Here's an idea. Instead of the current typical 200amp service, everybody gets a 20amp service that is "always on", and a 200 amp service that's subject to rolling blackouts.
I like this suggestion in principle, though some refinement is probably in order.
Here are a few issues that occurred to me:
I have to believe there could come cases where someone was doing some important thing on an emergency
basis and didn't get the power to do it. If they'd been ordinarily conservative, and if the system knew that,
I could see allowing an exception. So perhaps a bank of credits for conserving energy overall
would be good. This is why, by the way, people have suggested just using money as the basis tends to do the
right thing.
I also worry with your proposal about the issue of what constitutes a location that would be entitled to this
fixed item. Having it be people-based would almost be better than having it be location-based. If I have a
house that has 10 people living in it, would I not need ten people worth of A/C or are we expected to huddle in
one room? If someone has a mansion that can house 100 but has only one person in it, how much does that get?
If a person can classify part or all of their house as an office, can they exclude themselves from the limit?
Or do they get separate allocations of dedicated power for their home and their office?
Gerrymandering the
way the required energy is divvied up sounds like a task in itself.
That doesn't mean the plan is unworkable. But it may not be as simple or as uncontroversial as it sounds
at first blush. Alas. That's probably the main reason people point to the option of using money to mediate the decision--it allows everyone to spend their money in different ways, and at different times. But to the extent that there is some life-support threshold below which perhaps we should say one can't go, this still has some merit.
Can you imagine what would happen, either locally or world wide, if there is a real shortage of fuel? And prices go up to $30 per gallon or worse? Electricity would costs $2.50 per kwh? OK, this will not happen not today, but it could be the case in 40 years. Than you would think more than twice to even switch on your AC... Some poorer people would not even be able to pay for warming up a meal. Do you know what these people are going to do? I do not want to find out...
I would liken the issue to the the draft. (No, not the one coming in the window when the A/C is not working.)
Back when we had a mandatory draft, we all, as a society, cared whether we went to war.
But once we had a voluntary draft, many in the Elite don't have to care, at least not in the same way: It won't be their
kids. And though they pay lip service to the notion that it's a hard choice, that choice isn't felt
by them in the way it is by others.
It's below their radar. And they can indulge the illusion that the only reason people join the
military is that they want to. The idea that they cannot afford to is foreign to them.
This moves toward a two-tier society of haves and havenots,
because one can afford to just not care about the human cost.
In the case of energy, the risk of a blackout affects us all. So it's a reason to build more infrastructure.
But once the system is "managed" and society has been divvied up into groups who "of course must have power" and "of course must not" in order for the Greater Good to be served, the question of whether to have more
infrastructure becomes much more questionable since it is more distant to the decision-makers. I somehow doubt
that politicians will have their thermostats going down--what about the foreign dignitaries that might be visiting? Can't inconvenience them. And we'll find that rich people no longer live in "homes", they live in "free-standing buildings that happen to have home-like amenities", or some other dodge that regular people can't figure out... Like the way tax loopholes work. They will also be distanced.
It also becomes like the way we expect a better health care system from a Congress that has its own health care
plan that is better than everyone else's. The day Congress is required by law to have the worst health care of any US citizen is the day that health care will be really reformed. The day that going to war means the people who decided it have their kids yanked out of wherever they are and put on the front lines of the first ground force with handheld weapons entering the war, that's the day we'll know when a war is justified. And this plan for thermostat control, I assume it will have similar issues awaiting similar fixes that will never come.
What it is to be a society, at some level, is to all be in the same game. This proposal sounds like it makes everyone the same, but the nature of the dodges will not be apparent and the nature of the risks will be manageable by some and not by others. Power outages are more harsh, but they are also more truthful. They serve as a reminder that something is amiss. Making them less visible is not a certain recipe for making this
country better, since the sluggish nature of democracy makes it react only to things that are easily articulated. And this would make it all blurry and disputable, dissipating political energy that might otherwise be better used.
In the end, if global warming ever does take hold, the thermostat may be the absolute only thing in the entire house that
anyone wants to burn energy on, so it can't be a solution.
The solution expressed by caitriona81 in a related post seems more like it's on the right track.
Even if such a system did exist, it would be utterly useless due to the number of false positives it would produce.
Well, indeed. It's not clear what "positive" and "negative" mean in this context.
How would you measure success? The problem is that there are so many presuppositions here
that it's hard to know what the agenda is, or what the metric of success is.
From the article:
"When someone lies or tries to be deceptive,... there are behavior cues that show it.... A brief flash of fear."
We are to take this as fact.
But what if the trained terrorist does not in fact show fear because they are
comfortable with their training? We are led to believe not only that this technique is
professional but that the techniques of the passengers are amateurish.
Also, suppose it comes down to taking some sort of action. Suppose these
techniques reveal something but the searches reveal nothing. Will it stop here?
If someone is arrested, on what authority will it be?
Something like The Minority Report?
The problem is that this can't just be a technique in isolation.
It will have to become a matter of law if it is to be usefully prosecuted.
What will be the nature of the crime? The evidence that can be examined and challenged?
Who is the accuser? What law is broken?
Another commenter (timon) made an excellent reference to 1984. In that regard,
I wonder not only the question of what the crime will be
but what the punishment. When it becomes impossible to show useful evidence of a suspicion, the
only tool of prosecution perhaps becomes making someone an unpassenger.
I would hope we would have some minimal requirements that such "special screening" unto which people
were ushered were open to public view, but why do I assume that the next suggestion will be that
it's too dangerous to allow that, and that a nice place, comfortably out of sight and mind
of the rest of us is next... Or perhaps an alternate flight--say, to Guantanamo.
From the summary:
"E-mail growth accounts for much of that figure."
We're archiving spam?
Ignoring even the spam issue, there's also the issue that Outlook
encourages people to include the previous message in its entirety,
causing an O(n^2) effect for legitimate message chains; that is, every
message in a conversation tends to include all previous messages.
This not only increases archival size, but it also
causes mailboxes to approach
their seemingly arbitrary upper bound on mailbox size
much more rapidly than seems necessary.
It's a good example of how a single bad design decision can have
amazingly multiplied consequences. If nothing else,
you'd think Microsoft and other tools for managing email could explore
having better tools for noticing and offering to remove the redundancy.
Let's see here... If the company does poorly, you pay big bucks to bring in new hotshot execs. If the company does well, you pay them well to reward their results. It's quite a racket!
Actually, in some cases the problem can be that when you have a company that is losing money, it's hard to incentivize people to come aboard or stay aboard. If a company isn't making money, no one wants the blame for that. And that's understandable.
It's one thing to try to hire a company that's going down the tubes and tell the person you're hiring "look, I don't expect you to fix everything, but please don't make it worse and preferrably make it a lot better". It might be quite appropriate to have someone turn a company that's losing a billion dollars and bring it to something that is only losing a hundred million and to reward them handsomely for that transition. That is a positive thing. Not every turnaround works instantly and people can sometimes only do so much.
But this doesn't appear to be such a case. I only have the information in the article to go on, but from what it says, it sounds like
the problem is that the person who's giving out the bonuses is afraid to work with any other team
than the one he personally picked to get him into the mess.
At that point, someone with higher authority--the stockholders if need be--should be saying, "It sounds like an over-reliance on friendship, rather than good solid business process, got you into this mess. I don't think friendship is what's going to get you out."
Also, the notion that this should be a retention bonus (for merely being there after n years) rather than a merit bonus (for having caused a particular effect) is quite suspect.
Especially if the desire to fire for non-performance is as low as it apparently is.
You know, it's hard to know from one article--sometimes these articles can paint the truth a fair amount and might be just getting scapegoated. I can't tell and don't mean to be opining on the truth of who did what, only to be commenting on what to do about the situation assuming the account of the facts is accurate. However, with that said...
If these guys were really the ones who came up with the plan that drove things down
the tubes maybe they should just offer them the chance to work for zero dollars trying
to fix the problem and to only be paid at all if they turned the entire operation around within a certain time. It's not like anyone's going to be racing to hire up these guys. What's going to be on their resume? "Got Circuit City into a big mess, then bailed." They should be thrilled at the opportunity to get their name out of the gutter. Why should they need a million dollars as incentive to continue?
Or maybe the company just plans to hold them around until almost that time, and then
callously "let them go" just before their retention bonus time. (I've had that happen to
me before, with stock options, and I didn't get a pro-rated amount. That never seemed right. But business is often cold. And maybe that's why they're phrased it as a retention plan.)
My first thought was that if we personalized computers more, perhaps we wouldn't waste
as many of them. We have become very much a disposable society, in which the strangest
part of this is that anyone bats an eye about the loss of a computer. Yet I remember
when we used to mourn the passing of many of them. A lot of our waste problem in the
world is caused by our willingness to assume that disposing of something does not require
ceremony and can be done as casually as exhaling a breath of air... except no one is recycling the air and it's getting a little stuffy in here.
It's one reason people have big weddings... to make it so expensive that you think twice
before throwing it away on a mere argument. If throwing away a machine were more expensive, maybe we'd think twice about doing it... or better still, about buying one in the first place.
Yes, it would hold back progess. But where is progress leading us right now? With luck, we'll have computers powerful enough to solve the problems we created by having computers. And without luck, we may poison our world and all die.
Ah, yes, the smell of progress is all around us.
We can ask the staff to be less friendly and visible or the reverse.
They have the ability to just ask waitstaff to be more friendly or visible and thereby cause it to just happen???
Forget the rest of the research, this one technique is wholly unknown to and long sought by restaurants
everywhere. They should just publish how they manage that trick and call it a day!
I had a.com domain name relevant only to me, no legal trademark, registered and hosted at a provider that went bust. When attempting to re-host the domain I discovered,...
This account seems somehow wrong. Did you leave out some material information from the story?
Did this happen to you on a yearly boundary? If not, and if you had a registration on the domain
that was good for a year, why couldn't you just go to another domain provider and identify yourself
for a transfer? Was the account in good standing? Am I confused, or is this information not a matter of public record that extends
beyond the end of your term of registration? Is the registrar at which you bought it the only source
of record for such information? That would sound terribly dangerous as a single-point-of-failure for
the web in the case of any kind of disaster, much less bankruptcy.
Additionally, did you get no notice? Did you just come in one day and find that your domain no longer
responded and that all domains at that registrar were up for grabs? If so, that again seems very weird.
I thought a bankruptcy required some court intervention at least for the purpose of asset divvying, and
the notion that the registered domains were not an asset that required deliberative action seems odd to
me. Possible, certainly--I'm not a lawyer and don't know the process. But odd nevertheless.
Did you act at the moment of the bankruptcy--or did you wait? That is, was your problem the result of
the bankruptcy or your failure to act quickly? I realize these issues are probably sad and embarrassing,
and I'm not meaning to rub salt in a wound. But Slashdot articles inform people about how the world works,
and in exchange for the attention and good advice you offer, I think it's good to offer a complete accounting of the story.
Are you sure you're not leaving out some information? Perhaps the left-out information is not relevant
to the question you were asking, but implicit in the question you were asking is alerting people to
something that might happen to them. And I'd like to understand better the process by which this could
happen to someone else so that we all, as a community, might understand if there's a process issue that
needs fixing to assure proactively, rather than reactively, that this shouldn't happen in the future.
Sorry about your problem, btw. Losing a domain happened to a friend of mine by the more usual means of
just failing to pay for it for a while. Someone scooped it up and they were left paying a couple hundred
dollars to get it back. I agree that's a nuisance, but it does argue for keeping payments up to date on
things you care about.
Is constant accessibility freeing or just another chain around your neck?
It's not about access, it's about choice.
If you have the freedom to say "no", to turn it off, to refuse to carry it,
you're going to be fine with it.
If you don't, you're not.
It's likely one of those areas like harrassment or discrimination, where people have different points of view
not because they think in a fundamentally different way but because their personal experience is different. Such personal variation masks a lot of bad things. People tend to make
decisions on the basis of problems they can see personally or have felt personally, not problems they can understand intellectually.
So if they're not seeing/feeling the pain, they're not likely to be very accommodating.
In the case of cell phones and blackberries, since the exploitation is done by the people with the choice upon people with no choice,
there's a high potential for the people doing the asking either without realizing the effect, or without caring.
If there were an absolute right not to be discriminated against by one's employer
for having refused to start carrying a blackberry or cell phone or pager, that would be a big step forward. It's one thing if it's part of the initial job description you sign up for,
and another if it's thrust upon you on penalty of losing your job. That's not a choice.
Of course, the way things go, eventually there might be no jobs that didn't require you to waive
this right as a condition of employment... but one problem at a time, I suppose.
People often overlook things they care about when there is no risk they won't get it.
Look at the dating sites. People make a list of what they like, then they date people who match.
Then they realize what they should have listed.
Then again, in an overpopulated society, I definitely would not want to encourage
more people to be breeders, and I see lot of good in this notion, even if I think it won't
solve all the problems people have. Overcoming people's basic animal and getting more in control
of explosive population growth may be a prerequisite for a robot-based society, which simply doesn't function
well with large numbers of people. And having people voluntarily fail to breed is the least invasive way
of reducing population numbers.
The worst case, of course, would be that each of these robot-human pairs would feel a need to have a human child,
which would actually make the situation worse. But I doubt that will happen.
Btw, for an excellent and entertaining treatment of this robot love issue, see the underrated B-movie Cherry 2000.
yeah, psycho, creating controversies where none exist will surely be a consequence to make money..... or in your case the motivation will be mod points. go away. If writers and artists weren't such pansies maybe they wouldn't get trampled at every opportunity.
I wasn't speaking about myself as a writer. I like reading works of fiction, and I find that
there are never enough books by my favorite authors. I suspect the reason is that the typical
writer spends a great deal of his/her life doing marketing, not writing, and so wasting time
they could be writing good novels. There are surely also many good authors that never get
published at all, not because they don't have time or interest or ability to get their works
published if they know they will get nothing in exchange for that.
We should have a system that rewards them for what we want
out of them, not for becoming good marketeers, which serves us not.
I think it's a fallacy to think that others just as good will take their place that don't mind the burden. Surely others will take their place. But the claim that the ones who do will have the same character and quality as those who never came forward is something for which I've never seen
any substantive proof. I don't even know how you'd prove it. I just know it doesn't ring true
to me.
In sum, I think a world in which writers must only be unsquashable bullies is an
impoverished one.
P.S. In deference to your concern that I'm after mod points, I've voluntarily clicked "No Karma Bonus" on this post. That way, it will have the best chance possible of being ignored. I hope
that works for you.
The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted.
Hmmm. A globally distributed
entity that lets you create pages full of information where you control your
own content and can link to other people's stuff... There's an idea. But gee, it sounds so
familiar. Where have I heard that idea before?
On the one hand, it looks like a simple land grab of the Internet. People are already doing
precisely this thing--we call them web sites. But they aren't enough in Google's control,
so one might argue this is a simple move to give them greater access and control and ownership
of all the world's content.
On the other hand, there are some evolutionary inevitabilities of the net which go unresolved
and this could be a bid at solving that--I'd say a step toward, but I'd like to see robust
competition for the space, not a lemming-like dive for this as if it's all we're getting.
When the web originally came out, there was the hint of micropayments going to authors. That
never happened. Portals figured out they could just charge for access and never let the money
go to who it was accessing. This turned the economics of the web on its head because people
invested money and time and energy in creating master works of all kinds, without being reimbursed
in many cases. Some have figured out how to make businesses, but those are rarely content creators.
The special skill of knowing something is not the same as the special skill of knowing how to
build an enterprise web business. There are many, many writers and artists who make things that
are useful yet don't know how to make enough money on it. So maybe this could help.
And there's the other thing: We're all aging. That means that the content producers will start
to die, and their works, the things people depend on, will go away. Archive.org will rescue some of that, but in its present form, that's not a robust solution. This would at least address the survivability issue.
I would consider this at least something of a success not if Google gets a lot of content, but if good authors felt they could just sit down and create content and expect to be reimbursed for it in a way that fed their family, let them go on vacations, paid their medical bills, and allowed them to retire. If it's just dribs and drabs of pennies, it's doing nothing for society and everything for Google and it still doesn't solve anything.
Then again, there's a big risk that it will bias all writing toward an advertising model,
making our world even more driven by "fashion" and less by "substance" than it already is.
I'm not sure that's good.
And it's endowing a single entity with a lot of power over the world.
I'd like to see other serious entrants in this space to keep the competition (if there can even
be any) honest.
Right now it just sounds like the Internet all over again, but with Google's Terms of Service.
Robots armed with art of Tai-Chi is going to take over the world!!!
Innovations aren't used in isolation, they are combined with other innovations.
Just because this advance is about walking doesn't mean there will be robots whose
sole tool is walking.
I searched this thread for the words "gun" and "danger" and found neither, so consider this an attempt to reestablish balance to this discussion.
I think the situation warrants at least some passing thought to the dangers
imposed by having robots that are ever harder to hide from if anyone does
try to give them an agenda that is not 100% benevolent. And what hint (much
less safeguard)
do we have that anyone making these will even want be benevolent anyway?
A lot of this research
is being paid for by military funds.
Sure, it has peaceful applications, but so did nuclear power.
For a relatively chilling description of what robots, not even AI-ish robots,
just robots with a few simple skills and someone who designed them for functions
other than to babysit small children, see Orson Scott Card's recent book
Empire.
Indeed, a lot of people are not worried about robots until they get AI, but one
might regard AI as actually a weakness in war since it might lead to a willingness
to have ethics. It's the pre-AI robots that are going to be the willing soldiers,
that know nothing more than (a) how to walk steadily forward, (b) how not to take prisoners, (c) how not to get de-railed by terrain, and (d) how to carry a gun and point it. Which of those activities remains as science fiction?
And a secondary question: In what countries will such robotics be manufactured?
If national security hinges on this question, is the US equipped to make even the
defensive version of this weapon here should we ever find ourselves cut off from equipment suppliers abroad? And even if we can manufacture such things, will there be an arms race on par with the nuclear arms race?
A lot of posts were marked funny in this thread.
I don't think this is all fun and games.
If anyone responds saying that this isn't worth worrying about at this point,
I would be curious to hear at the same time
what that person thinks is an appropriately bright line which, if crossed,
is finally cause for concern.
And honestly, I am all for stopping the funding of a human mission to Mars. It sounds cool and all, but it isn't worth it right now. Manned missions are so much more expensive than robotic missions. Are they any better?
Well, first, I think a lot of the expense is about making it 100% safe. We'd be
better off taking volunteers for a one-way mission, and we'd surely still have takers. Human exploration isn't safe anyway, but having to build in a million safeguards makes it worse. So part of the reason I'd claim that it looks not worth it to send people is we're costing it wrong.
But beyond that, one reason to send people to mars might be symbolic and another practical: Symbolically, it might get people to thinking about just how amazingly important the Earth is to life just now... and perhaps to talking about just how fragile our hold is on all that.
Practically, the way we're going, this planet is going to soon be habitable only by robots, so perhaps humans should scout out some alternative locales. But even if we can't move all that way in the short time before global warming becomes a serious issue, we can still learn a lot about things like how to build habitats that could survive in hostile environments... which is what we're likely to be living in on Earth if we're not careful.
Notwithstanding approaches like the Arctic Doomsday Seed Vault, we need a lot more experiments like the
Biosphere before we're ready to survive the ecological worst case scenarios for the next 100 years.
Mankind as a "going concern" will be a lot more credible when we have sustainable, permanent bases elsewhere or is prepared to survive here in the absence of things working in the way they traditionally have accidentally happened to do.
The not-so-often-discussed implication of SETI isn't just that there isn't a lot
of life in outer space, but that by implication, nature of its own accord is not
prone to be naturally accommodating of life anywhere... there's no a priori reason to think it will go out of its way to continue to be friendly even to us here on Earth just because we're lucky enough to have had that happen before; the overwhelming evidence at this point is that the oasis we live in is just a fluke and one on which we're far from having demonstrated a robust foothold.
you make a good point, and I apologize for being a bit sarcastic.
No offense taken.
my fear is that with current technology available to the current administration, they have already co-opted the opposition's privacy, and used it as a weapon to stifle real dissent. [...]
i wonder, given how little real resistance has risen to the current administration's policies and practices, if this scenario is not already the case...
Politics has always had a component of this to it. The term "character assassination" surely didn't come from nowhere.
Mass media refines the raw product, as opium into morphine or heroin, allowing a more refined effect on and consequent control of the target audience.
But this isn't what I meant to allude to. In a way, it's benign, or at least
abstract, by comparison.
I literally meant to address the issue of real guns, etc. See the movie
Enemy of the State if you want a concrete, worked example of the technique applied to our own people.
(One would have thought
But go a step further: What if someone else took power in the US, and had similar access to tools for spotting those who were trying to restore order?
More like in Orson Scott Card's Empire (a pretty good read, by the way, full of the kind of tactical writing he did so well in Ender's Game, but applied to the more tangible world of modern America).
What seems a protection while we are in power becomes a liability if the feeble safeguard of "having a person we trust in office" shifts or falls away entirely. The US was founded on the simultaneous belief that government could be managed to
achieve great ends, but that it must never be trusted to do so simply because it was government. It requires oversight to keep it running out of control.
Government has no brain--it is merely a powerful shell of armor and claws, waiting for an animal to climb into it and bring it to life, like a ready-made suit for a hermit crab.
You mean, like the person sitting in the White House today?
Surely. But my point is that in this present political climate where each party distrusts the other,
it works just as well in reverse. Care for the Constitution is not partisan.
So you may take the remark in long form as "everyone has such a scenario where either the bad guy is already in office, or is at risk of becoming so". As a nation, we disagree on which of these states we're in, but few disagree that both scenarios are at risk of happening over a space of years, and so any policy that is secured on the basis of the promises of one party for partisan reasons are not much promise.
What makes the Constitution good is not whether it supports the party that I do or you do or anyone does.
It doesn't create kings. It was a rejection of kings. It makes process itself the
king, and holds the office holders as subordinate to process.
Process is our only protection against tyrants taking hold one day, all of a sudden, without asking permission.
That's a lot easier when the would-be tyrant can pull up a super-computer and punch in the natural language query "When will all people likely to oppose me be out of town?"... Tyrants have a much harder time against unknown targets than known ones.
And while there may be a big difference between who is an opposer of legitimate power and who's trying overthrow a tyrant, there's no difference in the kind of data one amasses in order to assess that. The info itself is easily turned from the benign use to a malevolent use.
None of this centralization of data now going on is about introducing process--it's about eliminating process.
It means that on any day, a single person with the wrong whim can just do things--broad and powerful things--without asking.
That is the intent. And the alleged safeguard is the good intentions of our politicians.
And yet, even if they could guarantee their good intentions in perpetuity (and they can't),
they can't guarantee who will be in next, so the promise is meaningless in many ways.
The federal government disclosed details yesterday of a border-security program to screen all people who enter and leave the United States, create a terrorism risk profile of each individual and retain that information for up to 40 years...
This reminds me of encryption key escrow, where some bright guy thought we'd all be safer if
there was just a big list of passwords all in one place so that the guy with the master root
password could get anything he wanted when he wanted. It's the superficially appealing but should-be-scary notion that government would be better if more efficient.
It's as if we think the entire world
is scary but the one thing we know is a universal constant is that whoever holds the keys will
not be compromised. And yet, to listen to radio DJ's, if Hillary takes office it will be as if a coup had taken place. Whatever you think of that claim--legitimate or ridiculous--the one thing that should not be in dispute is that whatever information is amassed against The People is available for use by anyone who has the keys even if a hostile regime change happens. Some people think electing the other party is such a thing, and others don't. But even if you believe an election is benign, there are potential events
in the world that are not neutral and that would be bad. We all draw lines in different places, but we all draw lines. I have my own political biases but they are not relevant here--people on both sides of the present political divides should be equally concerned on this one.
What if someone manipulated an election? What if the value of the dollar fell so low that the only people who could fund an electable candidate were foreigners? What if someone successfully attacked the center of government? What if someone bribed a politician? What if a hacker or a worm/virus/whatever snuck in and found all this data? Surely everyone has some scenario they can think of in which the person sitting in the White House might not be someone they wanted to trust with the kind of data being collected here.
Although many people are made nervous about abuse of information, the scenarios discussed usually seem to focus on an isolated individual doing a little inappropriate peeking or a bit of overzealous prosecution or menacing. But that's not the worst case. The worst case is someone
getting past the safeguards of the nation and getting to the seat of power and then having at their fingertips the knowledge of who is a threat and who is not, so they can't be re-taken because they have defensive knowledge on everyone who might oppose them.
The government seems obsessed with the notion that centralization is the key to success, but it doesn't realize that the designers of the original republic did a brilliant job of coming up with a distributed structure that made us all safe--the notion of each state having its own way of doing things, and having all of those states be relatively autonomous. Even to the point of allowing state militias, which as I understand it had the potential duty to protect the state from the federal government if it got uppity. In effect, what they implemented was genetic diversity, which makes it harder to attack the US because there are a variety of defenses in play unevenly and it's hard to devise a uniform plan of attack that will take down every state at the same time. But one by one, we're turning our states into clones of one another, so that a single plan of attack will be more likely to succeed on everything at once. That won't make us safer.
We were kinda missing a fully-committed competitor for prestige and bragging rights, like we had when we were pushing to the Moon in competition w/ Russia....
the only reason NASA appears to be getting back into the manned-mission-to-space thing again is because the Chinese got one of their own into space, and Russia+India want to put folks on the Moon... kinda sad that it takes ego just to get people working towards what should be a solid ideal in the first place
I agree. But there are other differences in play today, too. It makes it hard to see
for sure how it plays out. For example,
now that the fully-committed competitor turns out to be
countries to whom the US outsources the lion's share of its work,
what is the significance of a "competitive program" with those countries?
Who will have the resulting bragging rights?
One perceives some sort of variant of Gerald Holton's remark about Giants is called for here.
Something vaguely like: "In the modern world, our greatest achievement would be to pull the rug out from under the giants upon whose shoulders we have elected to stand."
My personal sense is that the space program was not a way to show off that
we were technologically good, but rather was a path to becoming technologically good.
That is, it was the investment in US infrastructure that mattered, and all the better
that it was for a peaceful purpose and gave mankind hope that people could use technology
for something other than weapons. The open question is not whether the passport carried
by the person going to Mars is a U.S. one, but where the dollars spent on R&D will flow to.
If a by-product of the program is not a ramping up of interest in and investment in US
math and science programs, then the whole notion that we are competing is a sham.
The space program was never about space.
And besides, if we want to go somewhere that has air that's hard to breathe and a temperature that isn't so good and not very much drinkable water, we can do that easier than building a spacecraft for just a couple of people: By sooner than 2031, with very little effort on our part, we can make the Earth itself into such a place and not even have to get off the couch to do it. We can just go on ignoring global environmental and climate issues and we'll be in "out o' space" in no time...
What we currently call "machine intelligence" is not quite up to the intelligence level of a cockroach.
Indeed, the ethics requirements should be on the makers of the robots, not on the robots.
Even very stupid (i.e., lacking in any semblance or even attempt at artificial intelligence) computer programs can have ethical issues--transmitting or storing inappropriate
information, computing faulty values, or giving bad advice are simple examples.
And fanciful notions of the unique nature of positronic brains aside, the set of things you can program for robots is pretty much the same as the set of things you can program for other computers, only the peripherals are different.
And like their less animated counterparts, most robot ethical issues, for now, are things that need to be handled at design, development, and debugging time... not at runtime.
And most responsibility for problems needs to be traced back to there.
The actual area where we're likely to see problems won't be in the robots themselves, it will
be in our propensity to want to give up our judgment to computers. Computer viruses were
largely not enabled by people who wrote them--programs didn't originally just start on their own on a computer--you had to manually start them. But people got tired of that. They didn't like pressing buttons that said "Show me the picture in this email message" or "Run the installation program on this disk." and they wanted it done for them. That desire to yield responsibilty for judgment to a mindless computer is what got us in trouble, not the computer's desire to do us harm.
The first car to run over a pedestrian while parking it won't have done so because the
robot was too eager to drive before it had been properly trained. It will be because the robot was too stupid to know it isn't just a toaster (see The Measure of a Man), coupled with the fact that some
programmer was too eager to show off his toy, or perhaps because some park guest was
too willing to try untested technology, or because some quality assurance person was too afraid to hold up the opening of the park, or because some politician thought it was cool to talk of computer ethics instead of human ethics.
Ethics and laziness don't go well together. And we're a pretty lazy lot, we humans.
I'd rank the probability that any lawmakers anywhere will ever require that robots not be built
until they have ethics built in as so close to 0% as to be indistinguishable from it.
People with cool toys to show off in the marketplace are not going to stand for that
kind of thing.
I can't find myself fearing fearless mice. Why? Because there was most likely a very good reason for the mice that they are afraid of cats and large things that can eat them...
Note that experiments like this are inherently more imprecise than the way they are summarized.
The whole point is not "fears cats" or "doesn't fear cats", it's
"has been observed trying things it wasn't previously doing that are assumed to be out of fear
of cats" and "not having been observed...etc." I recommend not reading the words describing research outcomes too literally.
When you see a study that says
"blah causes cancer in married people over 18",
give some serious thought to whether it might not mean
"blah may cause cancer generally, but our tests only covered this group and we're
being conservative about our claims."
One way this matters is kind of like the reason that evolution proceeds primarily through
behavioral pathways of things being attempted. Fear of a certain smell might keep mice
from cats, but maybe cats are not their principal threat any more. Maybe this is a behavior
from when there were lots of cats, and maybe most homeowners don't have freely breeding cats
any more. If that's so, then this could allow a lot mice to come into areas they haven't
been in before, as racoons have moved into cities.
A second and less obvious reason it may matter is that
a lot of what holds animals at bay in the openness of human cities may be more a holdover
of a natural fear that other animals, to include humans, would be "impolite".
But humans are, comparatively, ruthlessly
polite. Maybe most animals may steer
clear out of us for primitive fear reasons, not for practical reasons.
As they learn we are bad at wiping them out, and unwilling to use all available means,
that could change.
We don't need to hasten things by genetically improving their willingness to try harder.
Experimenting with the boldness aspects of behaviors may have unintended
consequences. I don't think it's bad to understand this kind of thing, since it may also
help to fix such problems as they come up (e.g., killer bees, and finding ways to get them
to be less aggressive). But that doesn't mean one shouldn't be careful about the genes
and make sure they don't leave the lab, perhaps even
using strong rules similar to what we use for
dangerous viruses.
Perhaps mice fear humans due to this same gene,
and that's why they run away rather than running toward them and biting when they see them.
Maybe this also affects that. In sufficient numbers, and there are no known ethics genes
inhibiting the creation of such numbers in mice, a bunch of fearless mice could be very
dangerous. In general, fearlessness is to be feared in sufficient numbers. Just look at war movies
where large numbers of dedicated lives are thrown away to make a small push forward.
If mice showed similar determination to take over a household, that would be formidable.
There are some good horror movies on this, but we could easily turn such movies to reality
through genetics.
Ask if you'll be fired if you don't sign it. That'd be interesting, too. Contracts made under duress are also not binding.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I'll not let that stop me from joining the fray and
suggesting another thing you might ask your lawyer about:
As I understand it, the usual argument for why this is possible to put in an initial
employment agreement is the somewhat tenuous claim that they are paying you salary
not just for work but also for the agreements they ask you to sign. After all,
if the salary is not for that, there is nothing being given you as consideration and
one might think you had no binding contract. Contracts require consideration, as I
understand it.
But once you're hired, it's pretty plain that the money they are paying you is for
what you've signed already. So unless there is new money in exchange for whatever
new contract you're being asked to sign, and specifically being withheld if you don't sign,
then what is the consideration you're being given in exchange for giving up additional
rights not already mentioned? This issue is what points (I think correctly) to the duress issue.
If the consideration is "we'll still employ you", that would seem to my (non-lawyerly) eye
as a prima facie case for a claim of duress. If the claim is something else, you'd want to
look at the contract to see what they think is the consideration. (In fact, I'd think the claim that they were going to still employ you would be something they wouldn't even want to hint at, since almost no company can really offer that as a benefit, and almost all employment contracts say outright that nothing you sign is a promise of continued employment.)
I've heard consideration described as "an act of legal detriment". That is, a contract
harms each party in a way that is defined by voluntary entry in the contract to be equal.
If either party did not agree that it was equal, they wouldn't sign. (That's why duress
is so bad. If you don't have choice of whether to enter the contract, the notion that the
contract itself defines its own metric of equality among the parties is suspect from the
outset.)
So, for example, suppose
I sell you a ball for $10. I'm "harmed" (legally, presumably not physically)
by giving up the ball that I value, you by giving up the $10 you value. That forms the contract.
But if I just give you a ball, that's not a contract, it's a gift. So if you injure yourself
legally by giving up these rights, how is the company injuring itself? What is it giving up
that would make you want to injure yourself thus? Or are you just giving the company a gift?
(I'm pretty sure the rules for renegging on the promise of a gift are different than for renegging on a
contract, but you can ask your lawyer for how.)
Like I said, these are not answers, just questions to ask someone formally qualified
to answer. Among other things, I understand the answers to differ by jurisdiction.
There's also a very practical matter here, by the way.
Saying "I'm not going to sign it." may not sit well with your boss.
Saying "I talked to a lawyer and on advice of counsel I'm not going to sign it." (presuming you talked to counsel and that's what they said--they might say just the opposite, so do talk to them) will sound better--like you're not just being willful.
So even if talking to a lawyer doesn't sort the matter out entirely, it may give you
the appropriate sense of self-confidence about what you end up doing and how to phrase it
to your employer.
You do realize that his only attempting to get on the ballot in South Carolina precluded him from winning the election, right, that he wasn't really trying to reach office? It doesn't matter if he was dead serious about winning in South Carolina, or if he thought it would be funny.
It might have blocked him from a serious likelihood of getting the necessary votecount, certainly,
but it didn't block him from being taken seriously as a candidate. What blocked him from that
were words like "I'm not trying to win" or whatever it was that he said to Russert.
He could have spun it otherwise, and not just to deceive people.
It's not beyond him to get enough write-in votes to be a serious contender.
He wouldn't be the comedian he is without strong insight into politics. Even if he's not
going to run, he could have made it onto the stage to say truths that others should be saying,
and to show the others (who are trying to win) that poll numbers can go up if you speak
dead serious truth. He has the opportunity, because he is an entertainer, to prove that what we are
looking for is not to be entertained.
But to do that, he must step out of his shell and
stop being selfish and egotistical. There's too much of that already going around.
For more elaboration, see my companion post The Quality of Heroism. I'm trying not to repeat myself.
Your entire post is based on the mistaken premise that Colbert actually wants to compete.
Alas, while it's always possible I'm confused about something, it's not about the fact that he doesn't want to run for office. I'm painfully aware of that. If I didn't make myself clear with this post, and you're up to another try, see my companion post about this same article, The Quality of Heroism, for an alternate explanation.
I don't know where to begin on this one, since I feel like you're replying to someone other than me. But let me hit a few obvious points, of the many that seem to have
misinterpreted me...
One of the things I like about Colbert, as a person, not the tv personality, is that he is very, very good. Not just the comedy, not the act, but as a responsible person living in the wacky US today.
I'll just say on this that I totally agree with this part. However, there's a difference
between being a good person and allowing other people to converse directly with
that person. He has to step out of the persona. See my remarks about Russert below.
You call people voting for him a tragedy, but I just can't see it that way.
I didn't say people voting for him is a tragedy.
I said him not taking the opportunity seriously is a tragedy.
He doesn't care to win. But he should care to win.
Because he could win.
I would've voted for him because he fits all the qualities that I am looking for in a president. I would not have voted for him because he's funny.
And I as well. But only if he were capable of showing he could step out of the role
of being funny. His message is, at present, too mixed. He went on Russert and
Russert held up his book and quizzed him on its contents. Instead of saying "Tim, it's a book of humor. It's not my political platform." he confused matters by answering as if he were defending the specific things he'd said in there. That was a tactical error.
One he could overcome if he wanted. But he's not wanting.
He's said he doesn't want to win.
That is the tragedy. That he could and doesn't want to.
People need him to want to and he's letting people down.
Colbert has shown a great lack of heroism here. He uses terms like that on his show
for effect, but I'm being serious here.
As I think of heroism, the one thing that stands out to me more than any other is that
it is unscheduled. It's not just the act. It's not the effect. It's that in almost
all cases, it cannot be planned or scheduled. It must be done in the moment, sacrificing
not just the obvious things like one's health or life, but the non-obvious things like
one's dreams and aspirations, one's day job, etc.
What's frustrating here is that you and I cannot run successfully for president. As a
practical matter, no matter what is said, it now requires too much money and energy for
most people to just decide their fed up and to run. At least seriously. Some of the
people that are called joke candidates are trying, and no matter what is said about it,
they are taking the slings and arrows of trying and the potential consequences of not
donig othe things. That, in a sense, is heroism, and more than Colbert is showing.
Man, the irony is that so many people would've voted for him.
It's not just an irony, it's a tragedy. Look at Bush. Forget that you don't like him.
I don't either. But he is enough good that the image makers and the people behind him
are able to craft a presidency around him, and as a total collective, they get what
they want. Colbert is capable of that. He has the opportunity. He is squandering it
because he doesn't want it. But heroism is not about what we want ourselves. It is about
what we know must be done at the time it can be done by the person who can do it.
Colbert has that opportunity and is squandering it.
Slashdot Mirror
I like this suggestion in principle, though some refinement is probably in order. Here are a few issues that occurred to me:
I have to believe there could come cases where someone was doing some important thing on an emergency basis and didn't get the power to do it. If they'd been ordinarily conservative, and if the system knew that, I could see allowing an exception. So perhaps a bank of credits for conserving energy overall would be good. This is why, by the way, people have suggested just using money as the basis tends to do the right thing.
I also worry with your proposal about the issue of what constitutes a location that would be entitled to this fixed item. Having it be people-based would almost be better than having it be location-based. If I have a house that has 10 people living in it, would I not need ten people worth of A/C or are we expected to huddle in one room? If someone has a mansion that can house 100 but has only one person in it, how much does that get? If a person can classify part or all of their house as an office, can they exclude themselves from the limit? Or do they get separate allocations of dedicated power for their home and their office?
Gerrymandering the way the required energy is divvied up sounds like a task in itself. That doesn't mean the plan is unworkable. But it may not be as simple or as uncontroversial as it sounds at first blush. Alas. That's probably the main reason people point to the option of using money to mediate the decision--it allows everyone to spend their money in different ways, and at different times. But to the extent that there is some life-support threshold below which perhaps we should say one can't go, this still has some merit.
I would liken the issue to the the draft. (No, not the one coming in the window when the A/C is not working.) Back when we had a mandatory draft, we all, as a society, cared whether we went to war. But once we had a voluntary draft, many in the Elite don't have to care, at least not in the same way: It won't be their kids. And though they pay lip service to the notion that it's a hard choice, that choice isn't felt by them in the way it is by others. It's below their radar. And they can indulge the illusion that the only reason people join the military is that they want to. The idea that they cannot afford to is foreign to them. This moves toward a two-tier society of haves and havenots, because one can afford to just not care about the human cost.
In the case of energy, the risk of a blackout affects us all. So it's a reason to build more infrastructure. But once the system is "managed" and society has been divvied up into groups who "of course must have power" and "of course must not" in order for the Greater Good to be served, the question of whether to have more infrastructure becomes much more questionable since it is more distant to the decision-makers. I somehow doubt that politicians will have their thermostats going down--what about the foreign dignitaries that might be visiting? Can't inconvenience them. And we'll find that rich people no longer live in "homes", they live in "free-standing buildings that happen to have home-like amenities", or some other dodge that regular people can't figure out... Like the way tax loopholes work. They will also be distanced.
It also becomes like the way we expect a better health care system from a Congress that has its own health care plan that is better than everyone else's. The day Congress is required by law to have the worst health care of any US citizen is the day that health care will be really reformed. The day that going to war means the people who decided it have their kids yanked out of wherever they are and put on the front lines of the first ground force with handheld weapons entering the war, that's the day we'll know when a war is justified. And this plan for thermostat control, I assume it will have similar issues awaiting similar fixes that will never come.
What it is to be a society, at some level, is to all be in the same game. This proposal sounds like it makes everyone the same, but the nature of the dodges will not be apparent and the nature of the risks will be manageable by some and not by others. Power outages are more harsh, but they are also more truthful. They serve as a reminder that something is amiss. Making them less visible is not a certain recipe for making this country better, since the sluggish nature of democracy makes it react only to things that are easily articulated. And this would make it all blurry and disputable, dissipating political energy that might otherwise be better used.
In the end, if global warming ever does take hold, the thermostat may be the absolute only thing in the entire house that anyone wants to burn energy on, so it can't be a solution. The solution expressed by caitriona81 in a related post seems more like it's on the right track.
Well, indeed. It's not clear what "positive" and "negative" mean in this context. How would you measure success? The problem is that there are so many presuppositions here that it's hard to know what the agenda is, or what the metric of success is.
We are to take this as fact. But what if the trained terrorist does not in fact show fear because they are comfortable with their training? We are led to believe not only that this technique is professional but that the techniques of the passengers are amateurish.
Also, suppose it comes down to taking some sort of action. Suppose these techniques reveal something but the searches reveal nothing. Will it stop here? If someone is arrested, on what authority will it be? Something like The Minority Report? The problem is that this can't just be a technique in isolation. It will have to become a matter of law if it is to be usefully prosecuted. What will be the nature of the crime? The evidence that can be examined and challenged? Who is the accuser? What law is broken?
Another commenter (timon) made an excellent reference to 1984. In that regard, I wonder not only the question of what the crime will be but what the punishment. When it becomes impossible to show useful evidence of a suspicion, the only tool of prosecution perhaps becomes making someone an unpassenger. I would hope we would have some minimal requirements that such "special screening" unto which people were ushered were open to public view, but why do I assume that the next suggestion will be that it's too dangerous to allow that, and that a nice place, comfortably out of sight and mind of the rest of us is next... Or perhaps an alternate flight--say, to Guantanamo.
Ignoring even the spam issue, there's also the issue that Outlook encourages people to include the previous message in its entirety, causing an O(n^2) effect for legitimate message chains; that is, every message in a conversation tends to include all previous messages. This not only increases archival size, but it also causes mailboxes to approach their seemingly arbitrary upper bound on mailbox size much more rapidly than seems necessary.
It's a good example of how a single bad design decision can have amazingly multiplied consequences. If nothing else, you'd think Microsoft and other tools for managing email could explore having better tools for noticing and offering to remove the redundancy.
Actually, in some cases the problem can be that when you have a company that is losing money, it's hard to incentivize people to come aboard or stay aboard. If a company isn't making money, no one wants the blame for that. And that's understandable.
It's one thing to try to hire a company that's going down the tubes and tell the person you're hiring "look, I don't expect you to fix everything, but please don't make it worse and preferrably make it a lot better". It might be quite appropriate to have someone turn a company that's losing a billion dollars and bring it to something that is only losing a hundred million and to reward them handsomely for that transition. That is a positive thing. Not every turnaround works instantly and people can sometimes only do so much.
But this doesn't appear to be such a case. I only have the information in the article to go on, but from what it says, it sounds like the problem is that the person who's giving out the bonuses is afraid to work with any other team than the one he personally picked to get him into the mess. At that point, someone with higher authority--the stockholders if need be--should be saying, "It sounds like an over-reliance on friendship, rather than good solid business process, got you into this mess. I don't think friendship is what's going to get you out."
Also, the notion that this should be a retention bonus (for merely being there after n years) rather than a merit bonus (for having caused a particular effect) is quite suspect. Especially if the desire to fire for non-performance is as low as it apparently is.
You know, it's hard to know from one article--sometimes these articles can paint the truth a fair amount and might be just getting scapegoated. I can't tell and don't mean to be opining on the truth of who did what, only to be commenting on what to do about the situation assuming the account of the facts is accurate. However, with that said...
If these guys were really the ones who came up with the plan that drove things down the tubes maybe they should just offer them the chance to work for zero dollars trying to fix the problem and to only be paid at all if they turned the entire operation around within a certain time. It's not like anyone's going to be racing to hire up these guys. What's going to be on their resume? "Got Circuit City into a big mess, then bailed." They should be thrilled at the opportunity to get their name out of the gutter. Why should they need a million dollars as incentive to continue?
Or maybe the company just plans to hold them around until almost that time, and then callously "let them go" just before their retention bonus time. (I've had that happen to me before, with stock options, and I didn't get a pro-rated amount. That never seemed right. But business is often cold. And maybe that's why they're phrased it as a retention plan.)
My first thought was that if we personalized computers more, perhaps we wouldn't waste as many of them. We have become very much a disposable society, in which the strangest part of this is that anyone bats an eye about the loss of a computer. Yet I remember when we used to mourn the passing of many of them. A lot of our waste problem in the world is caused by our willingness to assume that disposing of something does not require ceremony and can be done as casually as exhaling a breath of air... except no one is recycling the air and it's getting a little stuffy in here.
It's one reason people have big weddings... to make it so expensive that you think twice before throwing it away on a mere argument. If throwing away a machine were more expensive, maybe we'd think twice about doing it... or better still, about buying one in the first place.
Yes, it would hold back progess. But where is progress leading us right now? With luck, we'll have computers powerful enough to solve the problems we created by having computers. And without luck, we may poison our world and all die. Ah, yes, the smell of progress is all around us.
They have the ability to just ask waitstaff to be more friendly or visible and thereby cause it to just happen??? Forget the rest of the research, this one technique is wholly unknown to and long sought by restaurants everywhere. They should just publish how they manage that trick and call it a day!
Better still, patent it, and retire wealthy.
This account seems somehow wrong. Did you leave out some material information from the story?
Did this happen to you on a yearly boundary? If not, and if you had a registration on the domain that was good for a year, why couldn't you just go to another domain provider and identify yourself for a transfer? Was the account in good standing? Am I confused, or is this information not a matter of public record that extends beyond the end of your term of registration? Is the registrar at which you bought it the only source of record for such information? That would sound terribly dangerous as a single-point-of-failure for the web in the case of any kind of disaster, much less bankruptcy.
Additionally, did you get no notice? Did you just come in one day and find that your domain no longer responded and that all domains at that registrar were up for grabs? If so, that again seems very weird. I thought a bankruptcy required some court intervention at least for the purpose of asset divvying, and the notion that the registered domains were not an asset that required deliberative action seems odd to me. Possible, certainly--I'm not a lawyer and don't know the process. But odd nevertheless.
Did you act at the moment of the bankruptcy--or did you wait? That is, was your problem the result of the bankruptcy or your failure to act quickly? I realize these issues are probably sad and embarrassing, and I'm not meaning to rub salt in a wound. But Slashdot articles inform people about how the world works, and in exchange for the attention and good advice you offer, I think it's good to offer a complete accounting of the story.
Are you sure you're not leaving out some information? Perhaps the left-out information is not relevant to the question you were asking, but implicit in the question you were asking is alerting people to something that might happen to them. And I'd like to understand better the process by which this could happen to someone else so that we all, as a community, might understand if there's a process issue that needs fixing to assure proactively, rather than reactively, that this shouldn't happen in the future.
Sorry about your problem, btw. Losing a domain happened to a friend of mine by the more usual means of just failing to pay for it for a while. Someone scooped it up and they were left paying a couple hundred dollars to get it back. I agree that's a nuisance, but it does argue for keeping payments up to date on things you care about.
It's not about access, it's about choice. If you have the freedom to say "no", to turn it off, to refuse to carry it, you're going to be fine with it. If you don't, you're not.
It's likely one of those areas like harrassment or discrimination, where people have different points of view not because they think in a fundamentally different way but because their personal experience is different. Such personal variation masks a lot of bad things. People tend to make decisions on the basis of problems they can see personally or have felt personally, not problems they can understand intellectually. So if they're not seeing/feeling the pain, they're not likely to be very accommodating.
In the case of cell phones and blackberries, since the exploitation is done by the people with the choice upon people with no choice, there's a high potential for the people doing the asking either without realizing the effect, or without caring.
If there were an absolute right not to be discriminated against by one's employer for having refused to start carrying a blackberry or cell phone or pager, that would be a big step forward. It's one thing if it's part of the initial job description you sign up for, and another if it's thrust upon you on penalty of losing your job. That's not a choice. Of course, the way things go, eventually there might be no jobs that didn't require you to waive this right as a condition of employment... but one problem at a time, I suppose.
People often overlook things they care about when there is no risk they won't get it. Look at the dating sites. People make a list of what they like, then they date people who match. Then they realize what they should have listed.
Then again, in an overpopulated society, I definitely would not want to encourage more people to be breeders, and I see lot of good in this notion, even if I think it won't solve all the problems people have. Overcoming people's basic animal and getting more in control of explosive population growth may be a prerequisite for a robot-based society, which simply doesn't function well with large numbers of people. And having people voluntarily fail to breed is the least invasive way of reducing population numbers.
The worst case, of course, would be that each of these robot-human pairs would feel a need to have a human child, which would actually make the situation worse. But I doubt that will happen.
Btw, for an excellent and entertaining treatment of this robot love issue, see the underrated B-movie Cherry 2000.
I wasn't speaking about myself as a writer. I like reading works of fiction, and I find that there are never enough books by my favorite authors. I suspect the reason is that the typical writer spends a great deal of his/her life doing marketing, not writing, and so wasting time they could be writing good novels. There are surely also many good authors that never get published at all, not because they don't have time or interest or ability to get their works published if they know they will get nothing in exchange for that. We should have a system that rewards them for what we want out of them, not for becoming good marketeers, which serves us not.
I think it's a fallacy to think that others just as good will take their place that don't mind the burden. Surely others will take their place. But the claim that the ones who do will have the same character and quality as those who never came forward is something for which I've never seen any substantive proof. I don't even know how you'd prove it. I just know it doesn't ring true to me.
In sum, I think a world in which writers must only be unsquashable bullies is an impoverished one.
P.S. In deference to your concern that I'm after mod points, I've voluntarily clicked "No Karma Bonus" on this post. That way, it will have the best chance possible of being ignored. I hope that works for you.
Hmmm. A globally distributed entity that lets you create pages full of information where you control your own content and can link to other people's stuff... There's an idea. But gee, it sounds so familiar. Where have I heard that idea before?
On the one hand, it looks like a simple land grab of the Internet. People are already doing precisely this thing--we call them web sites. But they aren't enough in Google's control, so one might argue this is a simple move to give them greater access and control and ownership of all the world's content.
On the other hand, there are some evolutionary inevitabilities of the net which go unresolved and this could be a bid at solving that--I'd say a step toward, but I'd like to see robust competition for the space, not a lemming-like dive for this as if it's all we're getting.
When the web originally came out, there was the hint of micropayments going to authors. That never happened. Portals figured out they could just charge for access and never let the money go to who it was accessing. This turned the economics of the web on its head because people invested money and time and energy in creating master works of all kinds, without being reimbursed in many cases. Some have figured out how to make businesses, but those are rarely content creators. The special skill of knowing something is not the same as the special skill of knowing how to build an enterprise web business. There are many, many writers and artists who make things that are useful yet don't know how to make enough money on it. So maybe this could help.
And there's the other thing: We're all aging. That means that the content producers will start to die, and their works, the things people depend on, will go away. Archive.org will rescue some of that, but in its present form, that's not a robust solution. This would at least address the survivability issue.
I would consider this at least something of a success not if Google gets a lot of content, but if good authors felt they could just sit down and create content and expect to be reimbursed for it in a way that fed their family, let them go on vacations, paid their medical bills, and allowed them to retire. If it's just dribs and drabs of pennies, it's doing nothing for society and everything for Google and it still doesn't solve anything.
Then again, there's a big risk that it will bias all writing toward an advertising model, making our world even more driven by "fashion" and less by "substance" than it already is. I'm not sure that's good.
And it's endowing a single entity with a lot of power over the world. I'd like to see other serious entrants in this space to keep the competition (if there can even be any) honest.
Right now it just sounds like the Internet all over again, but with Google's Terms of Service.
Innovations aren't used in isolation, they are combined with other innovations. Just because this advance is about walking doesn't mean there will be robots whose sole tool is walking.
I searched this thread for the words "gun" and "danger" and found neither, so consider this an attempt to reestablish balance to this discussion.
I think the situation warrants at least some passing thought to the dangers imposed by having robots that are ever harder to hide from if anyone does try to give them an agenda that is not 100% benevolent. And what hint (much less safeguard) do we have that anyone making these will even want be benevolent anyway? A lot of this research is being paid for by military funds. Sure, it has peaceful applications, but so did nuclear power.
For a relatively chilling description of what robots, not even AI-ish robots, just robots with a few simple skills and someone who designed them for functions other than to babysit small children, see Orson Scott Card's recent book Empire.
Indeed, a lot of people are not worried about robots until they get AI, but one might regard AI as actually a weakness in war since it might lead to a willingness to have ethics. It's the pre-AI robots that are going to be the willing soldiers, that know nothing more than (a) how to walk steadily forward, (b) how not to take prisoners, (c) how not to get de-railed by terrain, and (d) how to carry a gun and point it. Which of those activities remains as science fiction?
And a secondary question: In what countries will such robotics be manufactured? If national security hinges on this question, is the US equipped to make even the defensive version of this weapon here should we ever find ourselves cut off from equipment suppliers abroad? And even if we can manufacture such things, will there be an arms race on par with the nuclear arms race?
A lot of posts were marked funny in this thread. I don't think this is all fun and games. If anyone responds saying that this isn't worth worrying about at this point, I would be curious to hear at the same time what that person thinks is an appropriately bright line which, if crossed, is finally cause for concern.
Well, first, I think a lot of the expense is about making it 100% safe. We'd be better off taking volunteers for a one-way mission, and we'd surely still have takers. Human exploration isn't safe anyway, but having to build in a million safeguards makes it worse. So part of the reason I'd claim that it looks not worth it to send people is we're costing it wrong.
But beyond that, one reason to send people to mars might be symbolic and another practical: Symbolically, it might get people to thinking about just how amazingly important the Earth is to life just now... and perhaps to talking about just how fragile our hold is on all that.
Practically, the way we're going, this planet is going to soon be habitable only by robots, so perhaps humans should scout out some alternative locales. But even if we can't move all that way in the short time before global warming becomes a serious issue, we can still learn a lot about things like how to build habitats that could survive in hostile environments... which is what we're likely to be living in on Earth if we're not careful. Notwithstanding approaches like the Arctic Doomsday Seed Vault, we need a lot more experiments like the Biosphere before we're ready to survive the ecological worst case scenarios for the next 100 years.
Mankind as a "going concern" will be a lot more credible when we have sustainable, permanent bases elsewhere or is prepared to survive here in the absence of things working in the way they traditionally have accidentally happened to do. The not-so-often-discussed implication of SETI isn't just that there isn't a lot of life in outer space, but that by implication, nature of its own accord is not prone to be naturally accommodating of life anywhere... there's no a priori reason to think it will go out of its way to continue to be friendly even to us here on Earth just because we're lucky enough to have had that happen before; the overwhelming evidence at this point is that the oasis we live in is just a fluke and one on which we're far from having demonstrated a robust foothold.
No offense taken.
Politics has always had a component of this to it. The term "character assassination" surely didn't come from nowhere. Mass media refines the raw product, as opium into morphine or heroin, allowing a more refined effect on and consequent control of the target audience.
But this isn't what I meant to allude to. In a way, it's benign, or at least abstract, by comparison. I literally meant to address the issue of real guns, etc. See the movie Enemy of the State if you want a concrete, worked example of the technique applied to our own people. (One would have thought But go a step further: What if someone else took power in the US, and had similar access to tools for spotting those who were trying to restore order? More like in Orson Scott Card's Empire (a pretty good read, by the way, full of the kind of tactical writing he did so well in Ender's Game , but applied to the more tangible world of modern America).
What seems a protection while we are in power becomes a liability if the feeble safeguard of "having a person we trust in office" shifts or falls away entirely. The US was founded on the simultaneous belief that government could be managed to achieve great ends, but that it must never be trusted to do so simply because it was government. It requires oversight to keep it running out of control.
Government has no brain--it is merely a powerful shell of armor and claws, waiting for an animal to climb into it and bring it to life, like a ready-made suit for a hermit crab.
Surely. But my point is that in this present political climate where each party distrusts the other, it works just as well in reverse. Care for the Constitution is not partisan. So you may take the remark in long form as "everyone has such a scenario where either the bad guy is already in office, or is at risk of becoming so". As a nation, we disagree on which of these states we're in, but few disagree that both scenarios are at risk of happening over a space of years, and so any policy that is secured on the basis of the promises of one party for partisan reasons are not much promise.
What makes the Constitution good is not whether it supports the party that I do or you do or anyone does. It doesn't create kings. It was a rejection of kings. It makes process itself the king, and holds the office holders as subordinate to process. Process is our only protection against tyrants taking hold one day, all of a sudden, without asking permission.
That's a lot easier when the would-be tyrant can pull up a super-computer and punch in the natural language query "When will all people likely to oppose me be out of town?" ... Tyrants have a much harder time against unknown targets than known ones.
And while there may be a big difference between who is an opposer of legitimate power and who's trying overthrow a tyrant, there's no difference in the kind of data one amasses in order to assess that. The info itself is easily turned from the benign use to a malevolent use.
None of this centralization of data now going on is about introducing process--it's about eliminating process. It means that on any day, a single person with the wrong whim can just do things--broad and powerful things--without asking. That is the intent. And the alleged safeguard is the good intentions of our politicians. And yet, even if they could guarantee their good intentions in perpetuity (and they can't), they can't guarantee who will be in next, so the promise is meaningless in many ways.
This reminds me of encryption key escrow, where some bright guy thought we'd all be safer if there was just a big list of passwords all in one place so that the guy with the master root password could get anything he wanted when he wanted. It's the superficially appealing but should-be-scary notion that government would be better if more efficient.
It's as if we think the entire world is scary but the one thing we know is a universal constant is that whoever holds the keys will not be compromised. And yet, to listen to radio DJ's, if Hillary takes office it will be as if a coup had taken place. Whatever you think of that claim--legitimate or ridiculous--the one thing that should not be in dispute is that whatever information is amassed against The People is available for use by anyone who has the keys even if a hostile regime change happens. Some people think electing the other party is such a thing, and others don't. But even if you believe an election is benign, there are potential events in the world that are not neutral and that would be bad. We all draw lines in different places, but we all draw lines. I have my own political biases but they are not relevant here--people on both sides of the present political divides should be equally concerned on this one.
What if someone manipulated an election? What if the value of the dollar fell so low that the only people who could fund an electable candidate were foreigners? What if someone successfully attacked the center of government? What if someone bribed a politician? What if a hacker or a worm/virus/whatever snuck in and found all this data? Surely everyone has some scenario they can think of in which the person sitting in the White House might not be someone they wanted to trust with the kind of data being collected here.
Although many people are made nervous about abuse of information, the scenarios discussed usually seem to focus on an isolated individual doing a little inappropriate peeking or a bit of overzealous prosecution or menacing. But that's not the worst case. The worst case is someone getting past the safeguards of the nation and getting to the seat of power and then having at their fingertips the knowledge of who is a threat and who is not, so they can't be re-taken because they have defensive knowledge on everyone who might oppose them.
The government seems obsessed with the notion that centralization is the key to success, but it doesn't realize that the designers of the original republic did a brilliant job of coming up with a distributed structure that made us all safe--the notion of each state having its own way of doing things, and having all of those states be relatively autonomous. Even to the point of allowing state militias, which as I understand it had the potential duty to protect the state from the federal government if it got uppity. In effect, what they implemented was genetic diversity, which makes it harder to attack the US because there are a variety of defenses in play unevenly and it's hard to devise a uniform plan of attack that will take down every state at the same time. But one by one, we're turning our states into clones of one another, so that a single plan of attack will be more likely to succeed on everything at once. That won't make us safer.
I agree. But there are other differences in play today, too. It makes it hard to see for sure how it plays out. For example, now that the fully-committed competitor turns out to be countries to whom the US outsources the lion's share of its work, what is the significance of a "competitive program" with those countries? Who will have the resulting bragging rights?
One perceives some sort of variant of Gerald Holton's remark about Giants is called for here. Something vaguely like: "In the modern world, our greatest achievement would be to pull the rug out from under the giants upon whose shoulders we have elected to stand."
My personal sense is that the space program was not a way to show off that we were technologically good, but rather was a path to becoming technologically good. That is, it was the investment in US infrastructure that mattered, and all the better that it was for a peaceful purpose and gave mankind hope that people could use technology for something other than weapons. The open question is not whether the passport carried by the person going to Mars is a U.S. one, but where the dollars spent on R&D will flow to. If a by-product of the program is not a ramping up of interest in and investment in US math and science programs, then the whole notion that we are competing is a sham. The space program was never about space.
And besides, if we want to go somewhere that has air that's hard to breathe and a temperature that isn't so good and not very much drinkable water, we can do that easier than building a spacecraft for just a couple of people: By sooner than 2031, with very little effort on our part, we can make the Earth itself into such a place and not even have to get off the couch to do it. We can just go on ignoring global environmental and climate issues and we'll be in "out o' space" in no time...
Indeed, the ethics requirements should be on the makers of the robots, not on the robots. Even very stupid (i.e., lacking in any semblance or even attempt at artificial intelligence) computer programs can have ethical issues--transmitting or storing inappropriate information, computing faulty values, or giving bad advice are simple examples.
And fanciful notions of the unique nature of positronic brains aside, the set of things you can program for robots is pretty much the same as the set of things you can program for other computers, only the peripherals are different. And like their less animated counterparts, most robot ethical issues, for now, are things that need to be handled at design, development, and debugging time... not at runtime. And most responsibility for problems needs to be traced back to there.
The actual area where we're likely to see problems won't be in the robots themselves, it will be in our propensity to want to give up our judgment to computers. Computer viruses were largely not enabled by people who wrote them--programs didn't originally just start on their own on a computer--you had to manually start them. But people got tired of that. They didn't like pressing buttons that said "Show me the picture in this email message" or "Run the installation program on this disk." and they wanted it done for them. That desire to yield responsibilty for judgment to a mindless computer is what got us in trouble, not the computer's desire to do us harm.
The first car to run over a pedestrian while parking it won't have done so because the robot was too eager to drive before it had been properly trained. It will be because the robot was too stupid to know it isn't just a toaster (see The Measure of a Man), coupled with the fact that some programmer was too eager to show off his toy, or perhaps because some park guest was too willing to try untested technology, or because some quality assurance person was too afraid to hold up the opening of the park, or because some politician thought it was cool to talk of computer ethics instead of human ethics.
Ethics and laziness don't go well together. And we're a pretty lazy lot, we humans. I'd rank the probability that any lawmakers anywhere will ever require that robots not be built until they have ethics built in as so close to 0% as to be indistinguishable from it. People with cool toys to show off in the marketplace are not going to stand for that kind of thing.
Note that experiments like this are inherently more imprecise than the way they are summarized. The whole point is not "fears cats" or "doesn't fear cats", it's "has been observed trying things it wasn't previously doing that are assumed to be out of fear of cats" and "not having been observed ...etc." I recommend not reading the words describing research outcomes too literally.
When you see a study that says
"blah causes cancer in married people over 18",
give some serious thought to whether it might not mean
"blah may cause cancer generally, but our tests only covered this group and we're
being conservative about our claims."
One way this matters is kind of like the reason that evolution proceeds primarily through behavioral pathways of things being attempted. Fear of a certain smell might keep mice from cats, but maybe cats are not their principal threat any more. Maybe this is a behavior from when there were lots of cats, and maybe most homeowners don't have freely breeding cats any more. If that's so, then this could allow a lot mice to come into areas they haven't been in before, as racoons have moved into cities.
A second and less obvious reason it may matter is that a lot of what holds animals at bay in the openness of human cities may be more a holdover of a natural fear that other animals, to include humans, would be "impolite". But humans are, comparatively, ruthlessly polite. Maybe most animals may steer clear out of us for primitive fear reasons, not for practical reasons. As they learn we are bad at wiping them out, and unwilling to use all available means, that could change. We don't need to hasten things by genetically improving their willingness to try harder.
Experimenting with the boldness aspects of behaviors may have unintended consequences. I don't think it's bad to understand this kind of thing, since it may also help to fix such problems as they come up (e.g., killer bees, and finding ways to get them to be less aggressive). But that doesn't mean one shouldn't be careful about the genes and make sure they don't leave the lab, perhaps even using strong rules similar to what we use for dangerous viruses.
Perhaps mice fear humans due to this same gene, and that's why they run away rather than running toward them and biting when they see them. Maybe this also affects that. In sufficient numbers, and there are no known ethics genes inhibiting the creation of such numbers in mice, a bunch of fearless mice could be very dangerous. In general, fearlessness is to be feared in sufficient numbers. Just look at war movies where large numbers of dedicated lives are thrown away to make a small push forward. If mice showed similar determination to take over a household, that would be formidable. There are some good horror movies on this, but we could easily turn such movies to reality through genetics.
And moreso if the recent "mighty mouse" gene got mixed in, too.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I'll not let that stop me from joining the fray and suggesting another thing you might ask your lawyer about:
As I understand it, the usual argument for why this is possible to put in an initial employment agreement is the somewhat tenuous claim that they are paying you salary not just for work but also for the agreements they ask you to sign. After all, if the salary is not for that, there is nothing being given you as consideration and one might think you had no binding contract. Contracts require consideration, as I understand it.
But once you're hired, it's pretty plain that the money they are paying you is for what you've signed already. So unless there is new money in exchange for whatever new contract you're being asked to sign, and specifically being withheld if you don't sign, then what is the consideration you're being given in exchange for giving up additional rights not already mentioned? This issue is what points (I think correctly) to the duress issue. If the consideration is "we'll still employ you", that would seem to my (non-lawyerly) eye as a prima facie case for a claim of duress. If the claim is something else, you'd want to look at the contract to see what they think is the consideration. (In fact, I'd think the claim that they were going to still employ you would be something they wouldn't even want to hint at, since almost no company can really offer that as a benefit, and almost all employment contracts say outright that nothing you sign is a promise of continued employment.)
I've heard consideration described as "an act of legal detriment". That is, a contract harms each party in a way that is defined by voluntary entry in the contract to be equal. If either party did not agree that it was equal, they wouldn't sign. (That's why duress is so bad. If you don't have choice of whether to enter the contract, the notion that the contract itself defines its own metric of equality among the parties is suspect from the outset.)
So, for example, suppose I sell you a ball for $10. I'm "harmed" (legally, presumably not physically) by giving up the ball that I value, you by giving up the $10 you value. That forms the contract. But if I just give you a ball, that's not a contract, it's a gift. So if you injure yourself legally by giving up these rights, how is the company injuring itself? What is it giving up that would make you want to injure yourself thus? Or are you just giving the company a gift? (I'm pretty sure the rules for renegging on the promise of a gift are different than for renegging on a contract, but you can ask your lawyer for how.)
Like I said, these are not answers, just questions to ask someone formally qualified to answer. Among other things, I understand the answers to differ by jurisdiction.
There's also a very practical matter here, by the way. Saying "I'm not going to sign it." may not sit well with your boss. Saying "I talked to a lawyer and on advice of counsel I'm not going to sign it." (presuming you talked to counsel and that's what they said--they might say just the opposite, so do talk to them) will sound better--like you're not just being willful. So even if talking to a lawyer doesn't sort the matter out entirely, it may give you the appropriate sense of self-confidence about what you end up doing and how to phrase it to your employer.
It might have blocked him from a serious likelihood of getting the necessary votecount, certainly, but it didn't block him from being taken seriously as a candidate. What blocked him from that were words like "I'm not trying to win" or whatever it was that he said to Russert. He could have spun it otherwise, and not just to deceive people. It's not beyond him to get enough write-in votes to be a serious contender.
He wouldn't be the comedian he is without strong insight into politics. Even if he's not going to run, he could have made it onto the stage to say truths that others should be saying, and to show the others (who are trying to win) that poll numbers can go up if you speak dead serious truth. He has the opportunity, because he is an entertainer, to prove that what we are looking for is not to be entertained. But to do that, he must step out of his shell and stop being selfish and egotistical. There's too much of that already going around.
For more elaboration, see my companion post The Quality of Heroism. I'm trying not to repeat myself.
Alas, while it's always possible I'm confused about something, it's not about the fact that he doesn't want to run for office. I'm painfully aware of that. If I didn't make myself clear with this post, and you're up to another try, see my companion post about this same article, The Quality of Heroism, for an alternate explanation.
I don't know where to begin on this one, since I feel like you're replying to someone other than me. But let me hit a few obvious points, of the many that seem to have misinterpreted me...
I'll just say on this that I totally agree with this part. However, there's a difference between being a good person and allowing other people to converse directly with that person. He has to step out of the persona. See my remarks about Russert below.
I didn't say people voting for him is a tragedy. I said him not taking the opportunity seriously is a tragedy. He doesn't care to win. But he should care to win. Because he could win.
And I as well. But only if he were capable of showing he could step out of the role of being funny. His message is, at present, too mixed. He went on Russert and Russert held up his book and quizzed him on its contents. Instead of saying "Tim, it's a book of humor. It's not my political platform." he confused matters by answering as if he were defending the specific things he'd said in there. That was a tactical error. One he could overcome if he wanted. But he's not wanting.
He's said he doesn't want to win. That is the tragedy. That he could and doesn't want to. People need him to want to and he's letting people down.
Colbert has shown a great lack of heroism here. He uses terms like that on his show for effect, but I'm being serious here.
As I think of heroism, the one thing that stands out to me more than any other is that it is unscheduled. It's not just the act. It's not the effect. It's that in almost all cases, it cannot be planned or scheduled. It must be done in the moment, sacrificing not just the obvious things like one's health or life, but the non-obvious things like one's dreams and aspirations, one's day job, etc.
What's frustrating here is that you and I cannot run successfully for president. As a practical matter, no matter what is said, it now requires too much money and energy for most people to just decide their fed up and to run. At least seriously. Some of the people that are called joke candidates are trying, and no matter what is said about it, they are taking the slings and arrows of trying and the potential consequences of not donig othe things. That, in a sense, is heroism, and more than Colbert is showing.
It's not just an irony, it's a tragedy. Look at Bush. Forget that you don't like him. I don't either. But he is enough good that the image makers and the people behind him are able to craft a presidency around him, and as a total collective, they get what they want. Colbert is capable of that. He has the opportunity. He is squandering it because he doesn't want it. But heroism is not about what we want ourselves. It is about what we know must be done at the time it can be done by the person who can do it. Colbert has that opportunity and is squandering it.
Colbert is, alas, no hero.