FYI, the parent poster is probably Arthur T. Murray (i.e. Mentifex), a noted internet crank. He's been posting links to his "AI4U/Mind" junk on usenet since the 1980s, and has since expanded to the WWW. There's a FAQ all about him here:
Well I had considerably more in mind when I said that. I think you probably understand what I had in mind. I was talking about the ability to park a helicopter/ drone/ what-have-you outside peoples' windows with a zoom lense, finding gaps in their curtains, (or forcing them to USE curtains to defend their otherwise-safe privacy) and zooming into their private activity? Do you think that police should be able to ride on the (hypothetical) loophole in the constitution, and gather surveilance without a warrant?
I don't consider this a loophole -- there isn't any infringement of private property going on. Rather, I think anybody in a public area should have the right to use whatever camera, zoom lens, or image enhancement algorithm that they want. Of course, being right outside somebody's window probably isn't public airspace. If somebody's shower is visible from public property and they want guaranteed privacy, they should probably get a curtain.
Celeb's? I'm one of those people who thinks celeb's deserve privacy too.
Sure, but nobody has a guarantee of privacy when they're visible from public.
Uhhh... This may be a trifle off topic. Pulsars (thought it was quasars? not the same thing) for a GPS-like function?
The similarity is that they're both unexpected applications for astrophysical phenomena.
That is that the bit stream received from GPS is completely predictable and the sequence recovered from these celestial sources is supposed to be completely unpredictable. The information gained from a GPS signal is not so much the message itself as it is the time when the message was received.
'sides, the main characteristic of pulsars is their regularity - indeed the outright coherence of their signal was initially thought to be evidence of an extraterrestrial technological civilization!
Right. Which is why one might want to use pulsars (not quasars) as timing signals for GPS-like position-finding.
For heaven's sake, if a cop were doing such a thing with a helecopter and a zoom lense it would be a crime.
Is it a crime? Granted, I may be naive in this area, but I don't think it should be illegal for a person to make use of a helicopter and zoom lens simultaneously, even if they happen to be a police officer.
The "hypothetical right" is that (unless warrants are issued) people have the right to live their lives free from "ubiquitous/heavy scrutiny".
Even if they're a celebrity or a politician? IMHO, it should be permissible to place politicians under an extreme amount of scrutiny.
According to that hypothetical right, there is no agent who is/should be capable of pulling in EVERY DETAIL of someone's LIFE and (without warrant) making a complete documentary of it.
Every detail which is visible from a public place.
Yet the drones could make such possibilities into reality. The drones could look into every car window, every apartment window, every house/back yard...Everything.
As can any human police officer, or any private citizen. The difference is simply a matter of degree.
I should probably mention that I'm a supporter of sousveillance, bottom-up surveillance of those in authority.
Anyhow, I suppose it is important to distinguish, between an "off duty cop" with his freedom-loving "civilian cap" on, and an "on duty" cop, who's job is to catch crooks, but is also sworn to uphold and respect the constitution of the United States of America.
If an off-duty cop observes something, is s/he allowed to act on that information when they're back on-duty?
One of my main contentions is that I can't see any way to effectively place restriction on police surveillance in public areas which wouldn't also put unreasonable restrictions on the sorts of observations private citizens are allowed to engage in.
And the last time I checked, they were required to get a warrant before doing so. What do you bet there wont be some court cases over air surveillance because the cops didn't get one?
The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Florida Supreme Court with a four-vote plurality, arguing that the accused did not have a reasonable expectation that the greenhouse was protected from aerial view, and thus that the helicopter surveillance did not constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment. However, the Court stopped short of allowing all aerial inspections of private property, noting that it was "of obvious importance" that a private citizen could have legally flown in the same airspace.
The entry also notes that the police officer observed the marijuana with his naked eyes, and makes reference to reasonable expectation of privacy. So at least superficially, this seems to me to be quite different than, eg, a drone with a powerful telescopic lense on it to observer people's faces, as many posts here seem to imply might want to be done with these drones.
Could you elaborate on what makes it different, besides a matter of degree? What if the marijuana were spotted by a telescopic lens on an unmanned satellite?
They might have a precident allowing aerial photos of the country but that is by no means a precident in favor of ubiquitous police awareness.
I'd certainly be opposed to ubiquitous awareness, especially if such awareness wasn't accompanied by a similar ability of the populace to keep tabs on police activity. However, it isn't ubiquitous awareness which is being proposed, but awareness of areas visible from public areas. In effect, it's just like the awareness provided by satellites, but with higher spatial and temporal resolution.
The fourth amendment provides that the government needs to have probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describe the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. In this case what those drones could do would be to search EVERYTHING without a warrant.
If I understand the Florida v. Riley ruling correctly, the whole point is that aerial observation doesn't constitute a search, just as watching somebody from the top of a building doesn't constitute a search.
The Eighth amendment specifies that some rights exist, and are protected by the constitution/bill of rights, EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE NOT SPELLED OUT.
Oh yes, certainly. I'm of a libertarian slant, and tend to defend my rights rather rabidly. However, I'm still not clear on what this hypothetical right you're referring to is. The right to not be observed by people in public places?
I'm personally GLAD we have our fine police officers on patrol, but that doesn't mean I want them examining every aspect of my life and/or building databases on the populace.
I support the right of individuals to engage in such activity (particularly when it's targetted towards politicians). Since police officers are also individuals, it's difficult for me to think of a solid reason to deny them that right.
The law(s) against stalking ? I don't know much about them, but basically their existance means that it's not only unconstitutional (for a cop) to follow a person around and search them without warrants or probably cause, it's also illegal.
Hm... I'm actually not familiar with such laws myself. If anyone else has further insight, I'd love to see it.
IDK why they modded my first post down. It is a reasonable post.
I'm glad you don't view your own backyard as private any more.
Last I checked, there wasn't some sort of magical protection field preventing people from seeing what was in my backyard, particularly if they own trampolines.;)
As an outsider looking in to the US, I am amazed how you were so quick to try to impeach a president for lying about where wiley jr. was hiding but not one interpreting your constitution and law to suit his handlers' needs.
Could you elaborate on how aircraft surveillance is unconstitutional or against the law? The Supreme Court's ruled in Florida v. Riley that a warrant isn't needed to observe property from public airspace.
except getting your rights systematically striped away.
I wasn't aware there was some sort of right against having airplanes flying overhead pointing cameras at you. I'm sure celebrities would love to have restrictions on photography in public places, as it would help them fend off papparazzi, but as far as I know, no such restrictions exist.
Maybe this would be obvious if I understood real stocks better, but how do they determine the share price for imaginary stocks? As I read it, the 'idea stocks' use imaginary money, and only the people who implement the good ideas get real money bonuses. I also couldn't tell if they're locked at $10,000 or if they earn more monopoly money for backing ideas that turn out well, thereby giving them a bigger say in subsequent ideas.
Again, I'm not sure how the company described in the article does things, but in an ideal case the share price would be whatever the market price is, with the equivalent of "dividends" based on how the product performs. Also, as far as the money goes, I suspect the best way to do things would be to have maybe a $1000 "idea stock bonus." If somebody decided not to do anything with it, they'd just get the $1000 as-is as a bonus on their salary. Alternatively, they could choose to risk the bonus in the market, earning or losing bonus-money based on market performance. Those who picked idea-stocks wisely would then have even more bonus-money to use for bids.
This reminds me of a proposal I saw to use pulsars as a sort of "Interstellar GPS," making use of their signals to determine one's location. The description from Selenian Boondocks:
The other [Microcosm proposal] that appeared even more interesting to me was the idea (which I'll dub X-ray Pulsar Positioning System or XPPS for short) of using naturally occuring signals from X-ray Pulsars to provide positioning and attitude data anywhere in the solar system, not just inside the orbit of existing GPS satellites. If something like that works, it could make interplanetary navigation substantially easier, much as GPS has made terrestrial navigation so much easier. GPS is really convenient, and it would be nice to get even some of the benefits of it without having to pay the huge infrastructure costs of setting up systems like that around every interesting planet or moon that we want to settle in the future. All that said, this is just a Phase I SBIR, and it would be interesting to know more about how they were actually planning on doing this. Anyone have any thoughts?
I would have no problem with this (and would actually think this is a good thing) if all imagery data from these UAVs were made accessible to the tax-paying public. As David Brin discussed in The Transparent Society, increasing surveillance can actually improve society and make people/government more accountable, but only if such surveillance is two-sided.
no private comercials could be run naming or picturing a specific candidate - the most specific they could be is "support the candidate that supports concept-x"
I'm curious: Do you think there should be restrictions on the creation of movies like Fahrenheit 9-11, which are largely dedicated to digging up dirt on particular candidates? What if somebody owns a television station and likes one candidate more than another -- should they be permitted to broadcast material which shows one candidate in a better light than another?
In all the replies to my post people keep speaking as if I was speaking of the candidates voice - I am not speaking about the candidates voice - I am speaking about the peoples
As far as I can tell, citizens running for political office are people. Plus, the various Campaign Finance Control laws generally don't just control what a candidate is allowed to say or do, but also control what people who support or oppose that candidate are allowed to say or do.
Yes because All individuals on the ballot receiving equal money - no more, no less favors the Republicans and the Democrats.
Who writes the laws that determine who can and can't get on the ballot? It certainly isn't the Green or Libertarian Party.
I do that people atleast READ my posts before replying.
You do not have a first ammendment right to give money to your candidate for the very reason that Money IS speech. The person with the most money has more of a voice, violating the right to equal representation of the other people in the district.
People who are famous also have more of a voice. Should there be restrictions on what famous people are and aren't allowed to do, so that they don't "violate the right to equal representation"?
Equal representation just means that people are able to vote. If they choose to vote for who rich or famous people support, your beef should be with the voters, not the rich or famous people.
The only way to remove the corporate-whore money culture from washington is to REMOVE ALL INDIVIDUAL FUNDING of Candidates. All money for an election should go into one pool, then all the candidates on the ballot should get an equal proportion.
I suspect the Democrats and Republicans are trying to work towards your suggestion with their Campaign Finance Control laws, to ensure that third parties never have a chance. I'm sure those in power would -love- to be able to have that sort of control over who is and isn't allowed to receive campaign funding.
Thing is though, back to the topic of the original thread, I don't think any of those cases you mentioned would have been better off if there were -more- people on the ship. If anything, having fewer people onboard due to automation would decrease the number of casualties, and reduce the amount of time until the ship was back in normal operation.
Why is there such universal agreement in regards to this "wisdom of the market" concept. Who says? Where is the definitive proof. i play on the Foresight Exchange (www.ideosphere.com) with everybody else and it's NOT always right.
The claim isn't that prediction markets are omniscient -- just that they're on average better than any of the alternatives.
Re:Vanity is a worthwhile reason for manned space
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US Plans Lunar Motel
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2. Research in aviation(Oh those damned Wright brothers! Trying to get all these poor masses to fly in air. It will have no practical application! Flight will be of no use to mankind... it is all vanity.)
3. All works of art and literature, cinema etc.. (Entertaining the masses ? Who wants these poor folks to be entertained ? They are a pox on us, I tell you! Wanting your name to live on, after you are dead ? Vanity! It is all vanity, I tell you!).
4. Research in navigation and seafaring.(Bah! Trying to get all those poor teeming masses to float on water and go to some place farway. Discovering new searoutes and lands ? What for? Who cares about whether these damned undeserving poor folks go to this place called the New World and establish some country called America... or populate some place called Australia. America...bah! who needs it!)
Besides, say, the National Endowment for the Arts, how much are any of these things government-funded? The Wright Brothers certainly didn't get Federal money to build their plane.
The real problem with this mentality is that these are warships. Smaller crews are vastly less efficent at damage control and have much smaller margins for casualties before the ship ceases to be combat effective.
How many naval casualties have there been in the past 30-some years, particularly in France, the UK, and other Western nations? I can't find any data on it off-hand, but I get the impression that the number is quite small, particularly for aircraft carriers.
Robin Hanson (who worked on the Policy Analysis Market you describe) actually has a pretty neat research paper analyzing the media's reaction to the project. Here's the abstract:
The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), otherwise known (inaccurately) as "terrorism futures," burst into public view in a firestorm of condemnation on July 29, 2003, and was canceled within one day. We look at the impression given of PAM by five hundred media articles, and how that impression varied with eleven indicators of article information quality: publication date, citing someone with firsthand knowledge, article length, a news or an editorial style, author anonymity, and the awards, circulation, frequency, and topic specialties of the periodical. All eleven indicators individually predict more favorable impressions of PAM. In a multiple regression model, seven of them remain clearly significant. This model predicts that a fifty word news article in an award-winning widely-read science and business publication a month later that mentioned an insider would give a solidly favorable impression of PAM, as would a similar three hundred word article today in a general publication.
I'm not aware of anything that lets you short Neoconservatism itself, but you can short on, say, the chances of a Republican winning the 2008 US Election, using real money. It's currently at 50.1% over on Intrade.
I'm happy to finally see a slashdot story on prediction markets, like the one described in the article, as they're one of the neatest new concepts I've come across. They've shown themselves to be on average the most accurate way to predict future events, more accurate than, say, individual experts or opinion polls. Having people "put their money where their mouth is" greatly improves the quality of predictions.
If you've never seen a prediction market in action before, I highly recommend checking out the real-money Intrade market, or the virtual-money Foresight Exchange. At such markets you can get estimated probabities for almost any major event. Here's a few examples from Intrade:
* Sony Playstation 3 release before October 6: 33% chance * Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic Presidential Nominee in 2008: 43.1% * John McCain to be the Republican Presidential Nominee in 2008: 36.6% * Osama Bin Laden to be captured/neutralised by 30 June 2006: 5.7% * Donald Rumsfeld to announce his resignation on/before 31Dec2006: 18.5% * Bird flu (H5N1) to be confirmed in the USA ON/BEFORE 31st December 2006: 70.0%
That said, I think the company described in the article can probably improve the way they handle their pay-offs. From the article:
At Rite-Solutions, the architecture of participation is both businesslike and playful. Fifty-five stocks are listed on the company's internal market, which is called Mutual Fun. Each stock comes with a detailed description -- called an expect-us, as opposed to a prospectus -- and begins trading at a price of $10. Every employee gets $10,000 in "opinion money" to allocate among the offerings, and employees signal their enthusiasm by investing in a stock and, better yet, volunteering to work on the project. Volunteers share in the proceeds, in the form of real money, if the stock becomes a product or delivers savings.
The wording in the article is a little ambiguous, but it seems that if you choose to bid on an idea which you "know" is good, and would be if it were selected as a product, if other people don't agree you lose your money. It would be better to have a system where if the stock isn't selected as a product, you get your money back. If the product is selected, you gain money if the product does well, and lose money if the product does poorly. This also adds an incentive for people to "short" popular ideas that they think are going to perform poorly.
Isn't that what Google already does, with their personal project time and whatnot?
I'm not sure what personal-project time has to do with having an internal ideas market, but Google does coincidentally have an internal prediction market, which they described in their official blog last year. From the description:
At Google, we're constantly trying to find new ways to organize the world's information, including information relevant to our business. Building on the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and the Iowa Electronic Markets, a few Googlers (Doug Banks, Patri Friedman, Ilya Kirnos, Piaw Na and me, with some help from Hal Varian), set up a predictive market system inside the company.
The markets were designed to forecast product launch dates, new office openings, and many other things of strategic importance to Google. So far, more than a thousand Googlers have bid on 146 events in 43 different subject areas (no payment is required to play).
We designed the market so that the price of an event should, in theory, reflect a consensus probability that the event will occur. To determine accuracy of the market, we looked at the connection between prices of events and the frequency with which they actually occurred. If prices are correct, events priced at 10 cents should occur about 10 percent of the time....
We also found that the market prices gave decisive, informative predictions in the sense that their predictive power increased as time passed and uncertainty was resolved. When a market first opens there may be considerable uncertainty about what will eventually happen; but as time goes on, some outcomes became more likely than others. The market prices should reflect this phenomenon, with the implied probability distributions becoming more concentrated over time....
Our search engine works well because it aggregates information dispersed across the web, and our internal predictive markets are based on the same principle: Googlers from across the company contribute knowledge and opinions which are aggregated into a forecast by the market. Sometimes, just feeling lucky isn't enough, and these tools can help.
A related idea I had recently which I wanted to toss into the open...
Lately on slashdot we've been having a few stories about the (Snow Crash-like) Second Life virtual world, and its active virtual economy. Take this article from Wired:
I think it would be quite interesting to try using Second Life's economy and scriptable world to create an in-game prediction market, similar to that described in the NYT article. Instead of using a purely reputation-based currency such a market could use the game's Linden Dollars, which can be exchanged with US dollars. The use of Linden Dollars would also help get around some of the anti-gambling laws one runs into when US dollars are involved. It seems that in-game scripts can communicate with external servers via email or XML-RPC, so one could probably have such an in-game script placing orders with a server running the open-source prediction market software like Foresight Exchange or Zocalo.
One might even imagine creating a Futarchy-like system, with bids made on decisions about how to make the market (or organization running the market) prosper in the Second Life world. That could be interesting. I've lately been musing a bit on how such a system might be a cute way to create a seed superintelligence, or more precisely, a self-improving collective intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, the parent poster is probably Arthur T. Murray (i.e. Mentifex), a noted internet crank. He's been posting links to his "AI4U/Mind" junk on usenet since the 1980s, and has since expanded to the WWW. There's a FAQ all about him here:
http://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html
Well I had considerably more in mind when I said that. I think you probably understand what I had in mind. I was talking about the ability to park a helicopter/ drone/ what-have-you outside peoples' windows with a zoom lense, finding gaps in their curtains, (or forcing them to USE curtains to defend their otherwise-safe privacy) and zooming into their private activity? Do you think that police should be able to ride on the (hypothetical) loophole in the constitution, and gather surveilance without a warrant?
I don't consider this a loophole -- there isn't any infringement of private property going on. Rather, I think anybody in a public area should have the right to use whatever camera, zoom lens, or image enhancement algorithm that they want. Of course, being right outside somebody's window probably isn't public airspace. If somebody's shower is visible from public property and they want guaranteed privacy, they should probably get a curtain.
Celeb's? I'm one of those people who thinks celeb's deserve privacy too.
Sure, but nobody has a guarantee of privacy when they're visible from public.
Uhhh... This may be a trifle off topic. Pulsars (thought it was quasars? not the same thing) for a GPS-like function?
The similarity is that they're both unexpected applications for astrophysical phenomena.
That is that the bit stream received from GPS is completely predictable and the sequence recovered from these celestial sources is supposed to be completely unpredictable. The information gained from a GPS signal is not so much the message itself as it is the time when the message was received.
'sides, the main characteristic of pulsars is their regularity - indeed the outright coherence of their signal was initially thought to be evidence of an extraterrestrial technological civilization!
Right. Which is why one might want to use pulsars (not quasars) as timing signals for GPS-like position-finding.
For heaven's sake, if a cop were doing such a thing with a helecopter and a zoom lense it would be a crime.
Is it a crime? Granted, I may be naive in this area, but I don't think it should be illegal for a person to make use of a helicopter and zoom lens simultaneously, even if they happen to be a police officer.
The "hypothetical right" is that (unless warrants are issued) people have the right to live their lives free from "ubiquitous/heavy scrutiny".
Even if they're a celebrity or a politician? IMHO, it should be permissible to place politicians under an extreme amount of scrutiny.
According to that hypothetical right, there is no agent who is/should be capable of pulling in EVERY DETAIL of someone's LIFE and (without warrant) making a complete documentary of it.
Every detail which is visible from a public place.
Yet the drones could make such possibilities into reality. The drones could look into every car window, every apartment window, every house/back yard...Everything.
As can any human police officer, or any private citizen. The difference is simply a matter of degree.
I should probably mention that I'm a supporter of sousveillance, bottom-up surveillance of those in authority.
Anyhow, I suppose it is important to distinguish, between an "off duty cop" with his freedom-loving "civilian cap" on, and an "on duty" cop, who's job is to catch crooks, but is also sworn to uphold and respect the constitution of the United States of America.
If an off-duty cop observes something, is s/he allowed to act on that information when they're back on-duty?
One of my main contentions is that I can't see any way to effectively place restriction on police surveillance in public areas which wouldn't also put unreasonable restrictions on the sorts of observations private citizens are allowed to engage in.
And the last time I checked, they were required to get a warrant before doing so. What do you bet there wont be some court cases over air surveillance because the cops didn't get one?
There already was one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Riley
The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Florida Supreme Court with a four-vote plurality, arguing that the accused did not have a reasonable expectation that the greenhouse was protected from aerial view, and thus that the helicopter surveillance did not constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment. However, the Court stopped short of allowing all aerial inspections of private property, noting that it was "of obvious importance" that a private citizen could have legally flown in the same airspace.
The entry also notes that the police officer observed the marijuana with his naked eyes, and makes reference to reasonable expectation of privacy. So at least superficially, this seems to me to be quite different than, eg, a drone with a powerful telescopic lense on it to observer people's faces, as many posts here seem to imply might want to be done with these drones.
Could you elaborate on what makes it different, besides a matter of degree? What if the marijuana were spotted by a telescopic lens on an unmanned satellite?
They might have a precident allowing aerial photos of the country but that is by no means a precident in favor of ubiquitous police awareness.
I'd certainly be opposed to ubiquitous awareness, especially if such awareness wasn't accompanied by a similar ability of the populace to keep tabs on police activity. However, it isn't ubiquitous awareness which is being proposed, but awareness of areas visible from public areas. In effect, it's just like the awareness provided by satellites, but with higher spatial and temporal resolution.
The fourth amendment provides that the government needs to have probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describe the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. In this case what those drones could do would be to search EVERYTHING without a warrant.
If I understand the Florida v. Riley ruling correctly, the whole point is that aerial observation doesn't constitute a search, just as watching somebody from the top of a building doesn't constitute a search.
The Eighth amendment specifies that some rights exist, and are protected by the constitution/bill of rights, EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE NOT SPELLED OUT.
Oh yes, certainly. I'm of a libertarian slant, and tend to defend my rights rather rabidly. However, I'm still not clear on what this hypothetical right you're referring to is. The right to not be observed by people in public places?
I'm personally GLAD we have our fine police officers on patrol, but that doesn't mean I want them examining every aspect of my life and/or building databases on the populace.
I support the right of individuals to engage in such activity (particularly when it's targetted towards politicians). Since police officers are also individuals, it's difficult for me to think of a solid reason to deny them that right.
The law(s) against stalking ? I don't know much about them, but basically their existance means that it's not only unconstitutional (for a cop) to follow a person around and search them without warrants or probably cause, it's also illegal.
Hm... I'm actually not familiar with such laws myself. If anyone else has further insight, I'd love to see it.
IDK why they modded my first post down. It is a reasonable post.
Who knows... mods are crazy.
I'm glad you don't view your own backyard as private any more.
;)
Last I checked, there wasn't some sort of magical protection field preventing people from seeing what was in my backyard, particularly if they own trampolines.
As an outsider looking in to the US, I am amazed how you were so quick to try to impeach a president for lying about where wiley jr. was hiding but not one interpreting your constitution and law to suit his handlers' needs.
Could you elaborate on how aircraft surveillance is unconstitutional or against the law? The Supreme Court's ruled in Florida v. Riley that a warrant isn't needed to observe property from public airspace.
except getting your rights systematically striped away.
I wasn't aware there was some sort of right against having airplanes flying overhead pointing cameras at you. I'm sure celebrities would love to have restrictions on photography in public places, as it would help them fend off papparazzi, but as far as I know, no such restrictions exist.
Maybe this would be obvious if I understood real stocks better, but how do they determine the share price for imaginary stocks? As I read it, the 'idea stocks' use imaginary money, and only the people who implement the good ideas get real money bonuses. I also couldn't tell if they're locked at $10,000 or if they earn more monopoly money for backing ideas that turn out well, thereby giving them a bigger say in subsequent ideas.
Again, I'm not sure how the company described in the article does things, but in an ideal case the share price would be whatever the market price is, with the equivalent of "dividends" based on how the product performs. Also, as far as the money goes, I suspect the best way to do things would be to have maybe a $1000 "idea stock bonus." If somebody decided not to do anything with it, they'd just get the $1000 as-is as a bonus on their salary. Alternatively, they could choose to risk the bonus in the market, earning or losing bonus-money based on market performance. Those who picked idea-stocks wisely would then have even more bonus-money to use for bids.
This reminds me of a proposal I saw to use pulsars as a sort of "Interstellar GPS," making use of their signals to determine one's location. The description from Selenian Boondocks:
The other [Microcosm proposal] that appeared even more interesting to me was the idea (which I'll dub X-ray Pulsar Positioning System or XPPS for short) of using naturally occuring signals from X-ray Pulsars to provide positioning and attitude data anywhere in the solar system, not just inside the orbit of existing GPS satellites. If something like that works, it could make interplanetary navigation substantially easier, much as GPS has made terrestrial navigation so much easier. GPS is really convenient, and it would be nice to get even some of the benefits of it without having to pay the huge infrastructure costs of setting up systems like that around every interesting planet or moon that we want to settle in the future. All that said, this is just a Phase I SBIR, and it would be interesting to know more about how they were actually planning on doing this. Anyone have any thoughts?
I would have no problem with this (and would actually think this is a good thing) if all imagery data from these UAVs were made accessible to the tax-paying public. As David Brin discussed in The Transparent Society, increasing surveillance can actually improve society and make people/government more accountable, but only if such surveillance is two-sided.
no private comercials could be run naming or picturing a specific candidate - the most specific they could be is "support the candidate that supports concept-x"
I'm curious: Do you think there should be restrictions on the creation of movies like Fahrenheit 9-11, which are largely dedicated to digging up dirt on particular candidates? What if somebody owns a television station and likes one candidate more than another -- should they be permitted to broadcast material which shows one candidate in a better light than another?
In all the replies to my post people keep speaking as if I was speaking of the candidates voice - I am not speaking about the candidates voice - I am speaking about the peoples
As far as I can tell, citizens running for political office are people. Plus, the various Campaign Finance Control laws generally don't just control what a candidate is allowed to say or do, but also control what people who support or oppose that candidate are allowed to say or do.
Yes because All individuals on the ballot receiving equal money - no more, no less favors the Republicans and the Democrats.
Who writes the laws that determine who can and can't get on the ballot? It certainly isn't the Green or Libertarian Party.
I do that people atleast READ my posts before replying.
?
You do not have a first ammendment right to give money to your candidate for the very reason that Money IS speech. The person with the most money has more of a voice, violating the right to equal representation of the other people in the district.
People who are famous also have more of a voice. Should there be restrictions on what famous people are and aren't allowed to do, so that they don't "violate the right to equal representation"?
Equal representation just means that people are able to vote. If they choose to vote for who rich or famous people support, your beef should be with the voters, not the rich or famous people.
The only way to remove the corporate-whore money culture from washington is to REMOVE ALL INDIVIDUAL FUNDING of Candidates. All money for an election should go into one pool, then all the candidates on the ballot should get an equal proportion.
I suspect the Democrats and Republicans are trying to work towards your suggestion with their Campaign Finance Control laws, to ensure that third parties never have a chance. I'm sure those in power would -love- to be able to have that sort of control over who is and isn't allowed to receive campaign funding.
Thing is though, back to the topic of the original thread, I don't think any of those cases you mentioned would have been better off if there were -more- people on the ship. If anything, having fewer people onboard due to automation would decrease the number of casualties, and reduce the amount of time until the ship was back in normal operation.
Why is there such universal agreement in regards to this "wisdom of the market" concept. Who says? Where is the definitive proof. i play on the Foresight Exchange (www.ideosphere.com) with everybody else and it's NOT always right.
The claim isn't that prediction markets are omniscient -- just that they're on average better than any of the alternatives.
2. Research in aviation(Oh those damned Wright brothers! Trying to get all these poor masses to fly in air. It will have no practical application! Flight will be of no use to mankind... it is all vanity.)
3. All works of art and literature, cinema etc.. (Entertaining the masses ? Who wants these poor folks to be entertained ? They are a pox on us, I tell you! Wanting your name to live on, after you are dead ? Vanity! It is all vanity, I tell you!).
4. Research in navigation and seafaring.(Bah! Trying to get all those poor teeming masses to float on water and go to some place farway. Discovering new searoutes and lands ? What for? Who cares about whether these damned undeserving poor folks go to this place called the New World and establish some country called America... or populate some place called Australia. America...bah! who needs it!)
Besides, say, the National Endowment for the Arts, how much are any of these things government-funded? The Wright Brothers certainly didn't get Federal money to build their plane.
The real problem with this mentality is that these are warships. Smaller crews are vastly less efficent at damage control and have much smaller margins for casualties before the ship ceases to be combat effective.
How many naval casualties have there been in the past 30-some years, particularly in France, the UK, and other Western nations? I can't find any data on it off-hand, but I get the impression that the number is quite small, particularly for aircraft carriers.
Robin Hanson (who worked on the Policy Analysis Market you describe) actually has a pretty neat research paper analyzing the media's reaction to the project. Here's the abstract:
Title: The Informed Press Favored the Policy Analysis Market
The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), otherwise known (inaccurately) as "terrorism
futures," burst into public view in a firestorm of condemnation on July 29, 2003,
and was canceled within one day. We look at the impression given of PAM by five
hundred media articles, and how that impression varied with eleven indicators of article
information quality: publication date, citing someone with firsthand knowledge, article
length, a news or an editorial style, author anonymity, and the awards, circulation,
frequency, and topic specialties of the periodical. All eleven indicators individually
predict more favorable impressions of PAM. In a multiple regression model, seven of
them remain clearly significant. This model predicts that a fifty word news article
in an award-winning widely-read science and business publication a month later that
mentioned an insider would give a solidly favorable impression of PAM, as would a
similar three hundred word article today in a general publication.
I'm going to short neoconservatism.
I'm not aware of anything that lets you short Neoconservatism itself, but you can short on, say, the chances of a Republican winning the 2008 US Election, using real money. It's currently at 50.1% over on Intrade.
I'm happy to finally see a slashdot story on prediction markets, like the one described in the article, as they're one of the neatest new concepts I've come across. They've shown themselves to be on average the most accurate way to predict future events, more accurate than, say, individual experts or opinion polls. Having people "put their money where their mouth is" greatly improves the quality of predictions.
If you've never seen a prediction market in action before, I highly recommend checking out the real-money Intrade market, or the virtual-money Foresight Exchange. At such markets you can get estimated probabities for almost any major event. Here's a few examples from Intrade:
* Sony Playstation 3 release before October 6: 33% chance
* Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic Presidential Nominee in 2008: 43.1%
* John McCain to be the Republican Presidential Nominee in 2008: 36.6%
* Osama Bin Laden to be captured/neutralised by 30 June 2006: 5.7%
* Donald Rumsfeld to announce his resignation on/before 31Dec2006: 18.5%
* Bird flu (H5N1) to be confirmed in the USA ON/BEFORE 31st December 2006: 70.0%
That said, I think the company described in the article can probably improve the way they handle their pay-offs. From the article:
At Rite-Solutions, the architecture of participation is both businesslike and playful. Fifty-five stocks are listed on the company's internal market, which is called Mutual Fun. Each stock comes with a detailed description -- called an expect-us, as opposed to a prospectus -- and begins trading at a price of $10. Every employee gets $10,000 in "opinion money" to allocate among the offerings, and employees signal their enthusiasm by investing in a stock and, better yet, volunteering to work on the project. Volunteers share in the proceeds, in the form of real money, if the stock becomes a product or delivers savings.
The wording in the article is a little ambiguous, but it seems that if you choose to bid on an idea which you "know" is good, and would be if it were selected as a product, if other people don't agree you lose your money. It would be better to have a system where if the stock isn't selected as a product, you get your money back. If the product is selected, you gain money if the product does well, and lose money if the product does poorly. This also adds an incentive for people to "short" popular ideas that they think are going to perform poorly.
Isn't that what Google already does, with their personal project time and whatnot?
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I'm not sure what personal-project time has to do with having an internal ideas market, but Google does coincidentally have an internal prediction market, which they described in their official blog last year. From the description:
At Google, we're constantly trying to find new ways to organize the world's information, including information relevant to our business. Building on the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and the Iowa Electronic Markets, a few Googlers (Doug Banks, Patri Friedman, Ilya Kirnos, Piaw Na and me, with some help from Hal Varian), set up a predictive market system inside the company.
The markets were designed to forecast product launch dates, new office openings, and many other things of strategic importance to Google. So far, more than a thousand Googlers have bid on 146 events in 43 different subject areas (no payment is required to play).
We designed the market so that the price of an event should, in theory, reflect a consensus probability that the event will occur. To determine accuracy of the market, we looked at the connection between prices of events and the frequency with which they actually occurred. If prices are correct, events priced at 10 cents should occur about 10 percent of the time.
We also found that the market prices gave decisive, informative predictions in the sense that their predictive power increased as time passed and uncertainty was resolved. When a market first opens there may be considerable uncertainty about what will eventually happen; but as time goes on, some outcomes became more likely than others. The market prices should reflect this phenomenon, with the implied probability distributions becoming more concentrated over time.
Our search engine works well because it aggregates information dispersed across the web, and our internal predictive markets are based on the same principle: Googlers from across the company contribute knowledge and opinions which are aggregated into a forecast by the market. Sometimes, just feeling lucky isn't enough, and these tools can help.
A related idea I had recently which I wanted to toss into the open...
Lately on slashdot we've been having a few stories about the (Snow Crash-like) Second Life virtual world, and its active virtual economy. Take this article from Wired:
Wired: Making a Living in Second Life
I think it would be quite interesting to try using Second Life's economy and scriptable world to create an in-game prediction market, similar to that described in the NYT article. Instead of using a purely reputation-based currency such a market could use the game's Linden Dollars, which can be exchanged with US dollars. The use of Linden Dollars would also help get around some of the anti-gambling laws one runs into when US dollars are involved. It seems that in-game scripts can communicate with external servers via email or XML-RPC, so one could probably have such an in-game script placing orders with a server running the open-source prediction market software like Foresight Exchange or Zocalo.
One might even imagine creating a Futarchy-like system, with bids made on decisions about how to make the market (or organization running the market) prosper in the Second Life world. That could be interesting. I've lately been musing a bit on how such a system might be a cute way to create a seed superintelligence, or more precisely, a self-improving collective intelligence.