...unless you, the people, fight like grim death against it.
Here in Australia we had a proposal for the `Australia Card' -- basically the same as this proposal, only not as technologically sophisticated. It was put to the people's vote (referendum or an election issue? I don't remember) and the people's response was to tell the proposers how to fold it into sharp corners, and where to stick it afterwards. That's Ok, though, because then they introduced the Tax File Number, which is a wannabe SSN -- you need it to earn an income (failure to provide a TFN is not illegal, but automatically results in you being taxed at 49.5%), to open a bank account, or just about anywhere else where you are using money in a non-trivial way.
The TFN was possible because we (the Australian population) had just fought furiously and won against a more draconian scheme, and were tired. Also, this almost slipped under the radar without comment, as the parliament rushed it through with very little debate, in the house or in public.
This may turn out to be another High Aim Tactic. Ask for something which is absolutely ridiculous, and let yourself be beaten back to what you wanted in the first place. Even if Ellison is serious (surely not...?) his overtures can -- and probably will -- be used by others with the same barrow to push.
The question is where to draw the line. How much freedom from surveillance do you want? Once you have figured that out, don't settle for one jot less! As soon as you rationalise that `I don't really need to be able to X' and bargain away the right to be able to do so, then you have just lost something precious which you will never get back.
Of course, things are rarely that simple, and some things are obviously stupid. (Such as, eg, `I demand the right to stockpile Anthrax spores'.) But the apparatchiks will use these examples to persuade you that the right to freely assemble, for example, is just too dangerous for you to have. It will not be put to you like that. It will be that some travel may have to be restricted, or that restrictions based on profiling [Hmm, you have travelled in the middle east, your family name is arabic, and you talk funny...] will be instituted `for the time being'.
If history teaches us anything, it is that `for the time being' can be translated `for the foreseeable future', and that just means `until it is no longer profitable to do so'.
Wasn't it a Founding Father who said `the Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance'?
You cannot patent artistic creations, mathematical models, plans, schemes or other purely mental processes.(emphasis in original)
And of course, as Turing showed, any computer program is equivalent to a mathematical model, ergo you cannot patent a program... QED.
Of course, this opinion is taken from freely available information (albeit direct from the source), and so may little to no relevance to what actually happens in the Real World.
Does not the rules for patenting an idea include the prerequisites that the idea or contraption be
Original (no prior art)
Not obvious to one skilled in the field
Of course, the patent system doesn't always actually check a patent application for what it means, as this, as was seen at the Ignobel Prize Awards in the Technology section.
Experian enables organizations to find the best prospects and make fast, informed decisions to improve and personalize relationships with their customers. It does this by combining
sophisticated and intelligent decision-making software and systems with some of the world's most comprehensive databases of information on consumers, businesses, motor vehicles
and property...
Translation:
Experian knows who you are.
Experian knows where you are.
Experian knows what you buy.
Experian will sell this information to anyone who wants it.
Experian wants you to be bombarded^H^H^H^H^H^H exposed to those advertisements which will be most suitable - or failing that, all of them.
and from the rest of the article:
Anyone who thinks they have a right to protect themselves from our 'services' is gravely mistaken.
Anyone who thinks they have a right to provide protection from our 'services' is gravely mistaken, and will be sued.
Resistance is futile.
As far as I read this, it seems that Experian is saying that it is illegal to even provide the option of opting out.
All this used to be guaranteed by an archaic organisation which existed as a collection of workers who organised themselves so as to gain greater bargaining power when dealing with the more powerful employers. They would make deals which set up such concepts as pay commensurate with work, compensation for unpleasant or onerous duties (such as overtime), and paid holidays, sick time, and vacation.
They were called Unions.
Whatever happened to them?
(I know that that last question is flamebait, but it has to be asked, if only for didactic reasons.)
The crusades were started by misunderstanding, politics and fanaticism, almost all on the European Christian side.
The rough sequence of events was:
The Persians and Turkish expansion reached the borders of Constantinople, whose inhabitants were Orthodox Christian, saw themselves as the last remnants of the Roman Empire in the east, and worried about the Turks for political, rather than religious reasons. They were not so worried about the religion of the army on their border, just that there was an army on their border
The Emperor of Byzantium in Constantinople sends a letter to the Catholic Pope, asking for help; one christian to another. At this time, the Frankish knights were known as the best cavalry in the world, and a hundred or so would have been very useful in repelling the Turkish army.
When this letter reaches the Pope, it is taken completely out of context, and it is assumed that the Turks are going to invade a christian country because it is christian, so as to forcibly convert or kill all christians. For this reason, and to stir up a wave of christian patriotism which would bolster his own political position, The Pope send word around the Franks to gather their forces and go to Constantinople to help.
Everyone is surprised when this call rouses even the peasants and serfs to move en masse to help. Instead of a hundred or so trained knights, thousands of untrained and fanatical masses swarm to the Black Sea.
When this swarm arrives at Constantinople (after a year or so), the Byzantines have since come to an arrangment with the Turks, and have absolutely no idea what to do with this new rabble army. In an attempt to stop them invading Constantinople themselves, the Byzantines ship them all over the river and say "Jerusalem is that way. Infidel Moslems live there. Go kill them."
The first Crusade changes tack from being the aid of Christians to the (re)conquering of the Holy Lands.
Wackiness ensues.
For the record, it was during the fourth crusade that the Franks and the Venetians invaded Constantinople and sacked it completely, signalling the beginning of the end of the Byzantine Empire.
Some other points:
The Moslems had a limited concept of Jihad from the Koran, and Mohammed's wars against local tribes. It was a strictly limited and controllable concept. It was not until the Franks invaded that they had to develop the concept of Jihad that we have today, mainly in self-defence.
The instability caused by the Crusades in the Islamic lands caused such political organisations as the Hashishim, who gave their name to the word `Assassin', and were the first terrorists.
Whose name will be remembered by your next door neighbour in 10 years: Mohandas Ghandi, or the guy who smashed the store window?
Be honest.
This seems a facetious argument - an apples and oranges comparison. How about these as pairs for comparison:
Lenin, or Trotsky
Josef Stalin, or any one of his opponents
Ayatollah Khomenei, or the Shah of Iran
George Dubbya, or Al Gore
People remember who won, because history is written by the winners.
>Unfortunately the only way to get on the news, and therefore raise the attention of the masses (either positively or negatively), is to act violently.
The IRA acts (or once acted, I don't remember anymore) violenty all the time. That's (or was) their mandate. So, when was the last time you either heard, or cared about them in America?
They, and their successors in idiocy, are on the news all the time here in Australia. Do not mistake your personal uninformedness for a general malaise.
Again, this is a matter of violence versus violence, on both sides. Both sides are still around, both sides are still fighting, and both sides have been successful. If it had not been for the Easter Rising and the nascent IRA, the modern state of Ireland would not exist.
Compare also Israel. The PLO (and Hammas, and the Islamic Jihad, and all the other gangs) and the Israeli army have been trading atrocities with each other for forty years. The reason most media coverage seems to favour the Israeli side is likely a result of Israel's status as a US client state (a theory expounded in great detail by Noam Chomsky). Both are acting as badly as each other, but if the PLO had not acted as it had, then the Palestinians and their sufferings would as forgotten as the Kurds. (Does anybody remember them? They are still being killed, by Iraq and by Turkey, by the way.)
Violence gets you on the news for a bit. Then the flame dies out and you are left with blood on your hands. Blood that all too often gets revenge, either physically, or on your conscience. It's one (metaphysically) poor ratio of cost vs. exposure.
Of course, continually escalating violence keeps you on the news. But how much violence is worth the cause? One store window? Ten? Beating up on the guy who is making the legislation? Death Threats? Blowing things up? Killing a person? 10 people? Destroying a city? A country?
The spilling of one drop of blood - literally - is far too much. But, when a stronger force is imposing force to bend a weaker force to its will, or to destroy and subjugate it, as in all the examples I have given above, if you do not resist you are essentially submitting. If you are not resisting, your actions are indistinguishable from assent. There are ways to do this without bloodshed and violence, but almost by definition, all effective methods of dissent are illegal. If they are not illegal, but they are tried and are proven effective, then expect them to be illegalised post haste. Even Gandhi was arrested.
A truely civilized society cannot, and will not, tolerate such behaviour -- even animals aren't capable of some of the atrocities that people do in the name of a cause.
This is absolutely true. It seems a pity, then, that we do not live in a civilised society. It seems even worse when you think that there has never been such a society in the history of humankind.
I hope the violent protestor spent some time doing community service thinking about what they've done, and what their actions can lead to.
Again, human nature intervenes in a beautiful plan. Lock someone up to think about what they have done, and they will instead spend all their time about how badly done-by they are, and how much they hate the people who locked them up.
Re:Random bits that are in Pi somewhere
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 1
Hmm. The more I think about this...
You are all correct in that you cannot put two infinite numbers end-to-end, because you will never reach the end of one to start the other, but you can interleave them.
If you can demonstrate a one-to-one correspondence between two sets, then the two sets are the same size. For every integer x, there is a square x*x, and an integer twice as big 2x, etc, etc. As there are an infinite number of integers, there are therefore also an infinite number of squares or even integers, and the number of these is precisely the same as there are of integers, even though they are obviously sub-sets of the integer set!
Are we boggled yet?
In other words, 2 * infinity is essentially meaningless, but infinity * 2 = infinity.
And you can continue by interleaving for as long as you like!
Remember also that the infinity referred to here is Aleph_0, but that Aleph_1 is infinitely bigger than Aleph_0, and that there are bigger infinities still... --------
I see no THERMONUCLEAR WARHEAD here.
You are at Y2.
Re:An Infinite Random Irrational Number
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 1
I would have thought that this would not be random because for the digits [1,3..6,8..0] there is a probability of 0.1 of their appearance, but a probability for '7' of 0.0, and a probability for '2' of 0.2.
Whether this measurable discontinuity would carry over when the fiddled pi is in other bases is another question entirely, and one for number theorists, not me. --------
I see no THERMONUCLEAR WARHEAD here.
You are at Y2.
Re:Random bits that are in Pi somewhere
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 1
Can pi appear in pi anywhere? I guess not, since that would mean that pi repeats. Could
e be in pi?
I would have said 'no', but then I remembered the story about how it is, in theory, possible to fit an infinite number of people into a hotel with an infinite number of rooms that were already full... (source?)
Could the same principle be used to justify squeezing one infinite length string of digits into another?
I wonder. (Common sense says that the concept is ridiculous, but as I have said before, when dealing with trans-finite numbers, check your common sense at the door.)
--------
I see no THERMONUCLEAR WARHEAD here.
You are at Y2.
An Infinite Random Irrational Number
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 1
If Pi is irrational, does that not imply that its fractional part is infinite and non-repeating in all bases? (Except possibly base pi...)
If Pi is infinitely long, non-repeating and random, then isn't the rule that any such number must contain all finite numbers... eventually?
But, by extrapolation, does this not imply that while pi may contain the complete source code to Office 2000, it also contains all possible incorrect versions, and it is impossible to know which one you have found. And it is impossible to know which base to look in. And it is impossible to know how far in it is. And, and, and,...
Essentially, if you find anything meaningful in pi (or e, or...), then it is a: accidental, and b: not actually meaningful.
The mathematics of trans-finite numbers will make your brain melt if you think about them long enough.
--------
I see no THERMONUCLEAR WARHEAD here.
You are at Y2.
Re:If they're supposed to have a lifespan of 25 ye
on
When A Cable Dies
·
· Score: 1
If they're supposed to have a lifespan of 25 years, then why is this newsworthy?
Maybe because this is the first cable to last as long as it was spec'ed to? How many other cables laid in 1976 are still operating? --------
I see no THERMONUCLEAR WARHEAD here.
Don't beat yourself up mate, Australia could be doing much worse than a valued ally of the USA. There are dozens of countries the world around that would trade places with Australia in a heartbeat.
Its a deal with the devil, and like all such arrangements it looks wonderful until you realise that you have sold your soul for trinkets.
Others may see that we have 'support' from the USA, and a relatively healthy western economy. What they don't see is that our 'support' lasts right up until the point where it is inconvenient for our masters^H^H^H^H^H^H valued partners, whereupon it is instantly dropped, but we are never allowed to question the dictates that come the other way. And they are dictates, make no mistake. What they don't see is that our economy was a lot healthier before we gave up England as our overlord and switched to Uncle Sam.
Being a 'valued ally' of the United States of America means that if you disagree with them, you are 'threatening that friendship'. Ask Noriega or Hussein what that means. If you show sufficient agreement, however, the rest of the world will dismiss your views - rightly - as a subservient echo.
It is a Faustian deal, and many Australians wish we had never made it.
____________ ''Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.''
Mephistopheles, Marlowe's Tragedy of Doctor Faustus
If you know the difference between Interpretive and Compiled, don't bother...
Fortran is a compiler, which turns commands into machine code once, rather than an interpreter like early BASIC, which has to interpret commands into machine code every time the program is run. These days BASIC (such as the dreaded M$ Visual Basic) can be compiled as well.
Interpretive languages made sense way back when for Teaching Languages. BASIC was never meant to be much, just a little playpen where it was easy to debug code, and most programs in BASIC weren't supposed to be much longer than a couple of dozen lines anyway. Unfortunately, the limitations were so irksome (essentially, you were running two programs at once, and one of them had to contain the other one...) that they were dropped.
Large programs (such as any Micro$oft Office component) can sometimes be improved with macros, and BASIC is used in these applications as a macro language.
Now that processing power has increased (as it will always tend to do), we have Java. Java is compiled into a pseudo-machine code, and then interpreted when it is run!
Plus ça change, plus ç'est la même chòse
(or however it is spelt in French... The more things change, the more they remain the same).
Without wanting to diminish Mr Martin's accomplishment in getting it right so long ago, a lot of people were making a lot of predictions. A lot of them were wrong. Mr Martin just happened to be right. That doesn't neccessarily mean much - someone had to be...
But if we succeed, he says, per capita income and individual net worth will soar around the globe. "It's like the child's story of Aladdin's lamp. We are the first generation that can work miracles. We've got the technology to make whatever we wish for."
Futurists, optimists and prognosticators have been saying things like this for hundreds of years. The argument works like this:
"We know more now than we used to. This trend is continuing. Therefore, we are just around the corner from Paradise"
The problem with this is that 'just around the corner' never seems to get any closer. Somehow, Human Nature always fscks it up.
What he is saying about the trends in AI are extrapolations which are more intelligent than your average extropian's, but he is not saying anything really new. AI researchers have suspected as much for a while now. But that doesn't mean that something entirely unexpected will make all bets off tomorrow.
Martin says your wallet will grow thin as programs like TrueFace recognize your unique appearance. Doors will open, cars will start. Pay phones, vending machines, and parking meters will automatically bill you.
And governments and big businesses will be able to track you wherever you go, if the whim takes them to. Same for Medical detectors.
He mentions that these new systems 'sound Orwellian', but are not really because there are no humans involved. But humans have to set the rules the AI works by...
My opinion: read, learn, think, but do not just accept. Think about what you want in your future, and think about the consequences of things. And never, ever assume that the most favourable assumptions are going to be correct.
Theoretically,.com and.org are universal and beyond national governments. Certainly you cannot predict from what country a domain originates when it is.com. Does anyone else remember the.us domain?
The US government snarfed the.mil and.gov domains when the Internet was still ARPANET, and they are not going to give them up, but it still seems to think that the entire Internet is its property, to manage or dispose of as it wishes.
It shouldn't need saying, but the United States is not the only country in the world. Its goverment is not the only government. Its goals are not the only goals.
Just maybe one or two people who are not United Statesians are getting a little upset that the US seems to treat the entire world as its private fief. This is just another example.
...easier to dip the line in acid or something to take away the outer layer and then just look at the light passing through that way so it wouldn't create any delay or loss?
Trouble is, this would itself degrade the signal by taking photons out of the signal stream.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't let you go there.
...unless you, the people, fight like grim death against it.
Here in Australia we had a proposal for the `Australia Card' -- basically the same as this proposal, only not as technologically sophisticated. It was put to the people's vote (referendum or an election issue? I don't remember) and the people's response was to tell the proposers how to fold it into sharp corners, and where to stick it afterwards. That's Ok, though, because then they introduced the Tax File Number, which is a wannabe SSN -- you need it to earn an income (failure to provide a TFN is not illegal, but automatically results in you being taxed at 49.5%), to open a bank account, or just about anywhere else where you are using money in a non-trivial way.
The TFN was possible because we (the Australian population) had just fought furiously and won against a more draconian scheme, and were tired. Also, this almost slipped under the radar without comment, as the parliament rushed it through with very little debate, in the house or in public.
This may turn out to be another High Aim Tactic. Ask for something which is absolutely ridiculous, and let yourself be beaten back to what you wanted in the first place. Even if Ellison is serious (surely not...?) his overtures can -- and probably will -- be used by others with the same barrow to push.
The question is where to draw the line. How much freedom from surveillance do you want? Once you have figured that out, don't settle for one jot less! As soon as you rationalise that `I don't really need to be able to X' and bargain away the right to be able to do so, then you have just lost something precious which you will never get back.
Of course, things are rarely that simple, and some things are obviously stupid. (Such as, eg, `I demand the right to stockpile Anthrax spores'.) But the apparatchiks will use these examples to persuade you that the right to freely assemble, for example, is just too dangerous for you to have. It will not be put to you like that. It will be that some travel may have to be restricted, or that restrictions based on profiling [Hmm, you have travelled in the middle east, your family name is arabic, and you talk funny...] will be instituted `for the time being'.
If history teaches us anything, it is that `for the time being' can be translated `for the foreseeable future', and that just means `until it is no longer profitable to do so'.
Wasn't it a Founding Father who said `the Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance'?
And of course, as Turing showed, any computer program is equivalent to a mathematical model, ergo you cannot patent a program
Of course, this opinion is taken from freely available information (albeit direct from the source), and so may little to no relevance to what actually happens in the Real World.
Does not the rules for patenting an idea include the prerequisites that the idea or contraption be
Of course, the patent system doesn't always actually check a patent application for what it means, as this, as was seen at the Ignobel Prize Awards in the Technology section.
Luke Skywalker as Christ...
The implications are staggering...
Translation:
and from the rest of the article:
As far as I read this, it seems that Experian is saying that it is illegal to even provide the option of opting out.
They were called Unions.
Whatever happened to them?
(I know that that last question is flamebait, but it has to be asked, if only for didactic reasons.)
The rough sequence of events was:
For the record, it was during the fourth crusade that the Franks and the Venetians invaded Constantinople and sacked it completely, signalling the beginning of the end of the Byzantine Empire.
Some other points:
Hmm. A bit more of a search around, and I found this.
Try Here for Geekcode. I don't know how many more recent versions there are, however.
This seems a facetious argument - an apples and oranges comparison. How about these as pairs for comparison:
Lenin, or Trotsky
Josef Stalin, or any one of his opponents
Ayatollah Khomenei, or the Shah of Iran
George Dubbya, or Al Gore
People remember who won, because history is written by the winners.
They, and their successors in idiocy, are on the news all the time here in Australia. Do not mistake your personal uninformedness for a general malaise.
Again, this is a matter of violence versus violence, on both sides. Both sides are still around, both sides are still fighting, and both sides have been successful. If it had not been for the Easter Rising and the nascent IRA, the modern state of Ireland would not exist.
Compare also Israel. The PLO (and Hammas, and the Islamic Jihad, and all the other gangs) and the Israeli army have been trading atrocities with each other for forty years. The reason most media coverage seems to favour the Israeli side is likely a result of Israel's status as a US client state (a theory expounded in great detail by Noam Chomsky). Both are acting as badly as each other, but if the PLO had not acted as it had, then the Palestinians and their sufferings would as forgotten as the Kurds. (Does anybody remember them? They are still being killed, by Iraq and by Turkey, by the way.)
The spilling of one drop of blood - literally - is far too much. But, when a stronger force is imposing force to bend a weaker force to its will, or to destroy and subjugate it, as in all the examples I have given above, if you do not resist you are essentially submitting. If you are not resisting, your actions are indistinguishable from assent. There are ways to do this without bloodshed and violence, but almost by definition, all effective methods of dissent are illegal. If they are not illegal, but they are tried and are proven effective, then expect them to be illegalised post haste. Even Gandhi was arrested.
This is absolutely true. It seems a pity, then, that we do not live in a civilised society. It seems even worse when you think that there has never been such a society in the history of humankind.
Again, human nature intervenes in a beautiful plan. Lock someone up to think about what they have done, and they will instead spend all their time about how badly done-by they are, and how much they hate the people who locked them up.
You are all correct in that you cannot put two infinite numbers end-to-end, because you will never reach the end of one to start the other, but you can interleave them.
If you can demonstrate a one-to-one correspondence between two sets, then the two sets are the same size. For every integer x, there is a square x*x, and an integer twice as big 2x, etc, etc. As there are an infinite number of integers, there are therefore also an infinite number of squares or even integers, and the number of these is precisely the same as there are of integers, even though they are obviously sub-sets of the integer set!
Are we boggled yet?
In other words, 2 * infinity is essentially meaningless, but infinity * 2 = infinity.
And you can continue by interleaving for as long as you like!
Remember also that the infinity referred to here is Aleph_0, but that Aleph_1 is infinitely bigger than Aleph_0, and that there are bigger infinities still...
--------
I see no THERMONUCLEAR WARHEAD here.
You are at Y2.
Whether this measurable discontinuity would carry over when the fiddled pi is in other bases is another question entirely, and one for number theorists, not me.
--------
I see no THERMONUCLEAR WARHEAD here.
You are at Y2.
I would have said 'no', but then I remembered the story about how it is, in theory, possible to fit an infinite number of people into a hotel with an infinite number of rooms that were already full... (source?)
Could the same principle be used to justify squeezing one infinite length string of digits into another?
I wonder. (Common sense says that the concept is ridiculous, but as I have said before, when dealing with trans-finite numbers, check your common sense at the door.)
--------
I see no THERMONUCLEAR WARHEAD here.
You are at Y2.
If Pi is infinitely long, non-repeating and random, then isn't the rule that any such number must contain all finite numbers ... eventually?
But, by extrapolation, does this not imply that while pi may contain the complete source code to Office 2000, it also contains all possible incorrect versions, and it is impossible to know which one you have found. And it is impossible to know which base to look in. And it is impossible to know how far in it is. And, and, and,...
Essentially, if you find anything meaningful in pi (or e, or ...), then it is a: accidental, and b: not actually meaningful.
The mathematics of trans-finite numbers will make your brain melt if you think about them long enough.
--------
I see no THERMONUCLEAR WARHEAD here.
You are at Y2.
Maybe because this is the first cable to last as long as it was spec'ed to? How many other cables laid in 1976 are still operating?
--------
I see no THERMONUCLEAR WARHEAD here.
You are at Y2.
Its a deal with the devil, and like all such arrangements it looks wonderful until you realise that you have sold your soul for trinkets.
Others may see that we have 'support' from the USA, and a relatively healthy western economy. What they don't see is that our 'support' lasts right up until the point where it is inconvenient for our masters^H^H^H^H^H^H valued partners, whereupon it is instantly dropped, but we are never allowed to question the dictates that come the other way. And they are dictates, make no mistake. What they don't see is that our economy was a lot healthier before we gave up England as our overlord and switched to Uncle Sam.
Being a 'valued ally' of the United States of America means that if you disagree with them, you are 'threatening that friendship'. Ask Noriega or Hussein what that means. If you show sufficient agreement, however, the rest of the world will dismiss your views - rightly - as a subservient echo.
It is a Faustian deal, and many Australians wish we had never made it.
____________
''Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.''
Mephistopheles, Marlowe's Tragedy of Doctor Faustus
Fortran is a compiler, which turns commands into machine code once, rather than an interpreter like early BASIC, which has to interpret commands into machine code every time the program is run. These days BASIC (such as the dreaded M$ Visual Basic) can be compiled as well.
Interpretive languages made sense way back when for Teaching Languages. BASIC was never meant to be much, just a little playpen where it was easy to debug code, and most programs in BASIC weren't supposed to be much longer than a couple of dozen lines anyway. Unfortunately, the limitations were so irksome (essentially, you were running two programs at once, and one of them had to contain the other one...) that they were dropped.
Large programs (such as any Micro$oft Office component) can sometimes be improved with macros, and BASIC is used in these applications as a macro language.
Now that processing power has increased (as it will always tend to do), we have Java. Java is compiled into a pseudo-machine code, and then interpreted when it is run!
Plus ça change, plus ç'est la même chòse (or however it is spelt in French... The more things change, the more they remain the same).
The weather forecasting models used by the CSIRO in Australia are (as far as I know) mostly still coded in Fortran. Let no-one say it is dead yet...
...at least until they become incovenient and I can then happily change them at whim, or ignore them and pretend they never happened.
But if anyone else breaks those rules and disadvantages me...
"We know more now than we used to. This trend is continuing. Therefore, we are just around the corner from Paradise"
The problem with this is that 'just around the corner' never seems to get any closer. Somehow, Human Nature always fscks it up.
What he is saying about the trends in AI are extrapolations which are more intelligent than your average extropian's, but he is not saying anything really new. AI researchers have suspected as much for a while now. But that doesn't mean that something entirely unexpected will make all bets off tomorrow.
And governments and big businesses will be able to track you wherever you go, if the whim takes them to. Same for Medical detectors.He mentions that these new systems 'sound Orwellian', but are not really because there are no humans involved. But humans have to set the rules the AI works by...
My opinion: read, learn, think, but do not just accept. Think about what you want in your future, and think about the consequences of things. And never, ever assume that the most favourable assumptions are going to be correct.
Repeat after me: The Internet is not just in the USA!
We in the Rest Of The World sometimes resent being subject to the USA DoC.
I seem to remember hearing some talk once about 'Taxation without representation'... Nah. Must have imagined it.
We Australians seemed to go from Rule Britannia to The Star Spangled Banner without a pause for breath!
granted by the government...
Whose government?
Theoretically, .com and .org are universal and beyond national governments. Certainly you cannot predict from what country a domain originates when it is .com. Does anyone else remember the .us domain?
The US government snarfed the .mil and .gov domains when the Internet was still ARPANET, and they are not going to give them up, but it still seems to think that the entire Internet is its property, to manage or dispose of as it wishes.
It shouldn't need saying, but the United States is not the only country in the world. Its goverment is not the only government. Its goals are not the only goals.
Just maybe one or two people who are not United Statesians are getting a little upset that the US seems to treat the entire world as its private fief. This is just another example.
Sorry. I'll shut up now.