It seemed like a good idea at the time, 150-200 years ago. Now maybe it doesn't. But look carefully at your assumptions about what would be better. Because people created prisons two centuries ago for essentially exactly the same reasons you now want to replace them. Either you or your ancestors are grievously wrong. That should give considerable pause for thought.
I don't follow: I am suggesting that we need to replace prisons because they act as Universities of Criminology, training and recruitment centers for crime syndicates and above all else we are reacting to crimes by training the offenders to be more effective and dangerous criminals. How does, in your words, "In the old days, folks convicted of crimes were flogged, put in stocks (to be pelted with rocks and dogshit), had their hands chopped off, or just hanged." possibly consitute "for essentially exactly the same reasons you now want to replace them"?
The only pause I had just now was trying to understand if you read my comment before responding to it.
I think the real solutions are to deal with societal issues that leads to so many people being in jail. Nip the problem in the bud so to speak. If you don't have inmates you don't have a problem dealing with inmates.
My real point here is that almost *anything* would be better for society than locking these people up together where they can learn from each other, become hardened, recruited by criminal organizations and *connected* - released back to the innocent world as predators working on their predatory doctoral dissertations.
A guy steals a car and runs from the police. When caught, he fights and because of all of this he goes to prison. When he comes out he is now part of a crime syndicate, knows everything there is to know about not getting caught, where to fence goods, who to call in case of problems, who the corrupt lawyers are that can make problems go away, etc.. etc.. etc.. He spends the rest of his life sucking blood from society.
Are we better off for having put him in prison? Perhaps a better conviction would be loosing his driving priveleges for the rest of his life. At least that way, we haven't created a more dangerous type of criminal.
That is the point. We react to crimes by training the criminal to be a more dangerous type of criminal. Isn't that madness?
Modern correctional intutitions are quite possibly the most culturally destructive institutions on the planet.
Consider for a moment what a prison system does:
Brings criminals together
Forces criminals to learn discipline, but particularly respect for more powerful criminals. By the time most inmates get out of prison, they will be affiliated with one or more criminal organizations mostly due to the fact that such affiliations are more or less required in prison to guarantee survival.
What do you think the ciminals talk about in a prison? How to evade the law, get out of trouble, do bigger jobs and scams, etc.. etc.. These topics are raised to an artform in such an environment
by virtue of the fact that so many criminals have been brought together, the best methods for breaking and evading the law for profit are naturally present in the minds of those that share a single location. Over time, the best methods are distilled into the common knowledge-pool inside the walls of the institution. In effect, this makes a prison much like a University, where the best ideas naturally distill out of the population of students and researchers. Only, in this case, we are dealing with socially destructive concepts.
So consider what we are doing when we put a convict into a prison:
We are paying tax dollars to educate the convict on sophisticated, state-of-the-art means to evade and break the law
We are hardening the criminal, training him and toughening him up
We are putting the criminal in a place where he can be recruited by crime syndicates and organizations
A prison is a quite ridiculous way to punish, because it punishes the system exponentially more than it punishes the criminal.
Modern prison systems are directly responsible for the nature and degree of organized crime and as an indirect result, corruption in the modern world (because the power that organize crime wields is generally directed towards the foundations of the system).
Now you want to give them websites? Hmph!
Seriously, though, the system needs to change. Putting criminals together is the worst possible thing for society. It would be much, much better to keep them in strict isolation or have some means of making sure that the influences around them are positive rather than negative.
To most end users, a consistent look and feel, that works right out of the box, is really important. So it's a very good thing that Linux distributions are improving in this area (which the article conveniently forgets to mention).
On one side of the spectrum is "OS X". Out of the box it slides onto your screen, seductively handing you delicious candy that works well, works smoothly and never asks any questions you can't answer.
In the middle is Windows. It crashes onto the scene, a little uncomfortably... It asks a lot of questions that have no answers. It yaps and bitches.. It falls apart and stops working. It misbehaves. But it does so consistently.
On the far side is Linux. The entry is... legion... It depends... It might come to you smooth and seductively like "OS X" or rocky and without mercy in the form of bash... There is no consistency, no predictability to the way it will treat you. It is at the same time smug, sophisticated, aloof, unreachable and yet completely at your mercy and transparent... It is too many things for too many people...
In the end, Linux will win. There can be no doubt about this for one simple reason, "Linux will always exist and always be there to improve".
However, there is no "linux" in "linux"... This is a problem. Sometimes, having a tyrant (e.g. Gates, Jobs,...) can force things to take a stand, good bad or otherwise. Who will be the linux tyrant?
Just some tired rambling... Hope you guys don't think I'm trolling... I really wonder what should be done.
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With all the people on Earth who have inadequate and/or overpriced housing, don't you think we should try this on Earth first? Don't you think we should try creating utopias for Earth's teeming billions first?
On a distant planet, the machines can algorithmically work without fighting over property rights, ecological considerations, natural resources and whatnot.
We Americans have a pretty interesting history regarding disclosing facts about basic science, research and non-terrestrial activities (at least when such science, research and non-terrestrial activities occur within the event horizon of the US blcack budget).
A more interesting question than the ESA doesn't work with NASA may be, if the ESA finds anything interesting how will NASA respond? Will it be, "Wow, why didn't we ever notice that?
With the proper use of AI (sim-city type + GA and/or Neural nets for aesthic testing), architecture and city-planning libraries and simulations, it should be possible to automate the construction of entire cities (even finding aesthic placements near natural resources).
One could imagine sending these things out to distant worlds far in advance of our arrival.
When we arrive to our new utopia, we can just add a reactor or two, turn the lights on and move in, en mass.
LARGE numbers of individuals living together in harmony, achieving a better life by dividing their workload and sharing the fruits of their labours. We call this blissful state utopia, and have been striving to achieve it for at least as long as recorded history. Alas, our efforts so far have been in vain. Evolution, however, has made a rather better job of it.
I find it interesting and insightful that they chose to include this. It seems reasonably clear that the simbiosis and communication between specialized individuals in a population mirrors that which occurs between cells in a multicellular organism (albeit with a much higher information density transmitted between parts).
While I disagree that this has been in vain (I think we can safely say that superorganisms are responsible for everything from industry to computers to spaceflight), I am happy to see this posited in such a forward way in the article. It's about time that we begin to acknowledge that we are cells in a multicellular (multi-individual) life form and that our DNA expresses phenotypes outside of the boundaries of our bodies (e.g. some of us have predisposed genetic advantages to specialize in social orginzation, communication, leadership, etc..). In fact, we should be looking at population samples of DNA to determine the genotypes of the master system that we compose rather than decomposing to the level of the individual human being.
Human evolution has been bound by societal pressures for far long enough for those pressures to be the primary forces at work on our evolution.
Not really. It appears that this chip stimulates the layer of nerves below the retina. Thus, it can only stimulate what you can normally see: Red, green, and blue (and light/dark with the rods). No chip that stimulates the nerves under the retina can make us see anything that our eye can't normally see. There's no undocumented "infrared nerve" that would allow us to see something unique from our normal vision if it were stimulated.
I think the parent post's point was that color is an artifact of neural response to external stimuli. Change the stimuli to something new and the patterns that the brain will adapt to interpret the new stimuli will be as different as vision is from non-vision. I believe this is true and will probably be the case with this type of cyborg vision regardless of the frequency response. The technology simply will not stimulate the nerves in the same way that a working eye would. The result is that vision and visual perception will be very different for those with cyborg eyes.
Red does not exist in the nerves; It is a learned pattern that results from red-cone nerve stimulation (which will not exist with this system).
It could be said that BitMover's sucess is a result of marketing BitKeeper through open source channels. Forgetting their roots and alienating the market that they used to grow themselves is a serious strategic error.
The big theorems will still be up to humans to prove. Think of computer- assisted math as a kind of spellchecker or Googe suggest.
In the short term, I think this is accurate. Computers can do a quick-and-dirty trace to see if a proof is worth chasing by a Mathemetician (e.g. it can proove it quickly, but not eloqently). The computer would be a bit of a quick brute-force, if not eloquent, assistant.
Eventually, computers will be there doing poetry and writing about history. Perhaps they will do both better than us.
Wow. How ever do we manage to do this every single day without automated monitoring and tracking? All that freedom that can only be abused. How frightening.
Ok, I am with you here. Insofar as automating this does accidentally express the emergent property of monitorability and trackability, this is indeed a bad idea.
What if the RFID does not provide personal data, but instead can only be used to verify insurance/vehicle permits and locate your vehicle?
I applaud the parent poster for his insight. Sometimes visibility of information is good.
Let's consider for a moment. You are driving down the highway in thousands of pounds of machinery at 65 miles an hour with your most beloved people in the world. You are doing this with thousands of other people each in their thousands of pounds of machinery traveling at high speeds. How would you feel about the following:
* Some of the drivers that are near you and your family have had their license revoked * Some of the drivers that are near you and your family are driving stolen cars * Some of the drivers that are near you are driving unregistered vehicles * Some of the drivers that are near you do not have insurance * Some of the drivers/owners of the cars that are near you have warrants for their arrest
Today, a police car can drive up behind you and run your plate to find out everything listed above except insurance. The only difference RFID would make is that this same thing could be done by stationairy check-points or by an officer watching a monitor that shows where the violations are occurring rather than checking vehicles one-by-one.
This is about safety and responsibility on public transportation systems. I have to say that it does make sense. This sort of thing would protect us much more than it would intrude upon us (And I am a major privacy advocate).
Mount the 802.11 wireless access points on the ceiling of the factory and put a long vertically mounted antenna on the forklift (to minimize or eliminate the effects of floor geometry).
Then use triangulation software that allows you to train it and keep collecting data points until your target precision is hit.
Mail In rebates are a sham, in that it takes 8-12 weeks for the check to come in. I am not going to wait 3 months for a 2 dollar check.
The true essence of the scam is that some percentage of people will never send them in, like you. Corporations know this and make use of it.
I have also encountered problems in the past with rebates where the company sends back a letter saying the copy of the receipt was illegible or whatever. It is frustrating.
I have done this in the past. I consulted for over 10 years in the Bay Area and never once had to consider the implications of my contracts, as those contracts were always between my company and my clients.
I did have to sign personal non-disclosures, of course. And my company did have to honor the requirements of my clients in terms of intellectual property (e.g. work for hire). But the corporate shield protected all of my prior work as well as non-related work.
As far as taxes go, professional services are not taxed and if you choose an S Corp, you will not incur double taxes (because an S Corp profits fall down to the principals).
You can dissolve a company at any time, but of course it does not relieve the company from financial responsibilities. The company is still responsible for it's debts and bancruptcy can cause you problems (e.g. you could go to jail for fraud for taking a company into bankruptcy just to avoid debt).
You can and should dissolve a company (that is just you consulting) in a case where a client is harrassing you badly (i.e. "Okay, I give up, I will close my company"). That doesn't prevent them from trying to file suite, but they will look pretty silly suing a company that is out of business (not to mention making it rather difficult for them to get any remedy). But generally, things never go that far. In 10 years of consulting, I have never been threatened with a suite. Why would a client bother?
On top of all of this, a corporation is an excellent tax shelter. You can expense things you never thought of before it gets posted to profit (and therefore declarable on your income). There are many benefits.
The thing to remember is that contract law and doing business is nothing like programming. Wetware dynamics revolves around perception and boundaries, not strictly adhered to executable recipes. Many software professionals get this confused because their minds are so trained to think in terms of strict cause-and-effect.
Don't take things too seriously in the business world, most of what you see and hear are there to confuse, impress and intimidate you, not to actually be executed against you.
When you vote someone into office it is their duty to represent the people. The issue is the the representitives are voted in by the majority so sometimes the minority does not have a voice.
Well, that would be fine. But unfortunately, it comes down to, 'Do I vote for this very rich Yale educated skull and bones member, or that very rich Yale educated skull and bones member."
Where is the choice? Where is the Public School educated, middle-class businessman that represents the majority?
Voting the super-elite into the highest office is a travesty of democracy. A true democracy would never do such a thing.
Even if it is legal for a violent overthrow of the government, doesn't the government have the right to protect it self?
What an interesting question. The question itself presupposes that the government is somehow seperate from the governed. Such a seperation, itself, begs for remedy. My instinct is to say, "yes, if it is a minority that is threatening them and no, if it is a majority."
But in reality, of course it would defend itself. In modern times, it does this proactively through many means.
Another famous quote I think about is "No taxation without representation." I often wonder about all these super-rich elites running the country. Do they really represent me?
Slashdot Mirror
The only pause I had just now was trying to understand if you read my comment before responding to it.
You posted anonymously, so I couldn't PM you. Could you private message me?
I think the real solutions are to deal with societal issues that leads to so many people being in jail. Nip the problem in the bud so to speak. If you don't have inmates you don't have a problem dealing with inmates.
My real point here is that almost *anything* would be better for society than locking these people up together where they can learn from each other, become hardened, recruited by criminal organizations and *connected* - released back to the innocent world as predators working on their predatory doctoral dissertations.
A guy steals a car and runs from the police. When caught, he fights and because of all of this he goes to prison. When he comes out he is now part of a crime syndicate, knows everything there is to know about not getting caught, where to fence goods, who to call in case of problems, who the corrupt lawyers are that can make problems go away, etc.. etc.. etc.. He spends the rest of his life sucking blood from society.
Are we better off for having put him in prison? Perhaps a better conviction would be loosing his driving priveleges for the rest of his life. At least that way, we haven't created a more dangerous type of criminal.
That is the point. We react to crimes by training the criminal to be a more dangerous type of criminal. Isn't that madness?
Felons have no right to vote. So who represents them in the government?
What, you don't think criminals are represented in government? What rock have you been hiding under, bub?
Consider for a moment what a prison system does:
Brings criminals together
Forces criminals to learn discipline, but particularly respect for more powerful criminals. By the time most inmates get out of prison, they will be affiliated with one or more criminal organizations mostly due to the fact that such affiliations are more or less required in prison to guarantee survival.
What do you think the ciminals talk about in a prison? How to evade the law, get out of trouble, do bigger jobs and scams, etc.. etc.. These topics are raised to an artform in such an environment
by virtue of the fact that so many criminals have been brought together, the best methods for breaking and evading the law for profit are naturally present in the minds of those that share a single location. Over time, the best methods are distilled into the common knowledge-pool inside the walls of the institution. In effect, this makes a prison much like a University, where the best ideas naturally distill out of the population of students and researchers. Only, in this case, we are dealing with socially destructive concepts.
So consider what we are doing when we put a convict into a prison:
We are paying tax dollars to educate the convict on sophisticated, state-of-the-art means to evade and break the law
We are hardening the criminal, training him and toughening him up
We are putting the criminal in a place where he can be recruited by crime syndicates and organizations
A prison is a quite ridiculous way to punish, because it punishes the system exponentially more than it punishes the criminal.
Modern prison systems are directly responsible for the nature and degree of organized crime and as an indirect result, corruption in the modern world (because the power that organize crime wields is generally directed towards the foundations of the system).
Now you want to give them websites? Hmph!
Seriously, though, the system needs to change. Putting criminals together is the worst possible thing for society. It would be much, much better to keep them in strict isolation or have some means of making sure that the influences around them are positive rather than negative.
sure... it'll take a little while, but it'll happen...
In the middle is Windows. It crashes onto the scene, a little uncomfortably... It asks a lot of questions that have no answers. It yaps and bitches.. It falls apart and stops working. It misbehaves. But it does so consistently.
On the far side is Linux. The entry is... legion... It depends... It might come to you smooth and seductively like "OS X" or rocky and without mercy in the form of bash... There is no consistency, no predictability to the way it will treat you. It is at the same time smug, sophisticated, aloof, unreachable and yet completely at your mercy and transparent... It is too many things for too many people...
In the end, Linux will win. There can be no doubt about this for one simple reason, "Linux will always exist and always be there to improve".
However, there is no "linux" in "linux"... This is a problem. Sometimes, having a tyrant (e.g. Gates, Jobs,
Just some tired rambling... Hope you guys don't think I'm trolling... I really wonder what should be done.
On earth, it is a little more confusing..
You know we have to leave that to the chicks. If we do it, or by proxy have our robots do it, we will catch hell...
My guess is that the ESA doesn't trust NASA.
We Americans have a pretty interesting history regarding disclosing facts about basic science, research and non-terrestrial activities (at least when such science, research and non-terrestrial activities occur within the event horizon of the US blcack budget).
A more interesting question than the ESA doesn't work with NASA may be, if the ESA finds anything interesting how will NASA respond? Will it be, "Wow, why didn't we ever notice that?
With the proper use of AI (sim-city type + GA and/or Neural nets for aesthic testing), architecture and city-planning libraries and simulations, it should be possible to automate the construction of entire cities (even finding aesthic placements near natural resources).
One could imagine sending these things out to distant worlds far in advance of our arrival.
When we arrive to our new utopia, we can just add a reactor or two, turn the lights on and move in, en mass.
While I disagree that this has been in vain (I think we can safely say that superorganisms are responsible for everything from industry to computers to spaceflight), I am happy to see this posited in such a forward way in the article. It's about time that we begin to acknowledge that we are cells in a multicellular (multi-individual) life form and that our DNA expresses phenotypes outside of the boundaries of our bodies (e.g. some of us have predisposed genetic advantages to specialize in social orginzation, communication, leadership, etc..). In fact, we should be looking at population samples of DNA to determine the genotypes of the master system that we compose rather than decomposing to the level of the individual human being.
Human evolution has been bound by societal pressures for far long enough for those pressures to be the primary forces at work on our evolution.
This plan by the Japanese is aggressive. They not only intend to enter the aerospace business, but they intend to dominate it and do it quickly.
It looks to me that, perhaps, the major technologies are in place for a real space race. Personally, I'll place my bets on China.
Red does not exist in the nerves; It is a learned pattern that results from red-cone nerve stimulation (which will not exist with this system).
It could be said that BitMover's sucess is a result of marketing BitKeeper through open source channels. Forgetting their roots and alienating the market that they used to grow themselves is a serious strategic error.
Watch karma in action in the next couple of years
Eventually, computers will be there doing poetry and writing about history. Perhaps they will do both better than us.
What if the RFID does not provide personal data, but instead can only be used to verify insurance/vehicle permits and locate your vehicle?
Let's consider for a moment. You are driving down the highway in thousands of pounds of machinery at 65 miles an hour with your most beloved people in the world. You are doing this with thousands of other people each in their thousands of pounds of machinery traveling at high speeds. How would you feel about the following:Today, a police car can drive up behind you and run your plate to find out everything listed above except insurance. The only difference RFID would make is that this same thing could be done by stationairy check-points or by an officer watching a monitor that shows where the violations are occurring rather than checking vehicles one-by-one.
This is about safety and responsibility on public transportation systems. I have to say that it does make sense. This sort of thing would protect us much more than it would intrude upon us (And I am a major privacy advocate).
Mount the 802.11 wireless access points on the ceiling of the factory and put a long vertically mounted antenna on the forklift (to minimize or eliminate the effects of floor geometry).
Then use triangulation software that allows you to train it and keep collecting data points until your target precision is hit.
I have also encountered problems in the past with rebates where the company sends back a letter saying the copy of the receipt was illegible or whatever. It is frustrating.
Understand that to calculate the minority / majority, you first have to factor out the dead weight that will do nothing.
I have done this in the past. I consulted for over 10 years in the Bay Area and never once had to consider the implications of my contracts, as those contracts were always between my company and my clients.
I did have to sign personal non-disclosures, of course. And my company did have to honor the requirements of my clients in terms of intellectual property (e.g. work for hire). But the corporate shield protected all of my prior work as well as non-related work.
As far as taxes go, professional services are not taxed and if you choose an S Corp, you will not incur double taxes (because an S Corp profits fall down to the principals).
You can dissolve a company at any time, but of course it does not relieve the company from financial responsibilities. The company is still responsible for it's debts and bancruptcy can cause you problems (e.g. you could go to jail for fraud for taking a company into bankruptcy just to avoid debt).
You can and should dissolve a company (that is just you consulting) in a case where a client is harrassing you badly (i.e. "Okay, I give up, I will close my company"). That doesn't prevent them from trying to file suite, but they will look pretty silly suing a company that is out of business (not to mention making it rather difficult for them to get any remedy). But generally, things never go that far. In 10 years of consulting, I have never been threatened with a suite. Why would a client bother?
On top of all of this, a corporation is an excellent tax shelter. You can expense things you never thought of before it gets posted to profit (and therefore declarable on your income). There are many benefits.
The thing to remember is that contract law and doing business is nothing like programming. Wetware dynamics revolves around perception and boundaries, not strictly adhered to executable recipes. Many software professionals get this confused because their minds are so trained to think in terms of strict cause-and-effect.
Don't take things too seriously in the business world, most of what you see and hear are there to confuse, impress and intimidate you, not to actually be executed against you.
Where is the choice? Where is the Public School educated, middle-class businessman that represents the majority?
Voting the super-elite into the highest office is a travesty of democracy. A true democracy would never do such a thing.
But in reality, of course it would defend itself. In modern times, it does this proactively through many means.
Another famous quote I think about is "No taxation without representation." I often wonder about all these super-rich elites running the country. Do they really represent me?