Of course it's revenge... that's what the justice system is all about
(from the victims' perspective).
You see folks, in the olden days, if you killed
my wife/child/father/etc., I would hunt you down and furnish
you with a grisly, drawn-out, most unpleasant death.
The motives for revenge lie deep within us (some more than others).
Jesus had it wrong: the meek evolved off and became chipmunks and
bunny rabbits a long time ago.
The potiential for revenge encouraged some forms of cooperation,
which resulted in everybody's economic benefit.
Unfortunately, it also led to a lot of violence. In one case,
for instance, Ogg slighted Fred on a business deal. So Fred used his
contacts in Europe to arrange a little "mishap" for Ogg. That didn't
fool Ogg's relatives, though: they knew Ogg adamently refused to wear
loose loin clothes while operating heavy machinery. So Ogg's son
swore revenge... blah, blah, blah, and twenty years later the entire
village was immersed in feud. For some reason, Ogg felt he could
slight Fred. For some reason, Fred thought he could extract more
vengence than he was due. For some reason, Ogg's family didn't see
Fred's side of the story and did not approve of Fred's actions.
It was a big problem for awhile, this violence. Warlords, anarchy...
the human race was all Afghaned in on itself. Then came a great
invention called "the rule of law".
In "the rule of law", individuals were told ahead of time what society
expected of them in business dealings, etc. One of the great ideas
that came along with "law" was the concept of "justice", which is
an ancient Babylonian word for "extracting revenge from those who
broken the law after confirming their violation with a group of
members drawn from the community who were uninvolved in the
percipatating incident". (Contrary to popular
belief, "justice" does not mean "the divine judgment of God delivered
by the church to lovingly correct his errant children and to defend
the righteous from the onslaught of the wicked".) The purpose of
justice is to pool the revenge-seeking power of the community
(thus allowing even the week to get revenge) while proxying the
revenge-seekers through a system of checks and balances
that keep things from getting out of hand. All of this furnishes
revenge without letting it become a destructive chain-reaction.
In other words, the justice system has
three customers: the suspect, the victim, and the community. The
goal of a justice system is to provide the suspect with fairness
(and a clean name, should he be innoccent), the victim with vengence
(should the suspect be guilty), and the community with stability
(in the form of violence-prevention).
And it works pretty well:
Something like the death penalty just doesn't bother me: I respect
both societies that choose it and those that reject it. Under
dire, scarce cirmcustances, you may be better off with it.
Under plentiful circumstances, you're probably better off without it.
As a side note, I'm worried to see "the rule of law" compromised by
economic intrests, by phalynxes of lawyers that aggressively seek
opportunties for legal violence, by vague and ill-constructed
"feel good" laws, by corrupted officials in all branches of government,
by busybodies who want to micromanage other people's lives, and
by any number of other things. When people
loose faith in the justice system, everything will cave in on itself.
Good info... and about that last comment ("A lot of the silly things the military does actually have good reasons.") reminds me of the fun I had reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon... the soldiers in the field are given lots of orders that seem silly, dangerous, and counter-productive, but it all made sense when viewed in context of the great WWII crypto game that Berkley Park played so well.
I tried to explain why it was a 'Bad Thing(tm)' repeatedly, but alway met with resistance from the shared governance committee.
Hmm... it's bad security, but maybe their concerns extend beyond security. When I was college, I ran web/ssh/ftp/etc. from my box. I accessed this stuff from home, on-the-go, etc. For class projects I maintained the official project site, documentation, and prototype enviornments on my PC and made them accessible to other students and outside clients. If you were to lock this stuff down like you do with corporate intranets, I would have never gained a lot of this exposure. There is no other way to provide students with the experience of running their own box, their own operating system, their own data, and their own software full-throttle on the internet.
Of course, I've seen schools that take the complete oppossite approach... they even proxy outgoing web connections so as to deny access to porn sites, etc. Sheesh.
A university environment poses unique problems... deal with it by creating multiple zones, giving students free firewall/virus software, and liberally yanking the network ports of worm-infected students (until they get the problem corrected). There's a lot of societal benefits of letting students have unfettered access. They are as follows:
Students learn to taste and value freedom, which leads to more civil liberties and a greater sense of personal responibilty down the road. Ergo, increased quality of life. (I haven't researched this, but a certain understanding of freedom could reduce government overhead and afford tangible long-term economic benefits too.)
Computer science students won't waste as much time writing programs that actively defeat firewalls (e.g., by port-probing, tunneling, etc.). This will save headaches for corporate admins down the road when FanceyP2PClient2020 starts tunneling X11 connections over SSL-encoded SOAP through DNS (with "worm-enabled" distribution and "transparent-installation"! Your whole subnet doesn't even know its running it!).
Let students learn some hard-world lessons in security. Okay... I don't really mean that. Nobody should have to loose time or data. But I did learn a lot watching my logs fill up with Red Alert and helping my entire Dorm get rid of Back Orffice.
there were lots of studies about factory workers and those that were given some attention liked their job more. put windows into the factory and morale goes up
These were the Hawthorne Studies... they specifically tried to determine
the effect of lighting levels on worker productivity. Increasing
the amount of light appeared to improve output. But decreasing the
amount of light did the same thing. I don't think anyone knows for
sure why the workers responded to the change in light instead
of the absolute value of the lighting level. Prehaps they felt
management was taking care of them. Prehaps they were more auspicious
about being observed by the guys conducting the study.
And yeah... a similar thing is happening in Maine. Are they really being
effective with those laptops? Will it really pay off for Maine in
the long run? Do we have any confidence that these laptops are being
used effectively?
A manager might say: I want to see the people from new york with
green hair AND the ones with purple hair who are over 8 feet tall.
Now what he really meant was an OR condition.
A manager wants to see the UNION of the two sets of people, which
you are calculating by making of list of each person x where x is
either in in the first group OR in the second.
My point is that the manager is unknowingly speaking a high-level
sentence in relational calculus and you are translating it down
to the level that the computer can understand. The boss isn't being
illogical so much as he's uses a different language than the computer.
English-like languages have tried to address this mismatch naievely,
assuming that it's just the syntax that scares people away. However,
(and this is where you really hit the nail on the head) the real
mismatch occurs at the semantic level: we are stochiastic beings
that don't take to well to formal semantics. Engineers, mathematicians,
scientists, and programmers have the education and nerve required
to get the knack of these programming languages when it serves our
aims, but the general population typically lacks this skill. Even us
programmers can have difficulty swinging language paradigms when
something new arrives in our life (like first-time Lispers who use
loops, variables, and other procedural constructs instead of
recursion, lambda expressions, and functional constructs). Thus,
the fundamental job of the software engineer: actively translate
back and forth between the human world and the computer world.
A Hypertalkish langauage isn't going to replace the software engineer
(nothing will short of human-level AI).
Trying to create new languages that allow for the more
straightforward expression of ideas is a noble goal, but the
"make it sound like english" approach is not going to bring a nirvana
where everyone can suddenly express their thoughts in code. At best,
such languages will afford communications b/t software engineers and
the users. This is particularly true when working with sub-languages
that pull the computer up to the level of a particular problem domain.
(Thus a major selling-point of stuff like XML, SQL, Guile, etc.)
What are we missing in our computational models of living systems?
We're missing the 3.5 billion year head start that evolution was given. We're also missing CPU power and human talent (although the
former has not become totally evident yet).
Is conciousness itself more profound? It feels more profound,
but that's the only argument in favor of the "concoiousness-is-special" theory. Whatever... conciousness is merely the sensation of new input against old memories. It only feels different to the being experiencing it. We have yet to figure out how it all works.
My understanding: the Turing Test is a good goal, but trying to build successfully better implementations is a fundamentally nieve approach. AI needs new leaps in fundamental understandings, not a silly popularity contest that makes AI look cute and pointless.
One of my AI profs compared it to trying to reach the moon: you need to research rocketry and avionics instead of building successfully taller ladders...
All of that said, though, prehaps Minsky and crew have an economic motivation: this may hinder the ability of the field to be taken seriously. It may siphon off attention, ambition, and talent to the wrong places and the wrong approaches. It may just seem amateaur. Maybe it Loebner is to real AI as Lindows is to real Linux distros.
Obviously this patent system is not old Ben had in mind.
Actually, Ben Franklin never patented any of his inventions... he wanted his works to be available to benefit all humankind. Wow... one of our founding fathers was an open source developer!
Today, of course, Ben would have to get defensive patents on his inventions.:-)
You've gone to a lot of effort to explain some of the benefits and philosophy
that motivates the existent of our various mechanisms of intellectual property...
copyright, patent, trademark, etc. I think most slashdotters understand all
that, but are worried by a system that disproportinately awards monopolies.
Society essentially buys "motivation" and "innovation" from inventers and entrepreneurs. It pays for all of this by reducing the "rights" of its members.
Specifically, there are words that can't be said, machines that can't be built,
items that can't be copied (unless properly licensed, etc.). As with anything
else that you purchase, you want to get the best possible deal. If doubling
the amount of "rights" we pay buys only a small amount of additional "innovation", than we've been ripped off. In our system, the government fixes the price that we pay for innovation, and there's not a lot of social pressure on government to keep that price low.
As you said, it's all about creating a system that "results is more prosperity and more fairness for everybody". From an economic standpoint, nothing else matters. Right now, the concept of "intellectual property" is overvalued while the concepts of "freedom", "openness", and "idea sharing" are undervalued. This hurts everyone.
Ignorance of the law is no defense for breaking it.
Bullshit. This idea has always been popular in Western culture, because it's very practical, but that does not make it right. The truth is, there are several seemingly innoccent actions that are
technically illegal. (I heard of the courts prosecuting a guy for picking up arrowheads because the law treats them as sacred Indian artifacts that you're supposed to leave in the ground... how are you suppose to know all of these little laws?) There are also several not-so-innoccent-but-not-that-bad actions that do not deserve excessive punishment. The impeteus is on society to educate its members about their obligations to the law.
When the courts operate blindly on these issues, we all lose out: we devote excessive punishment to some crimes that hurts our ability to punish other, more serious crimes. We also sacrifice people: if society punishes the 11-year old too excessively, then the odds are that they will have succeeded in creating a career criminal. What a tragedy when it's very, very likely that this kid could grow up and be a highly productive member of society.
Provably false. People get hit by trains because they're on the railroad tracks when the train goes by. This has nothing to do with luck, or circumstance. It has to do with bad decision making. Nobody's car ever "stalls out" on the tracks like in the movies. People try to "beat the train"... and fail.
In general, I agree: many train accidents are the result of people wagering their future in the hopes of saving 3 or 4 minutes. But
don't turn a blind eye to how design and infrastructure can influence
things...
We used to have a very akward, high-traffic, T-shaped intersection
where the train crossed over the secondary road very close to the
intersection (e.g., imagine drawing train tracks parallel and just
below the horizontal line of the "T"). The design was very poor,
and there were several aggrevating factors with height, visibility,
parking lots, etc.
One night, 4 schoolteachers got hemmed in by traffic while crossing the tracks. They were killed by an oncoming train. The driver could have been making very reasonable decisions while negotating her turn onto the secondary road... bad design is the primary culprit for
that accident. Fortunately, this intersection has been heavily
redone to properly handle the traffic it must support. The road is flat, everything is visible, the signaling mechanisms are obvious, and there are no adjacent parking lots to tangle up traffic flow.
The human mind is an operational hazard. Good designs take the inevitability for error into account and provide mechanisms to prevent or mitigate such errors. Designer and operator must both be serious about what they do.
And people do the same thing with the concept of "God"... even
though the details vary drastically, most cultures have a mythology
that posits a source of universal intention: something or someone
that controls natural events (weather, harvest, childbirth,
astronomical bodies, etc.) and interacts with individual human
lives (by providing comfort, discipline, special powers, spirtual
growth, second chances, forgiveness, condemation, tests and trials,
equalizing opportunities, purpose and meaning, spouse and family,
absolute morality, eternal security, etc.). The fact that these
things are (or will be) explainable through the lenses of natural
and cognitive science hasn't done much to convince people that
there's no God mediating their reality. It's as if we have to
attribute agency (in the AI sense of the term) to events
that are personally significant. All these uncontrolled externals
are wrapped up into "God".
But, to reply to the parent post, there are more practical reasons
for making the "complex entity"==>"person" simplification. When we
say "France opposses war with Iraq", it's pretty accurate, because
we get the impression that (1) the official government posture
and (2) the general sentiment of the French population do not
want to see a war. We have no way of characterizing it in a finer
manner than that... we don't have a list of x million French
who oppose war and the y million French who endorse it, so we use
the label "France" to tag the relevant input (in this case, the
relevant input is "political pressure", but if we were watching
a news broadcast about organized protest against the rapid expansion
of metropolitan Paris, than we might categorize the input as
"environmentalist").
I'm sure there are a thousand interesting AI and cogsci theories for
explaining or expressing this... the human brain is truly incredible,
but it make broad, obvious machine-like mistakes too.
Also, I imagine that FSF has built up a healthy list of
out-of-court settlements that will strengthen its case.
Ironic because evil patent companies (PanIP?) do the same
thing to build up strength for their patents (e.g., make
small guys settle, then get the big guys).
Linux seems to buffer writes to the floppy... e.g., you can
copy files on and off it, move them around, etc., and nothing
gets written until you unmount it.
That being said, there are WAY too many whiners in post secondary education.
There are way too many whiners in graduate education as well. I TA
a graduate course in computer science for non-CS majors, and was
stunned to find that ~70% of the students were working very
intimately together on graded homeworks and labs. On some assignments,
I got back 4 or 5 sets of nearly identical solutions (with the
cute but pointless obfuscation tricks like changing variable
names [e.g., "count-bunnies" becomes "bunnies-count"]). The students
were never prosecuted because you just can't fail an entire class
without having a very serious cross on which to nail them.
In retrospect, I shouldn't be too surprised: the evening news is
filled with whiners too. Just the other night, for instance, Fox
News showed a piece about a small town where the police decided
they needed to play an active role in controlling the dear population.
So of course, now there is a lawsuit by surbanites who would rather
kill the dear with their cars than have armed officers shooting
dear in their neighborhood.
In a larger sense, the new story itself was a sort of whining: why
did Fox consider this to be news? Is that really any of our business
what a small town decides to do?
Sigh... A few weeks ago, I decided that the only thing I can do about all this whining is to make sure I don't do it myself (does this post disqualify me?)... ultimately, you gotta stop feeling sorry for yourself and make your own life happen. As an American, I am inspired by the people who packed up their possesions
and moved into the wilderness while this nation expanded towards
the pacific: I think that gave a lot of grit to the U.S. character, and I think we would do well to gain back some of our rigor.
Have you ever closed an email account because it received too
much spam? Do you remember when alt.binaries.FOO actually contained
files that pertained to FOO instead of mountains of advertisments?
When the signal-to-noise drops too low, people will give up.
Each download has a small time-and-headache cost to it (even
if it's just playing the file for a few seconds to see if it
good or bad). Of course, people also have the option to fight:
spam filters, moderation systems, etc., but this often seems akin
to bailing a ship just to keep it afloat.
Note that there's a general problem here, with no easy solution except
for heavy centralization.
You have the original and make a copy of it, then place the copy into the new body. For a brief period there are now two copies of you.
Here's the catch, the original still dies. Meaning you still die, but a backup lives on.
Ahh... but what is conciousness? Nobody really knows, but a good
(naturalistic) guess is that conciousness includes the sensation of
change to an agent's internal state. "Self" is somewhat illusionary
under this definition: if you make a working copy of someone's brain,
both the original and the copy will fervently insist that they are
the same conciousness as from before the copy-event. And they
would both be correct. It's like a unix fork()... both resultant
processes have the exact same state after the call as before
(ignoring the change in PID, etc.).
Of course, it may also be possible to copy over bits and pieces
in a cojoined fashion so that the subject doesn't even realize he
is being duplicated... kinda like the Java Virtual Machine rearranging
objects in memory at run time to conserve space.
Why has it become such that UFO = flying saucer?
A "UFO" is just an unidentified flying object.
Because this is what languages do. Acronymns, compound words,
word composed with derivational affixes... all are subject to
loosing their generalized meaning when used repeatedly to describe
something specific. For instance, "homosexual" could mean
"consistently preferring the same style of sex (e.g., always missionary,
or always doggie). It could also be synonymous with monogamy, in
which case you would see Southern Baptists encourgaing homosexuality.
As it happens, hetero/homosexuality refer to something quite different. That's
because the meaning we attribute to the word has stabalized on
one of the many implied meanings that come from combining "homo/hetero"
with the word "sexuality". Intrestingly, a similar thing has happened with
the prefix "homo" by itself... if things had worked out differently,
"homo" might be short for homogeneous or homomorphic. Or we might
have kept the latin meaning of "human" (as in Homo Sapien).
Anything whizzing through the air that I can't identify is a "UFO", whether or not it has anything to do with spacecraft from another world.
Wrong. That's a fair mentality based on disecting the acronymn, but it's not
a practical one. If I saw something indistinguishable in the air
that I suspected to be mundane, I would not refer to it as a "UFO".
If it was spectecular, unexpected, and/or explainable (or if I wanted
to make a tongue-in-cheek joke to my audience), THEN I would use
the term, specifically because it invokes the spookiness of
little green men using our atmosphere just because it's fun to
navigate those tricky New Mexico crosswinds.:-) I expect most
speakers of English would be in agreement with me. I also expect
that most speakers would have no problem using "UFO" to
describe a mysterious orb piloted by winged, man-sized three-headed
penises they found sitting on the ground
in the middle of a clearing deep in the forest. Even though it isn't
flying, and it's quite plainly not a weather balloon or experimental
fighter jet, the term will still apply. Because it's meaning has
drifted and everybody sees it that way.
In general, it's easier to invent new words then to "correct"
the usage habits of others. Languages like to drift and semantics like
to change.
Yeah, but/dev/random will take forever because the entropy pool
gets depleted very, very quickly. The kernel slowly fills it back
up based on the timing of device interrupts, so you'll want to speed up the process
by (1) tying a gerbil to your keyboard with enough slack so that
it can thrash around and generate lots of keystrokes, or (2)
fixing your mouse on top of a running treadmill so that the surface
moves the little ball perpetually forward. Even then, it will still
take forever for/dev/random to generate all those bits... which
may prompt you to observe that, gee,
computers sure have a hard time being random.
[To observe this effect first hand, try `cat/dev/random` and watch
gibberish scroll up on your terminal. After the inital burst, you'll
have to move your mouse around to get more gibberish.]
Ultimately, you'd be better off disassembling your microwave and
pointing the gun
at your HDD in a nice, well-ventilated area.:-)
I don't have a problem with Lexmark making it technically difficult for competitors. I do have a problem when they use copyright, a government enforced monopoly on the software, to extend that monopoly into another market, i.e. the ink cartridge replacement market.
I have a problem with both. The human race wastes a lot of time and effort introducing artificial scarcities.
Though, as a consumer, I would agree with your point: using the legal system to stomp out competitors is the greater evil.
That's a swell cognitive trick, actually. Jef Raskin
mentions a similar thing they did with the Canon Cat (one of those
dorkie computerish word-processing typewriter of the 80's). When
saving the users file to disk (on shutdown), the Cat would also save
a bitmap of the current screen to the first few sectors of the
floppy. When the user turned the machine back on, these sectors were
read first and the image was blitted to the screen. About 10 seconds
later, the system finished booting and the user could begin editing
his/her document. Most users never noticed the delay b/t booting
and being able to edit. (See Raskin's book, The Humane Interface.)
Logo for third grade? How old were you? 10? I'd teach someone at that age Basic not Logo. In Middle School I'd move on to Visual Basic and or C. I programmed in logo and that was totally useless.
No no no! The idea is NOT to teach kids to program, it's to teach them to think and reason logically and to exercise/express/demonstrate that skill through the outlet of programming. C and VisualBasic are useful when dealing with memory allocation and Microsoft Access (respectively), but they aren't useful when dealing with logic: it's a forest obscured-by-the-trees thing. Instead of making students deal with poorly designed, syntactically-snarled procedural languages, give them something like Scheme or Logo where they can jump quite quickly to working with stuff like second-order logic, recursion, and symbolic manipulation.
The students who grow up to program professionally can learn C and VisualBasic when/if they need them. The students who don't become programmers can enjoy their increased ability to think symbolically, functionally, and recursively. The concepts taught by a procedural langauge are dramatically less valuable.
Besides, do you really want an army of 3rd graders churning out additional Outlook/Word viruses?
Jef's system is equivalently secure... the system assigns the PIN.
And the minimum password length is increased.
Suppose as an example you have a system with a 1000 users. If users
randomly pick passwords from the set of [a-z0-9]{6}, you can get
equivalent security by assigning them PINs from [a-z0-9]{8} (because
there are 2^36 == 1296 > 1000 combinations). Sociologically it can
be more or less secure: users can't pick an obvious PIN when these
things are assigned by the system, but they will be more tempted to
write these PINs down in a readily accessible place.
Overall, though, it just a bad idea to confuse one's identity with
an authorization secret, except in cute cases like supermarket
cash-registers.
The savings to the user is imaginary though (he/she has to remember
passwords which are longer, less meaningful, and not reusable on
other PIN-based systems).
Raskin understands one thing: flow. His suggestions in The Humane Interface all seek to hone the "flow" experience of the user. Truth be told, it would be nice if programmers (and website designers) thought more about this: many programs could benefit from eliminating unneccessary modes and superflous steps (like those obnoxious websites that force you to choose a country on the first page before proceeding).
However, Raskin often overemphasizes this aspect of the user experience. For instance, Raskin suggests giving the user a system-assigned PIN instead of a username/password combination. That way, a user logging into a system only has to type in one piece of information (the PIN) instead of two pieces (username and password). If done correctly, this would probably be more secure and ease the flow of the user's experinece.... except (and this point eludes him) this approach becomes a pain in the neck when you have multiple systems: most users would prefer to choose their own password at the trivial price of having to enter both their ID and password.
Another intresting but flawed idea of Raskin's is to create a standard series of cables that have uni-sex coupling adapters. It's a neat concept... you'd be able to plug any two cables together (provided they were of the same gauge) without the need for painful adapters, couplers, etc. Again, Raskin's ideas would involve a usability trade-off (that he doesn't see): it's easier to assemble all those wires leading into the back of your computer when each wire can only plug into a limited number of places. Think about how much trouble all those 3.5 jacks on the back of your soundcard give you when you don't have adequate lighting...
To be fair to Raskin, he some great ideas that counterbalance the often shoddy ideas of us programmers (like those funky number prompts in Blender where you click on the [unmarked] left side of the button to decrement and the [unmarked] right side to increment... WTF?). He is worth reading just for the challenge of embracing new ideas. Too, many times Raskin has a great point to make, but he expresses it in a way that makes him easily misunderstandable (e.g., "you don't need an operating system"). For a more balanced read, I suggest the authorative and entertaining The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, but Raskin is more revolutionary. I'm glad that some of his ideas are being realized in a real world environment where they can be modified and built-on.
.Copying the Windows registry paradigm for system and program information. One should not only be able to install programs and have their components registered, but also cleanly uninstall and/or install over existing versions in the same way. You can also standardize automatic upgrades for existing programs and kernel patches over the 'net using a similar tool.
Great... another person itching to reimplement Window's design mistakes. Listen people, as a datastore, the Windows registry is nothing more than a specialized filesystem. It's atrocious because you cannot manipulate it in the same way you can a regular filesystem... it's difficult to work with. If you're going to push standardization, why not advocate something truly neat, like creating a standard config file syntax in XML with governing schemas and GUI tools that help with configuration.
What we need (and what the Windows registry provides for Windows)
are standards that govern where things go and how they get installed, and we already have those in the form of a loose confederation of unix conventions and packaging formats. On Debian, for instance, all packages adhere to the File Hierarchy Standard and Debian Policy. The last thing we need is a meaningless overgrown forest of GUID's that are hard to get to, back up, maintain, inspect, and live with.
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You see folks, in the olden days, if you killed my wife/child/father/etc., I would hunt you down and furnish you with a grisly, drawn-out, most unpleasant death.
The motives for revenge lie deep within us (some more than others). Jesus had it wrong: the meek evolved off and became chipmunks and bunny rabbits a long time ago.
The potiential for revenge encouraged some forms of cooperation, which resulted in everybody's economic benefit. Unfortunately, it also led to a lot of violence. In one case, for instance, Ogg slighted Fred on a business deal. So Fred used his contacts in Europe to arrange a little "mishap" for Ogg. That didn't fool Ogg's relatives, though: they knew Ogg adamently refused to wear loose loin clothes while operating heavy machinery. So Ogg's son swore revenge... blah, blah, blah, and twenty years later the entire village was immersed in feud. For some reason, Ogg felt he could slight Fred. For some reason, Fred thought he could extract more vengence than he was due. For some reason, Ogg's family didn't see Fred's side of the story and did not approve of Fred's actions.
It was a big problem for awhile, this violence. Warlords, anarchy... the human race was all Afghaned in on itself. Then came a great invention called "the rule of law".
In "the rule of law", individuals were told ahead of time what society expected of them in business dealings, etc. One of the great ideas that came along with "law" was the concept of "justice", which is an ancient Babylonian word for "extracting revenge from those who broken the law after confirming their violation with a group of members drawn from the community who were uninvolved in the percipatating incident". (Contrary to popular belief, "justice" does not mean "the divine judgment of God delivered by the church to lovingly correct his errant children and to defend the righteous from the onslaught of the wicked".) The purpose of justice is to pool the revenge-seeking power of the community (thus allowing even the week to get revenge) while proxying the revenge-seekers through a system of checks and balances that keep things from getting out of hand. All of this furnishes revenge without letting it become a destructive chain-reaction.
In other words, the justice system has three customers: the suspect, the victim, and the community. The goal of a justice system is to provide the suspect with fairness (and a clean name, should he be innoccent), the victim with vengence (should the suspect be guilty), and the community with stability (in the form of violence-prevention).
And it works pretty well:
Something like the death penalty just doesn't bother me: I respect both societies that choose it and those that reject it. Under dire, scarce cirmcustances, you may be better off with it. Under plentiful circumstances, you're probably better off without it.
As a side note, I'm worried to see "the rule of law" compromised by economic intrests, by phalynxes of lawyers that aggressively seek opportunties for legal violence, by vague and ill-constructed "feel good" laws, by corrupted officials in all branches of government, by busybodies who want to micromanage other people's lives, and by any number of other things. When people loose faith in the justice system, everything will cave in on itself.
Good info... and about that last comment ("A lot of the silly things the military does actually have good reasons.") reminds me of the fun I had reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon... the soldiers in the field are given lots of orders that seem silly, dangerous, and counter-productive, but it all made sense when viewed in context of the great WWII crypto game that Berkley Park played so well.
Hmm... it's bad security, but maybe their concerns extend beyond security. When I was college, I ran web/ssh/ftp/etc. from my box. I accessed this stuff from home, on-the-go, etc. For class projects I maintained the official project site, documentation, and prototype enviornments on my PC and made them accessible to other students and outside clients. If you were to lock this stuff down like you do with corporate intranets, I would have never gained a lot of this exposure. There is no other way to provide students with the experience of running their own box, their own operating system, their own data, and their own software full-throttle on the internet.
Of course, I've seen schools that take the complete oppossite approach... they even proxy outgoing web connections so as to deny access to porn sites, etc. Sheesh.
A university environment poses unique problems... deal with it by creating multiple zones, giving students free firewall/virus software, and liberally yanking the network ports of worm-infected students (until they get the problem corrected). There's a lot of societal benefits of letting students have unfettered access. They are as follows:
These were the Hawthorne Studies... they specifically tried to determine the effect of lighting levels on worker productivity. Increasing the amount of light appeared to improve output. But decreasing the amount of light did the same thing. I don't think anyone knows for sure why the workers responded to the change in light instead of the absolute value of the lighting level. Prehaps they felt management was taking care of them. Prehaps they were more auspicious about being observed by the guys conducting the study.
And yeah... a similar thing is happening in Maine. Are they really being effective with those laptops? Will it really pay off for Maine in the long run? Do we have any confidence that these laptops are being used effectively?
I don't think I'll hold my breath.
A manager wants to see the UNION of the two sets of people, which you are calculating by making of list of each person x where x is either in in the first group OR in the second.
My point is that the manager is unknowingly speaking a high-level sentence in relational calculus and you are translating it down to the level that the computer can understand. The boss isn't being illogical so much as he's uses a different language than the computer.
English-like languages have tried to address this mismatch naievely, assuming that it's just the syntax that scares people away. However, (and this is where you really hit the nail on the head) the real mismatch occurs at the semantic level: we are stochiastic beings that don't take to well to formal semantics. Engineers, mathematicians, scientists, and programmers have the education and nerve required to get the knack of these programming languages when it serves our aims, but the general population typically lacks this skill. Even us programmers can have difficulty swinging language paradigms when something new arrives in our life (like first-time Lispers who use loops, variables, and other procedural constructs instead of recursion, lambda expressions, and functional constructs). Thus, the fundamental job of the software engineer: actively translate back and forth between the human world and the computer world. A Hypertalkish langauage isn't going to replace the software engineer (nothing will short of human-level AI).
Trying to create new languages that allow for the more straightforward expression of ideas is a noble goal, but the "make it sound like english" approach is not going to bring a nirvana where everyone can suddenly express their thoughts in code. At best, such languages will afford communications b/t software engineers and the users. This is particularly true when working with sub-languages that pull the computer up to the level of a particular problem domain. (Thus a major selling-point of stuff like XML, SQL, Guile, etc.)
We're missing the 3.5 billion year head start that evolution was given. We're also missing CPU power and human talent (although the former has not become totally evident yet).
Is conciousness itself more profound? It feels more profound, but that's the only argument in favor of the "concoiousness-is-special" theory. Whatever... conciousness is merely the sensation of new input against old memories. It only feels different to the being experiencing it. We have yet to figure out how it all works.
But it does work somehow.
One of my AI profs compared it to trying to reach the moon: you need to research rocketry and avionics instead of building successfully taller ladders...
All of that said, though, prehaps Minsky and crew have an economic motivation: this may hinder the ability of the field to be taken seriously. It may siphon off attention, ambition, and talent to the wrong places and the wrong approaches. It may just seem amateaur. Maybe it Loebner is to real AI as Lindows is to real Linux distros.
Actually, Ben Franklin never patented any of his inventions... he wanted his works to be available to benefit all humankind. Wow... one of our founding fathers was an open source developer!
Today, of course, Ben would have to get defensive patents on his inventions. :-)
You've gone to a lot of effort to explain some of the benefits and philosophy that motivates the existent of our various mechanisms of intellectual property... copyright, patent, trademark, etc. I think most slashdotters understand all that, but are worried by a system that disproportinately awards monopolies.
Society essentially buys "motivation" and "innovation" from inventers and entrepreneurs. It pays for all of this by reducing the "rights" of its members. Specifically, there are words that can't be said, machines that can't be built, items that can't be copied (unless properly licensed, etc.). As with anything else that you purchase, you want to get the best possible deal. If doubling the amount of "rights" we pay buys only a small amount of additional "innovation", than we've been ripped off. In our system, the government fixes the price that we pay for innovation, and there's not a lot of social pressure on government to keep that price low.
As you said, it's all about creating a system that "results is more prosperity and more fairness for everybody". From an economic standpoint, nothing else matters. Right now, the concept of "intellectual property" is overvalued while the concepts of "freedom", "openness", and "idea sharing" are undervalued. This hurts everyone.
Bullshit. This idea has always been popular in Western culture, because it's very practical, but that does not make it right. The truth is, there are several seemingly innoccent actions that are technically illegal. (I heard of the courts prosecuting a guy for picking up arrowheads because the law treats them as sacred Indian artifacts that you're supposed to leave in the ground... how are you suppose to know all of these little laws?) There are also several not-so-innoccent-but-not-that-bad actions that do not deserve excessive punishment. The impeteus is on society to educate its members about their obligations to the law.
When the courts operate blindly on these issues, we all lose out: we devote excessive punishment to some crimes that hurts our ability to punish other, more serious crimes. We also sacrifice people: if society punishes the 11-year old too excessively, then the odds are that they will have succeeded in creating a career criminal. What a tragedy when it's very, very likely that this kid could grow up and be a highly productive member of society.
In general, I agree: many train accidents are the result of people wagering their future in the hopes of saving 3 or 4 minutes. But don't turn a blind eye to how design and infrastructure can influence things...
We used to have a very akward, high-traffic, T-shaped intersection where the train crossed over the secondary road very close to the intersection (e.g., imagine drawing train tracks parallel and just below the horizontal line of the "T"). The design was very poor, and there were several aggrevating factors with height, visibility, parking lots, etc.
One night, 4 schoolteachers got hemmed in by traffic while crossing the tracks. They were killed by an oncoming train. The driver could have been making very reasonable decisions while negotating her turn onto the secondary road... bad design is the primary culprit for that accident. Fortunately, this intersection has been heavily redone to properly handle the traffic it must support. The road is flat, everything is visible, the signaling mechanisms are obvious, and there are no adjacent parking lots to tangle up traffic flow.
The human mind is an operational hazard. Good designs take the inevitability for error into account and provide mechanisms to prevent or mitigate such errors. Designer and operator must both be serious about what they do.
And people do the same thing with the concept of "God"... even though the details vary drastically, most cultures have a mythology that posits a source of universal intention: something or someone that controls natural events (weather, harvest, childbirth, astronomical bodies, etc.) and interacts with individual human lives (by providing comfort, discipline, special powers, spirtual growth, second chances, forgiveness, condemation, tests and trials, equalizing opportunities, purpose and meaning, spouse and family, absolute morality, eternal security, etc.). The fact that these things are (or will be) explainable through the lenses of natural and cognitive science hasn't done much to convince people that there's no God mediating their reality. It's as if we have to attribute agency (in the AI sense of the term) to events that are personally significant. All these uncontrolled externals are wrapped up into "God".
But, to reply to the parent post, there are more practical reasons for making the "complex entity"==>"person" simplification. When we say "France opposses war with Iraq", it's pretty accurate, because we get the impression that (1) the official government posture and (2) the general sentiment of the French population do not want to see a war. We have no way of characterizing it in a finer manner than that... we don't have a list of x million French who oppose war and the y million French who endorse it, so we use the label "France" to tag the relevant input (in this case, the relevant input is "political pressure", but if we were watching a news broadcast about organized protest against the rapid expansion of metropolitan Paris, than we might categorize the input as "environmentalist").
I'm sure there are a thousand interesting AI and cogsci theories for explaining or expressing this... the human brain is truly incredible, but it make broad, obvious machine-like mistakes too.
Also, I imagine that FSF has built up a healthy list of out-of-court settlements that will strengthen its case. Ironic because evil patent companies (PanIP?) do the same thing to build up strength for their patents (e.g., make small guys settle, then get the big guys).
Linux seems to buffer writes to the floppy... e.g., you can copy files on and off it, move them around, etc., and nothing gets written until you unmount it.
Can anyone confirm?
There are way too many whiners in graduate education as well. I TA a graduate course in computer science for non-CS majors, and was stunned to find that ~70% of the students were working very intimately together on graded homeworks and labs. On some assignments, I got back 4 or 5 sets of nearly identical solutions (with the cute but pointless obfuscation tricks like changing variable names [e.g., "count-bunnies" becomes "bunnies-count"]). The students were never prosecuted because you just can't fail an entire class without having a very serious cross on which to nail them.
In retrospect, I shouldn't be too surprised: the evening news is filled with whiners too. Just the other night, for instance, Fox News showed a piece about a small town where the police decided they needed to play an active role in controlling the dear population. So of course, now there is a lawsuit by surbanites who would rather kill the dear with their cars than have armed officers shooting dear in their neighborhood.
In a larger sense, the new story itself was a sort of whining: why did Fox consider this to be news? Is that really any of our business what a small town decides to do?
Sigh... A few weeks ago, I decided that the only thing I can do about all this whining is to make sure I don't do it myself (does this post disqualify me?)... ultimately, you gotta stop feeling sorry for yourself and make your own life happen. As an American, I am inspired by the people who packed up their possesions and moved into the wilderness while this nation expanded towards the pacific: I think that gave a lot of grit to the U.S. character, and I think we would do well to gain back some of our rigor.
When the signal-to-noise drops too low, people will give up. Each download has a small time-and-headache cost to it (even if it's just playing the file for a few seconds to see if it good or bad). Of course, people also have the option to fight: spam filters, moderation systems, etc., but this often seems akin to bailing a ship just to keep it afloat.
Note that there's a general problem here, with no easy solution except for heavy centralization.
Here's the catch, the original still dies. Meaning you still die, but a backup lives on.
Ahh... but what is conciousness? Nobody really knows, but a good (naturalistic) guess is that conciousness includes the sensation of change to an agent's internal state. "Self" is somewhat illusionary under this definition: if you make a working copy of someone's brain, both the original and the copy will fervently insist that they are the same conciousness as from before the copy-event. And they would both be correct. It's like a unix fork()... both resultant processes have the exact same state after the call as before (ignoring the change in PID, etc.).
Of course, it may also be possible to copy over bits and pieces in a cojoined fashion so that the subject doesn't even realize he is being duplicated... kinda like the Java Virtual Machine rearranging objects in memory at run time to conserve space.
Because this is what languages do. Acronymns, compound words, word composed with derivational affixes... all are subject to loosing their generalized meaning when used repeatedly to describe something specific. For instance, "homosexual" could mean "consistently preferring the same style of sex (e.g., always missionary, or always doggie). It could also be synonymous with monogamy, in which case you would see Southern Baptists encourgaing homosexuality. As it happens, hetero/homosexuality refer to something quite different. That's because the meaning we attribute to the word has stabalized on one of the many implied meanings that come from combining "homo/hetero" with the word "sexuality". Intrestingly, a similar thing has happened with the prefix "homo" by itself... if things had worked out differently, "homo" might be short for homogeneous or homomorphic. Or we might have kept the latin meaning of "human" (as in Homo Sapien).
Anything whizzing through the air that I can't identify is a "UFO", whether or not it has anything to do with spacecraft from another world.
Wrong. That's a fair mentality based on disecting the acronymn, but it's not a practical one. If I saw something indistinguishable in the air that I suspected to be mundane, I would not refer to it as a "UFO". If it was spectecular, unexpected, and/or explainable (or if I wanted to make a tongue-in-cheek joke to my audience), THEN I would use the term, specifically because it invokes the spookiness of little green men using our atmosphere just because it's fun to navigate those tricky New Mexico crosswinds. :-) I expect most
speakers of English would be in agreement with me. I also expect
that most speakers would have no problem using "UFO" to
describe a mysterious orb piloted by winged, man-sized three-headed
penises they found sitting on the ground
in the middle of a clearing deep in the forest. Even though it isn't
flying, and it's quite plainly not a weather balloon or experimental
fighter jet, the term will still apply. Because it's meaning has
drifted and everybody sees it that way.
In general, it's easier to invent new words then to "correct" the usage habits of others. Languages like to drift and semantics like to change.
Ultimately, you'd be better off disassembling your microwave and pointing the gun at your HDD in a nice, well-ventilated area. :-)
I have a problem with both. The human race wastes a lot of time and effort introducing artificial scarcities.
Though, as a consumer, I would agree with your point: using the legal system to stomp out competitors is the greater evil.
That's a swell cognitive trick, actually. Jef Raskin mentions a similar thing they did with the Canon Cat (one of those dorkie computerish word-processing typewriter of the 80's). When saving the users file to disk (on shutdown), the Cat would also save a bitmap of the current screen to the first few sectors of the floppy. When the user turned the machine back on, these sectors were read first and the image was blitted to the screen. About 10 seconds later, the system finished booting and the user could begin editing his/her document. Most users never noticed the delay b/t booting and being able to edit. (See Raskin's book, The Humane Interface.)
No no no! The idea is NOT to teach kids to program, it's to teach them to think and reason logically and to exercise/express/demonstrate that skill through the outlet of programming. C and VisualBasic are useful when dealing with memory allocation and Microsoft Access (respectively), but they aren't useful when dealing with logic: it's a forest obscured-by-the-trees thing. Instead of making students deal with poorly designed, syntactically-snarled procedural languages, give them something like Scheme or Logo where they can jump quite quickly to working with stuff like second-order logic, recursion, and symbolic manipulation.
The students who grow up to program professionally can learn C and VisualBasic when/if they need them. The students who don't become programmers can enjoy their increased ability to think symbolically, functionally, and recursively. The concepts taught by a procedural langauge are dramatically less valuable.
Besides, do you really want an army of 3rd graders churning out additional Outlook/Word viruses?
Suppose as an example you have a system with a 1000 users. If users randomly pick passwords from the set of [a-z0-9]{6}, you can get equivalent security by assigning them PINs from [a-z0-9]{8} (because there are 2^36 == 1296 > 1000 combinations). Sociologically it can be more or less secure: users can't pick an obvious PIN when these things are assigned by the system, but they will be more tempted to write these PINs down in a readily accessible place.
Overall, though, it just a bad idea to confuse one's identity with an authorization secret, except in cute cases like supermarket cash-registers.
The savings to the user is imaginary though (he/she has to remember passwords which are longer, less meaningful, and not reusable on other PIN-based systems).
However, Raskin often overemphasizes this aspect of the user experience. For instance, Raskin suggests giving the user a system-assigned PIN instead of a username/password combination. That way, a user logging into a system only has to type in one piece of information (the PIN) instead of two pieces (username and password). If done correctly, this would probably be more secure and ease the flow of the user's experinece.... except (and this point eludes him) this approach becomes a pain in the neck when you have multiple systems: most users would prefer to choose their own password at the trivial price of having to enter both their ID and password.
Another intresting but flawed idea of Raskin's is to create a standard series of cables that have uni-sex coupling adapters. It's a neat concept... you'd be able to plug any two cables together (provided they were of the same gauge) without the need for painful adapters, couplers, etc. Again, Raskin's ideas would involve a usability trade-off (that he doesn't see): it's easier to assemble all those wires leading into the back of your computer when each wire can only plug into a limited number of places. Think about how much trouble all those 3.5 jacks on the back of your soundcard give you when you don't have adequate lighting...
To be fair to Raskin, he some great ideas that counterbalance the often shoddy ideas of us programmers (like those funky number prompts in Blender where you click on the [unmarked] left side of the button to decrement and the [unmarked] right side to increment... WTF?). He is worth reading just for the challenge of embracing new ideas. Too, many times Raskin has a great point to make, but he expresses it in a way that makes him easily misunderstandable (e.g., "you don't need an operating system"). For a more balanced read, I suggest the authorative and entertaining The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, but Raskin is more revolutionary. I'm glad that some of his ideas are being realized in a real world environment where they can be modified and built-on.
Great... another person itching to reimplement Window's design mistakes. Listen people, as a datastore, the Windows registry is nothing more than a specialized filesystem. It's atrocious because you cannot manipulate it in the same way you can a regular filesystem... it's difficult to work with. If you're going to push standardization, why not advocate something truly neat, like creating a standard config file syntax in XML with governing schemas and GUI tools that help with configuration.
What we need (and what the Windows registry provides for Windows) are standards that govern where things go and how they get installed, and we already have those in the form of a loose confederation of unix conventions and packaging formats. On Debian, for instance, all packages adhere to the File Hierarchy Standard and Debian Policy. The last thing we need is a meaningless overgrown forest of GUID's that are hard to get to, back up, maintain, inspect, and live with.