I love it when geeks slam capitalism. Since high tech equipment of all kinds can only be affordable via mass production and massive R&D, it's pretty fucking hypocritical to say anything about capitalism while you're typing away on a product that took MASSIVE capital investment by the largest companies in the world.
Both the microchip revolution and the Internet have their origins in publicly funded research.
There's nothing to prevent mass production and massive R&D from occuring outside of capitalism. The USSR had all sort of mass production of arms, and enough R & D to put the first human into space.
(No, I'm not endorsing state communism; I'm a Zenarchist on good days and a libertarian socialist on others. I have little use for any system where a minority holds power, be it the state directly or a state-backed class of "owners".)
The NIMBY arguement ("Not In My BackYard", in case anyone isn't familiar with the term) is "I think we should have X, I just don't want it in my backyard." These are the people who argue for more prisons - as long as they're on the other side of town.
To recognize that nobody wants it in their backyard, and to give equal consideration to all those other people - to say "It doesn't affect me directly but I care anyway" - is the polar opposite of NIMBY. Indeed, it is compassion.
To go further and say "It doesn't directly affect anyone now living, but will affect future generations, so I care anyway", is getting close to wisdom...and is therefore rarely seen.
"Moral authority" doesn't enter into it. There is no (im)morality to be attached to this. It is science (supposedly) based on fact, not faith based on subjective views of right & wrong.
If only it were that simple.
The facts are rarely 100% clear, leading to some uncertainty. Even when the facts are 100% clear, usually what they are clear about is the amount of risk, not a simple safe/unsafe categorization.
The question of how to deal with uncertainty and risk is very much an ethical one. How much risk do I have the right to subject you to?
For example you can refuse a raise to a programmer, since even if he decides to go away you have plenty of other programmers who already know your sw.
Security by obsurity doesn't work for job security either.
Clueful employers value developers whose code is easy to work with. If other programmers can't figure out your software because you're deliberately writing obfuscated code, it's time to fire your ass and have it re-written.
Smart developers understand that if other people can't take over their code, they'll be stuck on the same project forever. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted, or transferred to a more interesting project.
And ethical programmers take professsional pride in writing code that others can easily understand.
Not that I want to defend the Republican party (not while it's being controlled by theocrats and neoimperialists, anyway), but double standards are politically universal.
If AI is possible (thats it: human intelligence can create something smartet than himself), then AI can create better AI just as human can create AI.
That's essential the idea behind Vinge's singularity: we create a super-human intelligence, then it creates something smarter than itself, then that intelligence creates something even smarter...in a very short time, something incredible emerges.
Note that, in the Vingean sense, "super-human intelligence" can include "intimate" computer/human interfaces...and already, Google is as close as your cell phone, the WorldBrain in your pocket.
Except not even the GPL would require anyone in the community that is using your code inhouse to give you back any code - so you have gained nothing, except maybe giving a competitive edge to your competitors.
While no law or contract requires it, the social mores of the free software communuty strongly encourage it. Mores can sometimes be stronger than laws. Even profit-monster corporations can be influenced by them, as potential customers and employees will make decisions based on whether a company is seen as "one of the good guys" or not.
More than that, though, those competitors may have a good competitive reason to release their changes.
Say Bob makes some changes to Free Software released by Alice. If Bob keeps his improvements to himself, he will have to re-integrate those changes at every release; if he contributes them, the changes get integrated into the project for future releases. (This is part of the argument I used to get my boss to let me contribute some changes back to WebInject.)
Of course, the more Alice's software is being improved on by a community, the more this argument applies. If Alice dumps it out there and forgets about it, Bob would have no benefit in releasing changes; but if Alice is actively creating a developer community around Aliceware, Bob has good reason to release his changes so that he can easily use improvements made by Charlie and Debbie.
Maintaining a private branch of software that is actively under development is a pain. Free your software and you end the pain.
The seed AI that you're worried about starting Skynet won't come from people that spread progeny by killing all the male soldiers in some other tribe and raping the women,
No, but it is quite possible that such a seed AI would be created by a state for military purposes
(people that spread their culture's memes by threatening to kill soldiers and civilians) or created by a corporation for economic purposes (people that beat the competion in the marketplace by any means necessary to gain access to consumer's hearts, minds, and pocketbooks). I.e., either a warmonger or a corporate greedhead is likely to control the "seed AI"'s education.
The sins of the parents are visited upon the children, unless the parents are very very careful; not because of any supernatural forces but because children learn maladaptive beliefs and behaviors from their parents.
John Searle advocates a position that symbol manipulation isn't intelligence. Rather that consciousness is an emergent property of patterns in neural firing.
You're equating "intelligence" with "consciousness"...that's problematic, as I can infer your intelligence by your words and actions but I cannot infer your consciousness by anything other than analogy to my own. Intelligence is functional, consciousness is purely experiential.
Searle's view falls down on two counts: it requires us to say that a symbol manipulation system that seems to be presenting intelligent output (like the Chinese room example) isn't intelligent; and it requires some unspecified "magic" property of brains.
I recommend the discussion in Hofstadter and Dennett's The Mind's I.
There is no intentionality for 1 + 1 = 2. But there is for the statement "I believe in the validity of axiomatic mathematicaly systems."
I know that there is intentionality when I make statements about belief. But there's no way that I can know that you're not just a clever but "dark inside" symbol manipulator when similar statements come out of your mouth.
Yes, that way lies solipsism, but we need not go all the way down that road, just enought to establish what we really can and cannot know about other minds.
All the Washington Post's editors are saying is that we should criticize him for the work he does at the World Bank, not for past deeds.
Riiiiiiiiight. So if, for example, your local school board hires a convicted rapist as a principle, don't criticize him for past deeds - that might damage the school; wait and see how he does in his new job.
Sorry, no. Rapsits, murders, and war mongerers are off this list of civilized human beings. Until and unless it is demonstrated that they have reformed, any move to put them in a position of trust needs to be resisted and criticised.
"The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is a sweeping piece of legislation that regulates, among other things, how companies report financial results and disclose executive compensation....
Ok. So WTF does it have to do with software, hardware, or any anything else we generally talk about/.? Sounds like a potential pain for the CFOs and their legions of bean counters, not the CIOs and their geek armies, so what's up?
IF the pilot is stillin control, then he doesn't need to go to Cuba.
Except that if he doesn't, he gets whereever he's going with a bunch of dead people in the passenger compartment. At the very least, dead customers are bad for the airline's business, thus providing a strong incentive for the pilot to comply.
It's a question of control of the situaton versus control of the aircraft. Success of the hijacking attempt is defined by whether they can get the pilot to comply with their demands, not whether they end up at the controls of the plane.
Determining the best response in a hostage situation is a critical judgment call.
Passengers need to remain extremely alert and rational to try to understand the
intentions of the hijackers. Sitting quietly may be prudent in most circumstances, but
it is conceivable the situation may require actions to not allow hijackers to take
control of the aircraft. In all situations, it is important for individuals to remain alert
to unexpected events, think clearly and act responsibly.
After which the nice man quite possibly shoots you anyway. [shrug]
Possibly, yes. Best you can do is read the situation as best you can and play the odds. He could have just shot you and taken your wallet; the fact that he didn't indicates that he's probably not completely homocidal.
Right, and we should trust the hijackers to tell us truthfully what they are planning.
No. Note the difference between the hiackers having "the pilot to fly to Cuba" versus them having control of the plane. If the hijackers are in the cabin with hostages but the pilot is in the locked cockpit and still in control of the aircraft, we don't have a 9/11-type scenario.
And pre-9-11-01 expert wisdom said for passengers to not resist nice little hijackers with funny accents.
Again, it comes down to knowing what's worth fighting over. If the hijackers want the pilot to fly to Cuba, it's probably not worth getting a hostage killed over. If the hijackers want control of the plane, enabling them to turn the plane into a bomb, take 'em apart.
All following the expert wisdom bought the people on four jets in the U.S. was a few minutes of fame as they plowed into some buildings.
Actually the passengers on Flight 93 knew that it was worth fighting about, and did so.
More accurately, you'd have to be a martial artist running a website which told people to stand up to muggers, and gave information on how to disarm people wielding guns.
Are you asserting that the guy running flag.blackened.net told readers to violently resist the state in such a circumstance, and gave them information on how to do so? I don't think that's the case, and without that your analogy falls flat.
I've read some of the stuff on the site (even linked to it just yesterday) and what I've seen there are discussions of political theory, no plans to blow up the local FBI office. (Apparently some doofus(es) posted something along those lines in a forum hosted on the server, which is what started this flap, but that's not the sysadmin's fault.)
Before they teach you that, they teach you to make sure you never put yourself in a situation where someone can pull a gun on you.
Of course we teach awareness and avoidance. You can do a lot to reduce the risk, but unless you never leave the house or have extensive intrusive security, there's no way to never be in a situation where someone can pull a gun on you. (Heck, even people with extensive intrusive security get shot.) Therefore considering in advance what you're willing to risk getting shot over is highly advisable.
So, what you really mean is that while you preach a damn good sermon, you're really sleeping with the devil, and the choir can go to hell for all you care.
If someone were to rob me at gunpoint, and I choose to comply and give them my money rather than have my brains scrambled by a bullet, does that mean I'm "sleeping with the devil"? Should I instead make some sort of principled stand about my right to not be robbed?
Hell no. Any competent and sane self-defense instructor will tell you to give the nice man with the gun your wallet. Same principle applies whether the thug with the gun has a badge or not.
We all have to make choices about what's worth risking life and freedom fighting for and what's not. Like your pocket cash, server logs fall into the later category.
You're not free to tell somebody else's secrets. You're not free to repeat somebody else's words without permission (with a few exceptions). You're not free to lie, in may cases; lying to deprive somebody of money or value is fraud, and lying to cause harm is slander.
Copyright, slander, libel, and fraud are civil matters. They are very different from state censorship.
Are you sure that it's that we conservatives don't know what socialism is, or that self-professed socialists don't know what communism is?
Where did communism enter into it?
And which communism do you mean? The state communism theorized by Marx? The total authoritarianism perpitrated by Lenin and Stalin? Libertarian communism as proposed by writers like Puente and Fontenis? Council communism? Anarcho-Communism?
It's very convenient for apologists for capitalism to claim that all socialism is commmunism, all communism is Soviet-style Marxism/Leninism, the Soviet Union failed, therefore there is no alternative to capitalism, Q.E.D. But there are problems with every step of that chain of logic.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish /. had a "+1 bizarre reference" mod... :-)
(For those going "huh?", the answer's here.)
Both the microchip revolution and the Internet have their origins in publicly funded research.
There's nothing to prevent mass production and massive R&D from occuring outside of capitalism. The USSR had all sort of mass production of arms, and enough R & D to put the first human into space.
(No, I'm not endorsing state communism; I'm a Zenarchist on good days and a libertarian socialist on others. I have little use for any system where a minority holds power, be it the state directly or a state-backed class of "owners".)
You misunderstand NIMBY.
The NIMBY arguement ("Not In My BackYard", in case anyone isn't familiar with the term) is "I think we should have X, I just don't want it in my backyard." These are the people who argue for more prisons - as long as they're on the other side of town.
To recognize that nobody wants it in their backyard, and to give equal consideration to all those other people - to say "It doesn't affect me directly but I care anyway" - is the polar opposite of NIMBY. Indeed, it is compassion.
To go further and say "It doesn't directly affect anyone now living, but will affect future generations, so I care anyway", is getting close to wisdom...and is therefore rarely seen.
If only it were that simple.
The facts are rarely 100% clear, leading to some uncertainty. Even when the facts are 100% clear, usually what they are clear about is the amount of risk, not a simple safe/unsafe categorization.
The question of how to deal with uncertainty and risk is very much an ethical one. How much risk do I have the right to subject you to?
Security by obsurity doesn't work for job security either.
Clueful employers value developers whose code is easy to work with. If other programmers can't figure out your software because you're deliberately writing obfuscated code, it's time to fire your ass and have it re-written.
Smart developers understand that if other people can't take over their code, they'll be stuck on the same project forever. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted, or transferred to a more interesting project.
And ethical programmers take professsional pride in writing code that others can easily understand.
Not that I want to defend the Republican party (not while it's being controlled by theocrats and neoimperialists, anyway), but double standards are politically universal.
That's essential the idea behind Vinge's singularity: we create a super-human intelligence, then it creates something smarter than itself, then that intelligence creates something even smarter...in a very short time, something incredible emerges.
Note that, in the Vingean sense, "super-human intelligence" can include "intimate" computer/human interfaces...and already, Google is as close as your cell phone, the WorldBrain in your pocket.
While no law or contract requires it, the social mores of the free software communuty strongly encourage it. Mores can sometimes be stronger than laws. Even profit-monster corporations can be influenced by them, as potential customers and employees will make decisions based on whether a company is seen as "one of the good guys" or not.
More than that, though, those competitors may have a good competitive reason to release their changes.
Say Bob makes some changes to Free Software released by Alice. If Bob keeps his improvements to himself, he will have to re-integrate those changes at every release; if he contributes them, the changes get integrated into the project for future releases. (This is part of the argument I used to get my boss to let me contribute some changes back to WebInject.)
Of course, the more Alice's software is being improved on by a community, the more this argument applies. If Alice dumps it out there and forgets about it, Bob would have no benefit in releasing changes; but if Alice is actively creating a developer community around Aliceware, Bob has good reason to release his changes so that he can easily use improvements made by Charlie and Debbie.
Maintaining a private branch of software that is actively under development is a pain. Free your software and you end the pain.
No, but it is quite possible that such a seed AI would be created by a state for military purposes (people that spread their culture's memes by threatening to kill soldiers and civilians) or created by a corporation for economic purposes (people that beat the competion in the marketplace by any means necessary to gain access to consumer's hearts, minds, and pocketbooks). I.e., either a warmonger or a corporate greedhead is likely to control the "seed AI"'s education.
The sins of the parents are visited upon the children, unless the parents are very very careful; not because of any supernatural forces but because children learn maladaptive beliefs and behaviors from their parents.
You're equating "intelligence" with "consciousness"...that's problematic, as I can infer your intelligence by your words and actions but I cannot infer your consciousness by anything other than analogy to my own. Intelligence is functional, consciousness is purely experiential.
Searle's view falls down on two counts: it requires us to say that a symbol manipulation system that seems to be presenting intelligent output (like the Chinese room example) isn't intelligent; and it requires some unspecified "magic" property of brains.
I recommend the discussion in Hofstadter and Dennett's The Mind's I .
I know that there is intentionality when I make statements about belief. But there's no way that I can know that you're not just a clever but "dark inside" symbol manipulator when similar statements come out of your mouth.
Yes, that way lies solipsism, but we need not go all the way down that road, just enought to establish what we really can and cannot know about other minds.
Riiiiiiiiight. So if, for example, your local school board hires a convicted rapist as a principle, don't criticize him for past deeds - that might damage the school; wait and see how he does in his new job.
Sorry, no. Rapsits, murders, and war mongerers are off this list of civilized human beings. Until and unless it is demonstrated that they have reformed, any move to put them in a position of trust needs to be resisted and criticised.
Ok. So WTF does it have to do with software, hardware, or any anything else we generally talk about /.? Sounds like a potential pain for the CFOs and their legions of bean counters, not the CIOs and their geek armies, so what's up?
Except that if he doesn't, he gets whereever he's going with a bunch of dead people in the passenger compartment. At the very least, dead customers are bad for the airline's business, thus providing a strong incentive for the pilot to comply.
It's a question of control of the situaton versus control of the aircraft. Success of the hijacking attempt is defined by whether they can get the pilot to comply with their demands, not whether they end up at the controls of the plane.
From the DoD's Antiterrorism Personal Protection Guide:
Possibly, yes. Best you can do is read the situation as best you can and play the odds. He could have just shot you and taken your wallet; the fact that he didn't indicates that he's probably not completely homocidal.
No. Note the difference between the hiackers having "the pilot to fly to Cuba" versus them having control of the plane. If the hijackers are in the cabin with hostages but the pilot is in the locked cockpit and still in control of the aircraft, we don't have a 9/11-type scenario.
Again, it comes down to knowing what's worth fighting over. If the hijackers want the pilot to fly to Cuba, it's probably not worth getting a hostage killed over. If the hijackers want control of the plane, enabling them to turn the plane into a bomb, take 'em apart.
Actually the passengers on Flight 93 knew that it was worth fighting about, and did so.
Are you asserting that the guy running flag.blackened.net told readers to violently resist the state in such a circumstance, and gave them information on how to do so? I don't think that's the case, and without that your analogy falls flat.
I've read some of the stuff on the site (even linked to it just yesterday) and what I've seen there are discussions of political theory, no plans to blow up the local FBI office. (Apparently some doofus(es) posted something along those lines in a forum hosted on the server, which is what started this flap, but that's not the sysadmin's fault.)
Of course we teach awareness and avoidance. You can do a lot to reduce the risk, but unless you never leave the house or have extensive intrusive security, there's no way to never be in a situation where someone can pull a gun on you. (Heck, even people with extensive intrusive security get shot.) Therefore considering in advance what you're willing to risk getting shot over is highly advisable.
If someone were to rob me at gunpoint, and I choose to comply and give them my money rather than have my brains scrambled by a bullet, does that mean I'm "sleeping with the devil"? Should I instead make some sort of principled stand about my right to not be robbed?
Hell no. Any competent and sane self-defense instructor will tell you to give the nice man with the gun your wallet. Same principle applies whether the thug with the gun has a badge or not.
We all have to make choices about what's worth risking life and freedom fighting for and what's not. Like your pocket cash, server logs fall into the later category.
Copyright, slander, libel, and fraud are civil matters. They are very different from state censorship.
Where did communism enter into it?
And which communism do you mean? The state communism theorized by Marx? The total authoritarianism perpitrated by Lenin and Stalin? Libertarian communism as proposed by writers like Puente and Fontenis? Council communism? Anarcho-Communism?
It's very convenient for apologists for capitalism to claim that all socialism is commmunism, all communism is Soviet-style Marxism/Leninism, the Soviet Union failed, therefore there is no alternative to capitalism, Q.E.D. But there are problems with every step of that chain of logic.
Conservatives like to throw that word "socialist" around. In the words of Inigo Montoya, "I do not think it means what you think it means."
Or is Hillary working for a democratic society and economy run to meet the needs of all instead of the profits of a few? For the worker's democratic ownership and/or control of the means of production? For the end of capitalist oppression and exploitation?
We know that programing errors make it into shipped code. Ignoring that reality is not a sensible option, so we must code defensively.
Er, yes. So write the error handling code instead of sticking in an assert(). :-)