"The trouble with computers is that they are sophisticated idiots". Tom Baker, Dr. Who
No, that's far too kind. I've known some pretty idiotic idiots, but software puts them in the shade for idiocy. I'm sure even George Bush could hold a more coherent conversation with a ten-year-old than the latest Eliza equivalent.
`Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.''
Even if that post was economical with the truth - which I'm not saying it was - which of these two is more plausible?
That the patent system has been deliberately corrupted to allow big corporations - who pay massive campaign contributions - the right to patent the obvious, and small variations on prior art, in order to create legal monopolies (that's precisely what patents are).
That this is all a big mistake, and once politicians realise it they will say "Oh, sorry for the oversight, I didn't realise the patent office was behaving contrary to the Constitution", and fix it.
Come on.
If the latter, what is the "adequate explanation" relating to stupidity? I haven't seen one that I consider "adequate".
Hardly. If company A has a "real" patent dated 1999, and you produce a registered idea in 1998 that is exactly the same, that's evidence that company A is not the (first) innovator. There's no evidence that you're the first, either, but that doesn't necessarily matter - it's enough to invalidate their patent (which is what I'm personally interested in - invalidating patents, not clamping down on, or leeching revenue from, other people's implementations of my ideas). They can't go back and say, "uh, actually, we invented it in 1998" - it goes by the patent date (either filing date or approval date, depending on jurisdiction, etc.) This applies to prior art checking both at registration stage and at trial stage (if the patent office was too stupid to have noticed the prior registration - which, as we all know, never happens. Ahem.) IANAL.
Re:Environmentalist wackos ...
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Eco-Terrorism
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Your argument is incoherent. Utilitarians like me would never say that something was pointless and yet still justified. The argument that "you will drive people away" is a 100% utilitarian argument.
Most people use utilitarian arguments when debating ethics, without consciously realising it - even many prominent philosophers!
Re:Stupidity is Self Curing
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Eco-Terrorism
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Note: I work on mice at a Genome Project center
Oh joy. A vivisectionist.
the appeal of casually destroying other people's work is indicative of how overrun Slashdot has become by people who have never created anything useful in their lives, but base their self-esteem on how much they can claim other people owe them. No one who has genuinely invested his or her life in creating -- art, software, a business, knowledge -- could be so blase about saying "Well, I think this is bad so I'm going to destroy it."
I assume you're referring to the "eco-terrorism". If so, it's hardly "casual" or "blase". Anything but. That's kind of the point.
People create torture devices (for animals as well as humans, note) and biological weapons, too, but that doesn't mean we should view them with some kind of stupid capitalistic reverence just because someone spent some effort creating them. I think devices designed for the sole purpose of torture are bad, and yes I wouldn't hesitate to destroy one if I came across one, and could do so without being found out.
Of course, that's not being blase, but then... I'm repeating myself.
I'd question how this all fits in with Michael's smarmy "anti-censorship" views
This is actually a serious point. Anyone gambling online with a shady and/or offshore corporation has to be monumentally stupid - how do you know that the code running the site isn't doing exactly that - saying "You lose, play again!" to everyone?
Another point. Large, mature open source projects (so we're not talking one-developer 0.01 projects here, we're talking things like the Linux kernel) benefit from pretty harsh and blunt code review (see ESR's writings on the subject). Yes, cruft exists there too - but it is usually flagged (or flamed) as such.
People don't like having their competence questioned.
Maybe, just maybe, that is one reason why so many projects are bloated, over-budget, and expensive to maintain. Maybe, just maybe, a lot of programmers need to learn that "being able to code something correctly != being able to code something well".
In other words, maybe protecting bad programmers' fragile egos isn't so important as creating better programmers.
Not every learning experience is easy. That's just the way life works.
If one side is treated truly unfairly (as definitely occurred in the Microsoft trial
Please give examples. It seems clear to me that Microsoft - and their atrocious legal advice (or refusal to listen to good advice) - are far and away the most to blame for the outcome of the original trial. Just take BillG's infamous video deposition. Was it really necessary to shoot themselves in the foot so wholeheartedly?
The trouble is, this time Microsoft seem to be still acting under the delusion that they are completely right and justified in all their actions, and somewhere up the legal chain, one of the judges will "see sense" and reverse (or reduce to a harmless level) any and all legal remedies in this case. Although Ballmer claims not to be assuming the final outcome, he admitted at the same time that there were no contingency plans for a breakup - kind of contradictory, surely?
Indeed. Unless Google has some human-level artificial intelligence technology up their sleeve, their reputation is going to be seriously tarnished by inevitably turning up porn results for innoccent searches.
I'm sorry, but that is completely false. Yes, certain people did believe that Eliza was a human being - but that wasn't a Turing test, because:
It didn't involve comparing Eliza to another human being in the same setting (dubious relevance, I admit, but this is a requirement of the Turing Test)
It didn't involve a panel of judges (this is absolutely necessary to avoid setting the bar too low)
And, most importantly of all, the people using Eliza were not told to try and reveal whether it was a computer or not! That makes all the difference - to whether the questions are easy or impossibly "hard" for the computer to understand.
The Turing Test has still never been passed. There is a cash prize on offer - the Loebner Prize - to anyone who writes a program which passes the Turing Test. (A much smaller prize is also given to the "most human-like" software at each Loebner Prize competition) Of course, no-one is anywhere near winning the main prize - including Cyc, which is quite capable of spewing out nonsense when confused.
In my opinion - speaking as a computer scientist in training - the Turing Test is an excellent test of AI.
Oh yes, the "invisible hand" of scientific research. Hmmmm... sounds depressingly familiar.
In practice, there are two problems with that over-optimistic view. (1) Reputation and popular [scientific] belief sometimes cause scientists to side with the incorrect view - e.g. a lot of scientists refused to believe relativity at first. (2) If an experiment seems to disprove something, there's often various ways of explaining that - incorrect procedures, incorrect assumptions etc. - which avoid throwing away the cherished belief.
If scientists are made more aware of these problems (it's one thing to talk about them, quite another to witness them first-hand), and if the peer-review process were to change so as to be less deferent to established authors, there might be less of these problems. What you describe is an idealisation rather than reality. For example, the HIV virus has never been isolated, and there is no convincing evidence that it even exists - but the majority of researchers in the AIDS field "believe" in the HIV-AIDS hypothesis because it is profitable to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's far too kind. I've known some pretty idiotic idiots, but software puts them in the shade for idiocy. I'm sure even George Bush could hold a more coherent conversation with a ten-year-old than the latest Eliza equivalent.
Even if that post was economical with the truth - which I'm not saying it was - which of these two is more plausible?
- That the patent system has been deliberately corrupted to allow big corporations - who pay massive campaign contributions - the right to patent the obvious, and small variations on prior art, in order to create legal monopolies (that's precisely what patents are).
- That this is all a big mistake, and once politicians realise it they will say "Oh, sorry for the oversight, I didn't realise the patent office was behaving contrary to the Constitution", and fix it.
Come on.If the latter, what is the "adequate explanation" relating to stupidity? I haven't seen one that I consider "adequate".
Hardly. If company A has a "real" patent dated 1999, and you produce a registered idea in 1998 that is exactly the same, that's evidence that company A is not the (first) innovator. There's no evidence that you're the first, either, but that doesn't necessarily matter - it's enough to invalidate their patent (which is what I'm personally interested in - invalidating patents, not clamping down on, or leeching revenue from, other people's implementations of my ideas). They can't go back and say, "uh, actually, we invented it in 1998" - it goes by the patent date (either filing date or approval date, depending on jurisdiction, etc.) This applies to prior art checking both at registration stage and at trial stage (if the patent office was too stupid to have noticed the prior registration - which, as we all know, never happens. Ahem.) IANAL.
Most people use utilitarian arguments when debating ethics, without consciously realising it - even many prominent philosophers!
Oh joy. A vivisectionist.
the appeal of casually destroying other people's work is indicative of how overrun Slashdot has become by people who have never created anything useful in their lives, but base their self-esteem on how much they can claim other people owe them. No one who has genuinely invested his or her life in creating -- art, software, a business, knowledge -- could be so blase about saying "Well, I think this is bad so I'm going to destroy it."
I assume you're referring to the "eco-terrorism". If so, it's hardly "casual" or "blase". Anything but. That's kind of the point.
People create torture devices (for animals as well as humans, note) and biological weapons, too, but that doesn't mean we should view them with some kind of stupid capitalistic reverence just because someone spent some effort creating them. I think devices designed for the sole purpose of torture are bad, and yes I wouldn't hesitate to destroy one if I came across one, and could do so without being found out.
Of course, that's not being blase, but then... I'm repeating myself.
I'd question how this all fits in with Michael's smarmy "anti-censorship" views
Destroying property != censorship.Maybe, just maybe, that is one reason why so many projects are bloated, over-budget, and expensive to maintain. Maybe, just maybe, a lot of programmers need to learn that "being able to code something correctly != being able to code something well".
In other words, maybe protecting bad programmers' fragile egos isn't so important as creating better programmers.
Not every learning experience is easy. That's just the way life works.
Could any lawyers out there please clear this up? Is this, or this not, a criminal case?
Please give examples. It seems clear to me that Microsoft - and their atrocious legal advice (or refusal to listen to good advice) - are far and away the most to blame for the outcome of the original trial. Just take BillG's infamous video deposition. Was it really necessary to shoot themselves in the foot so wholeheartedly?
I'm sorry, but that is completely false. Yes, certain people did believe that Eliza was a human being - but that wasn't a Turing test, because:
The Turing Test has still never been passed. There is a cash prize on offer - the Loebner Prize - to anyone who writes a program which passes the Turing Test. (A much smaller prize is also given to the "most human-like" software at each Loebner Prize competition) Of course, no-one is anywhere near winning the main prize - including Cyc, which is quite capable of spewing out nonsense when confused.
In my opinion - speaking as a computer scientist in training - the Turing Test is an excellent test of AI.
In practice, there are two problems with that over-optimistic view. (1) Reputation and popular [scientific] belief sometimes cause scientists to side with the incorrect view - e.g. a lot of scientists refused to believe relativity at first. (2) If an experiment seems to disprove something, there's often various ways of explaining that - incorrect procedures, incorrect assumptions etc. - which avoid throwing away the cherished belief.
If scientists are made more aware of these problems (it's one thing to talk about them, quite another to witness them first-hand), and if the peer-review process were to change so as to be less deferent to established authors, there might be less of these problems. What you describe is an idealisation rather than reality. For example, the HIV virus has never been isolated, and there is no convincing evidence that it even exists - but the majority of researchers in the AIDS field "believe" in the HIV-AIDS hypothesis because it is profitable to do so.
- scientists don't apologise for being wrong, etc. etc.
- you prefer a bit of eternal truth
The first is irrelevant to whether creationism is true, the second is a circular argument. Ever heard of logic, by any chance?Or is that just another satanic invention of those Godless scientists?
Microsoft and AOL have (mostly) gotten their power fair and square.
Bzzt. Sorry, if you'd read some balanced coverage of the antitrust trial you'd know that this isn't true.Or maybe I have.
Nah, that's too surreal.