You do not want to be in a "tiny bubble" when a
truck or SUV or bus hits you.
How curiously short-sighted of you. The "you do not want to be in a 'tiny bubble' when a truck or SUV or bus hits you" is a statistically insignificant period of time spent in a state of unhappiness. The vast majority of time aside from that, novbody cares.
An anonymous posting on a blog is *not the same thing* as a musical piece that required a lot of talent and upfront costs to produce.
Actually, they aren't that far apart, as you yourself demonstrate. Both require *years* of study and training, and even then can only be produced by a minority of individuals with the skills, the time, and resources to do so.
You didn't forget that learning to read and write adequately took you 15+ years, did you? That's easily comparable to the time it took the musicians to perfect their particular art, if not longer. And your grammar betrays you as well. You are not one of the millions of unwashed masses who rite like tat. You are part of an elite of sorts, not unlike the musicians who perform to the standard required in your post.
The level of control asserted over data, by the wealthy entrenched powers, is precisely the level of control that the unwashed masses choose to abide.
I'm going to have to disagree on that. The truth I see is that the unwashed masses don't choose to abide at all. In fact, the unwashed masses choose to download songs and movies. Your claim that the absence of overwhelming opposition to the laws indicates assent is naive. Modern populations in our democracies know that majority rule isn't how things work. It makes no sense to vote for one of several alternatives, when none of them actually represents your views.
In a world where presidents can be elected without a popular majority, you don't waste your time playing the voting game. What you do is what works for you, ie you let the rich people argue about copyright, and while they do you share movies with your friends and live your life.
You can change the system through, and only through, large groups of people that agree with you.
On this we agree. But whereas you believe in "voting" sine qua non, I believe that change happens de facto, through grassroots behaviour. Such as sharing movies widely until it's accepted as normal by those with power. And that's what I see happening (the former, we're not at the latter stage yet).
It's also possible that we may *never* get there, not for lack of potential, but for lack of time. Human civilizations do not move forward monotonically. Rather regularly, there are wars, some worse than others, and ecological disasters as well. Human history has many examples of civilizations that achieved a certain peak of technological advance, and then disappeared or were destroyed, and their technology lost to the next generations.
You should at least entertain the possiblity that machine sentience will never be achieved, simply because by the time the resources and technologies are achievable to do it, each civilisation will have had too many opportunities to perish, losing all the advances.
You know, somewhere in there you almost make a point about assisted driving, except it's as convincing as an argument about hammers.
Viz Humans are terrible at sticking nails into the walls with their bare hands, so we've invented hammers to help with the task. In fact, if you think about it, it's really the hammer that does all the hard work (*), and we don't need the human to wield it at all. Let's just build these hammers that magically know what nails need hammering and take the human completely out of the picture.
Oops wait, that's just stupid. The value in assisted driving technologies is that they adapt to the human behaviour but cannot replace it. A hammer without a human just sits on a workbench. It will continue to sit there until next year, if there's no human around to move it. And it certainly won't be nailing anything to anything during that time. A camera that takes pictures of the road and tries to recognize a center lane anomaly is not an AI system that drives people to where they want to go in all kinds of traffic conditions. It's just a camera that fails its task at night when the car doesn't have lights on. Its true value is in assisting a human being, and it only does so within narrow parameters which exist provided the human behaves a certain way. Kind of like when a human decides to hold the hammer properly and swing it against a nail.
it's not about denigrating, it's about caricaturing. The sky giant is a caricature, and a caricature is a portrait where various characteristics are exaggerated to draw attention to them. BTW when I use the word god I tend to use it in the plural, since I think it is more accurate that way.
Hell, how did intelligent people *LIVE* before Darwin came along? Did their
heads explode when someone asked them how humans came to exist? Or was Darwin
the first atheist EVER, and scientists came to exist only after he was born?
Science isn't about being intelligent, it is about the state of knowledge. Before Darwin, both intelligent and nonintelligent people were more ignorant. After Darwin, those who understood him were less ignorant, the others remained as ignorant as before.
Today, those who reject Darwin in favour of some invisible sky giant or other "intelligent" prime cause are as ignorant as their peers were before Darwin.
Although some of them may even be intelligent, that is irrelevant as to their ignorance.
I'd much prefer a human. He may be a few milliseconds slower to respond, but he has many more options for responding appropriately to the situation, using his judgement and experience, as opposed to a Google machine which must select among two or three automated sequences that are programmed in, making those same three choices in all circumstances.
A self driving car can simultaneously look in every direction around the car
and never have to blink. If an object is detected and the car needs to stop,
it takes a person time to physically lift their foot from one pedal and press
the other(s). Not much time, sure, but in a sudden stop scenario, every
little bit helps.
Yeah, yeah. A self driving car can look, but it cannot *see*. It cannot interpret and reason, you yourself admit this in your post. We here at slashdot have all written computer programs. We know that they are just recipes full of bugs and special cases that nobody has properly solved. A car that "looks" only sees the narrow special case shapes that were programmed in, and even those it doesn't get right 100% of the time. It can't, no training dataset is exhaustive.
And your stopping scenario is bullshit too. A human can judge the unfolding event and decide if stopping is even appropriate. Maybe there's a kid in the back without a seatbelt on and stopping for the duck that's crossing the road would cause injury to the kid.
There's a simple answer to this whole problem. Google should accept the responsibility as the driver of the vehicle, and pay just like a regular person every time the car causes an accident. It's a simple rule, there's no need to change any laws or anything, and the potential liability on Google will keep them honest. They'll make sure their cars don't get into accidents, because that will ruin them. What more can we ask?
Sorry, all of this is just waffle. Money talks, and bullshit walks. If Google believes in the reliability of its cars, it should be willing to take the responsibility for accidents. If their cars cause deaths, Google should pay for that. If their cars cause dents in other cars while parking, Google should pay for that, too. There's nothing like having your own money on the line to peel away the veneer of wishful thinking based on greed, and leave a sober assessment of the actual risks. Anything else is just a waste of time.
My theory is that now that Microsoft screwed the pooch with the latest Windows, all the Windows weenies who no longer have a usable system are coming over to Linux wanting to recreate what they lost. It's an invasion of the barbarians, basically.
Nobody cares about the local desktop screen performance any more. We've been living in a poor man's network transparent world for 10 years, and you don't even realize it. Nearly everybody now runs software on a machine half way around the world and displays its output locally, *very* slowly. It's called HTML and web apps. And those who work with computers instead of playing FPSes all day run software on beefy shared multicore machines over the local network, while wanting the output to show on the local machine. Using network transparency, so the programs don't have to be written in some god awful complicated way.
If the idiots take network transparency away from us, the only realistic option we'll have left is the even slower and totally ridiculous web app paradigm (yes, it truly is ridiculous - it's ten levels of hacks just to keep a bit of state on top of a stateless protocol).
But really, it is not optimal to use the CLI 100% for
everyday use for semi-normal people.
Your reductionist dichotomy is too naive. In the real world, there are many more shades of gray where people who use computers have expertise to handle complexity, and where CLI use isn't just for "administration".
But your worst mistake is to assume that somehow, we need to choose only one thing that is optimal for semi-normal people, whoever these people are. Here's a clue, in FOSS we don't need to choose at all. We already have a working Xorg system, and there's no need to replace it. It works. If someone wants something else, by all means they should build it for like minded people, but not by depriving existing users under the dubious claim of optimizing for semi normals, and if you're not semi normal, too bad.
FOSS isn't about concentrating resources for the greatest return on investment for the greatest market share. FOSS is about writing software that solves a problem. Throwing away software that already solves a problem just because it's old and unhip isn't FOSS, it's the kind of commercial decision a Google would make.
The punishment is withdrawing freedom, not becoming a sub-human.
That's what you say. For some people though, prison is partially a substitute for other purposes of natural justice. There is no universally accepted set of requirements that everyone agrees on. Among them, there is 1) prevention of further crimes by removing the criminal from society, 2) offering solace/revenge to the victims, 3) rehabilitating and educating the criminal, etc.
Unfortunately, no two persons agree on what amount of weight should be put on each of these requirements, let alone on whether these form an exhaustive set.
What is it
about "internet search engine" that is special compared to "online legal
database", "hall of records", or "almanac of 1972"?
Internet search engines spy on people. An online legal database doesn't spy on people (laws), neither does a hall of records (official), or an almanac (astronomy).
I have no problem with laws restricting Google's ability to spy on people, and if it applies to other spying search engines equally, so much the better.
An arbitrary plugin architecture is _optional_, it has no bearing on the correctness of the underlying HTML. A DRM standard that's part of the HTML language means that anyone who wants to render HTML needs to support it, or be labeled non-standards conformant.
Basically, having DRM as a standard that must be implemented to be conformant, (or be seen to be conformant by users), is a slippery slope and it exposes all applications that want to parse HTML properly, now or in the future, to API and operating system constraints that are needed to secure the DRM.
To make an analogy, it's like having ads on TV, and people who design TVs must design them so the ads can't be skipped or muted, and people who design chairs and sofas need to add devices to prevent people from getting up to the bathroom during ad breaks, and people who design windows need to make them one way to prevent people from outside looking and seeing the TV show, etc, etc.
Where are the PaleMoon.deb's ? I'm on Debian, and I'm keen to switch but there's no way I'm running a proprietary installer (I like.debs because 1) I don't have to go hunting for tarballs or installers around the web for each piece of software I want to try -and 2) I know that if I want to remove the software, it will be cleanly removed if it's a.deb).
I hate to break it to you, but... your dad is playing you. Think of it as payback for all the years of getting up at 3am to feed you a bottle and make you stop crying.
One problem is that Idaho isn't known for all its millionaires and entrepreneurs / risk takers, whereas California positively attracts such people. This might not seem like a big deal, but if you have a population for whom it is customary and even expected that risk taking leads to big rewards, versus a population which is, well average, then you have got to expect different outcomes even when the road rules are identical. It is not reasonable to expect that changing the rules on a docile population would lead to similar outcomes in a population full of movers and shakers.
You're conflating many different notions of infinity into some nebulous single meaning of infinity, which you then deny because the various notions are contradictory.
Infinity is a placeholder, a word that describes any one of many distinct extensions of finiteness. Think of "infinity" like a variable, "x" that can take many values. Depending upon the value it takes in any given application, it has some properties. In a different application, it has other properties. For example, it can mean the point at infinity in the complex plane, but it could also mean the line at inifnity in the projective plane. Or it could mean one of two symbols that describe the extended value representing sums which are not finite, but whose partial sums are monotonic. It can also mean a cardinality, or an unbounded process.
Really, to imagine that "infinity" must have a single meaning is to classify everything into black and white, finite and (a single) infinite, good or evil (if you're a constructivist or finitist) etc.
The best way to think of inifinity is that it's a word that lots of people use to mean different things. The important thing is that in any one case, somebody who uses the word makes clear which meaning is to be required then and there.
Freedom means letting people do things you don't want them to do.
That's idiotic. Free people aren't free to torture and kill anyone they like, no matter how much they want to. Freedom has natural boundaries, and doesn't include murder for a start.
Slashdot Mirror
How curiously short-sighted of you. The "you do not want to be in a 'tiny bubble' when a truck or SUV or bus hits you" is a statistically insignificant period of time spent in a state of unhappiness. The vast majority of time aside from that, novbody cares.
Actually, they aren't that far apart, as you yourself demonstrate. Both require *years* of study and training, and even then can only be produced by a minority of individuals with the skills, the time, and resources to do so.
You didn't forget that learning to read and write adequately took you 15+ years, did you? That's easily comparable to the time it took the musicians to perfect their particular art, if not longer. And your grammar betrays you as well. You are not one of the millions of unwashed masses who rite like tat. You are part of an elite of sorts, not unlike the musicians who perform to the standard required in your post.
I'm going to have to disagree on that. The truth I see is that the unwashed masses don't choose to abide at all. In fact, the unwashed masses choose to download songs and movies. Your claim that the absence of overwhelming opposition to the laws indicates assent is naive. Modern populations in our democracies know that majority rule isn't how things work. It makes no sense to vote for one of several alternatives, when none of them actually represents your views.
In a world where presidents can be elected without a popular majority, you don't waste your time playing the voting game. What you do is what works for you, ie you let the rich people argue about copyright, and while they do you share movies with your friends and live your life.
On this we agree. But whereas you believe in "voting" sine qua non, I believe that change happens de facto, through grassroots behaviour. Such as sharing movies widely until it's accepted as normal by those with power. And that's what I see happening (the former, we're not at the latter stage yet).
You should at least entertain the possiblity that machine sentience will never be achieved, simply because by the time the resources and technologies are achievable to do it, each civilisation will have had too many opportunities to perish, losing all the advances.
Providing sex on demand is, legally, a wife's duty in many cultures and religions.
Viz Humans are terrible at sticking nails into the walls with their bare hands, so we've invented hammers to help with the task. In fact, if you think about it, it's really the hammer that does all the hard work (*), and we don't need the human to wield it at all. Let's just build these hammers that magically know what nails need hammering and take the human completely out of the picture.
Oops wait, that's just stupid. The value in assisted driving technologies is that they adapt to the human behaviour but cannot replace it. A hammer without a human just sits on a workbench. It will continue to sit there until next year, if there's no human around to move it. And it certainly won't be nailing anything to anything during that time. A camera that takes pictures of the road and tries to recognize a center lane anomaly is not an AI system that drives people to where they want to go in all kinds of traffic conditions. It's just a camera that fails its task at night when the car doesn't have lights on. Its true value is in assisting a human being, and it only does so within narrow parameters which exist provided the human behaves a certain way. Kind of like when a human decides to hold the hammer properly and swing it against a nail.
(*)pun intended
it's not about denigrating, it's about caricaturing. The sky giant is a caricature, and a caricature is a portrait where various characteristics are exaggerated to draw attention to them. BTW when I use the word god I tend to use it in the plural, since I think it is more accurate that way.
Science isn't about being intelligent, it is about the state of knowledge. Before Darwin, both intelligent and nonintelligent people were more ignorant. After Darwin, those who understood him were less ignorant, the others remained as ignorant as before.
Today, those who reject Darwin in favour of some invisible sky giant or other "intelligent" prime cause are as ignorant as their peers were before Darwin. Although some of them may even be intelligent, that is irrelevant as to their ignorance.
I'd much prefer a human. He may be a few milliseconds slower to respond, but he has many more options for responding appropriately to the situation, using his judgement and experience, as opposed to a Google machine which must select among two or three automated sequences that are programmed in, making those same three choices in all circumstances.
Yeah, yeah. A self driving car can look, but it cannot *see*. It cannot interpret and reason, you yourself admit this in your post. We here at slashdot have all written computer programs. We know that they are just recipes full of bugs and special cases that nobody has properly solved. A car that "looks" only sees the narrow special case shapes that were programmed in, and even those it doesn't get right 100% of the time. It can't, no training dataset is exhaustive.
And your stopping scenario is bullshit too. A human can judge the unfolding event and decide if stopping is even appropriate. Maybe there's a kid in the back without a seatbelt on and stopping for the duck that's crossing the road would cause injury to the kid.
There's a simple answer to this whole problem. Google should accept the responsibility as the driver of the vehicle, and pay just like a regular person every time the car causes an accident. It's a simple rule, there's no need to change any laws or anything, and the potential liability on Google will keep them honest. They'll make sure their cars don't get into accidents, because that will ruin them. What more can we ask?
Next story!
My theory is that now that Microsoft screwed the pooch with the latest Windows, all the Windows weenies who no longer have a usable system are coming over to Linux wanting to recreate what they lost. It's an invasion of the barbarians, basically.
If the idiots take network transparency away from us, the only realistic option we'll have left is the even slower and totally ridiculous web app paradigm (yes, it truly is ridiculous - it's ten levels of hacks just to keep a bit of state on top of a stateless protocol).
Which Starbuck? The guy or the girl? Actually, the answer's obvious.
Your reductionist dichotomy is too naive. In the real world, there are many more shades of gray where people who use computers have expertise to handle complexity, and where CLI use isn't just for "administration".
But your worst mistake is to assume that somehow, we need to choose only one thing that is optimal for semi-normal people, whoever these people are. Here's a clue, in FOSS we don't need to choose at all. We already have a working Xorg system, and there's no need to replace it. It works. If someone wants something else, by all means they should build it for like minded people, but not by depriving existing users under the dubious claim of optimizing for semi normals, and if you're not semi normal, too bad.
FOSS isn't about concentrating resources for the greatest return on investment for the greatest market share. FOSS is about writing software that solves a problem. Throwing away software that already solves a problem just because it's old and unhip isn't FOSS, it's the kind of commercial decision a Google would make.
No? Then stop spamming slashdot with this "news". It's not news until there's working network transparency.
That's what you say. For some people though, prison is partially a substitute for other purposes of natural justice. There is no universally accepted set of requirements that everyone agrees on. Among them, there is 1) prevention of further crimes by removing the criminal from society, 2) offering solace/revenge to the victims, 3) rehabilitating and educating the criminal, etc.
Unfortunately, no two persons agree on what amount of weight should be put on each of these requirements, let alone on whether these form an exhaustive set.
Internet search engines spy on people. An online legal database doesn't spy on people (laws), neither does a hall of records (official), or an almanac (astronomy).
I have no problem with laws restricting Google's ability to spy on people, and if it applies to other spying search engines equally, so much the better.
Basically, having DRM as a standard that must be implemented to be conformant, (or be seen to be conformant by users), is a slippery slope and it exposes all applications that want to parse HTML properly, now or in the future, to API and operating system constraints that are needed to secure the DRM.
To make an analogy, it's like having ads on TV, and people who design TVs must design them so the ads can't be skipped or muted, and people who design chairs and sofas need to add devices to prevent people from getting up to the bathroom during ad breaks, and people who design windows need to make them one way to prevent people from outside looking and seeing the TV show, etc, etc.
Where are the PaleMoon .deb's ? I'm on Debian, and I'm keen to switch but there's no way I'm running a proprietary installer (I like .debs because 1) I don't have to go hunting for tarballs or installers around the web for each piece of software I want to try -and 2) I know that if I want to remove the software, it will be cleanly removed if it's a .deb).
I hate to break it to you, but ... your dad is playing you. Think of it as payback for all the years of getting up at 3am to feed you a bottle and make you stop crying.
You forgot: and some people (the majority) will laugh, and nod as it is so true to the mark.
One problem is that Idaho isn't known for all its millionaires and entrepreneurs / risk takers, whereas California positively attracts such people. This might not seem like a big deal, but if you have a population for whom it is customary and even expected that risk taking leads to big rewards, versus a population which is, well average, then you have got to expect different outcomes even when the road rules are identical. It is not reasonable to expect that changing the rules on a docile population would lead to similar outcomes in a population full of movers and shakers.
How do you say "take your stinkin paws off me you damn dirty ape" in Chinese?
Infinity is a placeholder, a word that describes any one of many distinct extensions of finiteness. Think of "infinity" like a variable, "x" that can take many values. Depending upon the value it takes in any given application, it has some properties. In a different application, it has other properties. For example, it can mean the point at infinity in the complex plane, but it could also mean the line at inifnity in the projective plane. Or it could mean one of two symbols that describe the extended value representing sums which are not finite, but whose partial sums are monotonic. It can also mean a cardinality, or an unbounded process.
Really, to imagine that "infinity" must have a single meaning is to classify everything into black and white, finite and (a single) infinite, good or evil (if you're a constructivist or finitist) etc.
The best way to think of inifinity is that it's a word that lots of people use to mean different things. The important thing is that in any one case, somebody who uses the word makes clear which meaning is to be required then and there.
That's idiotic. Free people aren't free to torture and kill anyone they like, no matter how much they want to. Freedom has natural boundaries, and doesn't include murder for a start.