It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis.
Well, isn't this cute. A contract, you say? Doesn't a contract involve some sort of consent? When did I consent to have TV broadcast into my home? Did I sign something when I bought my TV saying how I'd use it? No -- I'm not bound by any contract, no matter how disappointed the broadcasters may be with their business model.
So, the idea here is that security guards are only human and can't reliably monitor cameras themselves, right? And this system will pick up the slack, watching on the security guard's behalf? I don't mean to disparage security guards, but if this system works well enough to be considered worthwhile by security companies, then it will work well enough that security guards can get away with sleeping on the job until the computer alerts them to a problem. Thus, the human element of the system, being too reliant upon the computer, actually winds up being less aware. Criminals will figure this out. They will figure out that their behaviour can be overt, so long as the computer can't tell (whereas a human could easily do so). No more skulking around in shadows, guys -- nobody's watching! Just act like a civvie and nobody's the wiser. As long as gross (that is, macroscopic) actions look normal to the computer, no alarms will go off.
I think you're missing something important here. Technology enables ordinary surveillance tasks to be replicated and scaled up by amounts previously unimaginable. The result is not just more of the same -- at some point, it introduces a qualitative change
Consider surveillance cameras on city streets. Sure, the fact that I walk down a particular street at a particular time is public knowledge -- anyone could see me and remember. But what if every step I took in public was recorded on video and tracked? Whoever had that information would know a great deal about my behaviour, and that information could be used against me. Pervasive collection of information, even public information, can be a grave threat to privacy.
Now consider the technology discussed in this article. Phenomena such as racial profiling have taught us that an innocent person can suffer horribly at the hands of law enforcement personnel just because they fit a perceived statistical profile. Imagine a world where everyone is afraid to act in any way unusual for fear of being stopped for "questioning."
And you can forget the argument about "if it works, it's okay." First of all, these methods are inherently statistical, and statistical methods are never 100% accurate. If they were, they would be logical, deductive methods. Statistics is inductive.
Secondly, even if you did claim to have perfect foreknowledge of crimes to be committed, you create a predestination paradox. At what point does a would-be criminal make up his or her mind to commit a crime? Who's to say he or she wouldn't back down at the critical moment, or be unable to go through with it due to some chance event?
My real point here is that we can't always rely upon "more is better" methodology as our technology progresses. We have to consider how scale affects the nature of our technological activities. If we are blind to issues such as these, then eventually we'll get screwed. Maybe this prediction thing will turn out to be benign or even beneficial. But there are many, many issues of this sort, and some of them are going to bite us in the ass if we don't raise hell when we see a problem. Dig?
Half the time when we see a story on/. about some ludicrous lawsuit or the like, the reporting seems to completely accept whatever absurdity is taking place, merely reporting the facts (for shame!). I like this one, though -- read the last line of the article:
"If the suit goes forward, a judge will likely decide whether makers of a movie about a fictional character have the right to place him in fictional surroundings as well."
You _can_ disprove a negative; I can prove that there's no elephant between me and my monitor right now.
No, you really can't, sorry. Just the same as I can't prove there's no invisible dragon in (the late) Carl Sagan's garage. See his book "Candle in the Dark" for a chapter on this principle.
Ah, I believe that title is being ripped off for the name of an upcoming episode of "Andromeda." I believe it's "Be All My Sins Remembered."
Re:You 'geeks' really annoy me
on
The Forever War
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
When slashdot gives you a troll, make lemonade. Or trollade, hmm...
Anyway, this could be turned into an interesting question -- we're (sort of) at war, so is it really appropriate to be giving praise to a book about a war that goes on for hundreds of years? Well, you bet your ass it is. To be trite, remember that the unexamined life is not worth living. A book such as this represents a fantastic reflection on what war really means. That doesn't make it inappropriate in these troubled times -- it makes it extremely relevant.
Which goes to show that it's a great piece of science fiction. Some of us may have forgotten, but good sci fi is not about the future, it's about the present. The standard approach for a really good sci fi story is to take some observation about humanity, for example some cultural trend, and see what happens if it's extrapolated into a hyperbolic example. By looking at a potential future, we gain insight about the present.
The Forever War is a fantastic piece of work. Just to be clear, though it's set in the future this book is really about the Vietnam War, and in particular the sense of alienation a vet feels when returning home. I'm not into war novels at all, but this reads like sci fi and it's incredibly satisfying.
I also heartily recommend Haldeman's other "Forever" books: Forever Peace and Forever Free. They're not quite sequels (well, Forever Free is but it's set much later), but they give you the same sort of fantastic experience as The Forever War.
Some of my top sci fi picks of all time. They're on my shelf next to Ender's Game.
The article is a bit lacking on consumer-relevant details, but the marketese on their site gives you a better idea of that stuff.
Notables:
Price: "Matrix 3DM cards will be comparable in cost to 35mm film and work in a similar fashion"
Longevity: "Matrix 3-D Memory's array structure results in an archival storage device capable of storing data for more than 100 years."
Scaling up: "By leveraging the same infrastructure as the rest of the industry, Matrix 3-D Memory will scale at least as fast as other semiconductor technologies, maintaining its significant cost advantage with future process generations."
Compatibility: "Interchangeable with re-writeable flash cards"
Capacity: "Comparable cost per megabyte to optical and magnetic storage"
As I said, all other factors being equal. I would expect that these would cost more per unit than CDs, but I would also expect that they'll be able to hold a lot more data once the technology is refined. I don't think we've got enough information here to evaluate important factors like cost-per-byte.
One thing I didn't see answered in the article: these chips are write-once, we know that. But does that mean you must write the entire chip in one session, or could it be done incrementally?
Put another way, does write-once in this case mean it's like a CD (commit entire data payload in one chunk and seal it forever), or like a blank book (fill in pages as you go).
If it can be done incrementally, that represents a significant advantage over CDs, other factors being (for the sake of argument) equal.
today (2001): human trains AI, limited by wetware bandwidth
Wetware bandwidth, multiplied by the number of humans performing the training. Why don't they open-source it and let everyone in the world have the chance to train it? Much faster, much more democratic and therefore representative of what people really consider to be "normal" intelligent behavior.
This reminds me of the first detections of extrasolar planets, which have been found by the eccentricity (or "wiggle" if you want to be cute) in the position of their star they cause with their gravitational pull as they orbit the star.
Of course, gravity is notoriously weak and therefore difficult to use as an accurate measurement tool. I could be wrong, but I think they're starting to spot extrasolar planets by other means that are more satisfactory. Maybe they'll find something similar for dark matter.
What i'd like to know is...will they move the buttons around between voters? This would keep anyone from knowing who other people voted for. (Think fingerprints on the screen).
Oh, they'll move the buttons around, but keep the labels in the same place. Instant Florida vacation.
Good to see a governmental body acknowledging the benefits hackers can provide for society. To go a step further, a friend of mine actually wrote the software their school used for elections back when he was in high school.
Often when I read about an amazing new substance that's been developed on nanotech scale, I wonder what these things will look like on a macro-scale. If they use these new silicon nanocrystals to make an awesome new display, will it have some other cool properties? For example, could they be made into a thin, flexible display? Or maybe those stupid cellophane-roll displays they had in Red Planet (ugh)?
I believe that they're concurrently shooting the movies for Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. Anyone know if they're still using Anakin as Ender? It's not too late to kill myself, is it?
Those 60 lines are distributed worldwide. According to this article there are less than 10 lines in the US (which if I understand the funding procedures correctly means that THOSE are the ones which will be up for federal funding).
That's it exactly, then. Bush's policy doesn't even make any sense in the light of these facts. Is he defining some arbitrary cutoff date past which no new lines may be introduced? If not, then his proposal simply has no teeth when it comes to preventing harvesting of embryos.
"Destroy another fetus now, I don't like children anyhow." -Leonard Cohen, "The Future"
From my understanding, public, federally funded research, can only be conducted on these existing lines. Any new lines created by private firms cannot be used in federally funded research. Of course, no matter what the gov't decides, private researchers will go and do what they please. They just won't get any money from the feds.
Right, but consider what happens when a new line is created. The line of reasoning Dubyah used to justify research on the existing lines would apply to the new ones once they've already been created. As he said, the life-and-death decision is already made for those cases.
From the article:
He said the NIH would begin work Friday on creating a federal registry for existing stem cell lines and that any company or research group that wants to receive federal funds must place their stem cell lines on the registry.
Also, they say they don't know exactly how many lines do exist because it's so proprietary. And let's not forget the question of lines of stem cells created in other countries. If those were made available, why not put those in the registry as well?
I'm not saying that all this falls directly out of Bush's speech. After all, he has so far only agreed to fund $250 mil on the existing 60 or so lines. But if the issue comes up again for a new set of lines, he won't be able to say no to them without going back on what has been said.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, isn't this cute. A contract, you say? Doesn't a contract involve some sort of consent? When did I consent to have TV broadcast into my home? Did I sign something when I bought my TV saying how I'd use it? No -- I'm not bound by any contract, no matter how disappointed the broadcasters may be with their business model.
So, the idea here is that security guards are only human and can't reliably monitor cameras themselves, right? And this system will pick up the slack, watching on the security guard's behalf? I don't mean to disparage security guards, but if this system works well enough to be considered worthwhile by security companies, then it will work well enough that security guards can get away with sleeping on the job until the computer alerts them to a problem. Thus, the human element of the system, being too reliant upon the computer, actually winds up being less aware. Criminals will figure this out. They will figure out that their behaviour can be overt, so long as the computer can't tell (whereas a human could easily do so). No more skulking around in shadows, guys -- nobody's watching! Just act like a civvie and nobody's the wiser. As long as gross (that is, macroscopic) actions look normal to the computer, no alarms will go off.
Consider surveillance cameras on city streets. Sure, the fact that I walk down a particular street at a particular time is public knowledge -- anyone could see me and remember. But what if every step I took in public was recorded on video and tracked? Whoever had that information would know a great deal about my behaviour, and that information could be used against me. Pervasive collection of information, even public information, can be a grave threat to privacy.
Now consider the technology discussed in this article. Phenomena such as racial profiling have taught us that an innocent person can suffer horribly at the hands of law enforcement personnel just because they fit a perceived statistical profile. Imagine a world where everyone is afraid to act in any way unusual for fear of being stopped for "questioning."
And you can forget the argument about "if it works, it's okay." First of all, these methods are inherently statistical, and statistical methods are never 100% accurate. If they were, they would be logical, deductive methods. Statistics is inductive.
Secondly, even if you did claim to have perfect foreknowledge of crimes to be committed, you create a predestination paradox. At what point does a would-be criminal make up his or her mind to commit a crime? Who's to say he or she wouldn't back down at the critical moment, or be unable to go through with it due to some chance event?
My real point here is that we can't always rely upon "more is better" methodology as our technology progresses. We have to consider how scale affects the nature of our technological activities. If we are blind to issues such as these, then eventually we'll get screwed. Maybe this prediction thing will turn out to be benign or even beneficial. But there are many, many issues of this sort, and some of them are going to bite us in the ass if we don't raise hell when we see a problem. Dig?
"If the suit goes forward, a judge will likely decide whether makers of a movie about a fictional character have the right to place him in fictional surroundings as well."
No, you really can't, sorry. Just the same as I can't prove there's no invisible dragon in (the late) Carl Sagan's garage. See his book "Candle in the Dark" for a chapter on this principle.
Ah, I believe that title is being ripped off for the name of an upcoming episode of "Andromeda." I believe it's "Be All My Sins Remembered."
Anyway, this could be turned into an interesting question -- we're (sort of) at war, so is it really appropriate to be giving praise to a book about a war that goes on for hundreds of years? Well, you bet your ass it is. To be trite, remember that the unexamined life is not worth living. A book such as this represents a fantastic reflection on what war really means. That doesn't make it inappropriate in these troubled times -- it makes it extremely relevant.
Which goes to show that it's a great piece of science fiction. Some of us may have forgotten, but good sci fi is not about the future, it's about the present. The standard approach for a really good sci fi story is to take some observation about humanity, for example some cultural trend, and see what happens if it's extrapolated into a hyperbolic example. By looking at a potential future, we gain insight about the present.
I also heartily recommend Haldeman's other "Forever" books: Forever Peace and Forever Free. They're not quite sequels (well, Forever Free is but it's set much later), but they give you the same sort of fantastic experience as The Forever War.
Some of my top sci fi picks of all time. They're on my shelf next to Ender's Game.
And racist, too.
Notables:
As I said, all other factors being equal. I would expect that these would cost more per unit than CDs, but I would also expect that they'll be able to hold a lot more data once the technology is refined. I don't think we've got enough information here to evaluate important factors like cost-per-byte.
Put another way, does write-once in this case mean it's like a CD (commit entire data payload in one chunk and seal it forever), or like a blank book (fill in pages as you go).
If it can be done incrementally, that represents a significant advantage over CDs, other factors being (for the sake of argument) equal.
No, she is in high school and has nine friends.
And this is a paradox how? The answer is false. Some paradox.
I very much doubt that. A fluid will not oscillate in a rigid way that will transmit those vibrations uniformly into a solid body.
Wetware bandwidth, multiplied by the number of humans performing the training. Why don't they open-source it and let everyone in the world have the chance to train it? Much faster, much more democratic and therefore representative of what people really consider to be "normal" intelligent behavior.
Delivering high-voltage shock to the researchers doesn't constitute a reward?
Of course, gravity is notoriously weak and therefore difficult to use as an accurate measurement tool. I could be wrong, but I think they're starting to spot extrasolar planets by other means that are more satisfactory. Maybe they'll find something similar for dark matter.
Oh, they'll move the buttons around, but keep the labels in the same place. Instant Florida vacation.
Good to see a governmental body acknowledging the benefits hackers can provide for society. To go a step further, a friend of mine actually wrote the software their school used for elections back when he was in high school.
Often when I read about an amazing new substance that's been developed on nanotech scale, I wonder what these things will look like on a macro-scale. If they use these new silicon nanocrystals to make an awesome new display, will it have some other cool properties? For example, could they be made into a thin, flexible display? Or maybe those stupid cellophane-roll displays they had in Red Planet (ugh)?
I believe that they're concurrently shooting the movies for Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. Anyone know if they're still using Anakin as Ender? It's not too late to kill myself, is it?
That's it exactly, then. Bush's policy doesn't even make any sense in the light of these facts. Is he defining some arbitrary cutoff date past which no new lines may be introduced? If not, then his proposal simply has no teeth when it comes to preventing harvesting of embryos.
"Destroy another fetus now, I don't like children anyhow."
-Leonard Cohen, "The Future"
Right, but consider what happens when a new line is created. The line of reasoning Dubyah used to justify research on the existing lines would apply to the new ones once they've already been created. As he said, the life-and-death decision is already made for those cases.
From the article:
He said the NIH would begin work Friday on creating a federal registry for existing stem cell lines and that any company or research group that wants to receive federal funds must place their stem cell lines on the registry.
Also, they say they don't know exactly how many lines do exist because it's so proprietary. And let's not forget the question of lines of stem cells created in other countries. If those were made available, why not put those in the registry as well?
I'm not saying that all this falls directly out of Bush's speech. After all, he has so far only agreed to fund $250 mil on the existing 60 or so lines. But if the issue comes up again for a new set of lines, he won't be able to say no to them without going back on what has been said.
Perhaps you meant to say Verizon? Or is AT&T doing this as well?