Obviously the story anthropormorphizes things a bit, but the principles aren't wrong. For me one of the eye openers was learning about things like this:
There's a simple, near-limitless source of jobs that can only be filled by humans: do the same thing a machine does, but while being a human. We buy craftsy hand-made mugs, despite machines able to stamp out flawless mugs by the hundreds, because we like the idea that a real human was involved somewhere in the process.
Sure, but the humans doing the buying have to have something to buy it with. Also, at least in my home the number of handcrafted trinkets is FAR lower than the number of mass-produced stuff I own, and I imagine that is the case in just about any home. Unless the AIs start buying handcrafted stuff that makes for a very unbalanced economy. The same applies to butlers/servants/etc - most people have no desire to hire any of these, and most who do will just hire a robot to do a far better job for far less.
There is also a matter of resources. The machines will need to have resources to do their job, which means they'll drive up the prices of those resources. People using those same resources can't compete on price against the machines. It stands to reason that AI will accumulate all the wealth in the same way that the 1% do today.
It seems to me that unless the AI is designed to look out for human welfare the best we can hope to be is pets.
Well, at least you can program an AI to consider social responsibility, more than some people..
I have to agree with this. Presumably the morality that governs an AI will at least be understood, which is also far more than can be said about any person.
I think that just coming up with fundamental definitions of acceptable morality is going to be a big challenge in designing an AI. Any self-determining entity has morality - whether you intended for it to have it or not. "Do whatever it takes to make the owner money" is in fact a moral principle, albeit a rather poor one I think most would agree.
Anyone can eat what they want and maintain a reasonable weight. Either limit the portion or actually do enough physical exercise to burn off the excess calories consumed.
That's like saying any of my classmates could get the same grades I did in science and math classes. All they had to do was study 40 hours per day and write down the correct answers to the exam questions. Never mind that I was able to write down the correct answers while barely studying at all.
Don't assume the fact that you're able to do something means that others can do the same thing. The human brain doesn't work that way.
I fear unethical humans programing AI computers to things and then just stepping back and taking no responsibility for the outcomes as they effect individuals.
They already do that, but instead of AI, but they call it corporate policy. I somehow doubt AI can be significantly more harmful than corporate executives making a one size fits all solution for corporate behavior.
Right now policy might be black and white but the people making the decisions on the ground can use their discretion in applying it. Imagine if for every employee there were 47,000 intelligent AIs monitoring their every breath and checking to see that every break was completed on-time, that every policy was followed, etc. Actually, I don't get why a company would even have employees in the first place - so instead you have AIs that perfectly follow policy.
It would be really fun for the courts. A legal-dept AI would take a look at every single interaction a company has with anybody else and make a determination as to whether it was cost-effective to sue them (with almost no legal costs to do so). It might file a few hundred thousand lawsuits a day complete with briefs up to the max page/word count filed 1 second before every deadline, with arguments based on loopholes in laws that are so complex that you'd have to evaluate the arguments using the kinds of software you use to analyze modern mathematical proofs. The opposing council would no doubt use its own AIs as well as the courts, so that in the end every case gets decided in a few minutes. Good luck responding to the 300 page briefs within the 5 minute filing deadline if you're a measly human who wants to go pro se.
Personally I'm wondering when, if ever, anyone's going to be able to make Freenet style downloads usable to most people where there is no seed as such, you just cut a file into a million little encrypted pieces that are distributed among the entire network.
It is called Freenet.:)
There is no reason that you can't post a content-hashed key on a regular website.
Freenet isn't horrible for downloads of large files, as long as they're seeded (which they often aren't - but torrents suffer the same problem though with much more visibility before you go to try downloading a file). The lack of visibility might be the real issue on Freenet - you don't know if you're going to get all the parts to a file before you try, whereas with a tracker you can get a sense for what is and isn't actually seeded or at the very least you know not long after you start downloading it.
For browsing websites and such Freenet is horribly slow, but it is secure for all the reasons that tor/etc aren't - the latency is a deliberate strategy to defeat tracking.
I mean, some small company, let's say "John Doe Software" probably does not have its certificate verified down to the root level.
Uh, yes, it does, otherwise it would be useless. But any CA can sign a certificate for that company, so it's as strong as the least secure CA.
Or the least principled one. You have to trust every CA in every country on the planet. If you're a US defense contractor should you be trusting some Chinese CA? If you're a Chinese defense contractor, should you be trusting Verisign? The SSL trust model is a joke.
The best thing that was ever said to me was "We're in the (non-IT-business), not the security business."
Rings true when looking for profit. No one really gives two craps fully about security; most of it is security theater (shellshock? That got some attention. Still not patched fully.)
Yup. I once saw a movie (think mission impossible genre) where part of the movie involved breaking into a company in my industry to steal some kind of important data. It had the works - laser grids, armies of armed guards, etc. I was thinking that all they needed to do was get hired by the local cleaning company for $5/hr and MAYBE pick an office lock, but most likely just open up the filing cabinet with the data or walk out with a laptop. If they actually wanted to send in ninjas the local security would be lucky to notice, and if they did they'd just call the local police who I'm sure would dispatch both of their police cars sometime in the next 20 min.
IT security is just as rigorous. Companies don't stay in business by hiring armies of guards/IT/etc.
When you're talking about a company like Sony, which is really a zillion separate entities under one umbrella, I find it hard to believe Sony could have reacted so quickly as to lock down all other sites in one day.
I'm betting no company that big is capable of responding that fast.
It depends on what kind of people they have hired. Those who actually take an interest and read underground news multiple times a day are more likely to have fixes in place long before the need is evaluated, determined and requested up and down the corporate chain. Even if it should break with policies to patch without permission, a halfway decent sysadmin would invoke emergency powers in cases like this, and do the paperwork later.
Vulnerabilities come out every week. If you have to violate policy every week to keep up with them, then if the company wants to stick with the broken policy you're going to end up getting fired.
A big principle in large companies is division of labor and responsibility. Nobody really feels like they own the whole thing, so nobody cares enough to stick their neck on the line. It is easier to just shrug your shoulders like everybody else when the big disaster happens. If you do work your heart out you at best won't get rewarded for it, and at worst will get penalized.
Look -- regardless of all of this, the reality is Watson didn't make a nuanced statement like this, "Oh, yeah, variance can reasonably happen between any group." He said nothing like that. He basically said he thought Africa was unlikely to improve its condition because black people are stupider.
Interesting. That seems like a rather stupid thing to say...
As the GP pointed out there isn't a single "intelligence" trait, and your argument doesn't address that. IQ tests measure a very specific ability, and one which has been improving in all races for decades.
Well, it seems more likely that IQ measures a collection of many abilities that are loosely related, and that all of those abilities are likely governed by many more factors of which some are genetic.
However, my point remains that those genetic factors are going to have frequency distributions, and it is very likely that they're going to be different in different populations just like virtually every other allele that has been studied.
Thus, I share little with you, though you are presumably of my race. I feel more kinship to blacks than to whites like you.
Sounds like you and I have something in common. I have lots of black friends, but I tend to avoid people judge a man's character solely on the basis of a rational argument.
Aside from the fact that it's fundamentally incompatible with democracy, wasn't a huge part of the American revolution the idea that there should be no taxation without representation? Those felons are taxpayers, aren't they?
Technically representation and voting are different things. Representation means you have a person in the legislature representing you. Someone you can go to and share your grievances with. Voting means you got to pick that person.
So, why couldn't all those colonialists send a letter to an MP back in England?
Because there was no colonial sent to Parliament as an MP, no MP representing the colonies. No colonial, not even those with a franchise to vote in a colony, could vote for an MP. Only those living in England could vote for an MP.
You just said that being represented had nothing to do with being able to vote for your representative. The 13 colonies were represented by parliament. They just didn't get to vote for them. By your argument they should have been content with that.
If you're looking for the place where your post went from "misguided appeal to authority" to "racist rant," this is where it happens. Exactly why is it a "no brainer" that intelligence varies significantly by race??
Because it is a no-brainer that if you grab two random groups of individuals and measure ANY trait within them, you'd expect to find a difference in the mean. That is true no matter what the groups are, or what the trait is. Heck, if you grabbed 500 white people, took two samples of 50 out of that group, and compared just about any trait between the two groups of 50 you'd find differences. Hence the reason statisticians are interested in things like standard error.
Black people and white people tend not to inter-marry. I'm not saying that it never happens - only that it doesn't happen NEARLY as often as intra-racial marriage. That makes it all the more likely for genetic drift to make some genes become more predominant in one population vs the other.
Would you expect the genes that govern skin color to be any different between the average african-american and somebody of european descent? Then why not other genes?
I'm sure the typical American feels SO much better off than the typical Norwegian. And by typical I mean the 90% of Americans who struggle to stay employed, not what you get when you average Bill Gates with 10,000 homeless people.
I guess you support "consequence-free" life. Seven DUIs? No problem, go out and get your license back. Heck, why not apply for a job as a bus driver! Meth lab owner? No problem, go out and get a job at the local pharmacy!
Do you approach EVERY aspect of life with so little thought or just this one?
He didn't say that criminals shouldn't be rehabilitated. He didn't say that crime should be without consequence. He just said that consequences shouldn't be permanent.
If somebody has a DUI at the age of 16, should that preclude them from being a bus driver at the age of 50?
Next thing you know you'll be suggesting eternal torture as a punishment for moral offenses.
"until they're rehabilitated" really means "indefinite", which means "forever"... which is blatantly and deliberately unconstitutional.
In spite of all the bullshit from the right and left, the purpose of prisons is to protect the people from criminals. The rest is technique, not purpose.
So if the goal is truly to protect people, why would you ever release somebody who wasn't rehabilitated?
Prison is about revenge and looking like we're being tough on crime and doing something when somebody gets hurt. Nobody seems to care if it accomplishes anything positive at all.
If it were up to me the whole system would be completely overhauled. People who are dangerous would be locked up or monitored and treated until they were no longer dangerous. That would include vocational training/etc, and it would be available to anybody regardless of whether they had been charged with a crime, though participation would not be voluntary for criminals. Nobody would be allowed to know the criminal past of anybody or use it as a condition of employment - if they're not safe enough to be elementary school teachers, then they're on monitoring or in prison. The goal would be re-integration into the rest of society.
Anything that makes inmates feel like they have a positive connection to greater society is a good thing.
Exactly. Unless we intend to lock up all prisoners for ever, the vast majority will be released back into society eventually.
Do we want released inmates re-integrated with society as smoothly as possible, or do we want them back amongst us harbouring a deep resentment due to the way they were treated in prison? It's our choice.
I'm surprised the US hasn't made the choice to institute the Hunger Games. That will keep them in line!
Aside from the fact that it's fundamentally incompatible with democracy, wasn't a huge part of the American revolution the idea that there should be no taxation without representation? Those felons are taxpayers, aren't they?
Technically representation and voting are different things. Representation means you have a person in the legislature representing you. Someone you can go to and share your grievances with. Voting means you got to pick that person.
So, why couldn't all those colonialists send a letter to an MP back in England?
Anytime anybody needs access to another PC you have to send out an IT guy to grant access.
Why would anyone ever need access to another PC? Each employee should have a machine, and nobody else should be touching it unless that employee leaves the company, in which case the exit interview should require them to set their password to something and give it to their manager. So the only time you have to send an IT person out to grant access is when an employee dies suddenly.
You have a kiosk on a manufacturing floor. Do you propose having 14 kiosks at each location in the event that there are 14 different employees who have to use it? Or are you suggesting that employees should carry laptops around all the time? Not every employee works at a desk.
And what about support calls? IT workers may need access to lots of PCs, especially since your solution precludes the use of any kind of push-driven automated software management system.
Oh good - so that when the building catches on fire you lose the backup too. If the PC doesn't contain anything valuable, it doesn't need backup. If it does need backup, it needs something better than an external hard drive. Security isn't just about denying access to strangers - it is also about ensuring access to those who need it.
Fires are exceptionally rare, and the truly high-value assets should be on servers, which as I mentioned, should be backed up off-site, in an individually encrypted fashion. You can do this for desktops, too, if you'd prefer, but in practice, this really isn't needed.
You cut out the part I responded to. Are you backing up the workstations or not? If not, why do you need all those backup external hard drives at each workstation? If you are, then how are you protecting them against fire? Or are you proposing just spending lots of money on the appearance of having backups, without providing actual data security?
This is a big company. Everything is a shared project, and everything needs all that backup anyway. Now the user has to remember multiple sets of credentials since they need a different password for every thing they work on since there are no network credentials in your firewalled paradise.
There's no reason you can't use the same password. That's really no different than using a shared credential, security-wise, except that a shared credential database represents a single server that you can target to obtain information for all servers, whereas per-server credential databases contain a smaller subset of accounts, which means that cracking one machine and stealing its password database will gain you access to fewer machines than cracking that central password server would.
Ok, so instead of breaking into your AD server or whatever with credentials for every employee in the company, you break into the self-service HR website which has credentials for every employee in the company?
Oh, you need to have one dedicated hardware box for every project - no VMs in your IT paradise.
Why not? There's nothing preventing a VM's hard drive from being encrypted, and if somebody gets and keeps kernel access to a server long enough to find the keys in memory, you're in deep crap anyway.
I thought your whole point was to not have shared credentials that can be used to expand access beyond a single box. If you're going to run the boxes in VMs, then the hypervisor has privileged access to many boxes. If you want to be able to move VMs around in a cluster (which is how just about everybody does it) then that basically means you have a single point of access into every VM in your company. At that point, why not actually take advantage of centralized administration, since you've already denied yourself the benefits of a distributed model?
Obviously I don't know what kind of place you work in, but I think outsourcing has been a big factor here. At my workplace "getting things done" is a recipe for losing your job - that kind of work gets outsourced. What stays in is all the networking and communications-intensive stuff that drives decisions around what gets done, creating presentations to convince the higher-ups that things are getting done, and so on. That all tends to favor activities like chit-chat, asking for spontaneous presentations, attending constant meetings, and so on.
Many of the same people used to get things done in the past, but they're smart enough to have figured out which way the wind is blowing and adapt. They produce the kinds of "work output" that their management rewards, which isn't "getting things done."
I didn't want to do homework either but if I didn't my grades suffered. "Consequences"
Rather artificially-imposed consequences in the case of your example. When you get into the real world your employer is going to be just fine with using google to solve all your problems.
Being good at things definitely is useful in the real world. Being good at memorizing things - not so much. Being able to recognize situations where you should look up more info is the in-between skill that has largely replaced being a walking textbook.
However, perhaps it's time to acknowledge that much of the productivity increases that the Internet brought to the workplace are only possible because systems could be built that didn't assume that the company was under constant assault - a condition that is very likely no longer true.
That really makes you wonder.
If you try to mail a bomb to somebody else the police will track you down. If you try to mail a bomb to somebody in another country the bomb will never make it past customs most likely. For centuries countries have carefully regulated the passage of people and things across their borders.
Right now communications is not subject to these kinds of limitations. If you send a virus across a national border from a country that is friendly to such activities, it will reach its destination and there will be no consequences for you.
Will the day come when borders apply to packets on the internet? Maybe text-only content (not including javascript/etc) is considered exempt just like paper mail is in the physical world. However, if you want to send binaries over the internet you have to pay a tariff which covers the cost of scanning it. If the packet doesn't meet the whitelist criteria it gets held until it can be inspected. Webpages will resemble the early 90s.
Yup. Normally you have to think you have a good case before you sue, because you're going to spend a heap of money just to get discovery and be able to obtain the data you need to create a case. Then maybe the case doesn't look as good and you end up having to drop it, or just throw good money after bad.
Now everybody basically gets no-hassle discovery up-front. The data is available to them in the same way it is available to Sony, so no burying of data in paper files that aren't searchable and all that fun. Lawyers can see if they have a case before they spend much money. Heck, ambulance chasers can go through the books and find the best cases and then call up those potential plaintiffs and beg to represent them. The only cases that will get filed against Sony are ones that Sony is likely to lose, so now they are the ones facing all the litigation costs if they want to defend them. The lawyers don't even have to mention having looked at the illicit files. They just file a lawsuit, obtain discovery, and do parallel construction like the DAs do.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously the story anthropormorphizes things a bit, but the principles aren't wrong. For me one of the eye openers was learning about things like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There's a simple, near-limitless source of jobs that can only be filled by humans: do the same thing a machine does, but while being a human. We buy craftsy hand-made mugs, despite machines able to stamp out flawless mugs by the hundreds, because we like the idea that a real human was involved somewhere in the process.
Sure, but the humans doing the buying have to have something to buy it with. Also, at least in my home the number of handcrafted trinkets is FAR lower than the number of mass-produced stuff I own, and I imagine that is the case in just about any home. Unless the AIs start buying handcrafted stuff that makes for a very unbalanced economy. The same applies to butlers/servants/etc - most people have no desire to hire any of these, and most who do will just hire a robot to do a far better job for far less.
There is also a matter of resources. The machines will need to have resources to do their job, which means they'll drive up the prices of those resources. People using those same resources can't compete on price against the machines. It stands to reason that AI will accumulate all the wealth in the same way that the 1% do today.
It seems to me that unless the AI is designed to look out for human welfare the best we can hope to be is pets.
Well, at least you can program an AI to consider social responsibility, more than some people..
I have to agree with this. Presumably the morality that governs an AI will at least be understood, which is also far more than can be said about any person.
I think that just coming up with fundamental definitions of acceptable morality is going to be a big challenge in designing an AI. Any self-determining entity has morality - whether you intended for it to have it or not. "Do whatever it takes to make the owner money" is in fact a moral principle, albeit a rather poor one I think most would agree.
Anyone can eat what they want and maintain a reasonable weight. Either limit the portion or actually do enough physical exercise to burn off the excess calories consumed.
That's like saying any of my classmates could get the same grades I did in science and math classes. All they had to do was study 40 hours per day and write down the correct answers to the exam questions. Never mind that I was able to write down the correct answers while barely studying at all.
Don't assume the fact that you're able to do something means that others can do the same thing. The human brain doesn't work that way.
The difference is that there are people who can eat what they want and stay thin. Leavings things to evolution is often the safer bet.
I'd love to hear your proposed solution for the disabled.
I fear unethical humans programing AI computers to things and then just stepping back and taking no responsibility for the outcomes as they effect individuals.
They already do that, but instead of AI, but they call it corporate policy. I somehow doubt AI can be significantly more harmful than corporate executives making a one size fits all solution for corporate behavior.
Right now policy might be black and white but the people making the decisions on the ground can use their discretion in applying it. Imagine if for every employee there were 47,000 intelligent AIs monitoring their every breath and checking to see that every break was completed on-time, that every policy was followed, etc. Actually, I don't get why a company would even have employees in the first place - so instead you have AIs that perfectly follow policy.
It would be really fun for the courts. A legal-dept AI would take a look at every single interaction a company has with anybody else and make a determination as to whether it was cost-effective to sue them (with almost no legal costs to do so). It might file a few hundred thousand lawsuits a day complete with briefs up to the max page/word count filed 1 second before every deadline, with arguments based on loopholes in laws that are so complex that you'd have to evaluate the arguments using the kinds of software you use to analyze modern mathematical proofs. The opposing council would no doubt use its own AIs as well as the courts, so that in the end every case gets decided in a few minutes. Good luck responding to the 300 page briefs within the 5 minute filing deadline if you're a measly human who wants to go pro se.
Personally I'm wondering when, if ever, anyone's going to be able to make Freenet style downloads usable to most people where there is no seed as such, you just cut a file into a million little encrypted pieces that are distributed among the entire network.
It is called Freenet. :)
There is no reason that you can't post a content-hashed key on a regular website.
Freenet isn't horrible for downloads of large files, as long as they're seeded (which they often aren't - but torrents suffer the same problem though with much more visibility before you go to try downloading a file). The lack of visibility might be the real issue on Freenet - you don't know if you're going to get all the parts to a file before you try, whereas with a tracker you can get a sense for what is and isn't actually seeded or at the very least you know not long after you start downloading it.
For browsing websites and such Freenet is horribly slow, but it is secure for all the reasons that tor/etc aren't - the latency is a deliberate strategy to defeat tracking.
I mean, some small company, let's say "John Doe Software" probably does not have its certificate verified down to the root level.
Uh, yes, it does, otherwise it would be useless. But any CA can sign a certificate for that company, so it's as strong as the least secure CA.
Or the least principled one. You have to trust every CA in every country on the planet. If you're a US defense contractor should you be trusting some Chinese CA? If you're a Chinese defense contractor, should you be trusting Verisign? The SSL trust model is a joke.
The best thing that was ever said to me was "We're in the (non-IT-business), not the security business."
Rings true when looking for profit. No one really gives two craps fully about security; most of it is security theater (shellshock? That got some attention. Still not patched fully.)
Yup. I once saw a movie (think mission impossible genre) where part of the movie involved breaking into a company in my industry to steal some kind of important data. It had the works - laser grids, armies of armed guards, etc. I was thinking that all they needed to do was get hired by the local cleaning company for $5/hr and MAYBE pick an office lock, but most likely just open up the filing cabinet with the data or walk out with a laptop. If they actually wanted to send in ninjas the local security would be lucky to notice, and if they did they'd just call the local police who I'm sure would dispatch both of their police cars sometime in the next 20 min.
IT security is just as rigorous. Companies don't stay in business by hiring armies of guards/IT/etc.
When you're talking about a company like Sony, which is really a zillion separate entities under one umbrella, I find it hard to believe Sony could have reacted so quickly as to lock down all other sites in one day.
I'm betting no company that big is capable of responding that fast.
It depends on what kind of people they have hired. Those who actually take an interest and read underground news multiple times a day are more likely to have fixes in place long before the need is evaluated, determined and requested up and down the corporate chain.
Even if it should break with policies to patch without permission, a halfway decent sysadmin would invoke emergency powers in cases like this, and do the paperwork later.
Vulnerabilities come out every week. If you have to violate policy every week to keep up with them, then if the company wants to stick with the broken policy you're going to end up getting fired.
A big principle in large companies is division of labor and responsibility. Nobody really feels like they own the whole thing, so nobody cares enough to stick their neck on the line. It is easier to just shrug your shoulders like everybody else when the big disaster happens. If you do work your heart out you at best won't get rewarded for it, and at worst will get penalized.
Look -- regardless of all of this, the reality is Watson didn't make a nuanced statement like this, "Oh, yeah, variance can reasonably happen between any group." He said nothing like that. He basically said he thought Africa was unlikely to improve its condition because black people are stupider.
Interesting. That seems like a rather stupid thing to say...
As the GP pointed out there isn't a single "intelligence" trait, and your argument doesn't address that. IQ tests measure a very specific ability, and one which has been improving in all races for decades.
Well, it seems more likely that IQ measures a collection of many abilities that are loosely related, and that all of those abilities are likely governed by many more factors of which some are genetic.
However, my point remains that those genetic factors are going to have frequency distributions, and it is very likely that they're going to be different in different populations just like virtually every other allele that has been studied.
Thus, I share little with you, though you are presumably of my race. I feel more kinship to blacks than to whites like you.
Sounds like you and I have something in common. I have lots of black friends, but I tend to avoid people judge a man's character solely on the basis of a rational argument.
Aside from the fact that it's fundamentally incompatible with democracy, wasn't a huge part of the American revolution the idea that there should be no taxation without representation? Those felons are taxpayers, aren't they?
Technically representation and voting are different things. Representation means you have a person in the legislature representing you. Someone you can go to and share your grievances with. Voting means you got to pick that person.
So, why couldn't all those colonialists send a letter to an MP back in England?
Because there was no colonial sent to Parliament as an MP, no MP representing the colonies. No colonial, not even those with a franchise to vote in a colony, could vote for an MP. Only those living in England could vote for an MP.
You just said that being represented had nothing to do with being able to vote for your representative. The 13 colonies were represented by parliament. They just didn't get to vote for them. By your argument they should have been content with that.
If you're looking for the place where your post went from "misguided appeal to authority" to "racist rant," this is where it happens. Exactly why is it a "no brainer" that intelligence varies significantly by race??
Because it is a no-brainer that if you grab two random groups of individuals and measure ANY trait within them, you'd expect to find a difference in the mean. That is true no matter what the groups are, or what the trait is. Heck, if you grabbed 500 white people, took two samples of 50 out of that group, and compared just about any trait between the two groups of 50 you'd find differences. Hence the reason statisticians are interested in things like standard error.
Black people and white people tend not to inter-marry. I'm not saying that it never happens - only that it doesn't happen NEARLY as often as intra-racial marriage. That makes it all the more likely for genetic drift to make some genes become more predominant in one population vs the other.
Would you expect the genes that govern skin color to be any different between the average african-american and somebody of european descent? Then why not other genes?
and wealthy country in the world.
I'm sure the typical American feels SO much better off than the typical Norwegian. And by typical I mean the 90% of Americans who struggle to stay employed, not what you get when you average Bill Gates with 10,000 homeless people.
I guess you support "consequence-free" life. Seven DUIs? No problem, go out and get your license back. Heck, why not apply for a job as a bus driver! Meth lab owner? No problem, go out and get a job at the local pharmacy!
Do you approach EVERY aspect of life with so little thought or just this one?
He didn't say that criminals shouldn't be rehabilitated. He didn't say that crime should be without consequence. He just said that consequences shouldn't be permanent.
If somebody has a DUI at the age of 16, should that preclude them from being a bus driver at the age of 50?
Next thing you know you'll be suggesting eternal torture as a punishment for moral offenses.
"until they're rehabilitated" really means "indefinite", which means "forever" ... which is blatantly and deliberately unconstitutional.
In spite of all the bullshit from the right and left, the purpose of prisons is to protect the people from criminals. The rest is technique, not purpose.
So if the goal is truly to protect people, why would you ever release somebody who wasn't rehabilitated?
Prison is about revenge and looking like we're being tough on crime and doing something when somebody gets hurt. Nobody seems to care if it accomplishes anything positive at all.
If it were up to me the whole system would be completely overhauled. People who are dangerous would be locked up or monitored and treated until they were no longer dangerous. That would include vocational training/etc, and it would be available to anybody regardless of whether they had been charged with a crime, though participation would not be voluntary for criminals. Nobody would be allowed to know the criminal past of anybody or use it as a condition of employment - if they're not safe enough to be elementary school teachers, then they're on monitoring or in prison. The goal would be re-integration into the rest of society.
Anything that makes inmates feel like they have a positive connection to greater society is a good thing.
Exactly. Unless we intend to lock up all prisoners for ever, the vast majority will be released back into society eventually.
Do we want released inmates re-integrated with society as smoothly as possible, or do we want them back amongst us harbouring a deep resentment due to the way they were treated in prison? It's our choice.
I'm surprised the US hasn't made the choice to institute the Hunger Games. That will keep them in line!
Aside from the fact that it's fundamentally incompatible with democracy, wasn't a huge part of the American revolution the idea that there should be no taxation without representation? Those felons are taxpayers, aren't they?
Technically representation and voting are different things. Representation means you have a person in the legislature representing you. Someone you can go to and share your grievances with. Voting means you got to pick that person.
So, why couldn't all those colonialists send a letter to an MP back in England?
Why would anyone ever need access to another PC? Each employee should have a machine, and nobody else should be touching it unless that employee leaves the company, in which case the exit interview should require them to set their password to something and give it to their manager. So the only time you have to send an IT person out to grant access is when an employee dies suddenly.
You have a kiosk on a manufacturing floor. Do you propose having 14 kiosks at each location in the event that there are 14 different employees who have to use it? Or are you suggesting that employees should carry laptops around all the time? Not every employee works at a desk.
And what about support calls? IT workers may need access to lots of PCs, especially since your solution precludes the use of any kind of push-driven automated software management system.
Fires are exceptionally rare, and the truly high-value assets should be on servers, which as I mentioned, should be backed up off-site, in an individually encrypted fashion. You can do this for desktops, too, if you'd prefer, but in practice, this really isn't needed.
You cut out the part I responded to. Are you backing up the workstations or not? If not, why do you need all those backup external hard drives at each workstation? If you are, then how are you protecting them against fire? Or are you proposing just spending lots of money on the appearance of having backups, without providing actual data security?
There's no reason you can't use the same password. That's really no different than using a shared credential, security-wise, except that a shared credential database represents a single server that you can target to obtain information for all servers, whereas per-server credential databases contain a smaller subset of accounts, which means that cracking one machine and stealing its password database will gain you access to fewer machines than cracking that central password server would.
Ok, so instead of breaking into your AD server or whatever with credentials for every employee in the company, you break into the self-service HR website which has credentials for every employee in the company?
Why not? There's nothing preventing a VM's hard drive from being encrypted, and if somebody gets and keeps kernel access to a server long enough to find the keys in memory, you're in deep crap anyway.
I thought your whole point was to not have shared credentials that can be used to expand access beyond a single box. If you're going to run the boxes in VMs, then the hypervisor has privileged access to many boxes. If you want to be able to move VMs around in a cluster (which is how just about everybody does it) then that basically means you have a single point of access into every VM in your company. At that point, why not actually take advantage of centralized administration, since you've already denied yourself the benefits of a distributed model?
Obviously I don't know what kind of place you work in, but I think outsourcing has been a big factor here. At my workplace "getting things done" is a recipe for losing your job - that kind of work gets outsourced. What stays in is all the networking and communications-intensive stuff that drives decisions around what gets done, creating presentations to convince the higher-ups that things are getting done, and so on. That all tends to favor activities like chit-chat, asking for spontaneous presentations, attending constant meetings, and so on.
Many of the same people used to get things done in the past, but they're smart enough to have figured out which way the wind is blowing and adapt. They produce the kinds of "work output" that their management rewards, which isn't "getting things done."
I didn't want to do homework either but if I didn't my grades suffered. "Consequences"
Rather artificially-imposed consequences in the case of your example. When you get into the real world your employer is going to be just fine with using google to solve all your problems.
Being good at things definitely is useful in the real world. Being good at memorizing things - not so much. Being able to recognize situations where you should look up more info is the in-between skill that has largely replaced being a walking textbook.
However, perhaps it's time to acknowledge that much of the productivity increases that the Internet brought to the workplace are only possible because systems could be built that didn't assume that the company was under constant assault - a condition that is very likely no longer true.
That really makes you wonder.
If you try to mail a bomb to somebody else the police will track you down. If you try to mail a bomb to somebody in another country the bomb will never make it past customs most likely. For centuries countries have carefully regulated the passage of people and things across their borders.
Right now communications is not subject to these kinds of limitations. If you send a virus across a national border from a country that is friendly to such activities, it will reach its destination and there will be no consequences for you.
Will the day come when borders apply to packets on the internet? Maybe text-only content (not including javascript/etc) is considered exempt just like paper mail is in the physical world. However, if you want to send binaries over the internet you have to pay a tariff which covers the cost of scanning it. If the packet doesn't meet the whitelist criteria it gets held until it can be inspected. Webpages will resemble the early 90s.
Yup. Normally you have to think you have a good case before you sue, because you're going to spend a heap of money just to get discovery and be able to obtain the data you need to create a case. Then maybe the case doesn't look as good and you end up having to drop it, or just throw good money after bad.
Now everybody basically gets no-hassle discovery up-front. The data is available to them in the same way it is available to Sony, so no burying of data in paper files that aren't searchable and all that fun. Lawyers can see if they have a case before they spend much money. Heck, ambulance chasers can go through the books and find the best cases and then call up those potential plaintiffs and beg to represent them. The only cases that will get filed against Sony are ones that Sony is likely to lose, so now they are the ones facing all the litigation costs if they want to defend them. The lawyers don't even have to mention having looked at the illicit files. They just file a lawsuit, obtain discovery, and do parallel construction like the DAs do.