And not to mention, Battlestar Galactica too. A lot of the needless drama on that show could have been avoided if they had just licensed their testing framework from the Cylons.
Not just government. The glasses can be hacked, and then you'll have an *army* of people around the world who spy for others without knowing it. Think botnet with s/bot/camera/. Russian/Chinese/American organized hacker groups selling your whereabouts to the debt collection agencies, who'll track you down to intimidate you, while you're eating at some restaurant or drinking at a party. NSA hackers turned Mafia goons, they'll use the glasses network to break the witness protection schemes, datamine new blackmail opportunities in realtime, etc.
Knowing where everybody is at any given moment in time offers so many opportunities for manipulation, it's a totally new chessgame.
More likely,
Snapchat will probably launch some sort of display ad system, similar to what
Facebook and Twitter have nowâ"but given how it doesn't store user information
on its servers, it'll probably be hard to monetize its users as extensively as
those social networks.
What they should be deploying is some kind of system that instantly vaporizes other companies display ad systems before they reach my retina. I'd pay money for that.
Huh? The rule is: organisations do things to protect their own self interest.
We don't believe them when: what they say they did doesn't promote their own self interest.
1) "We tap data, but it's anonymous and we can't do anything with it". That's unbelievable, because their mission is to spy, and tapping useless data is not in their own interest.
2) "We did overreach". That's believable, because otherwise, they would be copping the blame for something they didn't do, which is not in their own self interest.
Sigh. You're making the mistake of thinking in the short term. Right
now, Google only packages and provides (rather than sells outright)
data to law enforcement. But unless you've live under a rock for
years, or are a newborn, you cannot seriously claim that Google won't
package and sell data to ordinary customers in the future. All it
takes is a decree from Larry Page, a change in policy, and it's
done. With retroactive access to previously collected data.
All the successful companies do U-turns to stay in business. Bill Gates did a U-turn on the Internet, Steve Jobs did a U-turn on the iPhone. IBM did several U-turns in its long history, they didn't even make computers when they were founded. And that's just U-turns, then there's acquisitions. When Larry Ellison buys Google in the next 10 years, do you think he'll have any qualms about selling peoples' data to anybody?
Google is Evil because they Built The Dataset. This data is so valuable and comprehensive, and the pioneering of the techniques to do it over and over again, ever more efficiently and cheaply, that people without scruples want it now, will want it in the future, and will eventually control it. That it certain, and you helped make it happen.
This is nothing new though, I do occasional conversion from ancient data
formats, people need to pay better attention, imagine trying to read an 8" CP/M floppy today.
It's not that it's a new problem as such, it's that for the first time in history we have a simple way to solve it, yet we have stupid greedy rich people who sponsor and enact laws to stop us from solving the problem.
The way to solve the problem is through massive duplication of all the data, over and over again through time. We have the technical means to do this on an unprecedented scale.
Even 1000 years ago, people had to painstakingly copy books, by hand, one at a time. And after a handful of copies were produced, there still weren't enough to guarantee that most would survive the ages, wars, fires, censorship, etc. So we generally have tiny collections from the past.
But now it's digital data. Anyone could copy it. We could have millions of copies of some obscure scientific work, all perfect duplicates. If even 0.1% of these copies survive, that's still thousands of copies.
And what do we do? We let a bunch of 1 percenters, who themselves barely know how or care to read, sponsor draconian copyright laws to stop eeryone from copying all that stuff, just on the off chance that they might copy a bunch of songs or movies that are outmoded within two years. And the commercial scienrific pulishers are some of the worst.
I was going to say something slightly different. A real orchestra's players have years of hard work getting the individual notes just right, and getting the experience of playing in groupts etc. So for electronic musicians to complain that a piece of music takes weeks to get right using software tools is pathetic, really. It's still orders of magnitude less than the work that was required to get an orchestra to the point where they play an equivalent (or even superior) piece.
The problem is with dumb users out there who just do not read the type of
permissions required by apps they download versus the functionalities that it
is supposed to give, that also without reading reviews and comments about it,
such problems are bound to happen.
No, the problem is commercial "appstores" that try to mimick the original open source model for application repositories, also known as package management systems, badly.
The reason software packages on Free OSes work well is because the software is free and open, so that anybody can inspect what it does, and anybody can patch the problems if they find any. Thus you get distro volunteers who look over a software package, verify that it actually does what it says it does, and package it according to distro guidelines. The result, in the case of large distros like Debian, is a high quality software repo that people can and do trust. And if one person doesn't see the problems in the source, someone else will.
The reason sofware packages on commercial "appstores" cannot ever work well or be safe to use is because the greedy OS vendors allow anyone who pays enough to put their closed software in the store, without ever checking what the software actually does. It's trivial to hide malicious code in a closed source binary. It might work fine all year, except on December 24 when it steals your credit details.
The truth is that this isn't a dumb user issue (although dumb users do exist), it's really a greedy appstore owner issue.
Yada Yada Yada Leader Of The Free World Yada Yada Yada.
You American hillbillies who believe in that crap need to get over yourself. Obama is not the leader of anybody except a tiny fraction of people, who like to think that the USA is THE WHOLE WORLD.
...but the problem being solved is "How do I accomplish this task without using a type B widget?". Those B widgets may be more
expensive than A, or perhaps they have some reliability problems, or maybe a type-A widget is already in use elsewhere in a commercial
product, and changing the part in step 12 lowers the number of distinct parts enough to save on the manufacturing process.
That's *tweaking* an existing solution, not solving a *new* problem. Everyone who has a STEM degree is trained in tweaking existing solutions to known problems. That's what most homework assignments in STEM are: "Solve existing generic problem X that you learned about in class, but don't use step 12 here."
The patent office is not, and has never been, an authority over which problems are worth solving. Per the "usefulness" requirement,
I beg to differ. One cannot assess originality and obviousness to practicioners of the art, without making an implied judgment about the worthiness of a problem's solution.
In the simplest terms, say I look at a proposal, and determine that it would take 5 minutes of work for me or my colleagues to come up with this. Then I don't consider the solution to be worth even writing up. It's something I would do incidentally, as a single step while working towards a more ambitious goal. That's not worth a patent.
And yet, if that same solution is dressed up in fancy language that obfuscates the specifics and is given to some patent examiner who covers a large range of applications in a variety of fields, I am now legally prohibited from independently solving this same incidental problem in a product I'm developing, because some company on the other side of the world paid a fee to register this idea as theirs for the next 20 years only 6 months ago.
But, but! My boss buys me coffe to drink twice a day. Should I refuse it and pretend to write a changelog instead, while reading slashdot? I'm now worried he'll think I'm a slacker. (Hey boss, if you're reading this I'm stumped on the spelling of funtionallity. Does it take on k or two?)
You don't get it. If you're going to get a patent for solving a problem, it better be an unsolved problem. I don't care if you're using a widget of type A instead of a widget of type B in Step 12, if the problem already has a solution, you don't deserve a patent for solving the problem again in a different way.
There are too many patents out there. We need to radically cut down on the ones being granted, and to radically invalidate the vast majority of existing ones. It's the only way the sciences and arts will progress.
Or the last. Perhaps they just copied the time travel tech from sifting through the remains of older, smarter races, and then they went back in time to be "first".
You know, it's guys like you who call yourselves AMERICAN's that are part of the problem. How do you think that makes the South Americans feel? They've been on the continent longer than you have... And then there's the North Americans, say those from Canada.
Please call yourself USian, because that's what you are. And if you don't understand what the fuss is about, I rest my case.
It was Wrong for Gmail to be "in beta". It was a weasel word to get people like you to forgive the issues for no good reason. A beta program is one where you have a fixed small number of testers who use the software in exchange for giving you detailed feedback on remaining bugs and usability. It's not a label you should leave on the software once you have actual users who expect to use it in their day to day activities. Especially if you expect them to agree to an EULA before doing so.
I hate to break it to you, but your experimental methodology for SICP is flawed. For example, if you set your mouse sensitivity sufficiently high, your wiggling will aways result in the scroll bar being at the top or the bottom. If also your window size is sufficiently small, then you will always click the top link, or the bottom link, of the TOC. What you need to do is calibrate your sampling procedure by computing a series of quantiles, changing the sensitivity and window size until these approximate the uniform distribution. I suggest getting a grad student to work out the details while we go to lunch. There's a special on roast beef in the cafeteria today.
Your analogy is nearly right. Except that Slashdotters also realize that languages can and should evolve, and programs should be written in the best language for the task that limits unnecessary ancillary issues.
If your program crashes because it failed a particular rule of C++, then it may be a waste of time to debug the exact circumstances of the crash. It may be better to realize that rewriting it in Python will prevent this whole class of problems and a bunch of others, and is the way to go. Similarly, sometimes it can be better to throw out, and replace, the existing patent laws with more useful ones, rather than worrying about the precise reason why some particular case fails in court, while trying to patch a complex system of case law one trial at a time.
IANAPA (I Am Not A Patent Agent) and I disagree. It's a slippery slope to allow software but argue that "most" is too obvious to be patentable. We should be marking a clear line between mathematical ideas, in particular logical arguments, which software is an embodiment of, and concrete inventions, which software is only a meta language for, but requires a specific chain of circumstances - a compiler into machine language, a machine which can understand the language, and some peripherals to output the results in a form that can influence the physical world.
To use a legal analogy, software is no different from an argument written by a lawyer, intended for a particular purpose, and following the rules of a particular system of laws. While every such document is slightly different to suit the circumstances, and many such documtents contain a lot of cleverness and originality, it makes no sense to patent the writings of lawyers, and neither does it make any sense to patent the writings of programmers for the same reason.
Tell the boss you can get rid of the four programmers by using a new super AI scripting system that only you can program. Tell him with the money he saves on the four salaries, he can pay three of those salaries to you on top of your normal one, and he's still going to save money! Win-Win! Next, you need to gain access to your Windows boxes without a gui: Simply install a Russian botnet, with a web based control interface. You can get an old one from any online Mafia surplus store. Next, you can simulate the AI system using a dozen cheap Indian IT professionals who simply do the needful overnight via the web interface. Demonsrate the system to the boss, claiming it's a natural language interface (don't mention the Indians). Make sure you finish the demo with a difficult task which is written in incomprehensible New Zealander slang, to show that the system still has just a few bugs left. When the boss is impressed, ask for another $500k to develop the system, promising joint marketing rights when it's finished. When difficulties arise in the next 6 months, ignore them, claiming you have coding to do and the final version will solve everything. At some point you will get fired. Use the golden parachute you negotiated after 3 months, when you were claiming that Google have been pestering you with job offers twice each day (proved using forged emails).
Now relax, count your money on the beach in Acapulco, and install an experimental version of Arch Linux on your Beowulf cluster of Raspberry Pi's. Log onto the Internets using your satellite phone, and help newbies with their sysadmin questions long into the sunset.
Exactly. I've said this before elsewhere, but this is the reverse of
the spammer coin. All the tricks that spammers use to fill our public
information sources with unwanted noise can be "used for good" if the
purpose is to poison databases. And there's good money in it, too. Think about how much an advertiser is willing to pay a spammer for their services, and realize that individuals who have a personal stake in getting their records poisoned are going to pay even more. And of course it's not just individuals, but companies too.
I think you have the right idea. Privacy needs strong laws, just like we have laws against murder and assault. In some very clear sense, the information about me is part of me. So when someone compromises my privacy it's like they maimed me, that's assault. And if they steal my secrets and impersonate my identity, that's as serious as if they killed me. In some cases they could actually kill me bureaucratically.
It's obvious that strong laws don't stop EVERYONE from murdering people, or from assaulting people. There are always bad apples. As a society, we hunt them down and put them in jail, or in some countries execute them. But everyone else knows the consequences and refrains from doing these things. With strong laws, everyone else will refrain from assaulting my privacy as well. I'd be happy with that.
So where to start? Let's start with giving ME copyright over all the data that mentions ME or is about ME. No matter if someone else collected it. It's ME in there, and so it belongs to ME. I'm sure that alone would substantially level the playing field. Afterwards, we can figure out what to do next. (*)
(*) Yes, I know the likes of facebook and google would denounce it as unworkable. That's the point. They are part of the problem already.
Slashdot Mirror
And not to mention, Battlestar Galactica too. A lot of the needless drama on that show could have been avoided if they had just licensed their testing framework from the Cylons.
Knowing where everybody is at any given moment in time offers so many opportunities for manipulation, it's a totally new chessgame.
What they should be deploying is some kind of system that instantly vaporizes other companies display ad systems before they reach my retina. I'd pay money for that.
1) "We tap data, but it's anonymous and we can't do anything with it". That's unbelievable, because their mission is to spy, and tapping useless data is not in their own interest.
2) "We did overreach". That's believable, because otherwise, they would be copping the blame for something they didn't do, which is not in their own self interest.
All the successful companies do U-turns to stay in business. Bill Gates did a U-turn on the Internet, Steve Jobs did a U-turn on the iPhone. IBM did several U-turns in its long history, they didn't even make computers when they were founded. And that's just U-turns, then there's acquisitions. When Larry Ellison buys Google in the next 10 years, do you think he'll have any qualms about selling peoples' data to anybody?
Google is Evil because they Built The Dataset. This data is so valuable and comprehensive, and the pioneering of the techniques to do it over and over again, ever more efficiently and cheaply, that people without scruples want it now, will want it in the future, and will eventually control it. That it certain, and you helped make it happen.
Unlikely, as that would mean sharing hardware specs and drivers, which isn't something hardware companies like to do, ever.
It's not that it's a new problem as such, it's that for the first time in history we have a simple way to solve it, yet we have stupid greedy rich people who sponsor and enact laws to stop us from solving the problem.
The way to solve the problem is through massive duplication of all the data, over and over again through time. We have the technical means to do this on an unprecedented scale.
Even 1000 years ago, people had to painstakingly copy books, by hand, one at a time. And after a handful of copies were produced, there still weren't enough to guarantee that most would survive the ages, wars, fires, censorship, etc. So we generally have tiny collections from the past.
But now it's digital data. Anyone could copy it. We could have millions of copies of some obscure scientific work, all perfect duplicates. If even 0.1% of these copies survive, that's still thousands of copies.
And what do we do? We let a bunch of 1 percenters, who themselves barely know how or care to read, sponsor draconian copyright laws to stop eeryone from copying all that stuff, just on the off chance that they might copy a bunch of songs or movies that are outmoded within two years. And the commercial scienrific pulishers are some of the worst.
It's pathetic.
I was going to say something slightly different. A real orchestra's players have years of hard work getting the individual notes just right, and getting the experience of playing in groupts etc. So for electronic musicians to complain that a piece of music takes weeks to get right using software tools is pathetic, really. It's still orders of magnitude less than the work that was required to get an orchestra to the point where they play an equivalent (or even superior) piece.
No, the problem is commercial "appstores" that try to mimick the original open source model for application repositories, also known as package management systems, badly.
The reason software packages on Free OSes work well is because the software is free and open, so that anybody can inspect what it does, and anybody can patch the problems if they find any. Thus you get distro volunteers who look over a software package, verify that it actually does what it says it does, and package it according to distro guidelines. The result, in the case of large distros like Debian, is a high quality software repo that people can and do trust. And if one person doesn't see the problems in the source, someone else will.
The reason sofware packages on commercial "appstores" cannot ever work well or be safe to use is because the greedy OS vendors allow anyone who pays enough to put their closed software in the store, without ever checking what the software actually does. It's trivial to hide malicious code in a closed source binary. It might work fine all year, except on December 24 when it steals your credit details.
The truth is that this isn't a dumb user issue (although dumb users do exist), it's really a greedy appstore owner issue.
You American hillbillies who believe in that crap need to get over yourself. Obama is not the leader of anybody except a tiny fraction of people, who like to think that the USA is THE WHOLE WORLD.
Well guess what? It's not.
Not necessarily. If he had a few wealthy backers, with an amnesty, he could be voted president. I'd vote for him.
That's *tweaking* an existing solution, not solving a *new* problem. Everyone who has a STEM degree is trained in tweaking existing solutions to known problems. That's what most homework assignments in STEM are: "Solve existing generic problem X that you learned about in class, but don't use step 12 here."
I beg to differ. One cannot assess originality and obviousness to practicioners of the art, without making an implied judgment about the worthiness of a problem's solution.
In the simplest terms, say I look at a proposal, and determine that it would take 5 minutes of work for me or my colleagues to come up with this. Then I don't consider the solution to be worth even writing up. It's something I would do incidentally, as a single step while working towards a more ambitious goal. That's not worth a patent.
And yet, if that same solution is dressed up in fancy language that obfuscates the specifics and is given to some patent examiner who covers a large range of applications in a variety of fields, I am now legally prohibited from independently solving this same incidental problem in a product I'm developing, because some company on the other side of the world paid a fee to register this idea as theirs for the next 20 years only 6 months ago.
But, but! My boss buys me coffe to drink twice a day. Should I refuse it and pretend to write a changelog instead, while reading slashdot? I'm now worried he'll think I'm a slacker. (Hey boss, if you're reading this I'm stumped on the spelling of funtionallity. Does it take on k or two?)
There are too many patents out there. We need to radically cut down on the ones being granted, and to radically invalidate the vast majority of existing ones. It's the only way the sciences and arts will progress.
Or the last. Perhaps they just copied the time travel tech from sifting through the remains of older, smarter races, and then they went back in time to be "first".
"The Buck Stops Here".
Harry S. Truman
Please call yourself USian, because that's what you are. And if you don't understand what the fuss is about, I rest my case.
It was Wrong for Gmail to be "in beta". It was a weasel word to get people like you to forgive the issues for no good reason. A beta program is one where you have a fixed small number of testers who use the software in exchange for giving you detailed feedback on remaining bugs and usability. It's not a label you should leave on the software once you have actual users who expect to use it in their day to day activities. Especially if you expect them to agree to an EULA before doing so.
He probably meant to write "middle grammar school", but failed.
I hate to break it to you, but your experimental methodology for SICP is flawed. For example, if you set your mouse sensitivity sufficiently high, your wiggling will aways result in the scroll bar being at the top or the bottom. If also your window size is sufficiently small, then you will always click the top link, or the bottom link, of the TOC. What you need to do is calibrate your sampling procedure by computing a series of quantiles, changing the sensitivity and window size until these approximate the uniform distribution. I suggest getting a grad student to work out the details while we go to lunch. There's a special on roast beef in the cafeteria today.
If your program crashes because it failed a particular rule of C++, then it may be a waste of time to debug the exact circumstances of the crash. It may be better to realize that rewriting it in Python will prevent this whole class of problems and a bunch of others, and is the way to go. Similarly, sometimes it can be better to throw out, and replace, the existing patent laws with more useful ones, rather than worrying about the precise reason why some particular case fails in court, while trying to patch a complex system of case law one trial at a time.
To use a legal analogy, software is no different from an argument written by a lawyer, intended for a particular purpose, and following the rules of a particular system of laws. While every such document is slightly different to suit the circumstances, and many such documtents contain a lot of cleverness and originality, it makes no sense to patent the writings of lawyers, and neither does it make any sense to patent the writings of programmers for the same reason.
Tell the boss you can get rid of the four programmers by using a new super AI scripting system that only you can program. Tell him with the money he saves on the four salaries, he can pay three of those salaries to you on top of your normal one, and he's still going to save money! Win-Win! Next, you need to gain access to your Windows boxes without a gui: Simply install a Russian botnet, with a web based control interface. You can get an old one from any online Mafia surplus store. Next, you can simulate the AI system using a dozen cheap Indian IT professionals who simply do the needful overnight via the web interface. Demonsrate the system to the boss, claiming it's a natural language interface (don't mention the Indians). Make sure you finish the demo with a difficult task which is written in incomprehensible New Zealander slang, to show that the system still has just a few bugs left. When the boss is impressed, ask for another $500k to develop the system, promising joint marketing rights when it's finished. When difficulties arise in the next 6 months, ignore them, claiming you have coding to do and the final version will solve everything. At some point you will get fired. Use the golden parachute you negotiated after 3 months, when you were claiming that Google have been pestering you with job offers twice each day (proved using forged emails).
Now relax, count your money on the beach in Acapulco, and install an experimental version of Arch Linux on your Beowulf cluster of Raspberry Pi's. Log onto the Internets using your satellite phone, and help newbies with their sysadmin questions long into the sunset.
Exactly. I've said this before elsewhere, but this is the reverse of the spammer coin. All the tricks that spammers use to fill our public information sources with unwanted noise can be "used for good" if the purpose is to poison databases. And there's good money in it, too. Think about how much an advertiser is willing to pay a spammer for their services, and realize that individuals who have a personal stake in getting their records poisoned are going to pay even more. And of course it's not just individuals, but companies too.
It's obvious that strong laws don't stop EVERYONE from murdering people, or from assaulting people. There are always bad apples. As a society, we hunt them down and put them in jail, or in some countries execute them. But everyone else knows the consequences and refrains from doing these things. With strong laws, everyone else will refrain from assaulting my privacy as well. I'd be happy with that.
So where to start? Let's start with giving ME copyright over all the data that mentions ME or is about ME. No matter if someone else collected it. It's ME in there, and so it belongs to ME. I'm sure that alone would substantially level the playing field. Afterwards, we can figure out what to do next. (*)
(*) Yes, I know the likes of facebook and google would denounce it as unworkable. That's the point. They are part of the problem already.