There are two things wrong with unforced prostitution, but one of them is a matter of taste. 1) Prostitutes frequently spread venereal diseases.
That's a matter of hygiene and medicine, not some inherent problem with the practice.
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2) Christians and Jews deplore many of the religious practices of the Babylonians.
Stop right there. I don't give a flying fuck what Christians and Jews deplore, and the same goes for Muslims, Hindus, Taoists, Buddhists, Sikhs, or any other religion. If they don't like it then they don't have to do it, but that doesn't give them the right to prohibit others from doing it.
I think we should focus on defining intelligence rather than jumping to the end game of creating one.
I agree.
At the same time, though, by attempting to mimic it or create it we may discover something along the way that helps us define it or understand it. If we needed to completely understand something before we tried to create it we'd be way behind where we are now in all sorts of fields. Sometimes the failures teach things that lead to successes.
So if FF sucks due to memory leaks, Chrome spys on you, then what browser is left? Chromium?
Good question.
For Windows I keep hearing about Opera, Pale Moon, K-Meleon, Safari and a few others, but for me NoScript and AdBlock are two must-have add-ons. If the browser doesn't have them or their equivalents, it's a non-starter.
For Linux it seems that Firefox, Konqueror, and Epiphany are the big ones. But again, it's the NoScript and AdBlock add-ons (or equivalents) that I've got to have, so I use FF on Linux (and it seems to behave better on Linux than on Windows in terms of memory gobbling).
I'm a Prime customer in the Seattle area and I almost always get stuff in 2 days, sometimes even the very next day.
For me it's been very rare when it takes longer than that (I can't actually remember when the last time it was longer than 2 days). YMMV of course, but that's my data point for whatever it's worth.
Yes, defining "intelligence" is a key item here. What does it actually mean, and how can we say whether something is "intelligent" or not? It's a bit of a fuzzy area to say the least. Without a clear definition of what "intelligence" means, we're all just guessing.
A couple of things:
First, I think that a sufficiently sophisticated system could mimic intelligence even though it wouldn't actually be intelligent (whatever that means). No, it wouldn't be truly intelligent or genuine "AI", but it could be good enough to use for a lot of practical applications.
Second, I do think that eventually we will develop some sort of genuine AI, in fact I think it's inevitable. But again, it's going to need to be defined as to what genuine AI is. What's the yardstick for determining whether or not it's really artificial intelligence? I think it would include the ability to learn, to make decisions that aren't pre-programmed or mechanically heuristic in nature, and the ability to potentially be somewhat illogical under the right conditions. Creativity (however you define that) would also be a component. Others would claim that it would have to include empathy and other "emotional" states.
In short, it's a helluva thing just to define what "intelligence" means and how to detect it. But I do believe that some form of "real" AI will eventually happen, even if it's not what we imagine it would be like today.
Again, how would we know whether or not to consider something as "intelligent"? What properties would it have to display to be labeled as such?
Your grandmother and her daughters didn't do anything wrong; we all do what we have to do to survive.
As a friend once said to me, "We all have the ethics we can afford." In other words, would I steal food if my family was starving? Damn right I would. I'd lie, cheat, and steal to feed my family.
As for prostitution, personally I don't think it's wrong in any way (unless it's forced). It should be completely legal, and not viewed as immoral or "sinful" or whatever label the authoritarians and bluenoses want to put on it.
Again, your grandmother and her daughters didn't do anything wrong. Your uncle is the shitbag in this scenario, and feel free to piss on his grave for me if you happen to have the chance.
...so you're casually dismissing the most devout and theologically knowledgeable Christians I know.
Yes, because those devout and theologically knowledgeable Christians are as full of shit as a septic tank. They'll find a way to rationalize anything so long as it means they can keep believing in their magic sky god. There's no bottom limit to the self-delusion willingly practiced by people who want to believe in fairy tales.
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Evolution deniers are irrational, in that they believe things in defiance of evidence and rational thought. I don't see why I should just figure that irrational people must be correct.
Hey, don't tell me- tell all of the fundamentalist preachers who still deny evolution. But frankly, when it comes to being irrational, religion is the gold standard.
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If a large number of Christian theologians say that the Bible doesn't contradict evolution, and they do (it's the position of the Catholic Church, for example), then obviously there isn't a clear contradiction.
Yeah....except for all the ones who says it does contradict the bible. Except for those guys, you're totally right!
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This means it's possible to interpret the words of the Bible in ways that do not contradict evolution, and hence the Bible itself doesn't contradict evolution.
FFS, it's possible to interpret the bible to mean anything you want it to mean. That's because it's vague, chock-full of errors, and because people want to believe what they want to believe.
What do people do now if their home gets infested with pests?I think that a new kind of professional bugbusters could arise as a result.
Sure, but how much would this kind of service cost? Maybe as much or more than just replacing the suspect gadgets (not a refrigerator or furnace, obviously, but still...). And who's to say they won't get reinfected the next day?
I can see it now: "Norton Anti-Virus For Home Appliances". "Mcafee HomeGuard Extreme DoubleSecure". Ugh.
One interesting challenge though - what happens if you have an IoT device that is thoroughly pwned and keeps changing IP addresses (and/or MAC addresses!) specifically to make identifying it internally even more complicated?!
Or if you have multiple pwned devices working in concert to trade off the traffic so as to try and stay below the radar. What if there were 5 or 6 or 10 devices, all infected...they could each share the load in random rotation. Each would would behave normally except for a few seconds or minutes a day when it would act maliciously. I would think that would be fairly tricky to nail down.
I really resisted Chrome until 2010 until I noticed that the memory leak was never going to be fixed.
I tried Chrome and I liked it, but I was a little leery of how much it phoned home...it seemed to be in constant contact with Google, every day, all day. It creeped me out and pissed me off. (It's the same reason why I don't run Win 10- too much telemetry.)
But maybe it's time to try Chrome again. As long as I can use NoScript and AdBlock I'll put up with Google monitoring my every keystroke and mouse click in the browser.
It's not a hate symbol per se, but some racist fuckholes use it as one. There's a difference.
If I used, I dunno, the "recycle" symbol as a hate symbol, would that make it a hate symbol? No, it would just be some arsehole (me) using it that way.
But, I suppose with enough usage it would start to be recognized as such and then, yeah, it could probably be considered a hate symbol.
Do you browse YouTube (or any other video sites) at all ?
How many tabs do you regularly have open? 10? 50? 100?
I browse Youtube occasionally on my PC, but more often on my tablet. My tabs are mostly open on different webmail clients and a few of my own sites that I watch for activity. As for tabs, it doesn't seem to matter. I might typically have ~15 tabs open on two or three instances of FF, but I've seen it do this with two tabs on a single instance.
The odd thing is that it doesn't seem to happen any faster with more tabs open, but I haven't really done any serious testing on that. It just seems that after ~24 hours or so it hits the RAM limit and starts to barf whether I have 5 tabs open or 20 tabs open.
This has been an issue for a long, long time. I'm not sure exactly what rev I started noticing it with but I think it's been this way for several years on different boxes, laptops, etc. Maybe version 10 or 12? Now we're up to version 49.x and it's still doing it...
Well, it would be more like sending it back to the manufacturer for them to retrofit it, or maybe requesting they send you some plastic wrap to fix their defective water carrying device.
A really dumb question - as all these devices can be configured to do DDOS attacks remotely, could they also be remotely reprogrammed to make the more secure?
I don't know. Can you retrofit a sieve to hold water?
As someone who owns a company that makes IoT devices and properly secures them, there are companies that do take security serious.
I know, but for every one that does take security seriously there are a hundred that don't. I applaud you for thinking of security, but you're the one out of a hundred. It's the other 99 I'm worried about.
It is time to blacklist these devices and prevent insecure devices that participate in DDoS permanently. This may mean things like MAC-based blocking on ISP-level.
But all your ISP sees is your router...so they'd have to start cutting people off from the internet left and right. And many, many people won't know what to do when that happens because all the ISP can tell them is that "some device" is sending traffic out.
Is it their thermostat? One or more light bulbs? The washer or refrigerator or the furnace? Maybe it's little Johnny's Speak-N-Spell or Sally's Barbie Dream Castle. Maybe it's the TV or the DVR or the the remote-viewing doorbell.
They'll have to unplug their whole house, bit by bit, checking with the ISP each step of the way. How is Joe Sixpack or Grandpa going to know what to do? And what if two or more devices are the culprit?
Shit, the more I think about it, the more I realize that this shit is going to be way worse than I imagined, and I'm pretty pessimistic to start with.
This AI hype has to stop. Neural networks are nothing like how the brain works. We have known that since 1975 at least! The only thing more annoying than a space nutter is an AI nutter.
There you go again.
AI-assisted translation is only going to get better and better and better as time goes on. It won't happen tomorrow or next week or next month, but come back in 5 years and I'd bet that it'll be a whole different ball game.
As someone who saw the idea of a portable phone go from "pipe dream" to "something you can buy for $9.95 at Walmart", I've learned not to scoff or say stuff like this can't be done. It will be done, just not at the breathless pace the press releases would like you to believe.
And that $9.95 phone? It also has a video camera, GPS mapping, accelerometers, a nice color display, and tons of other shit. You can do photo and video editing on it, send texts to the other side of the planet for free, and play all the silly games you could ever want on it. It has more computing power than the entire Department Of Defense had in 1960.
If you had told most people about this in 1960 they'd have had you committed. So yeah, I believe some form of AI will happen. It's inevitable.
The sad fact is that it's already too late. The problem is that there are loads of these insecure devices out there now, and they will likely be online for years to come.
Even if every new IoT device that was sold starting tomorrow was actually secure, we have a huge pool of susceptible devices that are already in place just waiting to be exploited.
Our best hope is that these craptastic devices fail quickly and are replaced, but I'm not going to hold my breath hoping that their replacements will be any more secure. Frankly, I have no reason to believe that IoT device makers will ever do anything to make their devices secure. We'll be seeing this shit 10 years from now, only worse.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two things wrong with unforced prostitution, but one of them is a matter of taste.
1) Prostitutes frequently spread venereal diseases.
That's a matter of hygiene and medicine, not some inherent problem with the practice.
-
2) Christians and Jews deplore many of the religious practices of the Babylonians.
Stop right there. I don't give a flying fuck what Christians and Jews deplore, and the same goes for Muslims, Hindus, Taoists, Buddhists, Sikhs, or any other religion. If they don't like it then they don't have to do it, but that doesn't give them the right to prohibit others from doing it.
I think we should focus on defining intelligence rather than jumping to the end game of creating one.
I agree.
At the same time, though, by attempting to mimic it or create it we may discover something along the way that helps us define it or understand it. If we needed to completely understand something before we tried to create it we'd be way behind where we are now in all sorts of fields. Sometimes the failures teach things that lead to successes.
So if FF sucks due to memory leaks, Chrome spys on you, then what browser is left? Chromium?
Good question.
For Windows I keep hearing about Opera, Pale Moon, K-Meleon, Safari and a few others, but for me NoScript and AdBlock are two must-have add-ons. If the browser doesn't have them or their equivalents, it's a non-starter.
For Linux it seems that Firefox, Konqueror, and Epiphany are the big ones. But again, it's the NoScript and AdBlock add-ons (or equivalents) that I've got to have, so I use FF on Linux (and it seems to behave better on Linux than on Windows in terms of memory gobbling).
Whether or not the Prime fees are a good deal depends on how much you shop on Amazon.
Bingo. I find that in the long run I end up saving quite a bit on shipping, way more than the cost of the membership.
I'm a Prime customer in the Seattle area and I almost always get stuff in 2 days, sometimes even the very next day.
For me it's been very rare when it takes longer than that (I can't actually remember when the last time it was longer than 2 days). YMMV of course, but that's my data point for whatever it's worth.
The operative word here is "intelligence."
Yes, defining "intelligence" is a key item here. What does it actually mean, and how can we say whether something is "intelligent" or not? It's a bit of a fuzzy area to say the least. Without a clear definition of what "intelligence" means, we're all just guessing.
A couple of things:
First, I think that a sufficiently sophisticated system could mimic intelligence even though it wouldn't actually be intelligent (whatever that means). No, it wouldn't be truly intelligent or genuine "AI", but it could be good enough to use for a lot of practical applications.
Second, I do think that eventually we will develop some sort of genuine AI, in fact I think it's inevitable. But again, it's going to need to be defined as to what genuine AI is. What's the yardstick for determining whether or not it's really artificial intelligence? I think it would include the ability to learn, to make decisions that aren't pre-programmed or mechanically heuristic in nature, and the ability to potentially be somewhat illogical under the right conditions. Creativity (however you define that) would also be a component. Others would claim that it would have to include empathy and other "emotional" states.
In short, it's a helluva thing just to define what "intelligence" means and how to detect it. But I do believe that some form of "real" AI will eventually happen, even if it's not what we imagine it would be like today.
Again, how would we know whether or not to consider something as "intelligent"? What properties would it have to display to be labeled as such?
Police are NOT dangerous, unless you make yourself a target by refusing to comply or acting like you are dangerous to the officer.
I think what you meant to write was, "Police are NOT dangerous, unless you happen to cross paths with them."
Yes, they keep us safe. Sometimes, though, they're the kind of people they should be keeping us safe from.
Your grandmother and her daughters didn't do anything wrong; we all do what we have to do to survive.
As a friend once said to me, "We all have the ethics we can afford." In other words, would I steal food if my family was starving? Damn right I would. I'd lie, cheat, and steal to feed my family.
As for prostitution, personally I don't think it's wrong in any way (unless it's forced). It should be completely legal, and not viewed as immoral or "sinful" or whatever label the authoritarians and bluenoses want to put on it.
Again, your grandmother and her daughters didn't do anything wrong. Your uncle is the shitbag in this scenario, and feel free to piss on his grave for me if you happen to have the chance.
...so you're casually dismissing the most devout and theologically knowledgeable Christians I know.
Yes, because those devout and theologically knowledgeable Christians are as full of shit as a septic tank. They'll find a way to rationalize anything so long as it means they can keep believing in their magic sky god. There's no bottom limit to the self-delusion willingly practiced by people who want to believe in fairy tales.
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Evolution deniers are irrational, in that they believe things in defiance of evidence and rational thought. I don't see why I should just figure that irrational people must be correct.
Hey, don't tell me- tell all of the fundamentalist preachers who still deny evolution. But frankly, when it comes to being irrational, religion is the gold standard.
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If a large number of Christian theologians say that the Bible doesn't contradict evolution, and they do (it's the position of the Catholic Church, for example), then obviously there isn't a clear contradiction.
Yeah....except for all the ones who says it does contradict the bible. Except for those guys, you're totally right!
-
This means it's possible to interpret the words of the Bible in ways that do not contradict evolution, and hence the Bible itself doesn't contradict evolution.
FFS, it's possible to interpret the bible to mean anything you want it to mean. That's because it's vague, chock-full of errors, and because people want to believe what they want to believe.
Along with "and" and "the" and "is", etc.
Now you done gone and triggered me, you white, cis-male shitlord!
What do people do now if their home gets infested with pests?I think that a new kind of professional bugbusters could arise as a result.
Sure, but how much would this kind of service cost? Maybe as much or more than just replacing the suspect gadgets (not a refrigerator or furnace, obviously, but still...). And who's to say they won't get reinfected the next day?
I can see it now: "Norton Anti-Virus For Home Appliances". "Mcafee HomeGuard Extreme DoubleSecure". Ugh.
One interesting challenge though - what happens if you have an IoT device that is thoroughly pwned and keeps changing IP addresses (and/or MAC addresses!) specifically to make identifying it internally even more complicated?!
Or if you have multiple pwned devices working in concert to trade off the traffic so as to try and stay below the radar. What if there were 5 or 6 or 10 devices, all infected...they could each share the load in random rotation. Each would would behave normally except for a few seconds or minutes a day when it would act maliciously. I would think that would be fairly tricky to nail down.
O Brave New World.
I really resisted Chrome until 2010 until I noticed that the memory leak was never going to be fixed.
I tried Chrome and I liked it, but I was a little leery of how much it phoned home...it seemed to be in constant contact with Google, every day, all day. It creeped me out and pissed me off. (It's the same reason why I don't run Win 10- too much telemetry.)
But maybe it's time to try Chrome again. As long as I can use NoScript and AdBlock I'll put up with Google monitoring my every keystroke and mouse click in the browser.
It's not a hate symbol per se, but some racist fuckholes use it as one. There's a difference.
If I used, I dunno, the "recycle" symbol as a hate symbol, would that make it a hate symbol? No, it would just be some arsehole (me) using it that way.
But, I suppose with enough usage it would start to be recognized as such and then, yeah, it could probably be considered a hate symbol.
Do you browse YouTube (or any other video sites) at all ?
How many tabs do you regularly have open? 10? 50? 100?
I browse Youtube occasionally on my PC, but more often on my tablet. My tabs are mostly open on different webmail clients and a few of my own sites that I watch for activity. As for tabs, it doesn't seem to matter. I might typically have ~15 tabs open on two or three instances of FF, but I've seen it do this with two tabs on a single instance.
The odd thing is that it doesn't seem to happen any faster with more tabs open, but I haven't really done any serious testing on that. It just seems that after ~24 hours or so it hits the RAM limit and starts to barf whether I have 5 tabs open or 20 tabs open.
This has been an issue for a long, long time. I'm not sure exactly what rev I started noticing it with but I think it's been this way for several years on different boxes, laptops, etc. Maybe version 10 or 12? Now we're up to version 49.x and it's still doing it...
Well, it would be more like sending it back to the manufacturer for them to retrofit it, or maybe requesting they send you some plastic wrap to fix their defective water carrying device.
A really dumb question - as all these devices can be configured to do DDOS attacks remotely, could they also be remotely reprogrammed to make the more secure?
I don't know. Can you retrofit a sieve to hold water?
As someone who owns a company that makes IoT devices and properly secures them, there are companies that do take security serious.
I know, but for every one that does take security seriously there are a hundred that don't. I applaud you for thinking of security, but you're the one out of a hundred. It's the other 99 I'm worried about.
It is time to blacklist these devices and prevent insecure devices that participate in DDoS permanently. This may mean things like MAC-based blocking on ISP-level.
But all your ISP sees is your router...so they'd have to start cutting people off from the internet left and right. And many, many people won't know what to do when that happens because all the ISP can tell them is that "some device" is sending traffic out.
Is it their thermostat? One or more light bulbs? The washer or refrigerator or the furnace? Maybe it's little Johnny's Speak-N-Spell or Sally's Barbie Dream Castle. Maybe it's the TV or the DVR or the the remote-viewing doorbell.
They'll have to unplug their whole house, bit by bit, checking with the ISP each step of the way. How is Joe Sixpack or Grandpa going to know what to do? And what if two or more devices are the culprit?
Shit, the more I think about it, the more I realize that this shit is going to be way worse than I imagined, and I'm pretty pessimistic to start with.
This AI hype has to stop. Neural networks are nothing like how the brain works. We have known that since 1975 at least! The only thing more annoying than a space nutter is an AI nutter.
There you go again.
AI-assisted translation is only going to get better and better and better as time goes on. It won't happen tomorrow or next week or next month, but come back in 5 years and I'd bet that it'll be a whole different ball game.
As someone who saw the idea of a portable phone go from "pipe dream" to "something you can buy for $9.95 at Walmart", I've learned not to scoff or say stuff like this can't be done. It will be done, just not at the breathless pace the press releases would like you to believe.
And that $9.95 phone? It also has a video camera, GPS mapping, accelerometers, a nice color display, and tons of other shit. You can do photo and video editing on it, send texts to the other side of the planet for free, and play all the silly games you could ever want on it. It has more computing power than the entire Department Of Defense had in 1960.
If you had told most people about this in 1960 they'd have had you committed. So yeah, I believe some form of AI will happen. It's inevitable.
...stem this madness?
The sad fact is that it's already too late. The problem is that there are loads of these insecure devices out there now, and they will likely be online for years to come.
Even if every new IoT device that was sold starting tomorrow was actually secure, we have a huge pool of susceptible devices that are already in place just waiting to be exploited.
Our best hope is that these craptastic devices fail quickly and are replaced, but I'm not going to hold my breath hoping that their replacements will be any more secure. Frankly, I have no reason to believe that IoT device makers will ever do anything to make their devices secure. We'll be seeing this shit 10 years from now, only worse.
No, they don't. Either make a joke, or don't. You don't get credit for meta-humour.
Apparently I do, Mr Zuckerberg.
Microsoft: I'm in ur bank, stealin' ur moneyz!!
Trusting Microsoft with banking is like hiring John Wayne Gacy as your babysitter.
Facebook at work....you know, sometimes the jokes just write themselves.
This is 16 to 24 year olds we are talking about, so they are ripping stuff off like Drake and Beiber.
Technically I'm not sure that actually qualifies as "music", but that's a discussion for another day.
Jimmy Kimmel commented on Justin Bieber Winning 'Best Male Artist': "I count at least 3 lies in the title of that award."