On the other hand, there is no point in underestimating your own intelligence. Given how stupid the general population is, many of people have every justification to consider themselves special. In addition to that, if someone has few chances to meet those other smart people, for all practical purposes, he can think he's unique.
I teach in the university (financial management to 3rd year students) and I am pretty confident about a quarter of them are unable to pass any reasoning test. Some of them don't even know how to convert millions to thousands, how many 0s are there in 10 million, etc. When I read a book or see a program on Discovery about research on dolphin intelligence, I often doubt if those stupid^H^H^Hents (I honestly mistyped that first, BTW) will beat the dolphins.
Isn't there anything for US/international news like Public.Ru for Russian ones? A full-text searchable archive of all major magazines and newspapers with materials going back to early 1990s. With limited free anonymous access too... Wouldn't that be neat?
A hundred Ph.Ds and we have what from Google? A search engine. Pathetic... Just think of what these people could have done if dispersed over 10 companies working on 20 extremely innovative breakthrough products. And at Google they made a goddamn Javascript webmail and a calculator.
Compare that to Xerox Palo Alto labs mentioned in the article. I think that while Google may be a nice place to work, a hot stock and an overhyped company (do you know how many Internet users actually use Google or any other search engine for that matter? Let me tell you that it's a lot less than 100%), it is not a big innovator. Creating one product and incrementally improving it over time is not what I call very impressive. Any other tech company seems more important and more interesting to me - Sony, Microsoft, IBM or even nVidia - they matter much more than Google. Because they do a lot more.
Grey goo couldn't have evolved in nature for one simple reason - if it did, we would not exist. And it is entirely possible that grey goo is extremely simple to create and that there actually was a 99.999999% chance that it would evolve, but luckily didn't.
On a more serious note, any organism that destroys it's natural habitat very effectively is unfit to live. There are some creatures that can do it, when placed in unnatural environment - sheep, for example, but these are the exceptions. To evolve, grey goo would need to be preceded by thousands of generations of white and progressively darker goo, with each next generation being more efficient in destroying the environment it lives in - an evolutionary impossibility.
I disagree with you. If you are paid 100+ dollars and your computer stops working, you don't just continue working with some papers. You are pretty much disabled until the tech fixes the problem. Even when the error is fixed, the mysterious "flow" was interrupted. And even more often people will use this as an excuse to go to the cooler or get an extra cup of coffee. The printer doesn't print, the network is down, the Windows crashed. And if it needs anything more serious than a reboot, the work stops.
how do you run a world where every individual has the power to wipe out everyone else? How do you run a world where every individual has the power to wipe out pretty much anyone else? And we already live in such a world. I can kill nearly anyone, except for a few politicians and businessmen that waste too much money on bodyguards. So what? I don't really want to kill people (although I do find some pleasure in imagining such possibilities) and I understand the possible consequences.
It won't be different in the future. Most people will not want to harm many of their fellow humans, and many will be deterred by fear of retribution. Most of those who try will be stopped by some of the safeguards, and most of those who die will be resurrected by nanotechnology, restored from backups or brought back to life in other ways.
Of course, there will be some incident and some people will end up dead tomorrow, but quoting Morpheus, "how would that be different from any other day?"
Single deaths are probably, but that's not a reason to stop. Huge disasters are unlikely. If you can start grey goo, surely 10 billion superhumans and AIs can prevent it.
Thanks for an informative post. I just want to bring to your attention the fact that the average salary in Ukraine is less than 100$/month. Many people get by on less than 60$/month. Now if you were a single mother with two daughters with no prospects to find a decent job, wouldn't you consider employing your daughter if you know no abuse is going to happen (there have been a number of article in Ukrainian press and the majority of such photographers do not abuse the kids)? What little money they are paid, is a huge help for them.
You also ignore the fact that the hardcore material involves very few kids in total - much less (thousands of times) than there are kids abused by their fathers, stepfathers, uncles, older brothers, etc. And that most of the kids in hardcore porn are actually from the South-East Asia and are professional prostitutes. There are already whoring themselves - what additional harm does it make to be filmed for child porn?
Heck, I support child pornography - it is freedom of speech, self-expression and what not. Production of child porn doesn't necessarily harm kids, sex with aduls doesn't necessarily harm kids, and even if it does, the crime is not in distributing child porn or watching it - it's in exploiting children.
SUPPORT CHILD PORNOGRAPHY - OPPOSE CENSORSHIP ON THE NET!
There are simply no such thing as child porn sites. Plain and simple - they do not exist. Distribution of child porn is impossible for half a decade already. Any ISP would take down a child porn site in hours or even minutes - certainly it won't be online long enough to end up in filters. And there are simply no countries and no ISPs that would knowingly host child pornography. Any site that is public enough to be known by "child charities" (my hands twitch as I want to strangle those fuckers - each and every one of them) can be (and is) taken down in 15 minutes by an e-mail to abuse@example.com
I dare BT to open the filter to the public. I bet there won't be a single porn site there, only legal child erotica sites, discussion forums and paedophilia advocacy sites. Blocking these is not fighting child porn, blocking these is fucking censorship.
As a part of a crusade on censorship, please consider the following instructions on finding child porn on the Internet. Fire up your favourite P2P client and search for "r@ygold", "pthc", "Hussyfan" "Lolitaguy". Enjoy!
P.S. I am not defending child porn, I am opposing the use of it as a scarecrow to censor Internet access. Remember, first they came for the child pornographers... If you do not defend child pornographers, nobody will be there when THEY come after you.
A serial number in a random frame can be blotted out easily or the entire frame can be cut out by someone compressing the video stream to an mpeg or divx.
How about a serial number in the frame with the number equal to the serial? Then if somebody removes frame N you still know the N. And the only way to remove the mark reliably would be to remove many (all?) frames from the film.:)
Of course, this might be solved by using two source copies and comparing them, but then you might start placing many serial numbers in each copy in such a way that two random copies would share some of the serials (unique to this pair). That would mean a pirate won't notice them and you will know that the copy leaked from these two guys.
Unfortunately, by that time the film would probably be one giant watermark with a few frames of actual story.:)
It's a myth that PC games are difficult to setup. You can just buy a Windows PC in the store, turn it on, insert the game CD, click on "Install", click on newly added icon and start playing. This isn't much more difficult that setting up a console game. Of course, PC offers you a choice - you can tweak the hardware for extra performance, download mods,get the latest drivers and patches for new functions (thoughg often they are used just for bugfixing).
As for different gameplay, that's a good point, though the reasons are not technological, but rather related to form factors and tradition. Like you, I hope that this new Xbox will benefit both world - the world of PC gaming might really use some more social casual style.
You don't know how close you are. LG has a microwave oven called "i-@ble" (Russian site), which supposedly means something like "eatable". I mean, how retarded is that? What next, "i-@b1-e"? Can't they, I dunno, find a human word, like Trilobite or something?...
In my opinion, the best direction for interactive movies (stories/games) to follow is to provide interactivity inside the narrative. If there is a compelling story, let the author tell it, but let the viewer interact with the world, watch the story unfold as he likes it, etc. Imagine reliving Romeo & Juliette through the eyes of all main and some secondary characters. You will probably not need to move the story along by yourself (unless you really want to - the ability to do it would benefit replayability though), but to actively watch it.
While this might be true in some cases, I believe that extensive optimisation is actually forced - people do it because they know there is zero hope people will upgrade. You need to make your new game prettier, but the hardware is still the same. That's why you optimise A LOT.
But while optimisation can be useful, it can't make much difference if we are talking about already good code. For example, consider nVidia's Dawn demo. A simple OpenGL wrapper made it possible to run it just as well (or better) on totally different ATi hardware, despite the fact that the demo was SUPPOSED TO highlight the power of nVidia chip.
Direct3D is great for compatibility and performance. I have not seen any concrete proofs that Windows games suffer from diverse hardware. Yes, debugging and testing is a bitch, but it's pretty easy to achieve scalability and the hardware is similar enough (being designed now by only two companies for only two APIs) to make performance losses minimal (although there are things like the last controvercy over nVidia and ATi performance in Half-Life 2 that was caused by different precision used).
I think the point is that large dinos died instantly from the heat, but smaller ones died slowly (years, decades, millenia) because the environment changed.
I suggest you find some deep underground ecosystem that thrives on some underground hot spring. 100 meters of rock above your head would protect you from the impact (unless you are so unlucky as to chose the place under the impact point) and the insects, worms, spiders and other ugly creatures would provide food after everybody and everything on the surface dies from heat and radiation.
You can buy a $400 gaming machine that would run most of Window games at max settings. You don't need to spend $2000 for that, especially if you don't care about extras like DVD-R or a good monitor (add a switch and use the Mac one).
At first it was because the PC was in its infancy and had practically zero graphics capabilities (and then Carmack wrote Commander Keen). Then it was because consoles had semi-powerful graphics chips and PC had nothing. But after PCs got Voodoo, the consoles advantage was mostly because they output to low-res TV.
There is simply no way XBox Next or PS3 can beat PCs at 3D graphics, unless they simply choose to use several hi-end standard nVidia or ATi cards in some custom setup. If both the console and the PC output to precisely the same screen, how can consoles be more powerful? Will they have a better graphics chip? And why wouldn't ATi (the provider of graphics for both Nintendo and MS XBox) use it for a PC graphics card?
The dominance of consoles in the graphics department is over. They simply don't have anything left for them other than the form factor (and more rigorous Q&A).
I've been once at Ruschlikon, Swiss Re's thinking department. In 2002 they organised a nice program for ISC-Symposium participants, which was largely concerned with forecasting technological/societal changes to do exactly what the report is about - warn Swiss Re clients (insurance companies) about new risks. Of course, a day visit is not enough to be immersed into their organisational culture, but from my experience there the researchers/managers/insurers in Ruschlikon didn't quite appear capable of making any non-trivial observations about the future.
So if you are considering reading that 57-page report, don't expect to see anything new or terribly important there. Most likely there is nothing you wouldn't already know from regularly reading Slashdot.:)
Well, it turns out you are wrong. The judge decided that it matters how obvious it seems in hindsight. I ruled that the original idea was simple and obvious and thus the patent is invalid.
This is true in other cases. Even if you are the first one to think of something, you can't get a patent (or can, but it will be overturned) if your idea is obvious. And of course, your suggested criteria is fatally flawed - in modern climate people patent everything that has a shred of originality, regardless of how obvious it is.
And Moore does admit that he is quite well off and even uses this fact as an argument for sharing his films over the Internet. As for the independent verification, yes it does bother me a bit. Moore is not perfect and I would appreciate a 100% honest person capable of presenting a balanced picture from a neutral position. This, unfortunately, is not possible at the moment, so we have to settle for the next best thing - a biased Moore who is a bit too creative with his facts.
I've read some of the articles on this topis (the original, the critique and the response). It appears that the analysis of Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman was valid and clearly much better than that of previous CSA researchers. The healthy sample (college kids) was selected specifically to remove other factors from play (poor people are more likely to be mentally unstable and stuff), CSA definition they used was the one accepted at that time (and now), but they specifically commented on how it should be change (after asked to do so by their reviewer) and proposed a modified construct of CSA. As for misreporting and failure to correct blah, I don't know the details, but I am ready to trust the judgement of reviewers and of American Association for the Advancement of Science that reviewed the paper again (at the request of APA) after the controversy ensued and found no faults in methodology and analysis.
Check out http://www.tmd.ac.jp/artsci/engl/tromovitch-e.htm for the list of papers by Tromovitch. You can then find most of them online and read. So far I am convinced by their research more than by irrational attacks of their opponents. For the time being I believe the available evidence points towards no significant long-term damage from CSA to boys.
The APA, which initially defended our publication as a "good study," eventually submitted to pressure and made concessions to the conservative congressmen and psychotherapists who were so angry. Raymond Fowler, the APA's chief executive officer, indicated to us that he had no alternative, because he was "in hand-to-hand combat with congressmen, talk show hosts, the Christian Right and the American Psychiatric Association." And so the APA issued a statement condemning child sexual abuse (as if we had endorsed it!), disavowing the article, and promising that it would be re-reviewed by another scientific organization...
And, indeed, our study was re-reviewed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), America's largest science organization. The panel found no fault with our methods or analyses, but reported that they did have "grave concerns" with how our article was politicized and misrepresented by our critics, whom they rebuked for violating public trust by disseminating inaccurate information. Our critics, who were expecting the AAAS to denounce our study, were notably silent.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, there is no point in underestimating your own intelligence. Given how stupid the general population is, many of people have every justification to consider themselves special. In addition to that, if someone has few chances to meet those other smart people, for all practical purposes, he can think he's unique.
I teach in the university (financial management to 3rd year students) and I am pretty confident about a quarter of them are unable to pass any reasoning test. Some of them don't even know how to convert millions to thousands, how many 0s are there in 10 million, etc. When I read a book or see a program on Discovery about research on dolphin intelligence, I often doubt if those stupid^H^H^Hents (I honestly mistyped that first, BTW) will beat the dolphins.
Isn't there anything for US/international news like Public.Ru for Russian ones? A full-text searchable archive of all major magazines and newspapers with materials going back to early 1990s. With limited free anonymous access too... Wouldn't that be neat?
A hundred Ph.Ds and we have what from Google? A search engine. Pathetic... Just think of what these people could have done if dispersed over 10 companies working on 20 extremely innovative breakthrough products. And at Google they made a goddamn Javascript webmail and a calculator.
Compare that to Xerox Palo Alto labs mentioned in the article. I think that while Google may be a nice place to work, a hot stock and an overhyped company (do you know how many Internet users actually use Google or any other search engine for that matter? Let me tell you that it's a lot less than 100%), it is not a big innovator. Creating one product and incrementally improving it over time is not what I call very impressive. Any other tech company seems more important and more interesting to me - Sony, Microsoft, IBM or even nVidia - they matter much more than Google. Because they do a lot more.
Grey goo couldn't have evolved in nature for one simple reason - if it did, we would not exist. And it is entirely possible that grey goo is extremely simple to create and that there actually was a 99.999999% chance that it would evolve, but luckily didn't.
On a more serious note, any organism that destroys it's natural habitat very effectively is unfit to live. There are some creatures that can do it, when placed in unnatural environment - sheep, for example, but these are the exceptions. To evolve, grey goo would need to be preceded by thousands of generations of white and progressively darker goo, with each next generation being more efficient in destroying the environment it lives in - an evolutionary impossibility.
Because most likely the content of these sites is legal - it's not child porn, it's either forums, erotic materials, porn stories, etc.
I disagree with you. If you are paid 100+ dollars and your computer stops working, you don't just continue working with some papers. You are pretty much disabled until the tech fixes the problem. Even when the error is fixed, the mysterious "flow" was interrupted. And even more often people will use this as an excuse to go to the cooler or get an extra cup of coffee. The printer doesn't print, the network is down, the Windows crashed. And if it needs anything more serious than a reboot, the work stops.
how do you run a world where every individual has the power to wipe out everyone else?
How do you run a world where every individual has the power to wipe out pretty much anyone else? And we already live in such a world. I can kill nearly anyone, except for a few politicians and businessmen that waste too much money on bodyguards. So what? I don't really want to kill people (although I do find some pleasure in imagining such possibilities) and I understand the possible consequences.
It won't be different in the future. Most people will not want to harm many of their fellow humans, and many will be deterred by fear of retribution. Most of those who try will be stopped by some of the safeguards, and most of those who die will be resurrected by nanotechnology, restored from backups or brought back to life in other ways.
Of course, there will be some incident and some people will end up dead tomorrow, but quoting Morpheus, "how would that be different from any other day?"
Single deaths are probably, but that's not a reason to stop. Huge disasters are unlikely. If you can start grey goo, surely 10 billion superhumans and AIs can prevent it.
Thanks for an informative post. I just want to bring to your attention the fact that the average salary in Ukraine is less than 100$/month. Many people get by on less than 60$/month. Now if you were a single mother with two daughters with no prospects to find a decent job, wouldn't you consider employing your daughter if you know no abuse is going to happen (there have been a number of article in Ukrainian press and the majority of such photographers do not abuse the kids)? What little money they are paid, is a huge help for them.
You also ignore the fact that the hardcore material involves very few kids in total - much less (thousands of times) than there are kids abused by their fathers, stepfathers, uncles, older brothers, etc. And that most of the kids in hardcore porn are actually from the South-East Asia and are professional prostitutes. There are already whoring themselves - what additional harm does it make to be filmed for child porn?
Heck, I support child pornography - it is freedom of speech, self-expression and what not. Production of child porn doesn't necessarily harm kids, sex with aduls doesn't necessarily harm kids, and even if it does, the crime is not in distributing child porn or watching it - it's in exploiting children.
SUPPORT CHILD PORNOGRAPHY - OPPOSE CENSORSHIP ON THE NET!
There are simply no such thing as child porn sites. Plain and simple - they do not exist. Distribution of child porn is impossible for half a decade already. Any ISP would take down a child porn site in hours or even minutes - certainly it won't be online long enough to end up in filters. And there are simply no countries and no ISPs that would knowingly host child pornography. Any site that is public enough to be known by "child charities" (my hands twitch as I want to strangle those fuckers - each and every one of them) can be (and is) taken down in 15 minutes by an e-mail to abuse@example.com
I dare BT to open the filter to the public. I bet there won't be a single porn site there, only legal child erotica sites, discussion forums and paedophilia advocacy sites. Blocking these is not fighting child porn, blocking these is fucking censorship.
As a part of a crusade on censorship, please consider the following instructions on finding child porn on the Internet. Fire up your favourite P2P client and search for "r@ygold", "pthc", "Hussyfan" "Lolitaguy". Enjoy!
P.S. I am not defending child porn, I am opposing the use of it as a scarecrow to censor Internet access. Remember, first they came for the child pornographers... If you do not defend child pornographers, nobody will be there when THEY come after you.
OPPOSE NAZI BRITISH TELECOM!
A serial number in a random frame can be blotted out easily or the entire frame can be cut out by someone compressing the video stream to an mpeg or divx.
:)
:)
How about a serial number in the frame with the number equal to the serial? Then if somebody removes frame N you still know the N. And the only way to remove the mark reliably would be to remove many (all?) frames from the film.
Of course, this might be solved by using two source copies and comparing them, but then you might start placing many serial numbers in each copy in such a way that two random copies would share some of the serials (unique to this pair). That would mean a pirate won't notice them and you will know that the copy leaked from these two guys.
Unfortunately, by that time the film would probably be one giant watermark with a few frames of actual story.
It's a myth that PC games are difficult to setup. You can just buy a Windows PC in the store, turn it on, insert the game CD, click on "Install", click on newly added icon and start playing. This isn't much more difficult that setting up a console game. Of course, PC offers you a choice - you can tweak the hardware for extra performance, download mods,get the latest drivers and patches for new functions (thoughg often they are used just for bugfixing).
As for different gameplay, that's a good point, though the reasons are not technological, but rather related to form factors and tradition. Like you, I hope that this new Xbox will benefit both world - the world of PC gaming might really use some more social casual style.
You don't know how close you are. LG has a microwave oven called "i-@ble" (Russian site), which supposedly means something like "eatable". I mean, how retarded is that? What next, "i-@b1-e"? Can't they, I dunno, find a human word, like Trilobite or something?...
In my opinion, the best direction for interactive movies (stories/games) to follow is to provide interactivity inside the narrative. If there is a compelling story, let the author tell it, but let the viewer interact with the world, watch the story unfold as he likes it, etc. Imagine reliving Romeo & Juliette through the eyes of all main and some secondary characters. You will probably not need to move the story along by yourself (unless you really want to - the ability to do it would benefit replayability though), but to actively watch it.
While this might be true in some cases, I believe that extensive optimisation is actually forced - people do it because they know there is zero hope people will upgrade. You need to make your new game prettier, but the hardware is still the same. That's why you optimise A LOT.
But while optimisation can be useful, it can't make much difference if we are talking about already good code. For example, consider nVidia's Dawn demo. A simple OpenGL wrapper made it possible to run it just as well (or better) on totally different ATi hardware, despite the fact that the demo was SUPPOSED TO highlight the power of nVidia chip.
Direct3D is great for compatibility and performance. I have not seen any concrete proofs that Windows games suffer from diverse hardware. Yes, debugging and testing is a bitch, but it's pretty easy to achieve scalability and the hardware is similar enough (being designed now by only two companies for only two APIs) to make performance losses minimal (although there are things like the last controvercy over nVidia and ATi performance in Half-Life 2 that was caused by different precision used).
I think the point is that large dinos died instantly from the heat, but smaller ones died slowly (years, decades, millenia) because the environment changed.
I suggest you find some deep underground ecosystem that thrives on some underground hot spring. 100 meters of rock above your head would protect you from the impact (unless you are so unlucky as to chose the place under the impact point) and the insects, worms, spiders and other ugly creatures would provide food after everybody and everything on the surface dies from heat and radiation.
You can buy a $400 gaming machine that would run most of Window games at max settings. You don't need to spend $2000 for that, especially if you don't care about extras like DVD-R or a good monitor (add a switch and use the Mac one).
At first it was because the PC was in its infancy and had practically zero graphics capabilities (and then Carmack wrote Commander Keen). Then it was because consoles had semi-powerful graphics chips and PC had nothing. But after PCs got Voodoo, the consoles advantage was mostly because they output to low-res TV.
There is simply no way XBox Next or PS3 can beat PCs at 3D graphics, unless they simply choose to use several hi-end standard nVidia or ATi cards in some custom setup. If both the console and the PC output to precisely the same screen, how can consoles be more powerful? Will they have a better graphics chip? And why wouldn't ATi (the provider of graphics for both Nintendo and MS XBox) use it for a PC graphics card?
The dominance of consoles in the graphics department is over. They simply don't have anything left for them other than the form factor (and more rigorous Q&A).
I've been once at Ruschlikon, Swiss Re's thinking department. In 2002 they organised a nice program for ISC-Symposium participants, which was largely concerned with forecasting technological/societal changes to do exactly what the report is about - warn Swiss Re clients (insurance companies) about new risks. Of course, a day visit is not enough to be immersed into their organisational culture, but from my experience there the researchers/managers/insurers in Ruschlikon didn't quite appear capable of making any non-trivial observations about the future.
:)
So if you are considering reading that 57-page report, don't expect to see anything new or terribly important there. Most likely there is nothing you wouldn't already know from regularly reading Slashdot.
Well, it turns out you are wrong. The judge decided that it matters how obvious it seems in hindsight. I ruled that the original idea was simple and obvious and thus the patent is invalid.
This is true in other cases. Even if you are the first one to think of something, you can't get a patent (or can, but it will be overturned) if your idea is obvious. And of course, your suggested criteria is fatally flawed - in modern climate people patent everything that has a shred of originality, regardless of how obvious it is.
And Moore does admit that he is quite well off and even uses this fact as an argument for sharing his films over the Internet. As for the independent verification, yes it does bother me a bit. Moore is not perfect and I would appreciate a 100% honest person capable of presenting a balanced picture from a neutral position. This, unfortunately, is not possible at the moment, so we have to settle for the next best thing - a biased Moore who is a bit too creative with his facts.
I've read some of the articles on this topis (the original, the critique and the response). It appears that the analysis of Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman was valid and clearly much better than that of previous CSA researchers. The healthy sample (college kids) was selected specifically to remove other factors from play (poor people are more likely to be mentally unstable and stuff), CSA definition they used was the one accepted at that time (and now), but they specifically commented on how it should be change (after asked to do so by their reviewer) and proposed a modified construct of CSA. As for misreporting and failure to correct blah, I don't know the details, but I am ready to trust the judgement of reviewers and of American Association for the Advancement of Science that reviewed the paper again (at the request of APA) after the controversy ensued and found no faults in methodology and analysis.
Check out http://www.tmd.ac.jp/artsci/engl/tromovitch-e.htm for the list of papers by Tromovitch. You can then find most of them online and read. So far I am convinced by their research more than by irrational attacks of their opponents. For the time being I believe the available evidence points towards no significant long-term damage from CSA to boys.
How is that "debunked"?