small squib that fries their innards.
Compare that to the starship trooper scenario, with heavily armored troops smash their way through the house. More danger and mess for everybody involved.
Although... we might learn from other species that have colonized urban settings and exploit its parameters for purposes other than what the designers intended. The troops make ad hoc, atypical uses of the urban environment. Some of these uses have been pioneered by species like rats, who are adept at finding shelter and moving stealthily in urban settings.
A robot rat, in particular, would never run out of "food"; it could function indefinitely by tapping into electricity.
One interesting fact about earthworms -- they are an exotic invasive species in North America. In fact, if you ever use worms as bait, you should never just toss them away except where you got them.
When the North American ice sheet receded, there weren't any earthworm species in most of the continent. Nature found its own equilibrium without them, with its own unique set of preferred tree and understory species. Europeans reintroduced the earthworm, and it is gradually erasing some of the distinctiveness of North American forest from European forests.
There is no question that earthworms are beneficial in most gardens and compost heaps, and might be useful in some kind of extraterrestrial gardening experiment. Then again, they might not, depending on the design of the garden.
Well, you wouldn't want anything lethal being part of the autonomous functions, but it as we've seen in the Mars rovers basic navigation is something that is achievable.
So when Sarge says get up on top of that ridge to lay down some suppressing fire, you can chart the approximate course, then get up and go to the bathroom, grab a coke and a bag of chips on the way back before you're needed.
OK, that particular scenario probably won't ever happen.
There's always an element of drawing the bullseye around the bullet hole in business planning. Your position is never quite what you'd want it to be (with rare exceptions), so you job, in part, is to imagine a bright future that, through an incredible stroke of luck, start right where you're standing right now.
The thing is, while that is all necessary and good as part of business planning, individual investors really ought not to make investment decisions based on this kind of planning, unless they have their own teams of researchers and analysts and their own sources of information.
If you know nothing about the technology, you can't really examine something like this critically. If you know a great deal about it, you are even less qualified to make prognostications, because your opinion about what is good technology messes with your opinion about what makes good business sense.
Mark Twain was a very intelligent man, who lost his entire fortune investing in a revolutionary typesetting system. The things that made him a great writer made him a lousy investor: imagination, contrariness, a willingness to buck convention. Of course, exactly the same qualities describe a superb investor. The thing that really did him in was overestimating his knowledge of a market he was peripherally involved in.
It was natural for Twain to be interested in the process of printing books and periodicals, and to be familiar enough with the process of typesetting in general to see the potential, but not quite intimately enough to see the pitfalls. He would have been better off investing in something he had absolutely no interest or prior experience in.
A Faraday cage has to be grounded carefully to work. That's were most people go wrong with their tin-foil hats. They neglect the alligator clip to the wire that leads to a six foot copper spike driven into the Earth.
Same goes for the various solutions for hiding the RFID in your passport. Yes, you can make reading it less efficient, but it is still physically possible.
Here's something to consider. If you have ever maintained an aquarium, you probably know that despite what common sense would tell you, the larger the aquarium is, the easier it is to keep going. True, things like water changes become logistically harder as the tank sizes get to the enormous ranges, but you build around that.
The tricky thing about small aquariums is that the chemistry can change rapidly in a small volume of water. You've got to watch a 5 gallon tank like a hawk for things like spikes in ammonia or shifts in pH. A 50 gallon tank is quite easy for a beginner to maintain, apart from having to lug buckets of water around. If you heater goes out, or worse if it get stuck on, you're fish are dead if you don't notice it right away. In a fifty gallon tank you've got some slack.
The logical end goal of growing plants on the Moon would be to set up a system in which the plants, given a carefully controlled start, establish an environment that achieves equilibrium without putting more resources into it. Naturally, the larger the environment is, the easier it would be to do this. Once you have established how much space you need to reach a moderately stable equilibrium, let's say it's a thousand cubic meters, you can build larger examples that actually resist moving away from their equilibrium point.
The thing about systems in equilibrium, as any chemical engineer will tell you, is that when you take something that is part of the equilibrium out, they respond by making more of it.
Which is just what you need to have an efficient, self sustaining environment on the Moon. Or the Earth, for that matter.
Now, put a saddle on that sucker and you have a 21st century Hussar.
Which might not be a bad idea. It's ironic that we're talking about technology like this, when every grunt or soldier I've ever talked to has the same complaint: the Pentagon can't seem to come up with a decent boot.
Except there wouldn't be any people in it, so you wouldn't need the cost and weight of the armor fancy reactive armor that's supposed to protect the crew from things like EFPs. And because you don't need to house and protect the crew, you could make it any size or shape you want, starting from something the size of a radio controlled car all the way up an M1 tank, minus the crew space, and maybe with things like robotic arms to do minefield clearance and deploying pontoon bridges.
I think this is certainly the most easily imaginable near term use for this technology, given a workspace with plenty of available power, that is designed for approximately human sized and shaped workers handling a variety of things not built with efficient robotic movement in mind.
Shipboard use might fit this description perfectly. While nearly everything this suit could do probably could be accomplished more effectively by other means, I see one application where the flexibility of having a humanoid form would be extremely helpful, namely responding to battle damage. In that case, the environment is altered outside its design parameters, so robotic forklifts aren't really an option.
Still, in the long run, remotely operated vehicles and immersive VR technologies could do anything a suit like this could, with less risk to personnel, but I can imagine a tethered power suit being adapted for use on aircraft carriers without having to do a lot of redesign.
Human decision making, feature recognition, senses and empathy are all available to the machine.
What I'm talking about here is a human operated machine, so the ability to make tactical decisions isn't factor. Balance and dexterity aren't that crucial, because you aren't limited to the human form, and as far as weapons use is concern, taking the trigger out of the equation means on less interface.
As far as resilience is concerned, true, but the robotic answer to that is replaceability.
The one thing that is undeniably true is that by taking the human operator out of harms way, tactical and strategic thinking changes in subtle ways. Perhaps we will have fewer Hadithas and My Lais on one hand. On the other the operators have no personal connection to the place; nor do the strategists have to consider the cost of operations except in a dollars and cents way.
A really effective ROV army would be the greatest instrument of tyranny imaginable.
Is the human form really the ideal form for urban warfare? Why not a swarm of robotic bees with taser stings? Furthermore, you aren't restricted to one form factor. You can have robotic spy-flies, robotic sapper-rats, robotic wall battering elephants.
It's not that I can't imagine a force of power armored commandos that can do things that normally equipped ones cannot. It's that I can't imagine the technology that makes that practical not creating even better choices.
Slashdot Mirror
In case you have to explain this to somebody who has a cargo cult mentality towards "rules", the problem with this process is it is supposed to give certain parties a vote in the results, but the votes it gives them are worthless because they can't sway any decisions one way or another.
Under the interpretation of the rules used by the person chairing the meeting, he has the exclusive personal power to determine the result of the votes in advance. If the formality of "voting" doesn't give him what he wants, he declares them as "inconclusive", dismisses some dissenting parties, and repeats until he gets the results that he wants.
What makes this particular instance a scandal is that the process went on so long it exposed its essential nature, which is that the decision is made by one person and the "vote" is only there to hide the fact. There are many democratic processes that are undermined by the ability of special interests to out wait the public interest, whether it is the developer who can afford to go to every zoning board meeting or the lobbyist who can parlay access to national politicians into handsome fees. It's rare that they are exposed as the cheating they are.
There's always a high minded excuse, as in this case it's the idea that approving OOXML will give ISO members the power to influence the specification in the future. These excuses never stand up to objective scrutiny. What they're saying is they'll take away the parties' voting rights this time, but next time it will be different. If the voting rights meant anything at all, why not put this justification itself to a vote? "Resolved: notwithstanding any concerns with OOXML as a standard, that OOXML be adopted as a standard with the understanding that ISO will control the resolution of those concerns."
If the process doesn't allow such a resolution to be passed by vote, why would it allow it to be created by fiat?
The reason people should get angry at this is because this kind of reason is something that should never go unchallenged. We shouldn't allow ourselves to become accustomed to it.
They ignore you because you obviously don't know what you're talking about.
Then they mock you because you expect to be taken seriously without putting in the work to become informed.
Then they fight you, because you won't go away until you've had your fight, and ingrained in your thinking, so deeply you don't know it's there, is the notion that might makes right.
Then you win, because there are so many ignorant, lazy, belligerent people that sooner later sensible people, who want to get something accomplished with their lives, will sooner or later give up on picking sense out of your nonsense.
Satan worshiper? You're out of date. After extensive market testing, the Devil has been rebranded as "Stan" [sm], beating out such alternatives as "Old Nick" (too old fogey) and "POD" (too urban). Hell, is now "Brimston Lake: A Gated Community".
Most people are quite aware that being able to tell a piece of music is snappy doesn't mean they can write a hit song. But somehow the distinction between experiencing excellence and producing it is lost on people when it comes to design.
Designing something is deceptively simple. Maybe it is simple, and that's what makes it hard. It's easy to do something bad, and hard to recognize something bad when it comes out of your self.
Spoken like a European.
Americans know that violence never truly solves anything, unless it is caught on camera.
It's all the fault of those undeserving rich people! They are blight on society. Anybody with assets over a hundred million might as well quit the human race! No person could possibly deserve to command thousands of times the resources of an ordinary person, it's obscene! People like that are, morally speaking, nothing more than appendages to their own portfolios. They can all go to hell as far as I'm concerned.
The kitchen? No. The Nursery? Might be a good idea.
Yes. A Faraday cage must be grounded. You can shield things without grounding them, but that is not a Faraday cage an there is some leakage.
But less lethal. There has never been a "knockout gas" that isn't dangerous.
Well, it probably doesn't matter if you go fishing in your town pond with worms you dug up in you yard. If you buy a big box of worms and drive north to fish in a forest with species that aren't adapted to the presence of worm, it makes a difference.
Not a big difference, but then neither does driving a fuel efficient car for a quarter mile trip. Cumulatively the effect of nearly everyone doing this things matters. The forest may be doomed, but people acting responsibly might mean it's preserved in its current form for one more generation.
Oh, certainly. I wasn't making a specific point about you.
If you've ever been on the product management end of the stick, though, the biggest danger is overestimating the number of people who think as you do or visualize their needs as you do. That's why it's dangerous for people with lots of technical knowledge to use it to guide their investments. You can overcome this, but it's a serious trap.
That's why I don't invest in tech companies at all; whenever I have it hasn't worked out.
I did pretty well in the financial services sector for some time, although I'll admit I had more than my fair share of luck. I simply chose that as one of my investments because money bores me. I'm mostly out now, but I'm thinking of getting back in now that that a disaster is making people scared of these stocks. That's the ticket: if you balance your portfolio, every time an industry goes down, you end up buying. Every time it goes up, you end up selling. Which is just another way of buying low and selling high.
It doesn't pay to get excited by a single company's brilliant potential. I'm actually contemplating getting out of stocks altogether because it's too tempting to be clever rather than patient. It's really a lot of trouble for an amateur to try to out think the market; it's better to out wait it.
You wouldn't need fail-safe AI. Do you need fail-safe AI for a smart bomb? In the case of the taser equipped bees, the limited operational time of an autonomous robot would be an advantage. You'd throw them into a building and they'd taser anything that was man sized and moved; then you go in with your troops, whose clothing transmits a shutdown message to any robots that find them.
Half an hour later, the bees are running low on juice and render themselves useless by igniting a small squib that fries their innards.
Compare that to the starship trooper scenario, with heavily armored troops smash their way through the house. More danger and mess for everybody involved.
That's an interesting point.
... we might learn from other species that have colonized urban settings and exploit its parameters for purposes other than what the designers intended. The troops make ad hoc, atypical uses of the urban environment. Some of these uses have been pioneered by species like rats, who are adept at finding shelter and moving stealthily in urban settings.
Although
A robot rat, in particular, would never run out of "food"; it could function indefinitely by tapping into electricity.
One interesting fact about earthworms -- they are an exotic invasive species in North America. In fact, if you ever use worms as bait, you should never just toss them away except where you got them.
When the North American ice sheet receded, there weren't any earthworm species in most of the continent. Nature found its own equilibrium without them, with its own unique set of preferred tree and understory species. Europeans reintroduced the earthworm, and it is gradually erasing some of the distinctiveness of North American forest from European forests.
There is no question that earthworms are beneficial in most gardens and compost heaps, and might be useful in some kind of extraterrestrial gardening experiment. Then again, they might not, depending on the design of the garden.
Well, you wouldn't want anything lethal being part of the autonomous functions, but it as we've seen in the Mars rovers basic navigation is something that is achievable.
So when Sarge says get up on top of that ridge to lay down some suppressing fire, you can chart the approximate course, then get up and go to the bathroom, grab a coke and a bag of chips on the way back before you're needed.
OK, that particular scenario probably won't ever happen.
There's always an element of drawing the bullseye around the bullet hole in business planning. Your position is never quite what you'd want it to be (with rare exceptions), so you job, in part, is to imagine a bright future that, through an incredible stroke of luck, start right where you're standing right now.
The thing is, while that is all necessary and good as part of business planning, individual investors really ought not to make investment decisions based on this kind of planning, unless they have their own teams of researchers and analysts and their own sources of information.
If you know nothing about the technology, you can't really examine something like this critically. If you know a great deal about it, you are even less qualified to make prognostications, because your opinion about what is good technology messes with your opinion about what makes good business sense.
Mark Twain was a very intelligent man, who lost his entire fortune investing in a revolutionary typesetting system. The things that made him a great writer made him a lousy investor: imagination, contrariness, a willingness to buck convention. Of course, exactly the same qualities describe a superb investor. The thing that really did him in was overestimating his knowledge of a market he was peripherally involved in.
It was natural for Twain to be interested in the process of printing books and periodicals, and to be familiar enough with the process of typesetting in general to see the potential, but not quite intimately enough to see the pitfalls. He would have been better off investing in something he had absolutely no interest or prior experience in.
A Faraday cage has to be grounded carefully to work. That's were most people go wrong with their tin-foil hats. They neglect the alligator clip to the wire that leads to a six foot copper spike driven into the Earth.
Same goes for the various solutions for hiding the RFID in your passport. Yes, you can make reading it less efficient, but it is still physically possible.
In other words, they can build a big terrarium.
Here's something to consider. If you have ever maintained an aquarium, you probably know that despite what common sense would tell you, the larger the aquarium is, the easier it is to keep going. True, things like water changes become logistically harder as the tank sizes get to the enormous ranges, but you build around that.
The tricky thing about small aquariums is that the chemistry can change rapidly in a small volume of water. You've got to watch a 5 gallon tank like a hawk for things like spikes in ammonia or shifts in pH. A 50 gallon tank is quite easy for a beginner to maintain, apart from having to lug buckets of water around. If you heater goes out, or worse if it get stuck on, you're fish are dead if you don't notice it right away. In a fifty gallon tank you've got some slack.
The logical end goal of growing plants on the Moon would be to set up a system in which the plants, given a carefully controlled start, establish an environment that achieves equilibrium without putting more resources into it. Naturally, the larger the environment is, the easier it would be to do this. Once you have established how much space you need to reach a moderately stable equilibrium, let's say it's a thousand cubic meters, you can build larger examples that actually resist moving away from their equilibrium point.
The thing about systems in equilibrium, as any chemical engineer will tell you, is that when you take something that is part of the equilibrium out, they respond by making more of it.
Which is just what you need to have an efficient, self sustaining environment on the Moon. Or the Earth, for that matter.
Not as awesome as bikini-clad fem-bots. Let's get our technology priorities straight here.
Now, put a saddle on that sucker and you have a 21st century Hussar.
Which might not be a bad idea. It's ironic that we're talking about technology like this, when every grunt or soldier I've ever talked to has the same complaint: the Pentagon can't seem to come up with a decent boot.
Except there wouldn't be any people in it, so you wouldn't need the cost and weight of the armor fancy reactive armor that's supposed to protect the crew from things like EFPs. And because you don't need to house and protect the crew, you could make it any size or shape you want, starting from something the size of a radio controlled car all the way up an M1 tank, minus the crew space, and maybe with things like robotic arms to do minefield clearance and deploying pontoon bridges.
I think this is certainly the most easily imaginable near term use for this technology, given a workspace with plenty of available power, that is designed for approximately human sized and shaped workers handling a variety of things not built with efficient robotic movement in mind.
Shipboard use might fit this description perfectly. While nearly everything this suit could do probably could be accomplished more effectively by other means, I see one application where the flexibility of having a humanoid form would be extremely helpful, namely responding to battle damage. In that case, the environment is altered outside its design parameters, so robotic forklifts aren't really an option.
Still, in the long run, remotely operated vehicles and immersive VR technologies could do anything a suit like this could, with less risk to personnel, but I can imagine a tethered power suit being adapted for use on aircraft carriers without having to do a lot of redesign.
What I'm talking about here is a human operated machine, so the ability to make tactical decisions isn't factor. Balance and dexterity aren't that crucial, because you aren't limited to the human form, and as far as weapons use is concern, taking the trigger out of the equation means on less interface.
As far as resilience is concerned, true, but the robotic answer to that is replaceability.
The one thing that is undeniably true is that by taking the human operator out of harms way, tactical and strategic thinking changes in subtle ways. Perhaps we will have fewer Hadithas and My Lais on one hand. On the other the operators have no personal connection to the place; nor do the strategists have to consider the cost of operations except in a dollars and cents way.
A really effective ROV army would be the greatest instrument of tyranny imaginable.
Well, I'll only say that historically, the undependability of the human body has been a major determining factor in warfare...
OK, I'm playing devil's advocate here.
Is the human form really the ideal form for urban warfare? Why not a swarm of robotic bees with taser stings? Furthermore, you aren't restricted to one form factor. You can have robotic spy-flies, robotic sapper-rats, robotic wall battering elephants.
It's not that I can't imagine a force of power armored commandos that can do things that normally equipped ones cannot. It's that I can't imagine the technology that makes that practical not creating even better choices.