I've read all of the stories with Dr. Susan Calvin and the rest of the gang, and all of them basically deal with loopholes in the three "laws". Two Faces of Tomorrow is a much better look at the problems and complexities of advanced systems (some not even sentient) behaving in ways detrimental to society... even when they're doing what they're "designed" to do.
We already create rule-based systems and use 'em to run little things like financial trading, power grids, traffic management systems, nuclear power plants, supply chains, oil refineries, and largely automated factories.
Besides, the entire body of work depended on the concept that designing a positronic brain WITH the laws was so complex that no one would ever even attempt to duplicate all of that work and design one WITHOUT them. Here in the real world, with most funding probably defense oriented, I suspect we'd get the killer versions first.
James P. Hogan's Two Faces of Tomorrow. And if you read it you might also remember that it came very close to blowing up the "world" first. What if it did so and THEN figured out humans were sentient too? Oops.
First, everyone here needs to read Hogan's Two Faces of Tomorrow, which deals with the subject quite nicely.
Second, you speak of evolutionary time scales, but what's an evolutionary time scale to an AI whose ability to think and determine new solutions to problems is measured in microseconds?
Third, as Hogan mentions, an AI need not "go to war" in order to be a major problem. Program an AI to run a city as efficiently as possible. Now, how long before it decides that it MUST be here to do so? How long before it stops responding to "inefficient" commands? How long before it decides that those pesky blobs of protoplasm need to be reigned in because they keep screwing things up?
Ditto. Years ago an automobile was all but dead once (if) it reached 100,000 miles. Today's versions regularly hit 100,000, 150,000, or even 200,000 and keep on rolling.
People don't give the darn things enough credit. You design a device that will run for a decade or more with minimal maintenance and that will start up after a week of sub-zero winter nights in Wisconsin or after spending days on end broiling in the Phoenix heat.
Consumer electronics are on a much faster track, but even there they DO more. Try rendering some HD video on a Pentium... if you can get fit it onto the hard drive. Hell, the average FILE on my iPod is larger than my first hard drive.
"It is the person who distributed the copy who has commited the copyright violation, because copyright specificaly relates to the distribution of copyrighted materials."
Ergo, everyone who uses BitTorrent to download copy-written material is guilty. P2P is a two-way technology and the person who's downloading a file is also uploading (distributing) his pieces to others at the same time. It's the nature of the protocol.
And don't try to find a loophole regarding "leeches". The vast majority don't, any more than the vast majority of P2P traffic consists of Linux distros.
"Quit buying the bullshit and look into some of this for yourself man..."
Try doing the same. Despite whatever the *IAA's have done, their excesses don't excuse someone else's. The fact of the matter is that, currently, people can steal music, movies, games, and software with almost zero chance of being caught. So they do. Low-risk, high-reward.
Greedy corporations, sticking it to the man, arcane interpretations of copyright law, the *IAA's, and more, are nothing more than rationalizations created to mask that one fact, allowing one to feel "good" about stealing.
So one is going to consider "access" a property right, all in order to download files that they're not going to consider being anyone's "property" at all?
Oh, how I love that term, beloved as it is by oh so many thieves, pirates, and other self-entitled self-centered greedy bastards.
I use the word "thief", as in "theft", as in taking without permission or knowledge. And to maximize the impact. Copyright infringement, on the other hand, is a term of art frequently and deliberately used by the hypocritical jerks on the other side of the fence in a vain attempt to rationalize and diminish the same act.
So what if I downloaded 1,000 songs, 200 movies, and the entire Adobe Creative Suite? So what if I'm now in possession of tens of thousands of dollars of content and software? So what if I don't have the balls to steal the same thing from the store? It's JUST infringement.
"...depend on the exploitation of the competitor's trademark..."
Which is where the confusion lies. Trademark law doesn't exist to completely protect someone from using the trademark in any way, shape, or form.
Remember the Pepsi Challenge ads? It's perfectly legal to create an ad that says I'm as good as Coke, or better than Coke, or that more people prefer me to Coke. What I can't do, however, is create a competing product and slap a Coke label on it. IOW, I can't market my product under the same name, as that would lead to customer confusion: Which Coke is the real Coke?
And since that's ALL trademarks do, pretty much anything else falls under fair use.
Which brings us to Google. Do a search on Coke and Google doesn't display a natural search result that says "Coke" but takes you to Pepsi. That would be infringing. They may, however, display the natural search results AND display an ad that says, "Like Coke? Try Pepsi."
An action no more illegal than your local grocery store printing a Pepsi coupon when you buy a Coke.
"Perhaps he worked very, very hard to write an awful book that no one wants, either to buy or to pirate. Does he still deserve income for it?"
Any author risks his investment (time and money) and basically works for a year or so on spec. You have a chance to examine the result (jacket, sample pages, reviews) and determine if you want to read the book. If so, then and only then do you pay for it and then and only then is the author rewarded for his efforts.
The issue lies in reading said book (or listening to music, watching the movie, or using the software)... and NOT paying for it. If you read it the author does indeed "deserve" the income. He ran the risk, without which you'd have no story to enjoy.
You might HOPE that napkin folding would generate income... and be disappointed. You made the investment and took the risk. Your choice.
Similarly, if you think (via the summary, reviews, etc.) that the book (music, movie) is NOT going to provide you with the needed value at the offered price... DON'T BUY IT. You then owe the author nothing. It's a pretty simple concept.
But if you obtain and read said book, then why should you NOT pay for it? He created something of value, you consumed something of value, and yet you don't want to pay for that value. Please explain.
Give me all of the exceptions and rationalizations of how you're unable to make a value-for-value buying decision and why you're somehow "special" and how you're automatically entitled to the work of others, at the price YOU want, when YOU want it. Poor little baby. "Food NOW!!!!"
"I disagree. If I buy a movie, I am not doing so just to have my rods, cones, and eardrum stimulated, I want to ENJOY it. It is for entertainment, and if it does not entertain me, it did not fulfill its purpose. Same as an inedible steak."
The problem is that once you've downloaded said movie and watched it you've now already consumed it. You may not have liked it, or you may even have liked it, or really liked it... but perhaps not enough to want to watch it again. Or not enough to pay $10 or $15 or whatever price is the going rate.
Or in other words, the steak was okay, but not great. And as such you have no real grounds for not paying for your meal. Now, you might not go back to that restaurant again, but that's like avoiding the same actors or directors in the future.
And with Rotten Tomatoes, Twitter, Facebook, friends, Amazon comments, NetFlix, streaming video previews, and so on, you have PLENTY of information with which to make an informed decsion BEFORE you buy.
Besides, if the steak is inedible you only eat a bite or so, then complain. Eating ALL of it and then complaining has little justification.
Right... except for single-player games that don't want or need a network connection.
Require it anyway? Of course, you then have the asshats who will remove or disable the code requiring the login and post that to the torrents. Or the other asshats who'll put a proxy in place to mimic the server, or...
The solution is only EASY to those who're half asleep.
Writing a good application in ANY language is a difficult task. Period.
And writing a good iPhone applications, given the physical constraints of the device and the necessity of adhering to the UI conventions, all while the OS itself is a moving target, is an ESPECIALLY difficult task.
Sorry, but your lack of DEVELOPMENT experience is showing if you think it's anything but an arduous task. Hacking a few lines of ObjC/Cocoa is the least of your problems.
The above is NOT flamebait, any more than was the parent post that attempted to refute an earlier statement by giving the WRONG numbers for the number of iPhone and WiMo applications.
Ummm... you can do a significant portion of iPhone development on an iPod Touch, which needs no service plan whatsoever. Depends on the type of application you want to do, of course. Something GPS-related, say, requires the iPhone.
Most games, OTOH, you want to be Touch-ready anyway. Half the market right there.
I don't think that spending $99 is going to force someone to produce a paid application instead of a free one.
And actually, I suspect instead that the real motivation is the somewhat heretical idea (stay with me here) that you can make MONEY writing applications for the iPhone. Get enough people to give you a buck an app, and in some cases you can make a LOT of money doing so.
Writing iPhone applications is a difficult, skilled process that can take a lot of time. Supporting and improving said application can also burn the hours. So if someone wants a buck or two in compensation, I, for one, am not going to cry over it. Especially if it means a steady supply of cheap and useful applications, games, and utilities.
But if YOU want to spend a week or month or more writing an iPhone application and then give it away for free, more power to you.
Holes? How about the fact that no navy in the known universe is going to make a captain of a kid right out of the acadamy AND give him the fleet flagship to boot. I don't care how many planets he saves.
"Great job, Ensign Kirk. You're now Lieutenant Kirk. Report to the Yorktown."
"I always say this, if traditional printed newspapers want to survive the digital age, all they need to do is go 100% ad-sponsored and distribute it to the public for FREE."
I'd consider paying for a subscription if by doing so I could dramatically cut or even eliminate the number of ads one usually has to wade through.
And if it meant that articles weren't spread across 10 pages to increase ad revenue and page views.
Slashdot Mirror
Pickpocketting may be hardly observeable, but the face of a known pickpocket working the area is a completely different story.
I've read all of the stories with Dr. Susan Calvin and the rest of the gang, and all of them basically deal with loopholes in the three "laws". Two Faces of Tomorrow is a much better look at the problems and complexities of advanced systems (some not even sentient) behaving in ways detrimental to society... even when they're doing what they're "designed" to do.
We already create rule-based systems and use 'em to run little things like financial trading, power grids, traffic management systems, nuclear power plants, supply chains, oil refineries, and largely automated factories.
Besides, the entire body of work depended on the concept that designing a positronic brain WITH the laws was so complex that no one would ever even attempt to duplicate all of that work and design one WITHOUT them. Here in the real world, with most funding probably defense oriented, I suspect we'd get the killer versions first.
James P. Hogan's Two Faces of Tomorrow. And if you read it you might also remember that it came very close to blowing up the "world" first. What if it did so and THEN figured out humans were sentient too? Oops.
First, everyone here needs to read Hogan's Two Faces of Tomorrow, which deals with the subject quite nicely.
Second, you speak of evolutionary time scales, but what's an evolutionary time scale to an AI whose ability to think and determine new solutions to problems is measured in microseconds?
Third, as Hogan mentions, an AI need not "go to war" in order to be a major problem. Program an AI to run a city as efficiently as possible. Now, how long before it decides that it MUST be here to do so? How long before it stops responding to "inefficient" commands? How long before it decides that those pesky blobs of protoplasm need to be reigned in because they keep screwing things up?
Ditto. Years ago an automobile was all but dead once (if) it reached 100,000 miles. Today's versions regularly hit 100,000, 150,000, or even 200,000 and keep on rolling.
People don't give the darn things enough credit. You design a device that will run for a decade or more with minimal maintenance and that will start up after a week of sub-zero winter nights in Wisconsin or after spending days on end broiling in the Phoenix heat.
Consumer electronics are on a much faster track, but even there they DO more. Try rendering some HD video on a Pentium... if you can get fit it onto the hard drive. Hell, the average FILE on my iPod is larger than my first hard drive.
Not to mention that we already tried that "write once run anywhere" approach about a decade ago...
And we all know how "that" turned out.
"It is the person who distributed the copy who has commited the copyright violation, because copyright specificaly relates to the distribution of copyrighted materials."
Ergo, everyone who uses BitTorrent to download copy-written material is guilty. P2P is a two-way technology and the person who's downloading a file is also uploading (distributing) his pieces to others at the same time. It's the nature of the protocol.
And don't try to find a loophole regarding "leeches". The vast majority don't, any more than the vast majority of P2P traffic consists of Linux distros.
"Quit buying the bullshit and look into some of this for yourself man..."
Try doing the same. Despite whatever the *IAA's have done, their excesses don't excuse someone else's. The fact of the matter is that, currently, people can steal music, movies, games, and software with almost zero chance of being caught. So they do. Low-risk, high-reward.
Greedy corporations, sticking it to the man, arcane interpretations of copyright law, the *IAA's, and more, are nothing more than rationalizations created to mask that one fact, allowing one to feel "good" about stealing.
Neither one. It's the people who think they're somehow entitled to all of the music and movies and software they want, and all for free...
So one is going to consider "access" a property right, all in order to download files that they're not going to consider being anyone's "property" at all?
Hypocrites, each and every one.
"copyright infringement"
Oh, how I love that term, beloved as it is by oh so many thieves, pirates, and other self-entitled self-centered greedy bastards.
I use the word "thief", as in "theft", as in taking without permission or knowledge. And to maximize the impact. Copyright infringement, on the other hand, is a term of art frequently and deliberately used by the hypocritical jerks on the other side of the fence in a vain attempt to rationalize and diminish the same act.
So what if I downloaded 1,000 songs, 200 movies, and the entire Adobe Creative Suite? So what if I'm now in possession of tens of thousands of dollars of content and software? So what if I don't have the balls to steal the same thing from the store? It's JUST infringement.
"...depend on the exploitation of the competitor's trademark..."
Which is where the confusion lies. Trademark law doesn't exist to completely protect someone from using the trademark in any way, shape, or form.
Remember the Pepsi Challenge ads? It's perfectly legal to create an ad that says I'm as good as Coke, or better than Coke, or that more people prefer me to Coke. What I can't do, however, is create a competing product and slap a Coke label on it. IOW, I can't market my product under the same name, as that would lead to customer confusion: Which Coke is the real Coke?
And since that's ALL trademarks do, pretty much anything else falls under fair use.
Which brings us to Google. Do a search on Coke and Google doesn't display a natural search result that says "Coke" but takes you to Pepsi. That would be infringing. They may, however, display the natural search results AND display an ad that says, "Like Coke? Try Pepsi."
An action no more illegal than your local grocery store printing a Pepsi coupon when you buy a Coke.
Please tell me what job, product or service you provide and where you're located?
Since I have no moral compunctions about not paying a thief, I'll be glad to return the favor...
"Perhaps he worked very, very hard to write an awful book that no one wants, either to buy or to pirate. Does he still deserve income for it?"
Any author risks his investment (time and money) and basically works for a year or so on spec. You have a chance to examine the result (jacket, sample pages, reviews) and determine if you want to read the book. If so, then and only then do you pay for it and then and only then is the author rewarded for his efforts.
The issue lies in reading said book (or listening to music, watching the movie, or using the software)... and NOT paying for it. If you read it the author does indeed "deserve" the income. He ran the risk, without which you'd have no story to enjoy.
You might HOPE that napkin folding would generate income... and be disappointed. You made the investment and took the risk. Your choice.
Similarly, if you think (via the summary, reviews, etc.) that the book (music, movie) is NOT going to provide you with the needed value at the offered price... DON'T BUY IT. You then owe the author nothing. It's a pretty simple concept.
But if you obtain and read said book, then why should you NOT pay for it? He created something of value, you consumed something of value, and yet you don't want to pay for that value. Please explain.
Give me all of the exceptions and rationalizations of how you're unable to make a value-for-value buying decision and why you're somehow "special" and how you're automatically entitled to the work of others, at the price YOU want, when YOU want it. Poor little baby. "Food NOW!!!!"
"I disagree. If I buy a movie, I am not doing so just to have my rods, cones, and eardrum stimulated, I want to ENJOY it. It is for entertainment, and if it does not entertain me, it did not fulfill its purpose. Same as an inedible steak."
The problem is that once you've downloaded said movie and watched it you've now already consumed it. You may not have liked it, or you may even have liked it, or really liked it... but perhaps not enough to want to watch it again. Or not enough to pay $10 or $15 or whatever price is the going rate.
Or in other words, the steak was okay, but not great. And as such you have no real grounds for not paying for your meal. Now, you might not go back to that restaurant again, but that's like avoiding the same actors or directors in the future.
And with Rotten Tomatoes, Twitter, Facebook, friends, Amazon comments, NetFlix, streaming video previews, and so on, you have PLENTY of information with which to make an informed decsion BEFORE you buy.
Besides, if the steak is inedible you only eat a bite or so, then complain. Eating ALL of it and then complaining has little justification.
Right... except for single-player games that don't want or need a network connection.
Require it anyway? Of course, you then have the asshats who will remove or disable the code requiring the login and post that to the torrents. Or the other asshats who'll put a proxy in place to mimic the server, or...
The solution is only EASY to those who're half asleep.
"... which includes using torrents in a legal and ethical manner."
Yeah, you and three other people. How in the heck did you manage to finish that sentence without dying of laughter?
Writing a good application in ANY language is a difficult task. Period.
And writing a good iPhone applications, given the physical constraints of the device and the necessity of adhering to the UI conventions, all while the OS itself is a moving target, is an ESPECIALLY difficult task.
Sorry, but your lack of DEVELOPMENT experience is showing if you think it's anything but an arduous task. Hacking a few lines of ObjC/Cocoa is the least of your problems.
First, go to the iPhone page of the Apple web site and see if you can read the big number in the middle of the page.
Never mind, I'll save you the trouble, it's 35,000. And that number was not hard to track down at all. http://www.apple.com/iphone/
Further, a CURRENT Microsoft press release (March '09), states, "Current Windows® phone users already have access to more than 20,000 applications through multiple distribution partners." http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/mar09/03-30CTIA09PR.mspx
The above is NOT flamebait, any more than was the parent post that attempted to refute an earlier statement by giving the WRONG numbers for the number of iPhone and WiMo applications.
Ummm... you can do a significant portion of iPhone development on an iPod Touch, which needs no service plan whatsoever. Depends on the type of application you want to do, of course. Something GPS-related, say, requires the iPhone.
Most games, OTOH, you want to be Touch-ready anyway. Half the market right there.
First, go to the iPhone page of the Apple web site and see if you can read the big number in the middle of the page.
Never mind, I'll save you the trouble, it's 35,000. And that number was not hard to track down at all. http://www.apple.com/iphone/
Further, a CURRENT Microsoft press release (March '09), states, "Current Windows® phone users already have access to more than 20,000 applications through multiple distribution partners." http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/mar09/03-30CTIA09PR.mspx
35,000. 20,000. 35,000. 20,000. 35,000. 20,000. Hmmmmm. Which number is larger?
Sorry, but in your utterance of your rabid denial you've given away your anti-Apple-fanboi status.
I don't think that spending $99 is going to force someone to produce a paid application instead of a free one.
And actually, I suspect instead that the real motivation is the somewhat heretical idea (stay with me here) that you can make MONEY writing applications for the iPhone. Get enough people to give you a buck an app, and in some cases you can make a LOT of money doing so.
Writing iPhone applications is a difficult, skilled process that can take a lot of time. Supporting and improving said application can also burn the hours. So if someone wants a buck or two in compensation, I, for one, am not going to cry over it. Especially if it means a steady supply of cheap and useful applications, games, and utilities.
But if YOU want to spend a week or month or more writing an iPhone application and then give it away for free, more power to you.
And that was my point: In this case "layout" doesn't make sense when the screen can be anywhere from an iPhone to a 30" computer LCD.
Holes? How about the fact that no navy in the known universe is going to make a captain of a kid right out of the acadamy AND give him the fleet flagship to boot. I don't care how many planets he saves.
"Great job, Ensign Kirk. You're now Lieutenant Kirk. Report to the Yorktown."
"I always say this, if traditional printed newspapers want to survive the digital age, all they need to do is go 100% ad-sponsored and distribute it to the public for FREE."
I'd consider paying for a subscription if by doing so I could dramatically cut or even eliminate the number of ads one usually has to wade through.
And if it meant that articles weren't spread across 10 pages to increase ad revenue and page views.
In other words, make it worthwhile...