I find it disturbing that the U.S. government is forcing Toyota to cease production, when they are also the owner of GM, Toyota's competitor. Yes the design has killed people, but a great many engineering mistakes kill people. Maybe the response is justified, but the national ownership raises interesting questions.
Its not so much that it wasn't a good idea, but that they negotiated in bad faith. The background is that a group of many manufacturers got together to make a memory standard that they could all use. They each chipped in ideas, and didn't patent them. Rambus steered the standard towards something that would include things they had already patented, and hoped no one would notice the patents. No one did. They then did not immediately sue, but waited until the standard was widely used by many of the original group, and others, so that paying the settlements would be preferable to the cost of switching standards. This is not simply patent trolling per the usual standard. This is an example of fraud. The company should get dissolved to pay remunerations towards those it defrauded, all patents released into public domain, and its board charged with felonies.
Correct, GM is truly a wonderful thing. But I do wonder if spot checks on produce wouldn't be advisable. Processed foods get spot checked, perhaps produce should as well. You can get a DNA sequencer on ebay for two grand now. Grabbing the sequence that produces abrin, or ricin from the rosary pea or castor bean respectively, and putting it in a couple corn plants, is within the ability of an undergrad certainly. The lab procedures are published out there, I saw them on the kindle store even. Corn is wind pollinated, so planting a few modified malcious plants upwind of a field could be really nasty. It is only going to get easier to do, and restricting the technology is the wrong way to try and prevent it. Spot checks of produce for common pathogens and dangerous chemicals would add to the price of food, so I wouldn't suggest they be mandatory. Might work kind of like an organic stamp, "Non-deadly GM" or somesuch.
Wealth redistribution is not the only way to improve the quality of life of the poor. Labor adds value. People are inventing things and manufacturing things that have lasting value. Technology and simple production capacity can reduce scarcity. I'm probably not using the term scarcity correctly in an economic sense there, as there is always more to want, but there is a threshold of want. A semi-rational person might become violent in a situation where they can't feed their family. But to become violent because you can't satisfy one of the higher orders of Maslow's hierarchy and some people can, takes a less rational person. If we can develop technology to bring almost everyone to a point where they are not short of shelter, food water et. al. That will go a long way. If we also add in some mindless entertainment like TV, video games, or bad paperbacks for everyone it becomes even less likely they will become violent. This can all be done without altering the existing weath distribution profile, just shifting the whole thing upwards.
All that said, its inevitable that someone who isn't particularly rational, or perhaps a bit *too* rational, will eventually get their hands on a WMD and use it, it will happen more than once. I just hope the first time it happens we don't react by giving up the vestiges of our freedom in the vain hope of preventing the inevitable recurrence.
Obscurity is not a substitute for security. But people forget that it *is* a very useful supplement to security in many cases. By all mean publish the plans to the safe, but don't tell people where you put the safe, that serves no purpose. Likewise, if you have a method or technique that you already know is flawed but have not found a way to remedy, keeping the badguys in the dark longer is a good thing. However the real point of this story is that people who really need to know better don't realize leaks are unrecoverable once they hit the internet. The letter seems to hint that they suspect there is nothing to be done at this point, but they aren't sure. Maybe a class on such topics would be useful. Wouldn't it be nice if all legislators used the time they weren't in session to educate themselves on such things?
Why will the artificially created person end up evil, while the naturally born child be ok? That is the cliche of course, because nature knows best right? I find the neoluddite underpinnings of the cliche to be disgusting. Its far more likely that a normal mature adult given superstrength would behave rationally, than a child who grew up stronger than everyone around them. The latter seems like a recipe for all sorts of neurosis.
I did not know about snapshot, thanks! I do use noscript, but who to allow? Even fortune 500 are getting compromised left and right. The VM is so I can allow pages I don't really trust (like gamespot for instance), and still check my balance if I want outside the sandbox. As far as running the javascript applications outside the VM, it would depend on the level of trust. Part of the problem is using code for things that could be done using a document format. My paranoia is justified I think. And its not that I have anything I'm worried about losing, I just hate the thought of becoming the cause of another annoyance in a few thousand people's day as they click delete on the spam my machine sent them.
Do away with client side browser scripting entirely and replace it with applications written in Javascript. I like languages, more are better. I don't like the requirement that I have to allow most websites to run essentially arbitrary code on my machine in order to view them. I know I don't have to go to those websites, but it is increasingly required to view just about anything. I don't trust my browser to protect me, and I resent having to switch to my virtual machine to browse, and then always having that notion that my virtual machine is probably a pox ridden compromised bit bucket that I should really empty at least once a week.
Many places including best buy are open to negotiation on the prices of some items. TVs laptops, etc. Games, movies, music and the like are not. For music and movies its mostly because the prices are too low to make it worth it. For Games they are borderline, but it doesn't matter anyway, they are fixed price. I've had it explained to me, but I still don't understand how that doesn't violate US laws. Or more to the point why it shouldn't.
I don't think GP was saying that pollution *isn't* a rights violation. I think he was saying its hard to say who and when and what are doing the violating. A small family farm with X cows isn't polluting the river, but N of those small family farms are along the river. So each of the farms do pollute, but to a degree that would be fine on its own. Saying no one can pollute at all "total rights protection" would impact more than just industry. It would impact you and me. Other than that I think you are completely correct, especially about the note that when we notice regulation being too restrictive it usually isn't doing the job we hoped it would. Sometimes that is because humans make the regulations and humans make mistakes. Sometimes it is because humans made the regulations and humans are corruptible. The idea of a free-ish market is that it can learn certain parameters better than we can specify them. It really is just a genetic algorithm, well not genetic as its not random, its more like hill-climbing or a particle filter. The key part is that humans get involved again in recognizing when the algorithm has broken down and needs our intervention to pop it out of a local maxima via regulation, and humans make mistakes and are corruptible so we choose not to recognize it or recognize it incorrectly, and then enact the wrong regulation even when we do recognize it correctly. The solution? Get used to imperfection.
Oh and to qualify as on topic, keeping large dogs in an urban environment is unkind, so eat the poor thing already!
If Gaia existed it would be the most capricious and brutal god imaginable. Only the strong survive, unless a rock falls on them, or a supernova goes off too close. Nature isn't the default state, the safe state, that we should try to cower in. Nature is the ravening maw of a stochastic greedy optimization technique with an arbitrary value function, that wants to test each individual of our species every moment of every day until we mess up and get squished. Nature is the enemy and we aren't safe until we subjugate it.
I think the notion was that at some point there is a level of effort in testing that should count as due diligence. That any side effects found in the future after that amount of testing should be treated as unfortunate accidents and not cause for litigation. If the FDA isn't implying that this sufficient level of testing has been done by signing off, what is it implying? If it is implying that, it should be solely culpable for the subsequent side effects as the company believed in good faith it had done due diligence. Unless of course it bribed the FDA directly or indirectly, which wouldn't surprise me either. Or falsified test results, which wouldn't raise my eyebrows even a little.
That said, if I want to do something stupid to myself, I should be able to buy "dietary supplements" made from my own stem cells and inject them wherever I please.
Just because the brain map now run on silicon doesn't mean it doesn't have rights. Treating it as a test subject instead of a person is a sure way to wake up skynet or the cylons or that thing from "I have no mouth and I must scream"
Cloning a wetware brain is far safer. Imagine you signed up to have your brain frozen and donated to science. You say good bye to your family and take your last breaths.
you wake up and notice you are numb, and your surroundings while idyllic have very low polygon counts and no odor. A fellow shows up and comfortingly explains you are the first upload. Assuming you are currently a well adjusted individual, are you going to go nuts and kill the rest of us, your meatspace bretheren?
It seems much less likely that a machine that "remembers" its first kiss will go skynet on us, than a very well understood support vector machine that has been preloaded with psuedorandom values and then treated like a machine (no warmth, no rights, no equality, no rest from practice) until it happens upon a behavior we think we like.
One reasons the 60ghz(5mm) mentioned in TFA is so great is that it won't make it from the living room into the bedroom so you don't get interference when you use it to go from the ps3 to the wall mounted flatscreen.
1mm(300ghz) is well into the water absorption band, to get out of it you'd need to get up around to 10 *micro*meter wave lengths. EHF for cellphones would require towers all over the place, the range wouldn't even be as good as wifi unless you jacked the power high enough that it would scare me to use, and even then I don't see it being any farther than a block given a clear LOS.
Incidentally 3mm (100ghz) wavelength is what that "skin on fire" ray uses.
All my abilities are either genetic luck of the draw or results of my environment, fatalistic, but rational.
I cannot think as well as some, or socialize as well as others, so this treatment could be argued as therapeutic. All of a sudden many people said "oh its therapeutic, that's OK then". They have some idea of a threshold of what abilities are "natural" and as long as we are bringing people up to that threshold we are fine, but going past it would of course be hubris. I should stop feeding trolls, or else poison the food.
What is wrong with deciding you want a baby with lopsided ears or green eyes? What is wrong with (in the future) choosing to give your baby heat receptors and a dog's sense of smell? The idea that nature or God doesn't want us to modify ourselves is seemingly close to universal, but I really don't understand it. People yell hubris, or nihilism. Is it that to want to improve humans is implying we don't already have limitless potential? The reaction is usually so emphatic that it seems there must be some cause. "I want to see gamma-rays, I want to hear x-rays, I want to smell, I want to smell dark matter." Cavil is a neurotic sociopath, but I do sympathize.
I subscribe to the proactionary principle, if it might work, try it. If it doesn't, stop. The precautionary principle is the result of our deep seeded fear of change, but life is change. All that said, I think modifying ourselves to fit our environment is easier and cheaper than the other way around. Whether its telecommuting instead of business trips, or something more controversial like bioengineering ourselves to run on energy sources we can more efficiently produce, or uploading and powering our brains off windfarms, the idea of modifying an entire planet strikes me as overly expensive for the desired outcome.
When I got it at Aggieland it was one of two things a CS with EE minor or EE with CS minor. Is this something different?
Either way, going back to school might make a nice "reset switch". Having an MS in CS or math wouldn't just help out with real work, it would set the clock back to "newgrad" status for the HR whackjobs.
I am the anti-process. I am not a cowboy coder. But rules and formality are never a substitute for an actual human thinking about what makes sense. Written formal process ends up being an impediment to getting work done *and* followed only in word, not spirit. This results in all the costs of process with none of its benefits.
Instead, decide what you mean by quality, spot check it, and punish/reward accordingly. I agree the actual practices you mention are the way to go in almost all cases. But what matters is if it works, and the documentation is adequate and correct. How they got there is of no importance. It is even less important that they get to that point in the same way every time. Consistency leads to stagnation.
It can be used to retrain minds. We are learning machines with positive and negative feedback. All negative feedback is pain of some sort. I would personally rather be 'fixed' clockwork orange style than be stuck in prison, useless to, and a burden on, society.
Its not the technology of the taser, or the practice of using pain, that is bad here. Its the mindset of *some* of the people using it. Letting the tech divert us from holding them accountable is a mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it disturbing that the U.S. government is forcing Toyota to cease production, when they are also the owner of GM, Toyota's competitor. Yes the design has killed people, but a great many engineering mistakes kill people. Maybe the response is justified, but the national ownership raises interesting questions.
Its not so much that it wasn't a good idea, but that they negotiated in bad faith. The background is that a group of many manufacturers got together to make a memory standard that they could all use. They each chipped in ideas, and didn't patent them. Rambus steered the standard towards something that would include things they had already patented, and hoped no one would notice the patents. No one did. They then did not immediately sue, but waited until the standard was widely used by many of the original group, and others, so that paying the settlements would be preferable to the cost of switching standards. This is not simply patent trolling per the usual standard. This is an example of fraud. The company should get dissolved to pay remunerations towards those it defrauded, all patents released into public domain, and its board charged with felonies.
Correct, GM is truly a wonderful thing. But I do wonder if spot checks on produce wouldn't be advisable. Processed foods get spot checked, perhaps produce should as well. You can get a DNA sequencer on ebay for two grand now. Grabbing the sequence that produces abrin, or ricin from the rosary pea or castor bean respectively, and putting it in a couple corn plants, is within the ability of an undergrad certainly. The lab procedures are published out there, I saw them on the kindle store even. Corn is wind pollinated, so planting a few modified malcious plants upwind of a field could be really nasty. It is only going to get easier to do, and restricting the technology is the wrong way to try and prevent it. Spot checks of produce for common pathogens and dangerous chemicals would add to the price of food, so I wouldn't suggest they be mandatory. Might work kind of like an organic stamp, "Non-deadly GM" or somesuch.
I'm guessing spelling class.
Wealth redistribution is not the only way to improve the quality of life of the poor. Labor adds value. People are inventing things and manufacturing things that have lasting value. Technology and simple production capacity can reduce scarcity. I'm probably not using the term scarcity correctly in an economic sense there, as there is always more to want, but there is a threshold of want. A semi-rational person might become violent in a situation where they can't feed their family. But to become violent because you can't satisfy one of the higher orders of Maslow's hierarchy and some people can, takes a less rational person. If we can develop technology to bring almost everyone to a point where they are not short of shelter, food water et. al. That will go a long way. If we also add in some mindless entertainment like TV, video games, or bad paperbacks for everyone it becomes even less likely they will become violent. This can all be done without altering the existing weath distribution profile, just shifting the whole thing upwards.
All that said, its inevitable that someone who isn't particularly rational, or perhaps a bit *too* rational, will eventually get their hands on a WMD and use it, it will happen more than once. I just hope the first time it happens we don't react by giving up the vestiges of our freedom in the vain hope of preventing the inevitable recurrence.
that sounds strangely like spam I've seen
Obscurity is not a substitute for security. But people forget that it *is* a very useful supplement to security in many cases. By all mean publish the plans to the safe, but don't tell people where you put the safe, that serves no purpose. Likewise, if you have a method or technique that you already know is flawed but have not found a way to remedy, keeping the badguys in the dark longer is a good thing. However the real point of this story is that people who really need to know better don't realize leaks are unrecoverable once they hit the internet. The letter seems to hint that they suspect there is nothing to be done at this point, but they aren't sure. Maybe a class on such topics would be useful. Wouldn't it be nice if all legislators used the time they weren't in session to educate themselves on such things?
Why will the artificially created person end up evil, while the naturally born child be ok? That is the cliche of course, because nature knows best right? I find the neoluddite underpinnings of the cliche to be disgusting. Its far more likely that a normal mature adult given superstrength would behave rationally, than a child who grew up stronger than everyone around them. The latter seems like a recipe for all sorts of neurosis.
I did not know about snapshot, thanks! I do use noscript, but who to allow? Even fortune 500 are getting compromised left and right. The VM is so I can allow pages I don't really trust (like gamespot for instance), and still check my balance if I want outside the sandbox. As far as running the javascript applications outside the VM, it would depend on the level of trust. Part of the problem is using code for things that could be done using a document format. My paranoia is justified I think. And its not that I have anything I'm worried about losing, I just hate the thought of becoming the cause of another annoyance in a few thousand people's day as they click delete on the spam my machine sent them.
Do away with client side browser scripting entirely and replace it with applications written in Javascript. I like languages, more are better. I don't like the requirement that I have to allow most websites to run essentially arbitrary code on my machine in order to view them. I know I don't have to go to those websites, but it is increasingly required to view just about anything. I don't trust my browser to protect me, and I resent having to switch to my virtual machine to browse, and then always having that notion that my virtual machine is probably a pox ridden compromised bit bucket that I should really empty at least once a week.
Many places including best buy are open to negotiation on the prices of some items. TVs laptops, etc. Games, movies, music and the like are not. For music and movies its mostly because the prices are too low to make it worth it. For Games they are borderline, but it doesn't matter anyway, they are fixed price. I've had it explained to me, but I still don't understand how that doesn't violate US laws. Or more to the point why it shouldn't.
I don't think GP was saying that pollution *isn't* a rights violation. I think he was saying its hard to say who and when and what are doing the violating. A small family farm with X cows isn't polluting the river, but N of those small family farms are along the river. So each of the farms do pollute, but to a degree that would be fine on its own. Saying no one can pollute at all "total rights protection" would impact more than just industry. It would impact you and me. Other than that I think you are completely correct, especially about the note that when we notice regulation being too restrictive it usually isn't doing the job we hoped it would. Sometimes that is because humans make the regulations and humans make mistakes. Sometimes it is because humans made the regulations and humans are corruptible. The idea of a free-ish market is that it can learn certain parameters better than we can specify them. It really is just a genetic algorithm, well not genetic as its not random, its more like hill-climbing or a particle filter. The key part is that humans get involved again in recognizing when the algorithm has broken down and needs our intervention to pop it out of a local maxima via regulation, and humans make mistakes and are corruptible so we choose not to recognize it or recognize it incorrectly, and then enact the wrong regulation even when we do recognize it correctly. The solution? Get used to imperfection.
Oh and to qualify as on topic, keeping large dogs in an urban environment is unkind, so eat the poor thing already!
If Gaia existed it would be the most capricious and brutal god imaginable. Only the strong survive, unless a rock falls on them, or a supernova goes off too close. Nature isn't the default state, the safe state, that we should try to cower in. Nature is the ravening maw of a stochastic greedy optimization technique with an arbitrary value function, that wants to test each individual of our species every moment of every day until we mess up and get squished. Nature is the enemy and we aren't safe until we subjugate it.
I think the notion was that at some point there is a level of effort in testing that should count as due diligence. That any side effects found in the future after that amount of testing should be treated as unfortunate accidents and not cause for litigation. If the FDA isn't implying that this sufficient level of testing has been done by signing off, what is it implying? If it is implying that, it should be solely culpable for the subsequent side effects as the company believed in good faith it had done due diligence. Unless of course it bribed the FDA directly or indirectly, which wouldn't surprise me either. Or falsified test results, which wouldn't raise my eyebrows even a little.
That said, if I want to do something stupid to myself, I should be able to buy "dietary supplements" made from my own stem cells and inject them wherever I please.
Just because the brain map now run on silicon doesn't mean it doesn't have rights. Treating it as a test subject instead of a person is a sure way to wake up skynet or the cylons or that thing from "I have no mouth and I must scream"
Cloning a wetware brain is far safer. Imagine you signed up to have your brain frozen and donated to science. You say good bye to your family and take your last breaths.
you wake up and notice you are numb, and your surroundings while idyllic have very low polygon counts and no odor. A fellow shows up and comfortingly explains you are the first upload. Assuming you are currently a well adjusted individual, are you going to go nuts and kill the rest of us, your meatspace bretheren?
It seems much less likely that a machine that "remembers" its first kiss will go skynet on us, than a very well understood support vector machine that has been preloaded with psuedorandom values and then treated like a machine (no warmth, no rights, no equality, no rest from practice) until it happens upon a behavior we think we like.
One reasons the 60ghz(5mm) mentioned in TFA is so great is that it won't make it from the living room into the bedroom so you don't get interference when you use it to go from the ps3 to the wall mounted flatscreen.
1mm(300ghz) is well into the water absorption band, to get out of it you'd need to get up around to 10 *micro*meter wave lengths. EHF for cellphones would require towers all over the place, the range wouldn't even be as good as wifi unless you jacked the power high enough that it would scare me to use, and even then I don't see it being any farther than a block given a clear LOS.
Incidentally 3mm (100ghz) wavelength is what that "skin on fire" ray uses.
All my abilities are either genetic luck of the draw or results of my environment, fatalistic, but rational.
I cannot think as well as some, or socialize as well as others, so this treatment could be argued as therapeutic. All of a sudden many people said "oh its therapeutic, that's OK then". They have some idea of a threshold of what abilities are "natural" and as long as we are bringing people up to that threshold we are fine, but going past it would of course be hubris. I should stop feeding trolls, or else poison the food.
What is wrong with deciding you want a baby with lopsided ears or green eyes? What is wrong with (in the future) choosing to give your baby heat receptors and a dog's sense of smell? The idea that nature or God doesn't want us to modify ourselves is seemingly close to universal, but I really don't understand it. People yell hubris, or nihilism. Is it that to want to improve humans is implying we don't already have limitless potential? The reaction is usually so emphatic that it seems there must be some cause. "I want to see gamma-rays, I want to hear x-rays, I want to smell, I want to smell dark matter." Cavil is a neurotic sociopath, but I do sympathize.
well if its anything analogous to our last mistake, we'll end up fixing global warming and causing foot odor or something.
I subscribe to the proactionary principle, if it might work, try it. If it doesn't, stop. The precautionary principle is the result of our deep seeded fear of change, but life is change. All that said, I think modifying ourselves to fit our environment is easier and cheaper than the other way around. Whether its telecommuting instead of business trips, or something more controversial like bioengineering ourselves to run on energy sources we can more efficiently produce, or uploading and powering our brains off windfarms, the idea of modifying an entire planet strikes me as overly expensive for the desired outcome.
When I got it at Aggieland it was one of two things a CS with EE minor or EE with CS minor. Is this something different? Either way, going back to school might make a nice "reset switch". Having an MS in CS or math wouldn't just help out with real work, it would set the clock back to "newgrad" status for the HR whackjobs.
I am the anti-process. I am not a cowboy coder. But rules and formality are never a substitute for an actual human thinking about what makes sense. Written formal process ends up being an impediment to getting work done *and* followed only in word, not spirit. This results in all the costs of process with none of its benefits. Instead, decide what you mean by quality, spot check it, and punish/reward accordingly. I agree the actual practices you mention are the way to go in almost all cases. But what matters is if it works, and the documentation is adequate and correct. How they got there is of no importance. It is even less important that they get to that point in the same way every time. Consistency leads to stagnation.
It can be used to retrain minds. We are learning machines with positive and negative feedback. All negative feedback is pain of some sort. I would personally rather be 'fixed' clockwork orange style than be stuck in prison, useless to, and a burden on, society.
Its not the technology of the taser, or the practice of using pain, that is bad here. Its the mindset of *some* of the people using it. Letting the tech divert us from holding them accountable is a mistake.
The parent isn't funny, and while insightful probably fits, I think a category of depressing should be an option.