"people looking at gay porn tend to have gay sex, and people looking at straight porn tend to have straight sex."
You surely meant to say: people who have straight sex prefer straight porn, and people who have gay sex prefer gay porn. People are simply not "converted" by porn. Sorry.
By the way, you might be interested to learn that lesbians prefer gay male porn. This pretty much answers the question of whether the porn is a cause or an effect. (Clue: it's not a cause.)
Pornography is not _intended_ to encourage anything. It is a material for consumption, and it satisfies an urge that most sexually active men have, namely for sexual variety and sexual stimulation. Not all men enjoy porn, not all women find it silly, but in general it's a man thing. Why do some men like watching rape videos? Maybe because they are unable to feel comfortable with women in normal situations, and rape seems to be one in which the man is totally in control. Does watching a rape video make men into rapists? That is a ridiculous idea. Men rape pretty much as a matter of course in certain situations: wars, conflicts, wherever moral society is damaged and women are unprotected. Rape videos may depict such settings, but they no more encourage rape than a gun-filled action film encourages violence. Sure, it feels nice to imagine that you could just shoot that punk who robbed your car. Hmmm... does that make you a criminal? Decidely not. Child pornography seems to fall into the same patterns as other kinds of extreme porn: it appeals to men, mainly, and men who have trouble acting as adults in a complex society. Children - like women in wars - are easy victims and clearly need protection from what is a pure crime. But depictions of crime, graphic or not, are not the same as the crime itself, and while the make feels 'right', it is not logical nor sustainable. Your example of gay porn is a good one. Do you imagine for a second that watching gay porn will entice a straight man to go to a gay bar? It does not seem plausible. Similarly, men who seek out and victimise children are not stimulated nor encouraged by kiddie porn, and looking at computer hard disks is a poor way to try to find them. Instead, go to the places where children mix with adult men who are not their relatives, and you will find that this is where paedophiles also go.
Yesterday we went to the supermarket and found the shelves full of lovely goods. Indeed, we were allowed freely to browse the rows and rows of delectable consumer goods, and we soon made ourselves busy by opening various packages and eating what we wanted, as well as filling our pockets and bags with the many beautiful things. I have to admit it was a wonderful fifty minutes. Imagine our surprise, therefore, when at the exit we were rudely stopped by a security guard and asked to pay for the goods we had consumed. There was no reason for this, and we were very angry. Needless to say, I will not be going back to this shop, and I encourage all of you to boycott this thing we call "capitalism" most strongly. The very idea that one person can somehow restrict the rights of others to come in and eat his food, drink his soda, and chew on his liquorice sticks is an affront to all civilized society. I am now returning to North Korea where people have a more decent view on such matters.
"someone watching a child porn may go out and and try it" How on earth do you reach this conclusion? It matches nothing demonstrated or seen elsewhere. In no domain do people jump up and imitate the things they see unless it is clearly part of an ongoing social movement. A person who intends to molest children will do so with or without porn. Children have been sexually abused for all history. It's the same old argument about violence on TV: people forget that the western world (US included) has the lowest levels of violence of any society in any place, any time. Although the levels of violence portrayed are higher than ever, the actual violence we encounter is rarer than ever. You cannot just state that child pornography is an exception to this trend. People commit criminal acts because they have the means, the motive, and the opportunity. Not because they watched some illegal pictures. And I have a daughter, yes, and if someone touched her or took pictures of her, I'd hunt him down. Nonetheless: there are ways to attack crime, and the current witch hunt on people who have kiddie porn on their computers is a mistake and it will eventually be seen as such. I'm going to stop discussing this subject now but I will say one last thing: most of the 'science' in the public discussion on child porn comes from the police, and this is a party with a vested interest in depicting all child porn viewers as twisted criminals. The police are a large part of a public perception that is painting huge segments of the population as criminals. It makes no sense except when you are trying to "act tough on crime."
Actually, alcoholics and drug users are more likely to show compulsive behaviour when their chosen drug is illegal. When the substance is banned, addicts consume as much as they can get. The very fact of the illegality adds to the addictive element. Put it like this: banning alchohol may decrease total consumption, as moderate drinkers consume less, but it creates more alchoholics, and incidentally, more crooks selling the stuff. For drugs it's the same. And although I'm starting to sound like someone I don't want to sound like, I have to assume this applies to other things we find noxious.
Possibly intentionally: child molesters, and people who download child pornography.
Uhm, I've a large collection of videos about cars crashing, but that does not make me a dangerous driver.
You are being somewhat wicked when you imply that everyone with a penchant for watching a kind of act is also likely to go out and commit it. This is a tired pseudo-psychology that has tried and failed to link TV to violence, games to violence, foreign-language films to political insurrection, what have you. Monkey see, monkey do? I don't think this argument has any provable basis.
You cannot save children from exploitation by making such falacious arguments. You must show a clear connection between the person in possession of pornography, and those committing the acts.
Imagine we're talking about rape videos. Now rape is a crime. Does this mean that someone luridly watching a rape video (real or faked) is actually a criminal too?
How about someone watching the film of a bank heist. Or the millions of viewers who watch 'cop reality shows'. Are they all likely to jump up and start stealing cars?
You can't stop using logic just because you're discussing an emotive subject - if anything you have to be more clear headed than usual.
Lurid interest in an illegal act is not (in the general sense) a crime, and is often a substitute for the real thing. Think clearly and you will see that there are better ways of preventing abuse of children.
One example: to recognise that most abuse of children actually happens in countries where children's rights are totally ignored, and often takes far worse forms than sexual exploitation.
"those with pictures are statistically likely to go on to physical acts..."
Do you have figures to back up this claim?
The study of pornography and its impact on sex crimes is always highly charged, but there is a good basis for believing that free access to pornography actually reduces sexual offenses (not just against children, but of all kinds).
And yes, there are "wrong buttons" that will download images to your PC. Someone else here mentioned that Newsnet is regularly spammed with child porn.
Criminals should be punished, no doubt about it. But witch-hunts are never productive. You think you are catching the real crooks? You're not. In fact, you're driving the sale and distribution of child porn underground, causing it to become harder and more violent.
Pushing even an obnoxious trade into the hards of real criminal networks is not wise: you may get that rosy feeling of 'doing good', but the cost is paid by huge numbers of new victims in far-off places.
This is probably an unfashionable idea, but the problem appears to be more that law enforcement agencies are treating child porn as an easy way to increase their scores. In truth there is probably little basis for treating downloading of child porn as "criminal behaviour", although the making and selling of it is most definitely so. I'm not defending child porn, but it's entirely possible that it represents for many would-be child molesters, an alternative way of satisfying their unhealthy sexual tendencies. Aggressive policing against people who have (for whatever reason, and there may be many, both innocent and less so) child porn on their computers is counter-productive. It does not protect children, it does not prevent child abuse, it does not catch the real exploiters, but it does create grief for many people who have done little more than click on the wrong button. Crime and punishment must be based on some kind of real moral injustice and the redressment of this. I don't think this is what we're seeing in these cases.
Zees ees a franchement stupide discussion, mes amis, seulement a collective des geeks et philologues could possibly be discussing ze differences between two bastard dialects of ze noble Francais. Zut alors! Tous le monde knows zat ze only correct, la seule bon mot, it is "saveur". Zees half-bred "flaveur" 'owever you want to spell it, it is a monstrosity, a barbaric insolence, en je suis proud zat l'Academie Francais in her wisdom 'as banished eet from ze common speach. Wat next, I ask vous? Zere is only one true language, un seul, et cela is ze noble French. All other dialects and jargots, grovel before her. Merci. Bon journee a vous tous.
What I have read about the gorillas in Rwanda and Congo, and the chimpanzees in Congo, is that the local people tend to treat the apes with respect and tolerance, all the more so in Rwanda where they used to get a nice income from tourism. The bushmeat hunters are generally outsiders - one particularly horrible example is logging companies, which employ hunters to feed their crews. Logging in the central African forests is gearing up, since these are some of the last big forests left. Logging firms send in crews to rip out the big old trees, and feed these guys on bushmeat. It's not a simple question of 'eat or die'. The fate of the big apes in Africa's central forests is tied to the fate of the forests themselves, and as so often, it's outsiders who are benefiting from the destruction, while the inhabitants of the region (human, near human, and whatever) find themselves extinguished.
Certainly the walk-up-and-use simplicity of the C64 and other 8-bit BASIC systems has never quite been seen again. I'm also reasonably impressed that the web site is holding up under the traffic, and frankly the web site is so pretty that it makes me want to spend money on the thing, no matter what it does. Excellent job: someone has understood how to market to geeks. But... where is the simple programming language? I mean, I could make a stupid game in 10 lines of C64 BASIC. I don't want to have to work in C/C++ to do this today, or I'd just stick to a PC. Give me a high-level audio and video API that does nice things from a simple interpreted language, something I can give to my kids to let them learn programming, and something that is easy to extend with bits and pieces of random hardware... that was the real magic of the 8-bit systems, and that does not quite seem to be all here yet. Or maybe I've just missed it somewhere.
I presume the term "new species" means one that homo sapiens sapiens has not yet discovered and put on the menu. Theorising this to be a "hybrid" is simply fantastic speculation: Occam's razor suggests that it's a relative of the species already known, and given the description of the flat face, it would be a large chimpanzee. If this is not a hoax, it will probably be found that local people know of the species and consider them to be "men of the forest" or whatever. Second prediction: the unfortunate animals will rapidly end up on the "bushmeat" menu of those freaks who enjoy eating the flesh of near-human species such as gorillas and chimpanzees. Third prediction: the study of the giant chimp (if that it is) will be limited to skulls, thighbones, and the occasional skin, with the wild population extinct and maybe one or two sad individuals "liberated" and stuck in zoo prisons. Central Africa has two species of gorilla and three subspecies of chimpanzee, and large chimpanzee individuals are not unknown. So it's most likely this is another chimpanzee subspecies that has adopted gorilla habits (such as sleeping on the ground) simply because it's too large to nest in trees. We should be treating these near-human cousin species with respect, but it seems that chimpanzees and gorillas are of most interest to humans because they are edible.
It's true that technology is a poor substitute for a happy social life, but at the same time, technology doesn't start lawsuits, sleep around, kill your dog, or burgle your home. People easily cause much more grief than technology does, and I think a large part of the geek's preference for machines is a desire to avoid that kind of shit. Personally I'm happy to spend time with people and accept the bad with the good, and I prefer an evening in a cafe to an evening with Slashdot. But it's not always easy. An active social life can often be a road straight into hell.
Given that one of the largest consumers of big flat panel TVs (JCDecaux in Europe anyhow) is the advertising businesses, it's a sensible proposal. I can imagine that the fog screen would be very striking in airports, as the travellers on rolling carpets are carried right up to and then through the screen. Whap!!
But there are certain obvious conditions that one seems to forget: 1. People have to want what's on sale 2. It must not be available anywhere else (cheaper) 3. Profit.
AFAICS everything comes down to 1 and 2, and if one does the job sem-decently, 3 as well. So, yes, people will pay for "content", but they must want it and it must be unique (or perceived to be unique, since perception is as good as, or possibly exactly the same as, reality.)
1. Many false positives, as apparently insecure constructs are totally secure given knowledge the programmer has about the source of inputs. E.g. a static buffer may appear prone to overflows, but maybe it's copying data with a known fixed size.
2. Many missing positives that depend on external factors: security settings, file visibility, encoding algorithms, etc.
My guess is that the false positive issue will make the approach unusable for any real software. If the developers can fine-tune that, the tool may be a good way of eliminating the most common kinds of security flaws in software today. But IMO crackers will simply find more subtle ways through the maze.
The key to software security may be good programming practice on the one hand, but that has to go hand in hand with simplicity and the elimination of unnecessary features, and transparency, so that security problems can be found by inspection and usage.
Yes totally self-righteous, but at least I don't suffer from some of the arrogance that many people in this discussion seem to show:
1. "morals seperate people from animals." What about psychopaths?
2. "Feeling pain makes us human. Robots that feel pain should have rights" (this one made me laugh). A fly feels pain. Rights?
3. "People are the dominant species." WTF? Because we think we are? I believe the most common species by bodymass are termites. And there are more pigs than people in some countries.
I admire the philosophers who can discuss the rights of robots while ignoring the fact that half the world can't find clean water to drink. This requires such a self-satisfied world view that my little self-righteous views are feeble in comparison.
But then, arguing with a bunch of teenage technofiles is generally a waste of time unless the talk is of gadgets or sex.
The truth about "rights" and "morals" is that we debate how much we should "give" to other species, as if we are gods. We're not. We're overdressed monkeys that pretend to greatness but we impress no-one but ourselves, and we have to permanently lie about the truth even to do that. Big deal.
I believe I said "who had human parents". There is little profit from debating the terms in which we phrase our definitions: you either understand my intention or you don't. Sex is not a by-product or side-effect of our human nature, it is central to it, and this is worth pointing out. Saying this does not mean I consider those who don't have sex (like 95% of the people here) less human. It simply provides a yardstick, a means of measuring the discussion.
My cat dreams, and I know it has imagination because it can enjoy itself doing silly things. Sorry to banalise "sentinence", but honestly I can't see that what my cat does is very differerent in nature from what any of us do.
As for self-awareness, I'd argue that (a) the majority of people are not really aware of their self-existence, at least not in any sense I can understand (and since we agree that we're competent to judge cats and children, why not other people?), and (b) this does not make them, not children under 10, any less human.
"Sentinence", like "consciousness", is one of those treasured goalposts that we set-up in order to sets us apart from the "animals". Completely circular argument, and worse, it sets the stage for riduculous conclusions: if you found a stone that was sentinent and had consciousness, would it be human? Piffle.
Humanity is _not_ difficult to define. Only when we try to say why humanity is _better_ than the other species do we start to look like flat earth bishops.
These are funny questions. What if we engineer a half-rat, half-human that looks like us but likes to live in sewer pipes? How about a human with four asses?
Interbreeding and having fertile children? I believe that this is not possible unless the genetic overlap is so close as to make your examples meaningless. I.e. the tiny difference between chimps and humans is still an impassible gulf when it comes to successful breeding. Humans are not approximations, we are (like all life) incredibly specific to our niche. You can't just mix and match and hope for a "cross".
(Not to suppose that someone won't be able to make mixed breeds in the lab. This does not count.)
It's like the question: "when did you stop beating your wife?"
Exactly what the mosquito thinks as it bears down on your heat signature and prepares to bore a hole through your skin to suck your blood to feed its young....
And what makes you believe humans are the dominant species? Uhm, are we not simply the largest source of food for innumerous parasites that find us "delicious"?...
Personally, I agree with you. But I believe my views to be parochial, personal, skewed, and ultimately irrelevant.
Your argument makes perfect sense anywhere except in a universe where reality is always a "best approximation". There are no perfectly round circles except in imaginary space, and there are no perfectly closed species except in the "now".
It's quite logical to define human in terms of "had human parents" and still go back 3.5 billion years to the first single-celled organism. Each generation is a "perfect" copy of the preceding generation, where the definition of "perfect" satisfies both the criteria for equivalence (human = human) and change over time.
One human generation: 25 years. 1 million years: 40,000 generations. Ancestors still recognizably human and probably interfertile. 10 million years: 400,000 generations. Ancestors rather more ape than human. And so on.
The tiny accumulation of change over massive amounts of time can turn a perfect circle into a perfect square.
I stand corrected, a "cyborg as human + machine parts" is undeniably human. A "cyborg as machine that looks human" is not.
My point about genetic closeness is not to claim that single-celled lifeforms, nor any species in fact, has "rights". The statement that we have to grant species rights implies that we humans have some godlike position that allows us to do such a thing. Earth the center of the universe, humans at the center of life. Sure, sure...
I'm suggesting we look at life as a continuous river rather than humans + "the rest of them". It is close to the truth (when looked at from the point of view of our only true inheritors, our genes), and it gives a moral position that makes some sense. (Unlike the "humans are holy" idea that gives us a license to kill.)
In the circles of importance we define around ourselves, a single toe is probably more important to most people than the lives of a thousand strangers somewhere on the planet.
Since our valuation of other people is so low, how can we possibly discuss the notion of "rights" for machines?
I stand by my thesis that genetic distance is the only basis we have for appreciating the value of other lifeforms. The day when a cyborg shares 99.99995 of my genes, I will probably be prepared to die for it.
From the article: "I would say if a creature is both sentient and intelligent, and has a moral sense,"... it is human.
But these are all terms designed specifically to separate the non-human animals from the human ones. Pure circularity. My cat is sentinent, and intelligent. As for her moral sense, if I could identify such a thing in myself, I'm sure I'd ascribe the same motivations to her.
But does that make my cat 'human'? Nope. Human is someone who looks and talks like me and has enough of my genes that we can (if we were of the right ages and genders) fuck like bunnies and make more humans.
Why do philosophers try so hard to identify the unique "humaness" of our species when it's such a simple thing...? Humans are animals that had human parents, and no amount of postulation or terminology will make a cat or a machine into a human.
Slashdot Mirror
"people looking at gay porn tend to have gay sex, and people looking at straight porn tend to have straight sex."
You surely meant to say: people who have straight sex prefer straight porn, and people who have gay sex prefer gay porn. People are simply not "converted" by porn. Sorry.
By the way, you might be interested to learn that lesbians prefer gay male porn. This pretty much answers the question of whether the porn is a cause or an effect. (Clue: it's not a cause.)
Pornography is not _intended_ to encourage anything. It is a material for consumption, and it satisfies an urge that most sexually active men have, namely for sexual variety and sexual stimulation. Not all men enjoy porn, not all women find it silly, but in general it's a man thing.
Why do some men like watching rape videos? Maybe because they are unable to feel comfortable with women in normal situations, and rape seems to be one in which the man is totally in control. Does watching a rape video make men into rapists? That is a ridiculous idea. Men rape pretty much as a matter of course in certain situations: wars, conflicts, wherever moral society is damaged and women are unprotected. Rape videos may depict such settings, but they no more encourage rape than a gun-filled action film encourages violence. Sure, it feels nice to imagine that you could just shoot that punk who robbed your car. Hmmm... does that make you a criminal? Decidely not.
Child pornography seems to fall into the same patterns as other kinds of extreme porn: it appeals to men, mainly, and men who have trouble acting as adults in a complex society. Children - like women in wars - are easy victims and clearly need protection from what is a pure crime.
But depictions of crime, graphic or not, are not the same as the crime itself, and while the make feels 'right', it is not logical nor sustainable.
Your example of gay porn is a good one. Do you imagine for a second that watching gay porn will entice a straight man to go to a gay bar? It does not seem plausible. Similarly, men who seek out and victimise children are not stimulated nor encouraged by kiddie porn, and looking at computer hard disks is a poor way to try to find them.
Instead, go to the places where children mix with adult men who are not their relatives, and you will find that this is where paedophiles also go.
Yesterday we went to the supermarket and found
the shelves full of lovely goods. Indeed, we
were allowed freely to browse the rows and rows
of delectable consumer goods, and we soon made
ourselves busy by opening various packages and
eating what we wanted, as well as filling our
pockets and bags with the many beautiful things.
I have to admit it was a wonderful fifty
minutes. Imagine our surprise, therefore, when
at the exit we were rudely stopped by a security
guard and asked to pay for the goods we
had consumed. There was no reason for this, and
we were very angry. Needless to say, I will not
be going back to this shop, and I encourage all
of you to boycott this thing we call "capitalism"
most strongly. The very idea that one person can
somehow restrict the rights of others to come in
and eat his food, drink his soda, and chew on his
liquorice sticks is an affront to all civilized
society. I am now returning to North Korea where
people have a more decent view on such matters.
Thank you for your time.
"someone watching a child porn may go out and and try it"
How on earth do you reach this conclusion?
It matches nothing demonstrated or seen elsewhere. In no domain do people jump up and imitate the things they see unless it is clearly part of an ongoing social movement.
A person who intends to molest children will do so with or without porn. Children have been sexually abused for all history.
It's the same old argument about violence on TV: people forget that the western world (US included) has the lowest levels of violence of any society in any place, any time. Although the levels of violence portrayed are higher than ever, the actual violence we encounter is rarer than ever.
You cannot just state that child pornography is an exception to this trend. People commit criminal acts because they have the means, the motive, and the opportunity. Not because they watched some illegal pictures.
And I have a daughter, yes, and if someone touched her or took pictures of her, I'd hunt him down. Nonetheless: there are ways to attack crime, and the current witch hunt on people who have kiddie porn on their computers is a mistake and it will eventually be seen as such.
I'm going to stop discussing this subject now but I will say one last thing: most of the 'science' in the public discussion on child porn comes from the police, and this is a party with a vested interest in depicting all child porn viewers as twisted criminals. The police are a large part of a public perception that is painting huge segments of the population as criminals. It makes no sense except when you are trying to "act tough on crime."
Actually, alcoholics and drug users are more likely to show compulsive behaviour when their chosen drug is illegal. When the substance is banned, addicts consume as much as they can get. The very fact of the illegality adds to the addictive element.
Put it like this: banning alchohol may decrease total consumption, as moderate drinkers consume less, but it creates more alchoholics, and incidentally, more crooks selling the stuff.
For drugs it's the same. And although I'm starting to sound like someone I don't want to sound like, I have to assume this applies to other things we find noxious.
Possibly intentionally: child molesters, and people who download child pornography.
Uhm, I've a large collection of videos about cars crashing, but that does not make me a dangerous driver.
You are being somewhat wicked when you imply that everyone with a penchant for watching a kind of act is also likely to go out and commit it. This is a tired pseudo-psychology that has tried and failed to link TV to violence, games to violence, foreign-language films to political insurrection, what have you. Monkey see, monkey do? I don't think this argument has any provable basis.
You cannot save children from exploitation by making such falacious arguments. You must show a clear connection between the person in possession of pornography, and those committing the acts.
Imagine we're talking about rape videos. Now rape is a crime. Does this mean that someone luridly watching a rape video (real or faked) is actually a criminal too?
How about someone watching the film of a bank heist. Or the millions of viewers who watch 'cop reality shows'. Are they all likely to jump up and start stealing cars?
You can't stop using logic just because you're discussing an emotive subject - if anything you have to be more clear headed than usual.
Lurid interest in an illegal act is not (in the general sense) a crime, and is often a substitute for the real thing. Think clearly and you will see that there are better ways of preventing abuse of children.
One example: to recognise that most abuse of children actually happens in countries where children's rights are totally ignored, and often takes far worse forms than sexual exploitation.
"those with pictures are statistically likely to go on to physical acts..."
Do you have figures to back up this claim?
The study of pornography and its impact on sex crimes is always highly charged, but there is a good basis for believing that free access to pornography actually reduces sexual offenses (not just against children, but of all kinds).
And yes, there are "wrong buttons" that will download images to your PC. Someone else here mentioned that Newsnet is regularly spammed with child porn.
Criminals should be punished, no doubt about it. But witch-hunts are never productive. You think you are catching the real crooks? You're not. In fact, you're driving the sale and distribution of child porn underground, causing it to become harder and more violent.
Pushing even an obnoxious trade into the hards of real criminal networks is not wise: you may get that rosy feeling of 'doing good', but the cost is paid by huge numbers of new victims in far-off places.
This is probably an unfashionable idea, but the problem appears to be more that law enforcement agencies are treating child porn as an easy way to increase their scores. In truth there is probably little basis for treating downloading of child porn as "criminal behaviour", although the making and selling of it is most definitely so. I'm not defending child porn, but it's entirely possible that it represents for many would-be child molesters, an alternative way of satisfying their unhealthy sexual tendencies.
Aggressive policing against people who have (for whatever reason, and there may be many, both innocent and less so) child porn on their computers is counter-productive. It does not protect children, it does not prevent child abuse, it does not catch the real exploiters, but it does create grief for many people who have done little more than click on the wrong button.
Crime and punishment must be based on some kind of real moral injustice and the redressment of this. I don't think this is what we're seeing in these cases.
Zees ees a franchement stupide discussion, mes amis, seulement a collective des geeks et philologues could possibly be discussing ze differences between two bastard dialects of ze noble Francais. Zut alors! Tous le monde knows zat ze only correct, la seule bon mot, it is "saveur". Zees half-bred "flaveur" 'owever you want to spell it, it is a monstrosity, a barbaric insolence, en je suis proud zat l'Academie Francais in her wisdom 'as banished eet from ze common speach.
Wat next, I ask vous? Zere is only one true language, un seul, et cela is ze noble French. All other dialects and jargots, grovel before her.
Merci. Bon journee a vous tous.
What I have read about the gorillas in Rwanda and Congo, and the chimpanzees in Congo, is that the local people tend to treat the apes with respect and tolerance, all the more so in Rwanda where they used to get a nice income from tourism. The bushmeat hunters are generally outsiders - one particularly horrible example is logging companies, which employ hunters to feed their crews. Logging in the central African forests is gearing up, since these are some of the last big forests left. Logging firms send in crews to rip out the big old trees, and feed these guys on bushmeat.
It's not a simple question of 'eat or die'. The fate of the big apes in Africa's central forests is tied to the fate of the forests themselves, and as so often, it's outsiders who are benefiting from the destruction, while the inhabitants of the region (human, near human, and whatever) find themselves extinguished.
Certainly the walk-up-and-use simplicity of the C64 and other 8-bit BASIC systems has never quite been seen again. I'm also reasonably impressed that the web site is holding up under the traffic, and frankly the web site is so pretty that it makes me want to spend money on the thing, no matter what it does. Excellent job: someone has understood how to market to geeks.
But... where is the simple programming language? I mean, I could make a stupid game in 10 lines of C64 BASIC. I don't want to have to work in C/C++ to do this today, or I'd just stick to a PC.
Give me a high-level audio and video API that does nice things from a simple interpreted language, something I can give to my kids to let them learn programming, and something that is easy to extend with bits and pieces of random hardware... that was the real magic of the 8-bit systems, and that does not quite seem to be all here yet.
Or maybe I've just missed it somewhere.
I presume the term "new species" means one that homo sapiens sapiens has not yet discovered and put on the menu. Theorising this to be a "hybrid" is simply fantastic speculation: Occam's razor suggests that it's a relative of the species already known, and given the description of the flat face, it would be a large chimpanzee.
If this is not a hoax, it will probably be found that local people know of the species and consider them to be "men of the forest" or whatever. Second prediction: the unfortunate animals will rapidly end up on the "bushmeat" menu of those freaks who enjoy eating the flesh of near-human species such as gorillas and chimpanzees. Third prediction: the study of the giant chimp (if that it is) will be limited to skulls, thighbones, and the occasional skin, with the wild population extinct and maybe one or two sad individuals "liberated" and stuck in zoo prisons.
Central Africa has two species of gorilla and three subspecies of chimpanzee, and large chimpanzee individuals are not unknown. So it's most likely this is another chimpanzee subspecies that has adopted gorilla habits (such as sleeping on the ground) simply because it's too large to nest in trees.
We should be treating these near-human cousin species with respect, but it seems that chimpanzees and gorillas are of most interest to humans because they are edible.
It's true that technology is a poor substitute for a happy social life, but at the same time, technology doesn't start lawsuits, sleep around, kill your dog, or burgle your home.
People easily cause much more grief than technology does, and I think a large part of the geek's preference for machines is a desire to avoid that kind of shit.
Personally I'm happy to spend time with people and accept the bad with the good, and I prefer an evening in a cafe to an evening with Slashdot. But it's not always easy. An active social life can often be a road straight into hell.
Given that one of the largest consumers of big flat panel TVs (JCDecaux in Europe anyhow) is the advertising businesses, it's a sensible proposal. I can imagine that the fog screen would be very striking in airports, as the travellers on rolling carpets are carried right up to and then through the screen. Whap!!
But there are certain obvious conditions that one seems to forget:
1. People have to want what's on sale
2. It must not be available anywhere else (cheaper)
3. Profit.
AFAICS everything comes down to 1 and 2, and if one does the job sem-decently, 3 as well. So, yes, people will pay for "content", but they must want it and it must be unique (or perceived to be unique, since perception is as good as, or possibly exactly the same as, reality.)
1. Many false positives, as apparently insecure constructs are totally secure given knowledge the programmer has about the source of inputs. E.g. a static buffer may appear prone to overflows, but maybe it's copying data with a known fixed size.
2. Many missing positives that depend on external factors: security settings, file visibility, encoding algorithms, etc.
My guess is that the false positive issue will make the approach unusable for any real software. If the developers can fine-tune that, the tool may be a good way of eliminating the most common kinds of security flaws in software today. But IMO crackers will simply find more subtle ways through the maze.
The key to software security may be good programming practice on the one hand, but that has to go hand in hand with simplicity and the elimination of unnecessary features, and transparency, so that security problems can be found by inspection and usage.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of me!
Yes totally self-righteous, but at least I don't suffer from some of the arrogance that many people in this discussion seem to show:
1. "morals seperate people from animals." What about psychopaths?
2. "Feeling pain makes us human. Robots that feel pain should have rights" (this one made me laugh). A fly feels pain. Rights?
3. "People are the dominant species." WTF? Because we think we are? I believe the most common species by bodymass are termites. And there are more pigs than people in some countries.
I admire the philosophers who can discuss the rights of robots while ignoring the fact that half the world can't find clean water to drink. This requires such a self-satisfied world view that my little self-righteous views are feeble in comparison.
But then, arguing with a bunch of teenage technofiles is generally a waste of time unless the talk is of gadgets or sex.
The truth about "rights" and "morals" is that we debate how much we should "give" to other species, as if we are gods. We're not. We're overdressed monkeys that pretend to greatness but we impress no-one but ourselves, and we have to permanently lie about the truth even to do that. Big deal.
I believe I said "who had human parents". There is little profit from debating the terms in which we phrase our definitions: you either understand my intention or you don't. Sex is not a by-product or side-effect of our human nature, it is central to it, and this is worth pointing out. Saying this does not mean I consider those who don't have sex (like 95% of the people here) less human. It simply provides a yardstick, a means of measuring the discussion.
My cat dreams, and I know it has imagination because it can enjoy itself doing silly things. Sorry to banalise "sentinence", but honestly I can't see that what my cat does is very differerent in nature from what any of us do.
As for self-awareness, I'd argue that (a) the majority of people are not really aware of their self-existence, at least not in any sense I can understand (and since we agree that we're competent to judge cats and children, why not other people?), and (b) this does not make them, not children under 10, any less human.
"Sentinence", like "consciousness", is one of those treasured goalposts that we set-up in order to sets us apart from the "animals". Completely circular argument, and worse, it sets the stage for riduculous conclusions: if you found a stone that was sentinent and had consciousness, would it be human? Piffle.
Humanity is _not_ difficult to define. Only when we try to say why humanity is _better_ than the other species do we start to look like flat earth bishops.
These are funny questions. What if we engineer a half-rat, half-human that looks like us but likes to live in sewer pipes? How about a human with four asses?
Interbreeding and having fertile children? I believe that this is not possible unless the genetic overlap is so close as to make your examples meaningless. I.e. the tiny difference between chimps and humans is still an impassible gulf when it comes to successful breeding. Humans are not approximations, we are (like all life) incredibly specific to our niche. You can't just mix and match and hope for a "cross".
(Not to suppose that someone won't be able to make mixed breeds in the lab. This does not count.)
It's like the question: "when did you stop beating your wife?"
...
...
...
Exactly what the mosquito thinks as it bears down on your heat signature and prepares to bore a hole through your skin to suck your blood to feed its young.
And what makes you believe humans are the dominant species? Uhm, are we not simply the largest source of food for innumerous parasites that find us "delicious"?
Personally, I agree with you. But I believe my views to be parochial, personal, skewed, and ultimately irrelevant.
Your argument makes perfect sense anywhere except in a universe where reality is always a "best approximation". There are no perfectly round circles except in imaginary space, and there are no perfectly closed species except in the "now".
It's quite logical to define human in terms of "had human parents" and still go back 3.5 billion years to the first single-celled organism. Each generation is a "perfect" copy of the preceding generation, where the definition of "perfect" satisfies both the criteria for equivalence (human = human) and change over time.
One human generation: 25 years. 1 million years: 40,000 generations. Ancestors still recognizably human and probably interfertile. 10 million years: 400,000 generations. Ancestors rather more ape than human. And so on.
The tiny accumulation of change over massive amounts of time can turn a perfect circle into a perfect square.
I stand corrected, a "cyborg as human + machine parts" is undeniably human. A "cyborg as machine that looks human" is not.
My point about genetic closeness is not to claim that single-celled lifeforms, nor any species in fact, has "rights". The statement that we have to grant species rights implies that we humans have some godlike position that allows us to do such a thing. Earth the center of the universe, humans at the center of life. Sure, sure...
I'm suggesting we look at life as a continuous river rather than humans + "the rest of them". It is close to the truth (when looked at from the point of view of our only true inheritors, our genes), and it gives a moral position that makes some sense. (Unlike the "humans are holy" idea that gives us a license to kill.)
In the circles of importance we define around ourselves, a single toe is probably more important to most people than the lives of a thousand strangers somewhere on the planet.
Since our valuation of other people is so low, how can we possibly discuss the notion of "rights" for machines?
I stand by my thesis that genetic distance is the only basis we have for appreciating the value of other lifeforms. The day when a cyborg shares 99.99995 of my genes, I will probably be prepared to die for it.
From the article: "I would say if a creature is both sentient and intelligent, and has a moral sense," ... it is human.
But these are all terms designed specifically to separate the non-human animals from the human ones. Pure circularity. My cat is sentinent, and intelligent. As for her moral sense, if I could identify such a thing in myself, I'm sure I'd ascribe the same motivations to her.
But does that make my cat 'human'? Nope. Human is someone who looks and talks like me and has enough of my genes that we can (if we were of the right ages and genders) fuck like bunnies and make more humans.
Why do philosophers try so hard to identify the unique "humaness" of our species when it's such a simple thing...? Humans are animals that had human parents, and no amount of postulation or terminology will make a cat or a machine into a human.