Thanks to the three-strikes law, yes, a vast amount of money is going into warehousing nonviolent criminals.
And thanks to proposition 13, only some people pay the taxes. Older residents (and the kids who inherit their homes) get a free ride, because, while the houses they bought for peanuts are now worth millions, they pay hardly any property tax. Meanwhile their neighbors shoulder the burden.
If they put half as much effort into their anti-malware activities as they do into their DRM regime, the world would be a better place.
They're more or less the same thing - the spread of malware is unauthorized file copying. The only way to fully prevent malware is to stop users from installing software, since they sometimes install malware.
The idea of not letting people install whatever they want on their own computers may sound ludicrous, but locked-down consoles have largely displaced PC's for gaming, and the iPhone is the #1 smartphone, so it's far from just a joke or a paranoid fantasy. It's here, and a lot of people like it.
Its not like these things are autonomous or have even the remotest capability of independent decision making.
Obviously that depends on how you define "decision" (which you may believe to be inherently different than "calculation"); however UAVs do have the capability to make as many independent decisions as are required for an airline pilot to complete an average flight, for whatever that's worth.
It sounds to me like what they're trying to do is lower the threshold for imprisoning radical clerics and the like... even if we can't prove a specific conspiracy, you advocated overthrowing the govt. and (of course) didn't register yourself, so off to jail you go.
Hard to imagine it won't be ruled unconstitutional, since inciting violence was already illegal anyways.
I don't think AI is going to be "discovered" all at once, by one person. Looking back in few hundred years it might seem like a revolution, but at the time, on the front lines, researchers will sweat and toil for tiny increments of notoriety. There will be no point at which a researcher says to himself, "here it is... if I press the Enter key to send this out, it will change everything and replace me." Usually the only thing a researcher is worried about is that the next researcher will beat him/her to the punch and steal the glory.
Other than perhaps the time frame, I think this prediction (from the article) is entirely reasonable: "in thirty years, it is likely that virtually all the intellectual work that is done by trained human beings such as doctors, lawyers, scientists, or programmers, can be done by computers for pennies an hour. It is also likely that with AGI the cost of capable robots will drop, drastically decreasing the value of physical labor. Thus, AGI is likely to eliminate almost all of today's decently paying jobs."
Look at the jobs from 100 years ago and most of them are, in fact, gone! The percentage of farmers in the US has declined from 40% to just a few percent. This is due to precisely what the article is about: automation.
In the past, of course, most people have moved on to other jobs. On the other hand, the manufacturing jobs displaced in the last 40 years have largely not been replaced, and people that would have held them are now the working or unemployed poor. You might argue those people were displaced by offshoring and not technology, but consider this.
We already have the bandwidth for video, VOIP, and webapps, so what's next?
Really, everything is a subset of video. Your computer's ouputs are a monitor and speaker, so if you can drive those remotely, with sufficient quality, you're done. All apps could move to the cloud.
Now, you say we already have the video for bandwidth; I say the move to video has only just begun. Blu-Ray is 40 megabits, so we at least need that much bandwidth to each person in a household, for all households simultaneously, as an upper limit. (More realistically, X% of that upper limit).
Google will get better and better at parroting good translating and interpreting decisions, but software will never be able to make those decisions, because, in the final analysis, they are subjective decisions.
Think about how successful google has been with search. Prior to the web, we would have idealized search as speaking with an expert who has all the knowledge that exists on the web. Various efforts still strive for that vision today (askjeeves, wolphramalpha, etc). But clearly it is unreachable for the forseeable future. Yet, search is very useful.
Similarly, this universal translator may well reach a point that it is possible to visit a place, buy things, have a meal, ask where the toilets are, and get back home, particularly when both parties in the conversation are familiar with the limitations of translation. That would be extremely useful, even if it's only 1/100 of all a native bilingual speaker understands, or what you would need for nuanced treaty negotiations or to author a respectable translation of War and Peace.
This has almost nothing to do with websites like Wikipedia, which people actually look at. Spammers create huge sets of keyword-laden wikis and other web pages, which all link to each other, for the purpose of fooling search engines that use PageRank and similar algorithms. To search engines, it's hard to differentiate this from a popular site with lots of users. But when you see these pages you know it immediately, like spam in your inbox.
It is no different than domain names. Type a random sequence of 4 characters.com, and the vast majority of times you will get some fairly innocuous spam site, e.g. dneo.com (picked at random), with no real content.
But it doesn't interfere much with most poeple's use of the web.
...If Amazon can dictate terms to book publishers in this fashion...
Actually the whole premise of the article is a fraud anyways, since amazon already caved to McMillan, which will now set the price of e-books on amazon.com, and already sharply raised amazon's previous pricing. So tell me, who is dictating terms here?
It *is* possible for everybody to have the quality of life average for a US citizen (land use excepted, though really that doesn't matter anyway, most US citizens live in cities, not prairies, it's just that open space counts so much against the average), just not by the same *means* that are currently necessary to provide this quality of life to US citizens now.
In other words, it isn't possible. But it may be some day, assuming the barriers that currently make it impossible are overcome, except for the ones that definitely won't be. Which is what I said in the first place.
For now, it is certain that no replacement for gasoline will be found until after it severely impacts our economy - more than it already has, that is, through recurring shocks from spiking oil prices.
The fact that most people live in cities is irrelevant. Space to physically put bodies is not the limiting factor. For every city dweller there are acres of farmland, grazing land, and drainage (for potable water) somewhere to support them. You don't own a specific plot out there in the country, but it is being worked for you. Yes, farms will continue to become yet more productive. But we will run out of cheap fresh water long before we run out of empty wasteland.
And to say that the founding fathers wanted an agrarian society is blatantly disingenuously anachronistic. The Industrial Revolution hadn't even occurred yet!
Which is just what I said. Some way of life will exist, by definition it will be the American way of Life, regardless of whether we would approve of it, or can even imagine it now. The industrial revolution was accompanied by plenty of consternation by people who felt crowded city life wasn't what America was about or should be about; certainly cheap farming and grazing had been a huge draw in settling America in the first place. In any case, when somebody like George H.W. Bush rejects conservation by stating "The American way of life is not negotiable," he is flat out wrong. It will continue to evolve, shaped by economics and geopolitics, as always.
Not when it comes to limited natural resources like land, and fossil fuels. Nor getting your way in international disputes. Some things are zero sum.
Now, I agree technology will continue to progress; hopefully we'll find something almost as cheap and useful as oil, meat production gets more efficient, etc. But the end result of this will not be the American way of life, as the parent referred to; rather it will evolve into a new, somewhat different thing that is more global and less lopsided than what we saw in the second half of the 20th century. Life will go on. The founding fathers imagined America as an agrarian society controlled by land owners, and wouldn't consider what we have now to be the American way of life, either.
...bringing the rest of the world to the US quality of life.
The US quality of life is only possible due to cheap offshore labor and disproportionate consumption of global natural resources.
It's mathematically impossible for every person on earth to burn this much oil, eat this much meat, and live on this much land. The reason I can buy my kids shoes for $6 at Wal-Mart is because somebody is desperate enough to trade a day of their time for ten minutes of mine.
Economic parity is fair, but it's also a big step down.
Please. He hates Apple so much he was willing to spend several hundred dollars on one of their products.
Obviously he didn't hate them until he experienced the product.
After years of disinterest in Apple, I finally bought my wife an iPod because the treadmills at our gym have their crummy prioprietary dock. So I caved, and bought an iPod. And guess what, it still didn't work! Turns out Apple locked down the video output on newer models so they could control the sale of accessories, like $45 video-out cables. So I sold the new iPod on ebay, and bought an older iPod Video that works with the treadmill. It'll be a long time until I buy another Apple product in the absence of further coercion.
The claim that women are born with all the instincts necessary to successfully give birth is plausible because every other creature on the planet can and natural selection would quickly remove those that can't from the gene pool.
This is absurd. The whole point of at least being near a hospital (even if you choose to give birth at home) is so your wife and new child don't get "removed from the gene pool."
Natural selection is just a natural process, not some jealous god whose dictates we must strive to obey.
Unless everybody is required to carry insurance, exclusions for pre-existing conditions are inevitable. Otherwise everybody would just wait until they got sick to buy insurance (i.e. it wouldn't really be insurance any more).
My understanding is the new healtcare plan would have mandated we all buy health insurance, and prevented insurance companies from excluding pre-existing conditions. For whatever faults the bill has (or had), I think making people buy health insurance (from private companies, or as a tax) is a good thing. Otherwise too many people fail to make provisions for the inevitable, and then fall back on the rest of us.
Why would Microsoft want or need to embrace ARM anyways? If the netbook market becomes large enough, Intel will simply make whatever investment is necessary to outcompete ARM in the netbook sector.
In other words, ARM is better off for netbooks to remain a small niche, one that doesn't attract too much attention from the big boys.
Of course I might be wrong, but honestly, if this philosophy really worked in governing bodies (the idea that you slash the budget to marginally operating ability, and suddenly you get better "products") then you should not expect record spending, but instead we should expect to see record budget slashing.
Nobody is claiming the new prioritization is better because the budget was reduced, only that the good done by the new prioritization offsets the damage from the reduction. Letting the Shuttle die certainly saved a boatload of money for other things.
Could you clarify your point about demographics? Do you mean Medicare is crowding out NASA? Certainly there's truth to that; medical expenses are approaching 18% of US GDP. That means for every work week, almost one full day is spent paying the healthcare system (either through taxes, premiums, reduced wages to employers who pay premiums, or copays - it's all just different means of feeding the same hungry beast). After witnessing the failure of healthcare reform (starting with the public's receptiveness to scaremongering about unplugging granny) I've realized that's just an albatross we'll have to carry. Americans do not want fundamental reforms.
Claiming that they are not to blame because it is "in their nature" is an argument for determinism, which is easily falsified in this instance by the simple fact that not everyone acts in this way.
That argument doesn't falsify a thing, just as billiard balls are not proven to exhibit free will simply because the 8 ball falls into the corner pocket while the 3 ball goes off to the left.
Actually, even your negative synopsis of the piece flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which is that attacks of Chinese origin are all a carefully orchestrated by the ruthless and scheming Chinese government to displace America from its "rightful" place of world dominance. So, yeah, the idea that a lot of it might just be petty white-collar criminals who live with their moms is quite a different phenomenon.
Slashdot Mirror
And thanks to proposition 13, only some people pay the taxes. Older residents (and the kids who inherit their homes) get a free ride, because, while the houses they bought for peanuts are now worth millions, they pay hardly any property tax. Meanwhile their neighbors shoulder the burden.
Nothing like reveling in the imaginary words you put in the mouths of your opposition!
They're more or less the same thing - the spread of malware is unauthorized file copying. The only way to fully prevent malware is to stop users from installing software, since they sometimes install malware.
The idea of not letting people install whatever they want on their own computers may sound ludicrous, but locked-down consoles have largely displaced PC's for gaming, and the iPhone is the #1 smartphone, so it's far from just a joke or a paranoid fantasy. It's here, and a lot of people like it.
Obviously that depends on how you define "decision" (which you may believe to be inherently different than "calculation"); however UAVs do have the capability to make as many independent decisions as are required for an airline pilot to complete an average flight, for whatever that's worth.
Hard to imagine it won't be ruled unconstitutional, since inciting violence was already illegal anyways.
I don't think AI is going to be "discovered" all at once, by one person. Looking back in few hundred years it might seem like a revolution, but at the time, on the front lines, researchers will sweat and toil for tiny increments of notoriety. There will be no point at which a researcher says to himself, "here it is... if I press the Enter key to send this out, it will change everything and replace me." Usually the only thing a researcher is worried about is that the next researcher will beat him/her to the punch and steal the glory.
Look at the jobs from 100 years ago and most of them are, in fact, gone! The percentage of farmers in the US has declined from 40% to just a few percent. This is due to precisely what the article is about: automation.
In the past, of course, most people have moved on to other jobs. On the other hand, the manufacturing jobs displaced in the last 40 years have largely not been replaced, and people that would have held them are now the working or unemployed poor. You might argue those people were displaced by offshoring and not technology, but consider this.
Really, everything is a subset of video. Your computer's ouputs are a monitor and speaker, so if you can drive those remotely, with sufficient quality, you're done. All apps could move to the cloud.
Now, you say we already have the video for bandwidth; I say the move to video has only just begun. Blu-Ray is 40 megabits, so we at least need that much bandwidth to each person in a household, for all households simultaneously, as an upper limit. (More realistically, X% of that upper limit).
Seriously? There are sheep working at google and I still can't get hired there?
Think about how successful google has been with search. Prior to the web, we would have idealized search as speaking with an expert who has all the knowledge that exists on the web. Various efforts still strive for that vision today (askjeeves, wolphramalpha, etc). But clearly it is unreachable for the forseeable future. Yet, search is very useful.
Similarly, this universal translator may well reach a point that it is possible to visit a place, buy things, have a meal, ask where the toilets are, and get back home, particularly when both parties in the conversation are familiar with the limitations of translation. That would be extremely useful, even if it's only 1/100 of all a native bilingual speaker understands, or what you would need for nuanced treaty negotiations or to author a respectable translation of War and Peace.
It is no different than domain names. Type a random sequence of 4 characters .com, and the vast majority of times you will get some fairly innocuous spam site, e.g. dneo.com (picked at random), with no real content.
But it doesn't interfere much with most poeple's use of the web.
Actually the whole premise of the article is a fraud anyways, since amazon already caved to McMillan, which will now set the price of e-books on amazon.com, and already sharply raised amazon's previous pricing. So tell me, who is dictating terms here?
Yes, we used to run all through the winter, in the dark, in the wind, on the ice, until we realized, "why"? On Winter mornings the gym is nicer.
In the summer, what we like about the gym is the outdoor swimming pool. Fun for the whole family (which is harder than it sounds).
In other words, it isn't possible. But it may be some day, assuming the barriers that currently make it impossible are overcome, except for the ones that definitely won't be. Which is what I said in the first place.
For now, it is certain that no replacement for gasoline will be found until after it severely impacts our economy - more than it already has, that is, through recurring shocks from spiking oil prices.
The fact that most people live in cities is irrelevant. Space to physically put bodies is not the limiting factor. For every city dweller there are acres of farmland, grazing land, and drainage (for potable water) somewhere to support them. You don't own a specific plot out there in the country, but it is being worked for you. Yes, farms will continue to become yet more productive. But we will run out of cheap fresh water long before we run out of empty wasteland.
Which is just what I said. Some way of life will exist, by definition it will be the American way of Life, regardless of whether we would approve of it, or can even imagine it now. The industrial revolution was accompanied by plenty of consternation by people who felt crowded city life wasn't what America was about or should be about; certainly cheap farming and grazing had been a huge draw in settling America in the first place. In any case, when somebody like George H.W. Bush rejects conservation by stating "The American way of life is not negotiable," he is flat out wrong. It will continue to evolve, shaped by economics and geopolitics, as always.
Now, I agree technology will continue to progress; hopefully we'll find something almost as cheap and useful as oil, meat production gets more efficient, etc. But the end result of this will not be the American way of life, as the parent referred to; rather it will evolve into a new, somewhat different thing that is more global and less lopsided than what we saw in the second half of the 20th century. Life will go on. The founding fathers imagined America as an agrarian society controlled by land owners, and wouldn't consider what we have now to be the American way of life, either.
The US quality of life is only possible due to cheap offshore labor and disproportionate consumption of global natural resources.
It's mathematically impossible for every person on earth to burn this much oil, eat this much meat, and live on this much land. The reason I can buy my kids shoes for $6 at Wal-Mart is because somebody is desperate enough to trade a day of their time for ten minutes of mine.
Economic parity is fair, but it's also a big step down.
Obviously he didn't hate them until he experienced the product.
After years of disinterest in Apple, I finally bought my wife an iPod because the treadmills at our gym have their crummy prioprietary dock. So I caved, and bought an iPod. And guess what, it still didn't work! Turns out Apple locked down the video output on newer models so they could control the sale of accessories, like $45 video-out cables. So I sold the new iPod on ebay, and bought an older iPod Video that works with the treadmill. It'll be a long time until I buy another Apple product in the absence of further coercion.
This is absurd. The whole point of at least being near a hospital (even if you choose to give birth at home) is so your wife and new child don't get "removed from the gene pool."
Natural selection is just a natural process, not some jealous god whose dictates we must strive to obey.
My understanding is the new healtcare plan would have mandated we all buy health insurance, and prevented insurance companies from excluding pre-existing conditions. For whatever faults the bill has (or had), I think making people buy health insurance (from private companies, or as a tax) is a good thing. Otherwise too many people fail to make provisions for the inevitable, and then fall back on the rest of us.
* read performance only
In other words, ARM is better off for netbooks to remain a small niche, one that doesn't attract too much attention from the big boys.
Admit it.
Nobody is claiming the new prioritization is better because the budget was reduced, only that the good done by the new prioritization offsets the damage from the reduction. Letting the Shuttle die certainly saved a boatload of money for other things.
Could you clarify your point about demographics? Do you mean Medicare is crowding out NASA? Certainly there's truth to that; medical expenses are approaching 18% of US GDP. That means for every work week, almost one full day is spent paying the healthcare system (either through taxes, premiums, reduced wages to employers who pay premiums, or copays - it's all just different means of feeding the same hungry beast). After witnessing the failure of healthcare reform (starting with the public's receptiveness to scaremongering about unplugging granny) I've realized that's just an albatross we'll have to carry. Americans do not want fundamental reforms.
That argument doesn't falsify a thing, just as billiard balls are not proven to exhibit free will simply because the 8 ball falls into the corner pocket while the 3 ball goes off to the left.
Actually, even your negative synopsis of the piece flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which is that attacks of Chinese origin are all a carefully orchestrated by the ruthless and scheming Chinese government to displace America from its "rightful" place of world dominance. So, yeah, the idea that a lot of it might just be petty white-collar criminals who live with their moms is quite a different phenomenon.