I wouldn't bother trying to change these kinds of minds. These people are talkers, who never have to weigh alternatives.
Besides, proclaiming that the United States sucks makes him a daring character in the middle of a great drama. Some people really need that, apparently.
Or even more compellingly, they put the solar powered robots on a barren planet to transform it's environment into one suitable for colonization a billion or so years hence. And guess what? A billion years is up...
You've observed the environment and drawn the wrong conclusions. Yes, software companies release add-ons. My software company is just releasing version 1.4 right now. Is that because we all sat around in a boardroom, smoking cigars and laughing about how we were going to screw our customers out of money?
Actually, it comes from two reasons. First of all, we never have enough time to deliver all of the features we would like. Software release schedules are driven by sales cycles, so when the cycle rolls around, it's time to ship, so that means we need to cut off development for QA some reasonable amount of time before that.
Second of all, we have features in our 6th release (the point releases aren't as simple as they look) that, quite literally, I didn't even know existed when I was writing 1.0. We have other technologies and ideas I did know about then, but didn't know that customers would want them.
And as far as document types, I can open Word 97 docs in Word ver_whateverversionIhave. Microsoft gets zero bastard points for backwards compatibility.
I see a lot of crap here on Slashdot about how software companies screw people like this and that, and I just wonder how people think we have the fricking time.
I think this whole 200 year software stuff is wildly naive for the above reasons. A great quote I heard once said something along the lines of:
When you place a 500 pound weight on a bridge, you can be reasonably sure that it will also support a 50 pound weight. The same is not true of software.
I think what Bricklin has failed to grasp in his analysis is that what we're going through right now is it's own industrial revolution. First OO, then widespread use of patterns, relational databases...we're figuring out vastly better ways of doing things in software. At some point, we'll have as concrete (natch) an understanding of how to build software as we do of bridgebuilding, and then we'll settle into stability.
Slashdot, circa 3500 BC: Uzan of Ur bemoans having to rebuild the stone bridges every 10 years.
I'm saying that sexuality is a very complicated and delicate thing that has consequences that are difficult to manage. It's better to be wiser before entering into the subject.
But we can't deal with sexuality like adults because we're so hung up on appearing to be liberated. Who wants to appear to be repressed? The second you mention that maybe having having anal sex broadcast twenty four hours a day in Times Square is a bad idea, you're tarred as if you've just proposed mandatory ankle length bathing suits.
To put it smartly, we have a culture which pressures the sixteen year old boy to have sex in the backseat rather than hang on a few years until he has some vague chances of dealing with it in a capable way.
Actually, I do. I killed the cable about six months ago. But as long as broadcasters get my fricking tax money to broadcast content, I get a say. In the real world, you don't automatically win the debate just because you favor fewer restraints on behavior.
When, by the way, did we have an America where boobs and swear words were on TV? I don't remember it.
Chapter 243 of my new book, Things We All Fricking Know But Like To Pretend We Don't For Some Reason covers the obvious reality that maybe children should get some scope on the universe before they engage in activities that make them parents. Of course, this inhibits pleasure, so a Slashdotter cannot conceive of it.
That's the whole point I was trying to make: he's begging the question. You can't even know for sure that I have faith from my comments; I merely asserted that HE was taking it as an article of faith that porn doesn't have, ahem, diabolical origins. I assert neither pro or con in my comments. And no, I'm not a Jesuit;).
And so are you by saying that porn is normal and healthy. I know that's what you **believe**, but I believe differently, and that's why we're having this discussion. You're saying porn is normal and healthy because, well, porn is normal and healthy, and anyone who says otherwise is stupid, because...
The assertion I'll stand by here is that it seems ridiculous that no one can even consider the possibility that under certain circumstances, for certain people, in certain ways, porn is harmful? There's not a single instance? What else in our world is like that? Can you name another entirely universal good?
I think that with the overwhelming demand for hybrids, we'll easily achieve this on average over the next ten years. Try going to a local dealership and test driving a hybrid. At least in Dallas, there's a 3 month waiting list.
And consider that if a third of the cars on the road double their mileage, this improves average mileage by a third, which I would guess is about 8 mpg. The only x factor would be the attrition rate of existing automobiles. And consider that we're really just in the first generation of hybrids. The free market has certainly produced a better solution to this problem than the government could have.
I'll be buying a new, i.e., new to me, car in the next 4-5 years, and I have a strong (say, $3000-5000) bias towards hybrids, beyond simply the payout in improved mileage. The only question will be if they can churn them out fast enough to keep up with demand.
Do you really, truly, not understand the reason why sexuality is more corrupting to children, or are you just canting out what you've heard everywhere else? I thought that this was just one of those things that we all knew the answer to but couldn't say it.
Sexuality is nearly universally presented out of context with its consequences. Violence is presented much less so. It may be glorified, but someone usually ends up dead (certainly in Die Hard, they did). Furthermore, children are much less likely to encounter a gang of terrorists than they are a girl in the backseat.
Is this really not comprehended? And are you really putting forth that porn has no connection with problems in sexuality of all varieties? It just has no effect on people?
1) Kids are not going to 'stumble' across pr0n. They are going to go out looking for it.
Yeah, that's what I thought until my 8 year old son fired up Xmen.com (it's thankfully been shut down now).
2) The primary responsibility for children who browse the net, lies not with the government, or lawmakers, or ISPs, or pr0n websites, or even the owner of the computer. It lies with their parents.
Absolutely, the primary responsibility. This does not mean that society bears no responsibility whatsoever for protecting children, however. Teachers can't play porn at the day care center. Why? Not strictly because of the free market, but because the law recognizes that there is a compelling societal interest in not prematurely sexualizing children.
3) Pr0n is not the work of satan, despite what many(including 4 S.C. judges) believe. People need a more mature attidude towards sex.
Prove it. This is as necessarily a religious belief as is the opposite belief, so I reject this point imprimus.
4) No matter WHAT gets put on the net and no matter WHAT the children see and do on it, we should NEVER sacrafice our liberties for the sake of piece of mind.
Really? Not even the most trivial liberty for the most substantial piece (sic) of mind? We shouldn't sacrifice the liberty of private ownership of nuclear weapons for peace of mind? We shouldn't restrict drunk drivers? Sounds like dogma to me (note that that doesn't mean it's wrong).
Repeat after me: freedom of speech doesn't mean that everything said is equally valuable.
Furthermore, I'll stack my consideration and intellect on issues against yours any day. An enlightened mind might consider that the opposition has different priorities. I'm willing to cede that the opposition is not stupid or ignorant (though I still believe they're wrong, in that in the long term preserving this right undermines the basis for free expression by debasing society, but that's another, long story).
Finally, I think we do need a more mature attitude towards sex. We need to realize that it's not a universal good, that sexual content isn't universally better than its absence, and that ideas have consequences. But we're not going to reach this point on Slashdot.
I like the general idea, but these prizes function better as boolean technical benchmarks, rather than the more general consumer robot you've outlined here.
Might make a good Ask Slashdot: what would the precise terms of an R-Prize be?
An un-tethered 100m sprint (on two legs) that beats the human world record would be a good start. AI benchmarks seem harder to define...
I think the key here is that the Wright Brothers developed the airplane outside of the rubric of government. If there had been a government program to develop the airplane, I imagine you'd have seen the same progression, particularly if private individuals were enjoined from development.
Furthermore, you could argue that manned spaceflight is not relevant, but I'd imagine you couldn't walk into a typical room of Americans without finding someone with a life impacted by space travel in general(satellite TV, phones, weather coverage, etc).
I can't speak for everyone, but my position is that, having looked at the science, it's unclear exactly what the nature of the warming is, whether it's technological or climatalogical in origin, and if it is technogenic then what exactly we can do about it.
The Kyoto protocol is pointless, i.e., even according to its own projections, it fails to achieve its ends. If everything it says is true, and it is adopted, it only delays the warming a few years at a hideous cost.
So, at the end of all this, it would seem that greatly decreasing fossil fuel consumption would be a great precautionary measure. The only other economically practical alternative to fossil fuels is nuclear. But the very same greens that cry about global warming prevent nuclear power from coming about. So, at least with me, it's a stalemate: I'm not willing to drastically reduce the quality of life for my family based on the imperfect understanding we have currently, and (most of) the greens would rather have global warming than nuclear power, apparently.
Judging from the recent statements of James Lovelock, this logjam may be breaking, thank God. A green embrace of non-meltdown capable pebble bed reactors, for example, could make this whole thing go away inside of twenty years.
I just recently had a similar discussion with my some older folks about the whole "briefcase nuke" thing. Is it possible? Yes, I suppose. But why spend all that money and take all that risk when you can (God forbid) put together mustard gas and kill a few thousand people on a subway?
Other scenarios abound. It's simply that briefcase nuke (or good grief, getting your hands on a spacecraft) are Mount Everests to climb in terms of terrorism.
Let me, as a radical free-market, hard-core conservative John Derbyshire t-shirt wearin' programmer respond to this.
First, there's nothing theoretically wrong with watching a lot of TV. Practically, there is. Television espouses a worldview, first of all. This world view is bicoastal, sexually promiscuous and materialistic. Consequences are separated from actions. Faith is mocked. Wisdom and insight doesn't play well for the demographic, so it is absent.
Consider that in watching three hours of television, you'll watch one hour of commercials.
Consider that almost any other activity is more productive, no matter how seemingly pointless. As for the points about news, I'm vastly better informed by the Internet. When I need video, I can get that on demand on the Internet.
I'm not sure how much of this whole problem is just warmed over Malthusianism (I'm sure the author of the parent knows what that means, everybody else just look it up).
I don't accept the premise that peak production reveals anything meaningful about the remaining supply. Production may fall for so many reasons, including OPEC's machinations, increased fuel efficiency in cars (good grief, that certainly has increased since the 70's), etc.
As it has been noted endlessly, there's an enormous supply of petroleum out there given a higher cost of extraction. Not far from where I live in the Fort Worth area, there's a town called Thurber. Thurber has the largest known deposit of bituminous coal on Earth (at least that's the town's claim). Thurber is also notable because it's a really cool ghost town. It's a ghost town because it developed as a mining town, and then far cheaper sources of energy became available. Almost all of that coal is still down there, just waiting for the energy prices to rise to the point where they justify extraction.
The bottom line is this: alternative energy sources are absolutely as well developed as they need to be at this point. The existing petroleum supplies at higher extraction costs provide us plateaus that we will fall to as cheaper sources are depleted. As we fall to those more expensive petroleum alternatives, the alternative sources will become more attractive, and attract development, and fix the problem. There might be some stutters as we drop from one plateau to another, but nothing big. We could always grow up and realize that nuclear power can work in the interim.
As per your recommendations, I'm always skeptical when micro tries to lead macro. It's just that the effects are so hard to predict. I would suggest that absolutely, if you want a hybrid for the fuel efficiency, you should buy one, but you shouldn't buy out of any larger plan to save the world because the effects are just too complex. For example, by buying a hybrid, you're obviously reducing demand pressure on the price of petroleum, which makes it more precious compared to solar. One might reason that, as a private individual, the best thing you can do to promote alternative energy sources is to drive a big SUV, which will drive up petroleum prices (infinitesimally). Of course, this has its own set of unexpected circumstances (introducing economies of scale, for instance), so I tend to just throw up my hands and say, "I just have to solve my own family (i.e., micro) problems and let the world take care of itself, for the most part."
Slashdot Mirror
I think that compliance with the law is incumbent on the AI's judgment. That is, the law is more properly characterized as:
Do not harm, or allow to come to harm any human being by action or inaction as far as the robot can imagine.
Thus, smarter AI robots are safer, because they can more accurately forsee dangerous situations.
I wouldn't bother trying to change these kinds of minds. These people are talkers, who never have to weigh alternatives.
Besides, proclaiming that the United States sucks makes him a daring character in the middle of a great drama. Some people really need that, apparently.
Or even more compellingly, they put the solar powered robots on a barren planet to transform it's environment into one suitable for colonization a billion or so years hence. And guess what? A billion years is up...
You've observed the environment and drawn the wrong conclusions. Yes, software companies release add-ons. My software company is just releasing version 1.4 right now. Is that because we all sat around in a boardroom, smoking cigars and laughing about how we were going to screw our customers out of money?
Actually, it comes from two reasons. First of all, we never have enough time to deliver all of the features we would like. Software release schedules are driven by sales cycles, so when the cycle rolls around, it's time to ship, so that means we need to cut off development for QA some reasonable amount of time before that.
Second of all, we have features in our 6th release (the point releases aren't as simple as they look) that, quite literally, I didn't even know existed when I was writing 1.0. We have other technologies and ideas I did know about then, but didn't know that customers would want them.
And as far as document types, I can open Word 97 docs in Word ver_whateverversionIhave. Microsoft gets zero bastard points for backwards compatibility.
I see a lot of crap here on Slashdot about how software companies screw people like this and that, and I just wonder how people think we have the fricking time.
I think this whole 200 year software stuff is wildly naive for the above reasons. A great quote I heard once said something along the lines of: When you place a 500 pound weight on a bridge, you can be reasonably sure that it will also support a 50 pound weight. The same is not true of software. I think what Bricklin has failed to grasp in his analysis is that what we're going through right now is it's own industrial revolution. First OO, then widespread use of patterns, relational databases...we're figuring out vastly better ways of doing things in software. At some point, we'll have as concrete (natch) an understanding of how to build software as we do of bridgebuilding, and then we'll settle into stability.
Slashdot, circa 3500 BC: Uzan of Ur bemoans having to rebuild the stone bridges every 10 years.
I'm saying that sexuality is a very complicated and delicate thing that has consequences that are difficult to manage. It's better to be wiser before entering into the subject.
But we can't deal with sexuality like adults because we're so hung up on appearing to be liberated. Who wants to appear to be repressed? The second you mention that maybe having having anal sex broadcast twenty four hours a day in Times Square is a bad idea, you're tarred as if you've just proposed mandatory ankle length bathing suits.
To put it smartly, we have a culture which pressures the sixteen year old boy to have sex in the backseat rather than hang on a few years until he has some vague chances of dealing with it in a capable way.
Actually, I do. I killed the cable about six months ago. But as long as broadcasters get my fricking tax money to broadcast content, I get a say. In the real world, you don't automatically win the debate just because you favor fewer restraints on behavior.
I dub thee...STRAWMAN SLAYER!!!
When, by the way, did we have an America where boobs and swear words were on TV? I don't remember it.
Chapter 243 of my new book, Things We All Fricking Know But Like To Pretend We Don't For Some Reason covers the obvious reality that maybe children should get some scope on the universe before they engage in activities that make them parents. Of course, this inhibits pleasure, so a Slashdotter cannot conceive of it.
Star Trek thing. It was revealed on Enterprise that this stands for 'Minshara', whatever that means.
It would be interesting if, when we do find one, that habitable planets ended up being referred to like that.
That's the whole point I was trying to make: he's begging the question. You can't even know for sure that I have faith from my comments; I merely asserted that HE was taking it as an article of faith that porn doesn't have, ahem, diabolical origins. I assert neither pro or con in my comments. And no, I'm not a Jesuit ;).
And so are you by saying that porn is normal and healthy. I know that's what you **believe**, but I believe differently, and that's why we're having this discussion. You're saying porn is normal and healthy because, well, porn is normal and healthy, and anyone who says otherwise is stupid, because...
The assertion I'll stand by here is that it seems ridiculous that no one can even consider the possibility that under certain circumstances, for certain people, in certain ways, porn is harmful? There's not a single instance? What else in our world is like that? Can you name another entirely universal good?
I think that with the overwhelming demand for hybrids, we'll easily achieve this on average over the next ten years. Try going to a local dealership and test driving a hybrid. At least in Dallas, there's a 3 month waiting list.
And consider that if a third of the cars on the road double their mileage, this improves average mileage by a third, which I would guess is about 8 mpg. The only x factor would be the attrition rate of existing automobiles. And consider that we're really just in the first generation of hybrids. The free market has certainly produced a better solution to this problem than the government could have.
I'll be buying a new, i.e., new to me, car in the next 4-5 years, and I have a strong (say, $3000-5000) bias towards hybrids, beyond simply the payout in improved mileage. The only question will be if they can churn them out fast enough to keep up with demand.
Do you really, truly, not understand the reason why sexuality is more corrupting to children, or are you just canting out what you've heard everywhere else? I thought that this was just one of those things that we all knew the answer to but couldn't say it.
Sexuality is nearly universally presented out of context with its consequences. Violence is presented much less so. It may be glorified, but someone usually ends up dead (certainly in Die Hard, they did). Furthermore, children are much less likely to encounter a gang of terrorists than they are a girl in the backseat.
Is this really not comprehended? And are you really putting forth that porn has no connection with problems in sexuality of all varieties? It just has no effect on people?
1) Kids are not going to 'stumble' across pr0n. They are going to go out looking for it.
Yeah, that's what I thought until my 8 year old son fired up Xmen.com (it's thankfully been shut down now).
2) The primary responsibility for children who browse the net, lies not with the government, or lawmakers, or ISPs, or pr0n websites, or even the owner of the computer. It lies with their parents.
Absolutely, the primary responsibility. This does not mean that society bears no responsibility whatsoever for protecting children, however. Teachers can't play porn at the day care center. Why? Not strictly because of the free market, but because the law recognizes that there is a compelling societal interest in not prematurely sexualizing children.
3) Pr0n is not the work of satan, despite what many(including 4 S.C. judges) believe. People need a more mature attidude towards sex.
Prove it. This is as necessarily a religious belief as is the opposite belief, so I reject this point imprimus.
4) No matter WHAT gets put on the net and no matter WHAT the children see and do on it, we should NEVER sacrafice our liberties for the sake of piece of mind.
Really? Not even the most trivial liberty for the most substantial piece (sic) of mind? We shouldn't sacrifice the liberty of private ownership of nuclear weapons for peace of mind? We shouldn't restrict drunk drivers? Sounds like dogma to me (note that that doesn't mean it's wrong).
Repeat after me: freedom of speech doesn't mean that everything said is equally valuable.
Furthermore, I'll stack my consideration and intellect on issues against yours any day. An enlightened mind might consider that the opposition has different priorities. I'm willing to cede that the opposition is not stupid or ignorant (though I still believe they're wrong, in that in the long term preserving this right undermines the basis for free expression by debasing society, but that's another, long story).
Finally, I think we do need a more mature attitude towards sex. We need to realize that it's not a universal good, that sexual content isn't universally better than its absence, and that ideas have consequences. But we're not going to reach this point on Slashdot.
I like the general idea, but these prizes function better as boolean technical benchmarks, rather than the more general consumer robot you've outlined here.
Might make a good Ask Slashdot: what would the precise terms of an R-Prize be?
An un-tethered 100m sprint (on two legs) that beats the human world record would be a good start. AI benchmarks seem harder to define...
To invent a robot dog and name it Dogmatic.
I think the key here is that the Wright Brothers developed the airplane outside of the rubric of government. If there had been a government program to develop the airplane, I imagine you'd have seen the same progression, particularly if private individuals were enjoined from development.
Furthermore, you could argue that manned spaceflight is not relevant, but I'd imagine you couldn't walk into a typical room of Americans without finding someone with a life impacted by space travel in general(satellite TV, phones, weather coverage, etc).
Furthermore, Stalin didn't have faith, Pol Pot didn't have faith, Tim McVeigh...
Mankind is evil. There's no quick fix.
The mystery will be solved for you in a few years when your child is being prematurely sexualized by our culture.
It is a mystery to me how a parent could be so obtuse as to not see this coming.
I can't speak for everyone, but my position is that, having looked at the science, it's unclear exactly what the nature of the warming is, whether it's technological or climatalogical in origin, and if it is technogenic then what exactly we can do about it.
The Kyoto protocol is pointless, i.e., even according to its own projections, it fails to achieve its ends. If everything it says is true, and it is adopted, it only delays the warming a few years at a hideous cost.
So, at the end of all this, it would seem that greatly decreasing fossil fuel consumption would be a great precautionary measure. The only other economically practical alternative to fossil fuels is nuclear. But the very same greens that cry about global warming prevent nuclear power from coming about. So, at least with me, it's a stalemate: I'm not willing to drastically reduce the quality of life for my family based on the imperfect understanding we have currently, and (most of) the greens would rather have global warming than nuclear power, apparently.
Judging from the recent statements of James Lovelock, this logjam may be breaking, thank God. A green embrace of non-meltdown capable pebble bed reactors, for example, could make this whole thing go away inside of twenty years.
Yup. It's a massively parallel array of solar collectors.
I just recently had a similar discussion with my some older folks about the whole "briefcase nuke" thing. Is it possible? Yes, I suppose. But why spend all that money and take all that risk when you can (God forbid) put together mustard gas and kill a few thousand people on a subway?
Other scenarios abound. It's simply that briefcase nuke (or good grief, getting your hands on a spacecraft) are Mount Everests to climb in terms of terrorism.
Conversely, the ability to capture profit from the invention of a device might enable the invention of the device in the first place.
Golden goose problems suck.
Nonsense. Here is the new Vader costume.
That too, but violence is more often presented in context than sexuality. But you're right, TV is incredibly violent as well, even on network TV.
Let me, as a radical free-market, hard-core conservative John Derbyshire t-shirt wearin' programmer respond to this.
First, there's nothing theoretically wrong with watching a lot of TV. Practically, there is. Television espouses a worldview, first of all. This world view is bicoastal, sexually promiscuous and materialistic. Consequences are separated from actions. Faith is mocked. Wisdom and insight doesn't play well for the demographic, so it is absent.
Consider that in watching three hours of television, you'll watch one hour of commercials.
Consider that almost any other activity is more productive, no matter how seemingly pointless. As for the points about news, I'm vastly better informed by the Internet. When I need video, I can get that on demand on the Internet.
I'm not sure how much of this whole problem is just warmed over Malthusianism (I'm sure the author of the parent knows what that means, everybody else just look it up).
I don't accept the premise that peak production reveals anything meaningful about the remaining supply. Production may fall for so many reasons, including OPEC's machinations, increased fuel efficiency in cars (good grief, that certainly has increased since the 70's), etc.
As it has been noted endlessly, there's an enormous supply of petroleum out there given a higher cost of extraction. Not far from where I live in the Fort Worth area, there's a town called Thurber. Thurber has the largest known deposit of bituminous coal on Earth (at least that's the town's claim). Thurber is also notable because it's a really cool ghost town. It's a ghost town because it developed as a mining town, and then far cheaper sources of energy became available. Almost all of that coal is still down there, just waiting for the energy prices to rise to the point where they justify extraction.
The bottom line is this: alternative energy sources are absolutely as well developed as they need to be at this point. The existing petroleum supplies at higher extraction costs provide us plateaus that we will fall to as cheaper sources are depleted. As we fall to those more expensive petroleum alternatives, the alternative sources will become more attractive, and attract development, and fix the problem. There might be some stutters as we drop from one plateau to another, but nothing big. We could always grow up and realize that nuclear power can work in the interim.
As per your recommendations, I'm always skeptical when micro tries to lead macro. It's just that the effects are so hard to predict. I would suggest that absolutely, if you want a hybrid for the fuel efficiency, you should buy one, but you shouldn't buy out of any larger plan to save the world because the effects are just too complex. For example, by buying a hybrid, you're obviously reducing demand pressure on the price of petroleum, which makes it more precious compared to solar. One might reason that, as a private individual, the best thing you can do to promote alternative energy sources is to drive a big SUV, which will drive up petroleum prices (infinitesimally). Of course, this has its own set of unexpected circumstances (introducing economies of scale, for instance), so I tend to just throw up my hands and say, "I just have to solve my own family (i.e., micro) problems and let the world take care of itself, for the most part."