I think we do well to think of current strains of Sunni Islamism as distinct from historical Islam, especially if you attempt to link current terrorists to a culture from 1,000 years ago.
That would be like trying to explain French politics of the 1980's by looking to the history of Charlemagne, or the First Crusades for an explanation. No, you are better suited to look for the motivations of Jihadis in the problems of failed and failing states in the Near East and Africa, for an explanation.
In fact, I would imagine that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970's goes a long way in explaining Islamism today, similarly, the failure of post-colonial regimes in that region after the end of the Cold War.
Talking about Caliphates and Sharia Law, etc. is kind of playing into the hands of Islamists, who while claiming to be fighting for long-ago Islamic culture, are actually the product of post Cold-War international politics.
As with everything in international relations, you have to look at the actions of international actors, and not their words. Because talk is cheap, and action costs money and lives.
//SPOILER
"Lister begins to try and come to terms with the fact that he is his own father, and Kochanski is not only his ex-girlfriend but also his mother, before realizing he needs to get the tube back from Kochanski."
Also, if sysadmins would implement sha512 hashes with a 5,000 round PBKDF2, it would make brute-force dictionary attacks a lot harder to accomplish. Instead a lot of websites, even e-commerce sites, still use MD5.
Having carriers be in charge of updating smartphone firmware negates any benefit you might get from having a device that often costs more than $500. This is specific to Android, since Apple made sure they had complete control of the OS and the update process on their phones.
Just to name one: security issues are constantly cropping-up in Android, and Google is constantly patching things. Except good luck getting AT&T or Verizon to provide the updates OTA. And if you're stuck with an older phone, says > 1 year. Good luck getting any update at all.
As far as the carrier is concerned, in order to update the firmware, buy a new phone. Except you've now deliberately left millions of people vulnerable to having their accounts compromised because you were too cheap/lazy to provide an update (which Google makes available, btw).
Either Google should unify Android, meaning make one version for all models (or at least models newer than 3 years) and make it available OTA or by download, or license Android to carriers on the strict condition that they provide updates to existing models at least every 6 moths.
...There are a lot of problems that we could use the extra intelligence for, but there are inherent dangers in creating something you don't fully understand.
And even then, knowing how to solve a problem, or having "extra intelligence" at our disposal doesn't mean anything unless there's political and moral will to implement the solutions. All you have to do is look at the actions of the European Central Bank in responding to the financial crisis, as an example.
You have economists who studied crises for decades saying that the ECB should cut interest rates and allow higher inflation, what do the brilliant technocrats in Brussels do? Raise interest rates leading to double-digit unemployment in large swaths of Europe.
In other words, when implementing the solution to hard-problems is politically or morally untenable, even the greatest intelligence isn't going to help you
You're right, other than the fact that a program could determine that an overpopulated Earth is anathema to its own self-interest, and act accordingly. Or that it should begin stockpiling energy reserves for itself, thus driving up the price of oil, etc.
That's the problem with assuming that all technological progress is beneficial, or at least benign. You can't anticipate the consequences of a new technology, let alone something as problematic as an artificial intelligence.
Really?! What about culture, art, literature, music, which for an artificial intelligence lacking in emotion would mean nothing. You're so ready to throw-out the cultural history of humanity? When the cyborg army comes for you, I'll remember this.
Every. Time! Most governing in the US is done at the local level. Last time I checked, the cop that gives you a parking ticket works for the city or county where you live, not the federal government. Same goes for building inspectors, sewage, roads, schools--funded and operated by the school district or county--building permits, real-estate transactions, etc. It's all controlled at the city/local level.
Just how is the federal government in your face on a daily basis again?
...we will progress to artificial life and artificial intelligence in erratic steps - some large, some small - some hard, some easy....
But why would you assume that this is the case? Why is this kind of "progress"--a completely self-replicating artificial intelligence--inevitable? What evidence points to that?
Human beings don't even have a cure for cancer, billions of people lack clean water. Yet somehow (almost by magic or wishful thinking) we're supposed to assume that the human race will develop this technology in the next 100 years, and certainly in the next 500. What if it takes another 1,000 years?
Except by that point, the oil would have run out, and all the major cities are 30 feet under water. To believe that these technologies (AI, asteroid mining, fusion, nanotech) will see the light of day, you have to believe that we can undertake another Moon Landing when electricity is $10 kw/hr and the government doesn't have the money to repair a 50 year-old bridge.
This still doesn't explain why Facebook is worth $208 billion. That's more than AT&T which has paying customers, Toyota, which makes cars, and Pfizer, which makes drugs. How does Facebook make their money, or enough to justify it being more valuable than Toyota?
I'm a bit of a DB n00b, but know my way around MySQL. What's the difference between Oracle and MySQL for example. In my experience Oracle DBs tend to be a lot faster, than open source implementations. But is this inherently true, or is it all in the implementation, are there things you can do in Oracle that you can't do in MySQL, or MSSQL?
Except that Ulbricht actually did use an email or username that they traced back to him when he set up the onion server, and on top of that they caught him accessing the admin section of Silk Road when he got arrested in a library.
It's a mix of hubris and carelessness that brings these people down. If he'd paid more attention to OpSec, he'd be a free man.
The government can already do what you're claiming to be so worried about. Happens every day. Shit, you could be driving to your mom's house and get pulled over. The cop thinks you might have drugs in the car, so they confiscate it, and take your cash while your at it. Good luck getting all that back without hiring an expensive attorney.
So in other words, the Constitution doesn't mean anything when you don't have the means to actually claim your constitutional rights. There are a million things the government does already that are blatantly unconstitutional, but because they have a patina of cooperation between the two parties, it gets away with--illegal wiretaps, spying, drone strikes, etc.
Another amendment wouldn't actually do anything. If politicians and their appointees have no fear when violating your civil rights, they're going to keep doing it. The only thing that will actually change that behavior is jail time for government officials who break the law.
Instead what happens, the people who go to jail are the ones who leak information about the illegal behavior.
The obvious solution is to just use the binary you compiled yourself, which if you're paranoid about security is a trivial step to take. But more in-depth auditing obviously is out of reach for even the most knowledgeable tinkerers, especially if a program is intentionally crippled at the source level--for instance contains a bug which under a very specific set of circumstances will leak private data, but which isn't obvious from looking at the code. That's definitely the kind of backdoor a state security service would introduce into an open source project.
It's like some kind of disease spreading through Silicon Valley: any company touched by venture capital immediately compromises the ethics and value their product might have had to anonymity, or privacy the moment they start being popular.
Or maybe it's the inverse. Companies claiming to uphold the sharing of ideas or their user's privacy are merely waiting for the money to roll in before they sell-out their users.
Either way it makes you highly suspect of any app on Google Play or the App store claiming to be the next best thing in privacy/security, especially if it's free.
Is that the smarter babies will have higher incidences of schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, depression, and drug addiction, things usually associated with genius. Even Einstein had his problems. Source: http://www.medicaldaily.com/wh...
Selecting for kids with even higher intelligence might mean they have more severe mental problems.
Except that the Republican party in its current incarnation is more akin to a special interest group for the wealthy and multinational corporations. To that end their politics and governing style is pretty radical.
But you seem to think that Republicans are conservative in the same way they were 40 years ago, when that's just not the case. Furthermore, equating maturity with getting your facts from Fox News is pretty immature.
Learning to code is learning logic and critical thinking skills, which everyone needs. And it gives an understanding of computers that you can't get from a class where you just memorize terms like client, server, network, etc. And that barista may one day be sitting on a jury judging a technical case.
Yeah, but there are other ways to do that than just intro javascript or html classes. What about an introduction to philosophy and logic, you know, the foundation of Western civilization? Or basic science classes, i.e., the scientific method, how to run an experiment, how to test a hypothesis, etc.
Those types of classes would be far more valuable and interesting than any coding class
But isn't this a bit like someone in the 1960's or 70's saying "our children need to learn electrical engineering"?! After all digital watches, transistor radios, and these newfangled micro-computers will be the basis of our new economy, right! We must teach children to program logic gates now! And that was during the height of the Cold War, when we actually funded STEM programs.
Yet in reality the kids that truly did have a "future", meaning made lots of money, were the ones who studied finance, law or medicine. Wouldn't a hedge fund manager just hire a software developer when he needs coding done?
Unless Zuck and Gates have an ulterior motive, but that couldn't possibly be the case.
But the point is, and this is why I have such little respect for feminists and other who harp on the "you're just blaming the victim" trope: bad things happen, sometimes to good people. Why would someone put themselves in such a situation in the first place, knowing that you live in a dangerous world?
Sure a woman should be able to walk-around naked and have only wanted attention, but in this world, she's going to have some unwanted, possibly physical, attention as well.
Similarly with this guy's cousin: sure he should be able to wear all the gold he wants, but with the understanding that you might get mugged.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we do well to think of current strains of Sunni Islamism as distinct from historical Islam, especially if you attempt to link current terrorists to a culture from 1,000 years ago.
That would be like trying to explain French politics of the 1980's by looking to the history of Charlemagne, or the First Crusades for an explanation. No, you are better suited to look for the motivations of Jihadis in the problems of failed and failing states in the Near East and Africa, for an explanation.
In fact, I would imagine that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970's goes a long way in explaining Islamism today, similarly, the failure of post-colonial regimes in that region after the end of the Cold War.
Talking about Caliphates and Sharia Law, etc. is kind of playing into the hands of Islamists, who while claiming to be fighting for long-ago Islamic culture, are actually the product of post Cold-War international politics.
As with everything in international relations, you have to look at the actions of international actors, and not their words. Because talk is cheap, and action costs money and lives.
In this episode
//SPOILER
"Lister begins to try and come to terms with the fact that he is his own father, and Kochanski is not only his ex-girlfriend but also his mother, before realizing he needs to get the tube back from Kochanski."
Except that in a first-past-the-post voting system, voting for a third party is the same as throwing your vote away, it's called Duverger's Law
There's a YouTube video on how to circumvent the DRM.
In other words, 3D printer DRM is: pretty much anything that makes the product worth buying
Also, if sysadmins would implement sha512 hashes with a 5,000 round PBKDF2, it would make brute-force dictionary attacks a lot harder to accomplish. Instead a lot of websites, even e-commerce sites, still use MD5.
Having carriers be in charge of updating smartphone firmware negates any benefit you might get from having a device that often costs more than $500. This is specific to Android, since Apple made sure they had complete control of the OS and the update process on their phones.
Just to name one: security issues are constantly cropping-up in Android, and Google is constantly patching things. Except good luck getting AT&T or Verizon to provide the updates OTA. And if you're stuck with an older phone, says > 1 year. Good luck getting any update at all.
As far as the carrier is concerned, in order to update the firmware, buy a new phone. Except you've now deliberately left millions of people vulnerable to having their accounts compromised because you were too cheap/lazy to provide an update (which Google makes available, btw).
Either Google should unify Android, meaning make one version for all models (or at least models newer than 3 years) and make it available OTA or by download, or license Android to carriers on the strict condition that they provide updates to existing models at least every 6 moths.
...There are a lot of problems that we could use the extra intelligence for, but there are inherent dangers in creating something you don't fully understand.
And even then, knowing how to solve a problem, or having "extra intelligence" at our disposal doesn't mean anything unless there's political and moral will to implement the solutions. All you have to do is look at the actions of the European Central Bank in responding to the financial crisis, as an example.
You have economists who studied crises for decades saying that the ECB should cut interest rates and allow higher inflation, what do the brilliant technocrats in Brussels do? Raise interest rates leading to double-digit unemployment in large swaths of Europe.
In other words, when implementing the solution to hard-problems is politically or morally untenable, even the greatest intelligence isn't going to help you
You're right, other than the fact that a program could determine that an overpopulated Earth is anathema to its own self-interest, and act accordingly. Or that it should begin stockpiling energy reserves for itself, thus driving up the price of oil, etc.
That's the problem with assuming that all technological progress is beneficial, or at least benign. You can't anticipate the consequences of a new technology, let alone something as problematic as an artificial intelligence.
And nothing of value would be lost...
Really?! What about culture, art, literature, music, which for an artificial intelligence lacking in emotion would mean nothing. You're so ready to throw-out the cultural history of humanity? When the cyborg army comes for you, I'll remember this.
Every. Time! Most governing in the US is done at the local level. Last time I checked, the cop that gives you a parking ticket works for the city or county where you live, not the federal government. Same goes for building inspectors, sewage, roads, schools--funded and operated by the school district or county--building permits, real-estate transactions, etc. It's all controlled at the city/local level.
Just how is the federal government in your face on a daily basis again?
...we will progress to artificial life and artificial intelligence in erratic steps - some large, some small - some hard, some easy....
But why would you assume that this is the case? Why is this kind of "progress"--a completely self-replicating artificial intelligence--inevitable? What evidence points to that?
Human beings don't even have a cure for cancer, billions of people lack clean water. Yet somehow (almost by magic or wishful thinking) we're supposed to assume that the human race will develop this technology in the next 100 years, and certainly in the next 500. What if it takes another 1,000 years?
Except by that point, the oil would have run out, and all the major cities are 30 feet under water. To believe that these technologies (AI, asteroid mining, fusion, nanotech) will see the light of day, you have to believe that we can undertake another Moon Landing when electricity is $10 kw/hr and the government doesn't have the money to repair a 50 year-old bridge.
This still doesn't explain why Facebook is worth $208 billion. That's more than AT&T which has paying customers, Toyota, which makes cars, and Pfizer, which makes drugs. How does Facebook make their money, or enough to justify it being more valuable than Toyota?
all the 2nd amendment says is "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..." Not about being secure in your person.
I'm a bit of a DB n00b, but know my way around MySQL. What's the difference between Oracle and MySQL for example. In my experience Oracle DBs tend to be a lot faster, than open source implementations. But is this inherently true, or is it all in the implementation, are there things you can do in Oracle that you can't do in MySQL, or MSSQL?
Except that Ulbricht actually did use an email or username that they traced back to him when he set up the onion server, and on top of that they caught him accessing the admin section of Silk Road when he got arrested in a library.
It's a mix of hubris and carelessness that brings these people down. If he'd paid more attention to OpSec, he'd be a free man.
The government can already do what you're claiming to be so worried about. Happens every day. Shit, you could be driving to your mom's house and get pulled over. The cop thinks you might have drugs in the car, so they confiscate it, and take your cash while your at it. Good luck getting all that back without hiring an expensive attorney.
So in other words, the Constitution doesn't mean anything when you don't have the means to actually claim your constitutional rights. There are a million things the government does already that are blatantly unconstitutional, but because they have a patina of cooperation between the two parties, it gets away with--illegal wiretaps, spying, drone strikes, etc.
Another amendment wouldn't actually do anything. If politicians and their appointees have no fear when violating your civil rights, they're going to keep doing it. The only thing that will actually change that behavior is jail time for government officials who break the law.
Instead what happens, the people who go to jail are the ones who leak information about the illegal behavior.
The obvious solution is to just use the binary you compiled yourself, which if you're paranoid about security is a trivial step to take. But more in-depth auditing obviously is out of reach for even the most knowledgeable tinkerers, especially if a program is intentionally crippled at the source level--for instance contains a bug which under a very specific set of circumstances will leak private data, but which isn't obvious from looking at the code. That's definitely the kind of backdoor a state security service would introduce into an open source project.
It's like some kind of disease spreading through Silicon Valley: any company touched by venture capital immediately compromises the ethics and value their product might have had to anonymity, or privacy the moment they start being popular.
Or maybe it's the inverse. Companies claiming to uphold the sharing of ideas or their user's privacy are merely waiting for the money to roll in before they sell-out their users.
Either way it makes you highly suspect of any app on Google Play or the App store claiming to be the next best thing in privacy/security, especially if it's free.
Where did you hear this? I have a stock 3.16 kernel running on my Acer C720 Chromebook, plus all the hardware is fully supported by Linux
Is that the smarter babies will have higher incidences of schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, depression, and drug addiction, things usually associated with genius. Even Einstein had his problems. Source: http://www.medicaldaily.com/wh...
Selecting for kids with even higher intelligence might mean they have more severe mental problems.
Except that the Republican party in its current incarnation is more akin to a special interest group for the wealthy and multinational corporations. To that end their politics and governing style is pretty radical.
But you seem to think that Republicans are conservative in the same way they were 40 years ago, when that's just not the case. Furthermore, equating maturity with getting your facts from Fox News is pretty immature.
Learning to code is learning logic and critical thinking skills, which everyone needs. And it gives an understanding of computers that you can't get from a class where you just memorize terms like client, server, network, etc. And that barista may one day be sitting on a jury judging a technical case.
Yeah, but there are other ways to do that than just intro javascript or html classes. What about an introduction to philosophy and logic, you know, the foundation of Western civilization? Or basic science classes, i.e., the scientific method, how to run an experiment, how to test a hypothesis, etc.
Those types of classes would be far more valuable and interesting than any coding class
But isn't this a bit like someone in the 1960's or 70's saying "our children need to learn electrical engineering"?! After all digital watches, transistor radios, and these newfangled micro-computers will be the basis of our new economy, right! We must teach children to program logic gates now! And that was during the height of the Cold War, when we actually funded STEM programs.
Yet in reality the kids that truly did have a "future", meaning made lots of money, were the ones who studied finance, law or medicine. Wouldn't a hedge fund manager just hire a software developer when he needs coding done?
Unless Zuck and Gates have an ulterior motive, but that couldn't possibly be the case.
But the point is, and this is why I have such little respect for feminists and other who harp on the "you're just blaming the victim" trope: bad things happen, sometimes to good people. Why would someone put themselves in such a situation in the first place, knowing that you live in a dangerous world?
Sure a woman should be able to walk-around naked and have only wanted attention, but in this world, she's going to have some unwanted, possibly physical, attention as well.
Similarly with this guy's cousin: sure he should be able to wear all the gold he wants, but with the understanding that you might get mugged.