Do you leave up something almost universally-prurient because somebody out there might find it educational?
Yes! This! You lighten up about OMG NAKED BODIES because prurience is no reason to delete it! Obviously depictions of (actual, not artwork) child molestation, etc., should be removed as violations of law just about everywhere and specifically in the hosting countries. But for voluntarily portrayed, copyright-clean instances featuring consensual participants in legal acts, the mere fact that it's porn shouldn't be grounds for removing it from Wikimedia. If you've got a lot of stuff that's on the server but not referenced in any article, you might remove it as a trim to save space (WM is not Picasa). But imposing these sorts of uptight cultural standards is entirely contradictory to the spirit of a participatory medium dedicated to freedom of knowledge and information.
Not only that -- the phrase "too much unnecessary porn" implies that there is an appropriate, non-zero amount of unnecessary pornography that should be hosted on Wikimedia servers.
If it ends up being broken because of DRM, why not buy the game so the developers get their cut and then download the cracked version?
Because it encourages the use of this DRM in the future. Why would I pay someone to release a deliberately crippled product? If Civ V does require a live-connection DRM system, I will be sending Firaxis a letter detailing exactly why I won't be buying the next release in a series I greatly love.
Not quite -- an Arizona license will suffice. An out-of-state one wouldn't be construed as proof of citizenship. (Nor should it be, since driver's licenses are appropriately issued to non-citizens.)
...of course they want to leave people in an indefinite illegal status. Legal citizens have a much easier time enforcing their rights in re: wages and workplace standards. Illegal immigrants are far, far easier to exploit.
So stop supporting IE6. If that doesn't work -- if your stuff *needs* to work in IE6 -- then you should be able to appreciate why I need to keep it around, too.
I don't come up with standards for my employer. That wouldn't even be my division, even if I had the authority, and I do encourage two-browser installs as much as possible. But since you can't have a Legacy IE6 installed alongside an IE7, and users tend to surf the web with whatever's lying around, we're both up a creek.
No, it's equivalent to saying "We need to run mission-critical software that won't run on higher versions of IE."
I've actually had to go around uninstalling IE 7 and 8 from user machines and re-installing IE 6 because the users have to run IE6-only software, or the vendor's IE7 installer doesn't work, or there are bugs in the IE 7 version, etc. etc. Sure, I'd love to get rid of the vendor -- you think that's easy?
Of course, I also encourage people to do any *ahem* personal browsing in Firefox anyway, but IE6 isn't going to go away until we don't need it. If the web-designer artistes out there want to complain about cross-browser compatibility, they can either bite me, or come down and do my users' jobs for them.
user cluelessness about how to make use of high resolution displays. What you want to do is configure your system to display things larger.
What arrogance.
No, what I want to do is have things appear at a reasonable size. My options for doing that appear to be:
1) Spend $1000 for a huge, high-resolution display, which displays resolution substantially finer than the top range of HD TVs, certainly much more detailed than anything I ever actually look at -- and then make everything bigger anyway -- or - 2) Use my $200 screen at its native resolution, acknowledge that a bigger one wouldn't fit on my desk, and have essentially the same viewing experience.
Oh please -- you wouldn't be imprisoned for erroneously collecting a tax.
What they're doing isn't on shaky ground at all, because they aren't taxing the act of commerce. They're taxing you owning and using something inside the state. It doesn't matter if you bought it, stole it, or found it; when you brought it into the state as your property, you became subject to paying the tax on its value (which the state might choose to waive if you already paid a use tax in another jurisdiction).
This is no more a law regulating interstate commerce than a law requiring certain fuel additives would be, or a law banning smoking in certain public places.
I am unaware of any clause in the Constitution that says you are allowed to evade state taxes due to bookkeeping errors. In fact, I can think of at least one section that says the opposite.
...I'm not sure what the point you're making is, unless you're just arguing that much online retail is unsustainable from a pure price perspective.
That might be true, but I think it's only true for goods that are strongly commodities. For the most part, if I shop online, it's because I know I can actually find what I'm looking for there, which I can't do if I buy in a store. A company that can afford to offer unique selection can charge higher prices, since hey, you can't get it somewhere else.
What you're basically saying is that Amazon with its variety, or a t-shirt vendor with its unique designs, can run a profitable web business, while pets.com, selling gravel over the internet, can't. It's a good reminder, but it shouldn't be surprising.
...depends. When it's all over the internet, it's not exactly a minor mishap. And if that company's going to pay me $60k more than the competition, then yes sir, yes I do!
Um, keep in mind we're in the middle of a massive economic crisis. Budgets that were decided back when the coffers looked to be full are suddenly irresponsible, because the state was counting on a bunch of tax revenue that it won't get now, and because the Feds aren't sending as much money to the state as they would have in better times (two years ago).
This will right itself. It'll just suck for a couple years. It wouldn't be so bad if the state government could deficit-spend for a while -- now'd be a great time to make some jobs while paying below-boom-time-market rates to fix those roads and bridges -- but the world is what it is...
It sounds like you had the luxury of a course in which you were actually expected to learn something, rather than being dumped in a weed-out class in which half to three-quarters of the students are expected to fail so they won't bother the rest of the department later.
Hahaha... my representative cares what I think. That's cute!
No, really. I'm a distinct racial minority in my district (which is dominated by racialized politics). I don't have the money to be making donations large enough to be listened to. And while I'm one of the few who is actually capable of writing an action memo that a legislative aide would read (I interned in the Senate), solutions don't usually come from people who don't see that there's a problem. Which, in this case, as far as the status quo is concerned, I don't.
At this point, *my* best move would be to donate to the EFF, as they're the ones actually representing my interests, with sufficient clout to do something about it. And that is exactly what I intend to do.
It's interesting, when you talk about mechanically-assisted sports. Time-sensitivity and pressure levels may also play a role. I was reading an article in a popular science magazine (I think it was Discover) some years back that talked about testing that was done on Formula 1 and other competitive racing drivers. Surprisingly, they had heart-rate/cardiovascular capacity alterations that were very similar to those of more physical professional athletes. Since you don't need to work out a lot to drive a car, my guess is that the body actually responds to the physical stress of high competition by enhancing cardiovascular performance.
In that sense, anything that requires that level of competitive stress, under time sensitivity, is likely to be sport-like.
Personally, my definition of game vs. sport is that in a game, participants' capabilities are limited entirely by the rules (and creativity). In sports, rules limit the game, but so does individual physical capacity. In games, there are no strategies which are in agreement with the rules but which many people physically cannot execute. In sports, there are legal plays which some people can make and others can't, based on the individual.
This is why e-sports folks are obsessed with the more boring aspects of computer gaming, the ones that are based on physical capability that varies from person to person. Things like micromanagement and actions-per-second. That's why that StarCraft team was making a mod for SCII to remove a lot of the automation features and make it more SCI-like; they realized that once you automate away the tedious and demanding process of clicking on a bunch of stuff accurately and tabbing back to different views, etc., what's left is more of a game than a sport, and it becomes limited by rules more than individual capacity.
I consider this a position that requires evidence. You have not provided any.
You're welcome to think that, but as I said, it's a prediction. If I tell you I think it's going to rain tomorrow, what evidence could there possibly be to support that assertion? Either it does or it doesn't. If you disagree, make a strong AI using current computational and programming models...
However since nature has done it in that humans are evolved creatures the notion that humans cant is absurd.
Explain. Why is it absurd to think that there are limits to human capability? There are all kinds of things that humans have never done and likely will never do.
By demanding that an AI respond in a manner we would recognise as love you have defined an output function which is computable and finite by definition.
At this point you're just restating your premise (i.e. that everything is by definition computable). What exactly does it mean to compute love as a result? What objective-but-not-brain-bound definition do we have for love as an output state? You're instead evoking a subjective perception ("we would recognize as love") as the standard, which seems inappropriate, given that different people will disagree on what constitutes love. You also appear to be relying on a functionalist interpretation of mind, which is a position I find inadequate. I know you reject the notion of qualia (and yet I'm guessing you have them, and that everyone you know will assert that they do too)... but I would argue that when asking whether a computer can love, it is less important that we believe it does, and more important that it believe it does. IE a mind's subjective experience of its existence is a necessary condition for a mind to exist. Obviously that raises an underlying problem, which is how can we assign credibility to a claim that a machine believes something. We can do that pretty easily for people because we know from personal experience that beliefs, feelings, etc. are an expected product of certain neurological structures (the brain), but I don't know that I'd write the same pass for claims made by inorganic constructs. I would be willing to accept the claim eventually, but I'd want a bit more evidence than SmarterChild telling me I'd hurt its feelings. [I'd want to see it react spontaneously to unexpected stimuli in a way consistent with it having feelings, and I'd want to see those feelings (as evidenced by reactions) in a variety of circumstances to show at least human-level consistency of emotional response. But I digress.]
As far as algorithmicity goes, at this point you're essentially saying that "algorithm" is a synonym for "process." I view this as a poor definition, but I respect your right to disagree.
Regarding what is required for minds, again, I view this as a prediction, rather than a provable canonical statement. Call it a hypothesis: "I predict that the following are essential to the development of human-like minds: needs, ability to act to meet them, ability to perceive an objective reality, a unitary locus of perception, and a collection of historical experiences." At present I am not sure how to even begin falsifying this claim, except perhaps (for some parts of it) doing something horrible like raising a child in a sensory-deprivation box, or replacing its senses with an artificial perspective from somewhere else, ideally one over which it has no control. As we know of (or have documented the historical existence of) over ten billion minds, all of them human*, humans seem like the obvious experimental choice, but I'm sure you appreciate the difficulties.
* or other sentient mammal, if your definition of mind swings that way, but that's again a whole host of issues & we cannot have the same direct empathy for an elephant as we can a person...
I mean, I think ultimately the problem lies with the corporations. But when they control the legal system, are there any legal means to check their power? That's the quandary.
Education is a start, but don't be too hard on the masses. Sure, the media love to distract us with Tiger Woods' love life, but a whole lot of people in the country are more concerned with their mortgages being under water than with the terms of some copyright treaty. I wish they shared our priorities too, but that's the way of things.
Regarding the federal administration, a lot of that is strongly shaped by the Presidency & who the prez picks to head up the various organizations. So there is that lever, but there's usually not a whole lot of nuance to the choices on offer (with a two-party, winner-take-all system, and both parties perfectly content with the current level of corporate involvement in government, no President is going to save us).
Within the system, I don't know what would do it beyond major grassroots campaigning for non-mainstream candidates. But it's tough to get people behind that, too, since "everybody knows" that those candidates don't stand a chance. (And to be fair, there's no guarantee that they'll stick to their principles while in office).
Typically when you look at what actually happens, rather than the rhetoric, term limits tend to increase corporate power in government (see e.g. here). Basically, your average citizen doesn't know what's going on with the government. Government is a very complicated piece of work, and if you pull out all the people who know how to operate it, the only people left who can make it go are the vendors' marketing departments and whoever has the tech support contract -- i.e. the lobbyists and corporate representatives become the only "voice of reason" or institutional memory. You can imagine what happens when you entrust corporate-types with that role. And new "citizen politicians" are much less savvy about the corporate flacks; they haven't seen it all before, so they aren't as on their guard against shenanigans.
It feels viscerally right to just "throw the bums out," but government accountability takes a scalpel, not a hatchet.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you leave up something almost universally-prurient because somebody out there might find it educational?
Yes! This! You lighten up about OMG NAKED BODIES because prurience is no reason to delete it!
Obviously depictions of (actual, not artwork) child molestation, etc., should be removed as violations of law just about everywhere and specifically in the hosting countries. But for voluntarily portrayed, copyright-clean instances featuring consensual participants in legal acts, the mere fact that it's porn shouldn't be grounds for removing it from Wikimedia. If you've got a lot of stuff that's on the server but not referenced in any article, you might remove it as a trim to save space (WM is not Picasa). But imposing these sorts of uptight cultural standards is entirely contradictory to the spirit of a participatory medium dedicated to freedom of knowledge and information.
Not only that -- the phrase "too much unnecessary porn" implies that there is an appropriate, non-zero amount of unnecessary pornography that should be hosted on Wikimedia servers.
If it ends up being broken because of DRM, why not buy the game so the developers get their cut and then download the cracked version?
Because it encourages the use of this DRM in the future. Why would I pay someone to release a deliberately crippled product? If Civ V does require a live-connection DRM system, I will be sending Firaxis a letter detailing exactly why I won't be buying the next release in a series I greatly love.
Not statistically relevant. See analysis at her site.
Showing a drivers license will suffice.
Not quite -- an Arizona license will suffice. An out-of-state one wouldn't be construed as proof of citizenship. (Nor should it be, since driver's licenses are appropriately issued to non-citizens.)
Your Arizona license. If you're in town from New Mexico, that might be a problem for you.
...of course they want to leave people in an indefinite illegal status.
Legal citizens have a much easier time enforcing their rights in re: wages and workplace standards. Illegal immigrants are far, far easier to exploit.
So stop supporting IE6. If that doesn't work -- if your stuff *needs* to work in IE6 -- then you should be able to appreciate why I need to keep it around, too.
I don't come up with standards for my employer. That wouldn't even be my division, even if I had the authority, and I do encourage two-browser installs as much as possible. But since you can't have a Legacy IE6 installed alongside an IE7, and users tend to surf the web with whatever's lying around, we're both up a creek.
No, it's equivalent to saying "We need to run mission-critical software that won't run on higher versions of IE."
I've actually had to go around uninstalling IE 7 and 8 from user machines and re-installing IE 6 because the users have to run IE6-only software, or the vendor's IE7 installer doesn't work, or there are bugs in the IE 7 version, etc. etc. Sure, I'd love to get rid of the vendor -- you think that's easy?
Of course, I also encourage people to do any *ahem* personal browsing in Firefox anyway, but IE6 isn't going to go away until we don't need it. If the web-designer artistes out there want to complain about cross-browser compatibility, they can either bite me, or come down and do my users' jobs for them.
user cluelessness about how to make use of high resolution displays. What you want to do is configure your system to display things larger.
What arrogance.
No, what I want to do is have things appear at a reasonable size. My options for doing that appear to be:
1) Spend $1000 for a huge, high-resolution display, which displays resolution substantially finer than the top range of HD TVs, certainly much more detailed than anything I ever actually look at -- and then make everything bigger anyway --
or -
2) Use my $200 screen at its native resolution, acknowledge that a bigger one wouldn't fit on my desk, and have essentially the same viewing experience.
So saving myself $800 is cluelessness now?
Oh please -- you wouldn't be imprisoned for erroneously collecting a tax.
What they're doing isn't on shaky ground at all, because they aren't taxing the act of commerce. They're taxing you owning and using something inside the state. It doesn't matter if you bought it, stole it, or found it; when you brought it into the state as your property, you became subject to paying the tax on its value (which the state might choose to waive if you already paid a use tax in another jurisdiction).
This is no more a law regulating interstate commerce than a law requiring certain fuel additives would be, or a law banning smoking in certain public places.
I am unaware of any clause in the Constitution that says you are allowed to evade state taxes due to bookkeeping errors. In fact, I can think of at least one section that says the opposite.
...I'm not sure what the point you're making is, unless you're just arguing that much online retail is unsustainable from a pure price perspective.
That might be true, but I think it's only true for goods that are strongly commodities. For the most part, if I shop online, it's because I know I can actually find what I'm looking for there, which I can't do if I buy in a store. A company that can afford to offer unique selection can charge higher prices, since hey, you can't get it somewhere else.
What you're basically saying is that Amazon with its variety, or a t-shirt vendor with its unique designs, can run a profitable web business, while pets.com, selling gravel over the internet, can't. It's a good reminder, but it shouldn't be surprising.
...depends. When it's all over the internet, it's not exactly a minor mishap. And if that company's going to pay me $60k more than the competition, then yes sir, yes I do!
Um, keep in mind we're in the middle of a massive economic crisis. Budgets that were decided back when the coffers looked to be full are suddenly irresponsible, because the state was counting on a bunch of tax revenue that it won't get now, and because the Feds aren't sending as much money to the state as they would have in better times (two years ago).
This will right itself. It'll just suck for a couple years. It wouldn't be so bad if the state government could deficit-spend for a while -- now'd be a great time to make some jobs while paying below-boom-time-market rates to fix those roads and bridges -- but the world is what it is...
It sounds like you had the luxury of a course in which you were actually expected to learn something, rather than being dumped in a weed-out class in which half to three-quarters of the students are expected to fail so they won't bother the rest of the department later.
Hahaha... my representative cares what I think. That's cute!
No, really. I'm a distinct racial minority in my district (which is dominated by racialized politics). I don't have the money to be making donations large enough to be listened to. And while I'm one of the few who is actually capable of writing an action memo that a legislative aide would read (I interned in the Senate), solutions don't usually come from people who don't see that there's a problem. Which, in this case, as far as the status quo is concerned, I don't.
At this point, *my* best move would be to donate to the EFF, as they're the ones actually representing my interests, with sufficient clout to do something about it. And that is exactly what I intend to do.
Look, the reality is that the U.S. economy currently depends almost exclusively on shenanigans in the high-finance industry.
There. That's better. cf. here..
Hollywood can go hang for as much as it'll do to the economy.
And remember we're only seeing what EFF want us to see - they're hardly going to present the most unbiased view.
Well, sure. But I'm not worried about what'll happen if their agenda becomes reality.
It's interesting, when you talk about mechanically-assisted sports. Time-sensitivity and pressure levels may also play a role. I was reading an article in a popular science magazine (I think it was Discover) some years back that talked about testing that was done on Formula 1 and other competitive racing drivers. Surprisingly, they had heart-rate/cardiovascular capacity alterations that were very similar to those of more physical professional athletes. Since you don't need to work out a lot to drive a car, my guess is that the body actually responds to the physical stress of high competition by enhancing cardiovascular performance.
In that sense, anything that requires that level of competitive stress, under time sensitivity, is likely to be sport-like.
Personally, my definition of game vs. sport is that in a game, participants' capabilities are limited entirely by the rules (and creativity). In sports, rules limit the game, but so does individual physical capacity. In games, there are no strategies which are in agreement with the rules but which many people physically cannot execute. In sports, there are legal plays which some people can make and others can't, based on the individual.
This is why e-sports folks are obsessed with the more boring aspects of computer gaming, the ones that are based on physical capability that varies from person to person. Things like micromanagement and actions-per-second. That's why that StarCraft team was making a mod for SCII to remove a lot of the automation features and make it more SCI-like; they realized that once you automate away the tedious and demanding process of clicking on a bunch of stuff accurately and tabbing back to different views, etc., what's left is more of a game than a sport, and it becomes limited by rules more than individual capacity.
They don't, which is as it should be.
I consider this a position that requires evidence. You have not provided any.
You're welcome to think that, but as I said, it's a prediction. If I tell you I think it's going to rain tomorrow, what evidence could there possibly be to support that assertion? Either it does or it doesn't. If you disagree, make a strong AI using current computational and programming models...
However since nature has done it in that humans are evolved creatures the notion that humans cant is absurd.
Explain. Why is it absurd to think that there are limits to human capability? There are all kinds of things that humans have never done and likely will never do.
By demanding that an AI respond in a manner we would recognise as love you have defined an output function which is computable and finite by definition.
At this point you're just restating your premise (i.e. that everything is by definition computable). What exactly does it mean to compute love as a result? What objective-but-not-brain-bound definition do we have for love as an output state? You're instead evoking a subjective perception ("we would recognize as love") as the standard, which seems inappropriate, given that different people will disagree on what constitutes love.
You also appear to be relying on a functionalist interpretation of mind, which is a position I find inadequate. I know you reject the notion of qualia (and yet I'm guessing you have them, and that everyone you know will assert that they do too)... but I would argue that when asking whether a computer can love, it is less important that we believe it does, and more important that it believe it does. IE a mind's subjective experience of its existence is a necessary condition for a mind to exist. Obviously that raises an underlying problem, which is how can we assign credibility to a claim that a machine believes something. We can do that pretty easily for people because we know from personal experience that beliefs, feelings, etc. are an expected product of certain neurological structures (the brain), but I don't know that I'd write the same pass for claims made by inorganic constructs. I would be willing to accept the claim eventually, but I'd want a bit more evidence than SmarterChild telling me I'd hurt its feelings. [I'd want to see it react spontaneously to unexpected stimuli in a way consistent with it having feelings, and I'd want to see those feelings (as evidenced by reactions) in a variety of circumstances to show at least human-level consistency of emotional response. But I digress.]
As far as algorithmicity goes, at this point you're essentially saying that "algorithm" is a synonym for "process." I view this as a poor definition, but I respect your right to disagree.
Regarding what is required for minds, again, I view this as a prediction, rather than a provable canonical statement. Call it a hypothesis: "I predict that the following are essential to the development of human-like minds: needs, ability to act to meet them, ability to perceive an objective reality, a unitary locus of perception, and a collection of historical experiences." At present I am not sure how to even begin falsifying this claim, except perhaps (for some parts of it) doing something horrible like raising a child in a sensory-deprivation box, or replacing its senses with an artificial perspective from somewhere else, ideally one over which it has no control. As we know of (or have documented the historical existence of) over ten billion minds, all of them human*, humans seem like the obvious experimental choice, but I'm sure you appreciate the difficulties.
* or other sentient mammal, if your definition of mind swings that way, but that's again a whole host of issues & we cannot have the same direct empathy for an elephant as we can a person...
I mean, I think ultimately the problem lies with the corporations. But when they control the legal system, are there any legal means to check their power? That's the quandary.
Education is a start, but don't be too hard on the masses. Sure, the media love to distract us with Tiger Woods' love life, but a whole lot of people in the country are more concerned with their mortgages being under water than with the terms of some copyright treaty. I wish they shared our priorities too, but that's the way of things.
Regarding the federal administration, a lot of that is strongly shaped by the Presidency & who the prez picks to head up the various organizations. So there is that lever, but there's usually not a whole lot of nuance to the choices on offer (with a two-party, winner-take-all system, and both parties perfectly content with the current level of corporate involvement in government, no President is going to save us).
Within the system, I don't know what would do it beyond major grassroots campaigning for non-mainstream candidates. But it's tough to get people behind that, too, since "everybody knows" that those candidates don't stand a chance. (And to be fair, there's no guarantee that they'll stick to their principles while in office).
Typically when you look at what actually happens, rather than the rhetoric, term limits tend to increase corporate power in government (see e.g. here). Basically, your average citizen doesn't know what's going on with the government. Government is a very complicated piece of work, and if you pull out all the people who know how to operate it, the only people left who can make it go are the vendors' marketing departments and whoever has the tech support contract -- i.e. the lobbyists and corporate representatives become the only "voice of reason" or institutional memory. You can imagine what happens when you entrust corporate-types with that role. And new "citizen politicians" are much less savvy about the corporate flacks; they haven't seen it all before, so they aren't as on their guard against shenanigans.
It feels viscerally right to just "throw the bums out," but government accountability takes a scalpel, not a hatchet.
...or else people will keep using FireFox, because they want to keep using Flash.