Marie SkÃ...odowska-Curie was Polish. Her friends and family called her Panni as opposed to Madame.
This is an inappropriate nitpick. For one, the Polish word is pani. Two, her husband was a Frenchman, as was nearly her entire social circle from the age of 24 to the end of her life. While Curie did teach her children Polish and retain some ties with her country of origin, "Madame" is an entirely appropriate appelation for this woman who did all her life's work in France, became a French citizen, and served the French state and army.
A trans-human society may be able to make do with the resources available on Earth. Assuming technology exists to transmute materials, the only thing needed is more energy, and research in fusion is going ahead regardless of the scaling back of space exploration. Even if we went up into orbit to create a system of beamed solar power as is often discussed, that's not the same as moving into space.
Ironically the tech to make what you speculate to happen will only come about as a spin off from space exploration.
What tech? Again, while automated asteroid defenses would necessitate putting some technology into orbit, that is not the same as exploring the solar system. The rapid technological advances of our time are moving ahead just fine without a new space race.
Why go anywhere else at all? As the pace of technology accelerates, it may well be that the future of the human race is staying put right here, moving into a virtual reality instead of expanding outward through the cosmos. Defense against asteroids could be automated, and while the sun would eventually expand into a red giant and engulf the Earth, we still have a few billion years, so there's no rush.
It is curious that this possibility is rarely considered in nerd circles, as it has been proposed by science-fiction writers. In his future history starting with Harvest of Stars, the late Poul Anderson foresaw much of the human race and its AI successors content to remain on Earth and turn their attention to mathematical explorations. Vernor Vinge too speculated in his early musings on the Singularity that it could involve a civilization moving into a computer mind buried deep underneath the planet's surface instead of exploring space.
Those are grey areas, but someone working hard work for multiple clients drawn from the general public, and bringing in $1200 a month, as they OP claims, should be considered no different than any other worker.
He'd have had a great deal more credibility (and thus have a greater impact) had he gone through proper channels first and gotten no satisfaction.
Snowden has always claimed -- and the US government has recently admitted - that he did first approach his superiors, and only when his unease was brushed aside did he decide to release his information to journalists.
Thats what the ballot box is for. The agency mission is generally an open thing. We need whistleblowers to expose hidden wrongdoing, not to try to change policy.
My whole point is that there is a gap between the purported mission that voters can direct, and the real mission which, as we have seen, is kept hidden from the public until whistleblowers speak out. The NSA's public mission is reassuringly worded fluff, voters could have known nothing about the agency's insistence on ready access to all American internal telecommunications until Snowden spoke out.
Even Orwell would have readily admitted and accepted that human beings are social creatures that come together to form societies based on mutual support, which involves some degree of pressure on people to do their share. There's a great leap between a normal, functioning state and 1984.
The key to the campaign of openness to whistleblowers, as distinct from criminal leakers and publicity seekers, Meyer stresses, is that it "must aid the agency mission.
There's your problem (or rather society's problem) right there: when the agency mission is sucking up as much information as possible, privacy of American citizens be damned, and then covering up for one another to reassure the American public, then that is something no one wants to aid, and the whole point of whistleblowing is to stop it.
That the NSA's mission is a megalomaniac "collect it all" approach has been clear for a long, long time now. Back in the early millennium I read James Bamford's Body of Secrets and followed keenly the European Parliament's ECHELON investigation (which was sadly obscured in the news by 9/11). Sadder than the fact that Snowden risks lifelong imprisonment is the fact that it took so long to get a Snowden in the first place after years of hints that something was wrong.
It's not just a matter of the money in this individual case. Using workers paid under the table and bragging about it to one's peers leads to greater tolerance of tax avoidance. Once people think it's OK to avoid paying taxes in one case, they start doing so in other cases. Rigorous enforcement is needed, but in the meantime some shame would do as well.
In the Nordic countries, I can only assume that any working class receiving a meagre salary is insufficiently organized. When I moved to Finland to study, I initially didn't speak the language well enough to get white collar work, so I had to support myself by taking cleaning jobs. I was amazed how much money I was making compared to what I would have made in the US: though there is no legislated minimum wage, the union had succeeded in bargaining for high wages and other benefits, all of which employees in the field in question received whether they were union members or not.
You might think you are saving money, but it's actually a net loss for everyone if one of the ways that kid is undercutting lawn services is by not paying taxes on that income. You are only doing society a disservice by paying someone under the table instead of hiring a legally registered firm that withholds taxes for its employees.
Those private, invite-only torrent communities don't usually require you to provide brand-new stuff. It's often enough if you upload old stuff that no one else has made available yet. If you e.g. have a collection of classic vinyl and a means to rip it to FLAC, or can upload a few arthouse films that got a limited DVD release a decade ago, then you're in.
Geez, before you develop a conspiracy theory of Dice opening the site up to spammers, actually read the posts here: they are not spamming a product, they are parodying the spam that the company behind MyCleanPC used to post. BillTheEngineer isn't a spammer, he's a troll who has found a way to crapflood the comments section just like in the good ol' days.
Your Slashdot UID is not much different from mine, I would have expected you to have been around here long enough to be familiar with the common trolls. Reposting these parodies of the PC cleaner product has been popular for years now.
You picked the wrong fellow to be pedantic with, my good man. In Classical Greek, myriados was both a numeral "10,000" and an adjective "countless". As a glance at the OED entry for the word will show, both senses passed into English when it borrowed the word.
If you actually read his posts, you'll find that they are not the real ads for MyCleanPC that were going around a few years ago, but hyperbolic parodies of them. He's not a spammer, just a troll.
Also, how the fuck did that fuckhead spammer BillTheEngineer get to post zillions of copies of his spam, all at 16:04, while us regular users have to wait 5 minutes?
I don't know, but I'm in awe. I once reposted the MyCleanPC troll as a tongue-in-cheek response to a poster who seemed like he was shilling, and it triggered some kind of detection filter in Slashcode, so my account was frozen. I had to contact the admins to get it restored.
Yet somehow BillTheEngineer has posted it not just once, but myriad times. Verily, in days of yore bards would recite this glorious deed of valor down the ages.
AI is a tough problem, and no doubt it'll be tough to find the first solution to it; but we do have hints, as in, how other brains are constructed, and so we're not running completely blind here.
If we want to construct AIs according to the way human brains are constructed, we reach an ethnical conundrum. Neuroscience has been showing for decades now that much of human thought isn't a process of reasoning at all, but rather chemical factors beyond our control. The entire motivation to do anything with our lives is a result of biological pressures, not free will.
If we create an AI, we would have to fill it with the same induced drives that human beings have as an accident of evolution, otherwise it won't want to do any of the thinking that we hope AIs will do. I know Slashdot has many Buddhists who believe that freedom from drives/passions/attachments is the only form of liberation, so by creating AIs with the necessary pressure on them to perform some activity, are we not simply bringing more misery into the universe?
Are you seriously saying that anyone accused of rape should immediately be PRESUMED guilty, with no defense allowed...
The only appropriate defence is "He didn't do it". It's appalling to support your friend by saying "She was asking for it by behaving the way she did" (it's still rape), or "She wanted it but then regretted it" (an increasing number of jurisdictions allow a person to withdraw consent after the fact).
While Vinge often treats the Singularity in his fiction like Marooned in Realtime or the Zones of Thought books as a real singularity (civilizations disappear suddenly and it is not clear what happened to them), he strongly hints that there was some sort of merger of man and machine. Once a biological lifeform is so augmented with technological inventions that the biological part fades away, is that not "artificial intelligence"? I think the term "artificial" is fair enough as the resulting lifeform is not the result of slow biological evolution but a technological/industrial development.
Some years ago, William Gibson stopped extrapolating what the future would be like (Neuromancer is now horribly dated because of that) and has instead chose to set his books in the dark corners of the present day. So, he's a different kind of author than what Mr.Erwin above calls Stross.
The Kindle doesn't necessarily have DRM either. As I said, I get my books from other sources which are DRM-free. Anyone who has a DRMed ebook can easily remove the DRM with the Calibre plugin.
CR, you've turned this into a "paper vs ebook" argument.
I didn't intend too. While my own experience is with an e-reader, there are also paper book readers out there that discover that, through Amazon, they can buy older titles for as little as a penny plus shipping. A writer working today has to compete with a used market vastly bigger than a decade ago.
But while we're on the subject...
The bookstores in my town are always busy.
But are they busy with people buying books? In recent years I've watched bookstores all over Europe staying afloat by reducing the amount of floor space dedicated to books and instead making their money from a café or by selling hipster accoutrements (Lomo cameras, organic snacks, themed stationary, tea sets, etc.). That doesn't necessarily mean that paper books are dying, but it certainly means that selling paper books in physical locations instead of an online shop is no longer a profitable activity.
You do want to read recent books by pirating them.
Sure, if books published half a century ago or more are "recent" for you. Books from the 1930s or even 1960s were published after the copyright cutoff date, but they are old and hoary now, and many have made their way into a canon.
But if there are no new books, then in some number of years all the books will be about a distant and foreign world without the same relevance to us.
As someone who did a Classics degree before moving on to other things -- but still maintains proficiency in Greek and Latin -- in a pinch I could even be content with just the classical canon. Human beings haven't really changed over the millennia, the concerns of authors back then are still very much relevant to readers today.
In any event, the perspective I offered above is not something unusual: that contemporary artists are competing with a long tail has been noted in film and music too.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an inappropriate nitpick. For one, the Polish word is pani. Two, her husband was a Frenchman, as was nearly her entire social circle from the age of 24 to the end of her life. While Curie did teach her children Polish and retain some ties with her country of origin, "Madame" is an entirely appropriate appelation for this woman who did all her life's work in France, became a French citizen, and served the French state and army.
A trans-human society may be able to make do with the resources available on Earth. Assuming technology exists to transmute materials, the only thing needed is more energy, and research in fusion is going ahead regardless of the scaling back of space exploration. Even if we went up into orbit to create a system of beamed solar power as is often discussed, that's not the same as moving into space.
What tech? Again, while automated asteroid defenses would necessitate putting some technology into orbit, that is not the same as exploring the solar system. The rapid technological advances of our time are moving ahead just fine without a new space race.
Why go anywhere else at all? As the pace of technology accelerates, it may well be that the future of the human race is staying put right here, moving into a virtual reality instead of expanding outward through the cosmos. Defense against asteroids could be automated, and while the sun would eventually expand into a red giant and engulf the Earth, we still have a few billion years, so there's no rush.
It is curious that this possibility is rarely considered in nerd circles, as it has been proposed by science-fiction writers. In his future history starting with Harvest of Stars , the late Poul Anderson foresaw much of the human race and its AI successors content to remain on Earth and turn their attention to mathematical explorations. Vernor Vinge too speculated in his early musings on the Singularity that it could involve a civilization moving into a computer mind buried deep underneath the planet's surface instead of exploring space.
Those are grey areas, but someone working hard work for multiple clients drawn from the general public, and bringing in $1200 a month, as they OP claims, should be considered no different than any other worker.
Snowden has always claimed -- and the US government has recently admitted - that he did first approach his superiors, and only when his unease was brushed aside did he decide to release his information to journalists.
My whole point is that there is a gap between the purported mission that voters can direct, and the real mission which, as we have seen, is kept hidden from the public until whistleblowers speak out. The NSA's public mission is reassuringly worded fluff, voters could have known nothing about the agency's insistence on ready access to all American internal telecommunications until Snowden spoke out.
Even Orwell would have readily admitted and accepted that human beings are social creatures that come together to form societies based on mutual support, which involves some degree of pressure on people to do their share. There's a great leap between a normal, functioning state and 1984.
There's your problem (or rather society's problem) right there: when the agency mission is sucking up as much information as possible, privacy of American citizens be damned, and then covering up for one another to reassure the American public, then that is something no one wants to aid, and the whole point of whistleblowing is to stop it.
That the NSA's mission is a megalomaniac "collect it all" approach has been clear for a long, long time now. Back in the early millennium I read James Bamford's Body of Secrets and followed keenly the European Parliament's ECHELON investigation (which was sadly obscured in the news by 9/11). Sadder than the fact that Snowden risks lifelong imprisonment is the fact that it took so long to get a Snowden in the first place after years of hints that something was wrong.
It's not just a matter of the money in this individual case. Using workers paid under the table and bragging about it to one's peers leads to greater tolerance of tax avoidance. Once people think it's OK to avoid paying taxes in one case, they start doing so in other cases. Rigorous enforcement is needed, but in the meantime some shame would do as well.
In the Nordic countries, I can only assume that any working class receiving a meagre salary is insufficiently organized. When I moved to Finland to study, I initially didn't speak the language well enough to get white collar work, so I had to support myself by taking cleaning jobs. I was amazed how much money I was making compared to what I would have made in the US: though there is no legislated minimum wage, the union had succeeded in bargaining for high wages and other benefits, all of which employees in the field in question received whether they were union members or not.
You might think you are saving money, but it's actually a net loss for everyone if one of the ways that kid is undercutting lawn services is by not paying taxes on that income. You are only doing society a disservice by paying someone under the table instead of hiring a legally registered firm that withholds taxes for its employees.
Those private, invite-only torrent communities don't usually require you to provide brand-new stuff. It's often enough if you upload old stuff that no one else has made available yet. If you e.g. have a collection of classic vinyl and a means to rip it to FLAC, or can upload a few arthouse films that got a limited DVD release a decade ago, then you're in.
Geez, before you develop a conspiracy theory of Dice opening the site up to spammers, actually read the posts here: they are not spamming a product, they are parodying the spam that the company behind MyCleanPC used to post. BillTheEngineer isn't a spammer, he's a troll who has found a way to crapflood the comments section just like in the good ol' days.
Your Slashdot UID is not much different from mine, I would have expected you to have been around here long enough to be familiar with the common trolls. Reposting these parodies of the PC cleaner product has been popular for years now.
You picked the wrong fellow to be pedantic with, my good man. In Classical Greek, myriados was both a numeral "10,000" and an adjective "countless". As a glance at the OED entry for the word will show, both senses passed into English when it borrowed the word.
If you actually read his posts, you'll find that they are not the real ads for MyCleanPC that were going around a few years ago, but hyperbolic parodies of them. He's not a spammer, just a troll.
I don't know, but I'm in awe. I once reposted the MyCleanPC troll as a tongue-in-cheek response to a poster who seemed like he was shilling, and it triggered some kind of detection filter in Slashcode, so my account was frozen. I had to contact the admins to get it restored.
Yet somehow BillTheEngineer has posted it not just once, but myriad times. Verily, in days of yore bards would recite this glorious deed of valor down the ages.
Sorry, that should have read "we reach an ethical conundrum."
If we want to construct AIs according to the way human brains are constructed, we reach an ethnical conundrum. Neuroscience has been showing for decades now that much of human thought isn't a process of reasoning at all, but rather chemical factors beyond our control. The entire motivation to do anything with our lives is a result of biological pressures, not free will.
If we create an AI, we would have to fill it with the same induced drives that human beings have as an accident of evolution, otherwise it won't want to do any of the thinking that we hope AIs will do. I know Slashdot has many Buddhists who believe that freedom from drives/passions/attachments is the only form of liberation, so by creating AIs with the necessary pressure on them to perform some activity, are we not simply bringing more misery into the universe?
The only appropriate defence is "He didn't do it". It's appalling to support your friend by saying "She was asking for it by behaving the way she did" (it's still rape), or "She wanted it but then regretted it" (an increasing number of jurisdictions allow a person to withdraw consent after the fact).
While Vinge often treats the Singularity in his fiction like Marooned in Realtime or the Zones of Thought books as a real singularity (civilizations disappear suddenly and it is not clear what happened to them), he strongly hints that there was some sort of merger of man and machine. Once a biological lifeform is so augmented with technological inventions that the biological part fades away, is that not "artificial intelligence"? I think the term "artificial" is fair enough as the resulting lifeform is not the result of slow biological evolution but a technological/industrial development.
Some years ago, William Gibson stopped extrapolating what the future would be like (Neuromancer is now horribly dated because of that) and has instead chose to set his books in the dark corners of the present day. So, he's a different kind of author than what Mr.Erwin above calls Stross.
The Kindle doesn't necessarily have DRM either. As I said, I get my books from other sources which are DRM-free. Anyone who has a DRMed ebook can easily remove the DRM with the Calibre plugin.
I didn't intend too. While my own experience is with an e-reader, there are also paper book readers out there that discover that, through Amazon, they can buy older titles for as little as a penny plus shipping. A writer working today has to compete with a used market vastly bigger than a decade ago.
But while we're on the subject...
But are they busy with people buying books? In recent years I've watched bookstores all over Europe staying afloat by reducing the amount of floor space dedicated to books and instead making their money from a café or by selling hipster accoutrements (Lomo cameras, organic snacks, themed stationary, tea sets, etc.). That doesn't necessarily mean that paper books are dying, but it certainly means that selling paper books in physical locations instead of an online shop is no longer a profitable activity.
Sure, if books published half a century ago or more are "recent" for you. Books from the 1930s or even 1960s were published after the copyright cutoff date, but they are old and hoary now, and many have made their way into a canon.
As someone who did a Classics degree before moving on to other things -- but still maintains proficiency in Greek and Latin -- in a pinch I could even be content with just the classical canon. Human beings haven't really changed over the millennia, the concerns of authors back then are still very much relevant to readers today.
In any event, the perspective I offered above is not something unusual: that contemporary artists are competing with a long tail has been noted in film and music too.