What MS really need to do is educate people - instead of an intimidating dialogue that says "DO YOU WANT TO ALLOW THIS YES | NO" there needs to be an explanation of the consequences.
If they ever do that, I'm going to write a virus which replaces the "OK" box with a "TL;DR" box, just to prove a point. I'd bet 80% of the computers it reached would fall victim in the brief period before the anti-virus programs updated and killed it.
It is a MS problem to some extent because there's still a heck of a lot of XP installs out there. In a sense, we're still paying for past wrongs. Even with XP, it's still primarily the users fault (I looked after some XP boxes for others and they were always fine), but it's security model wasn't as good as any Linux distro you care to name. With Windows 7 though, they're equivalent. The only difference is that most Linux distros will ask you to enter your password and click OK, whilst Windows 7 will display a big yellow-topped box and just ask you if you're sure. But in either case, both OS's have reached the stage where there's little more you can do to secure the system without reaching the point where you're taking control of the OS away from the user. And the latter is a whole other debate.
An AI is just a machine in abstract form. If an AI "improves" an AI it's not different to a human making a machine to build a machine. The human is still the ultimate cause.
I disagree with that. A man can cause a child, but that doesn't mean that the actions of that child are no different to if the man had done them. Cause is only cause. It does not mean that a piece of code that self-modifies without the continued action of its creator is no different in principle to code that doesn't. That "continued action" is critical to the nature of the thing. When something does not require continual action, we now call that independence.
Because the AI only exists within the confines of the programming that the human creates. It is therefore only a tool of the human mind
When code becomes self-modifying, it can go beyond the human mind. Much like a child can grow beyond its parents, learning more, doing more, changing in unexpected ways, so could that code. Your argument assumes that the only input (and thus cause for development) of a progeny AI, is its creator. But the qualitative difference between the progeny AI and the dead code, is that the former can change in relation to the world around it, not only its creator. And as the world around it is more than its mere creator, then it can be influenced and go beyond its mere creator - it has become its own thing.
It doesn't *have* to be humans that are doing the engineering, does it? Couldn't we, at some point in the future, have AI performing engineering?
Well once, we programmed in Assembly. These days people are doing things in Python and so much is happening automatically to turn their generic hand-waving into stuff the processors can understand that it boggles the mind. You're just talking about climbing up the tree a little further. The question, as usual, is how to precisely define your problem. I could formally specify a design in Z that was mathematically proven to be correct and design a comprehensive test suite to check adherance. Of course the test suite would need to be formally specified and tested as well, and then all the stages turning my high-level code into low-level code tested as well. It could be done, but it would take a long time. At any stage, the problem is defining exactly what you want something to do and what you don't want it to do. I've never worked in avionics, but I imagine it's pretty complex.
For me, without knowing much about this case, the concern is a court determining where the distinguishing line between negligence and accident lies. Software like this must be difficult and large and specialised. Is a court qualified to come in and say: you needed an extra programmer - this is manslaughter or it's unfortunate no-one caught that these packets weren't properly terminated according to the protocol and it was an accident.
The Americans overthrew British rule for their own interests. It had nothing to do with The Greater Good.
But I kind of consider that to be the Greater Good. Basically, I have more sympathy for the greater body of people than for the rulers. At the time of the revolution, those rulers were the British government and throne. These days those rulers are home grown. But I still like to see the American people standing up for themselves against unjust rule. Is the rule of the US govt. unjust? Messy and complicated, but there's plenty in there that's worth opposing.
I guess you havent noticed but Microsoft is actually paying people to lounge around Slashdot all day and do damage control through some media companies.
Well, for a simple example - most countries that can afford some sort of public health option... have one.
Please do not tell me that your entire view of world politics is based on whether they have some sort of public health option or not.
Alternately, please don't tell me that you think you can surmise someone's entire view of world politics by one example they used in a post when asked for one.;)
Yeah, but as a European who has lived in the USA, I have to say that the disconnect between the general honesty and politeness of the US people and the actions of the government is very striking. It's all but inexplicable until you turn on a TV and see what passes for news in that country. The American people in my experience are polite, generally nice, and massively uninformed / misinformed. Most US citizens if made aware of this behaviour would, I believe, take the attitude of "if we say we'll do something, we should." Even the ones who don't agree with the act are likely to be of the opinion that the US simply shouldn't have agreed to something it wasn't honestly intending to do.
I liked it when you overthrew British rule. You were the best you'd ever been, then. I would love to see a return of that willingness to act.
A gentleman's bet then. You try it too. I bet if you ask 10 people what "borrowing" means, they'll all, or v. nearly all, refer to giving something back / temporary arrangement.
I still don't see how its any different than playing pirated games on a computer. Many pirated games require items that modify the OS to break SecureROM, reroute packets to prevent calling home, etc. There is also the risk of the downloaded game carring a payload that messes with the OS. How is that any different than breaking out of CHROOT jail and running an unapproved app?
True, I was talking primarily about music and movies, rather than games. Modifications to the OS to break SecureROM or whatever probably are pretty significant, though there will be plenty of people lack your understanding to appreciate that the way that. But yeah, I've never pirated a game so perhaps hadn't realised how involved this had become. But music and movies, sure.
Aye, perhaps. But you're not a pirate-pirate. The conversation earlier was about downloading and then someone used needing to have the music in multiple formats as a reason to download songs. I was just pointing out that you can get these in a suitable format by paying for your copy. Indeed, you omitted the part where I don't even have to rip any more as I buy my MP3s directly, encoded at a high bit-rate. Ripping a CD might be a violation of the DMCA in the USA (or might not), but it's definitely not the case that you can say "I had to pirate this song in order to play it both on my CD player and on my iPhone" which is the case which was made.
It's the same for music : You buy it for your CD Player, for your iPhone,...
You might want to look into something called "ripping". And incidentally, I buy most of my music as DRM-free downloads encoded as 320kbps MP3s. I listen to them however I want on whatever I want.
As to being forced to buy new editions of old movies... just don't?
I loved Dragon Age Origins, but Dragon Age 2, while not a bad game, is inferior in almost every way for me.
Uh, shudder. I know what you mean. I almost bought DA2 just on the strength of DA:O. But Bioware were generous enough to release a demo and I cancelled. Possibly I'll get it a year from now when it's cheaper and has all the DLC included in one bundle. But I doubt it.
Point noted about it being "asking price" rather than "for free".
There was a time when you could play your music for your friends. Now its unfair use, as its not for personal use, so you have to pay royalties for every song you play at a house party
Can't say I've ever had a problem with that. People vomiting, yes. People fighting, yes. Person having sex with other person over the back of a chair in the living room in front of everyone, yes. Having to pay royalties on the music playing... that's a new one on me. You must be going to some pretty amazing house parties.
Well, I'm sorry, but if they gave up that quickly, it sounds like they are.
I don't think so. I think one of the factors at work here is making people aware that they have to take active steps to do something wrong. It's like a park that has a keep off the grass sign. People may ignore it and go on there anyway. But if there is a fence around the park and they have to unhook part of the gate to get on there, then they wont (or are very much less likely to). Who can't unhook a gate? Not many. But in doing so, they are moving from a casual transgression that they hadn't really thought about, to an actual act of volition that takes an action. And at that point, two things kick in. The first is that they think about what they're doing ("Hey, I'm taking something without paying"), and the second is they realise that they are consciously acting to do something that is a transgression.
You can climb the gate, but you can't climb the gate without knowing that it's there and what it's for.
Would it be a "good thing"? Here's a different take. What Valve did was to sell to different groups at different prices. They first off sold to the people who really wanted the game at price $X, then later sold to people who valued the game less at a lower price $Y. It was good marketing because they managed to sell at the highest prices people were willng to pay to two different groups.
What you're proposing is that they just forget about the first stage and go straight to selling at $Y. The determinant for whether that is a better strategy is how quickly the number of people who would buy at $Y but not at $X falls with time. If people who would have bought at $Y when the game was released are still likely to do so three months later, then it makes sense to follow Valves strategy of selling at a premium first and then at the reduced cost three months later.
I think the perceived value of a game amongst people who want it cheaper doesn't drop off fast enough to make Valve's strategy the inferior choice. Only Valve's marketing department will be able to give a good answer though.
Theft and stealing to most people means taking something that doesn't belong to you. Ergo, piracy falls into that quite naturally. I think it would be a very unusual person who when asked what stealing was said: "depriving another person of something." After all, there are a tonne of ways to do that which are theft, so it's a very bad definition of theft. "Taking what isn't yours" is what most people would say. To be honest, I'm rather tired of the Slashdot dogma that you can't call piracy theft.
Slashdot Mirror
What MS really need to do is educate people - instead of an intimidating dialogue that says "DO YOU WANT TO ALLOW THIS YES | NO" there needs to be an explanation of the consequences.
If they ever do that, I'm going to write a virus which replaces the "OK" box with a "TL;DR" box, just to prove a point. I'd bet 80% of the computers it reached would fall victim in the brief period before the anti-virus programs updated and killed it.
It is a MS problem to some extent because there's still a heck of a lot of XP installs out there. In a sense, we're still paying for past wrongs. Even with XP, it's still primarily the users fault (I looked after some XP boxes for others and they were always fine), but it's security model wasn't as good as any Linux distro you care to name. With Windows 7 though, they're equivalent. The only difference is that most Linux distros will ask you to enter your password and click OK, whilst Windows 7 will display a big yellow-topped box and just ask you if you're sure. But in either case, both OS's have reached the stage where there's little more you can do to secure the system without reaching the point where you're taking control of the OS away from the user. And the latter is a whole other debate.
An AI is just a machine in abstract form. If an AI "improves" an AI it's not different to a human making a machine to build a machine. The human is still the ultimate cause.
I disagree with that. A man can cause a child, but that doesn't mean that the actions of that child are no different to if the man had done them. Cause is only cause. It does not mean that a piece of code that self-modifies without the continued action of its creator is no different in principle to code that doesn't. That "continued action" is critical to the nature of the thing. When something does not require continual action, we now call that independence.
Because the AI only exists within the confines of the programming that the human creates. It is therefore only a tool of the human mind
When code becomes self-modifying, it can go beyond the human mind. Much like a child can grow beyond its parents, learning more, doing more, changing in unexpected ways, so could that code. Your argument assumes that the only input (and thus cause for development) of a progeny AI, is its creator. But the qualitative difference between the progeny AI and the dead code, is that the former can change in relation to the world around it, not only its creator. And as the world around it is more than its mere creator, then it can be influenced and go beyond its mere creator - it has become its own thing.
It doesn't *have* to be humans that are doing the engineering, does it? Couldn't we, at some point in the future, have AI performing engineering?
Well once, we programmed in Assembly. These days people are doing things in Python and so much is happening automatically to turn their generic hand-waving into stuff the processors can understand that it boggles the mind. You're just talking about climbing up the tree a little further. The question, as usual, is how to precisely define your problem. I could formally specify a design in Z that was mathematically proven to be correct and design a comprehensive test suite to check adherance. Of course the test suite would need to be formally specified and tested as well, and then all the stages turning my high-level code into low-level code tested as well. It could be done, but it would take a long time. At any stage, the problem is defining exactly what you want something to do and what you don't want it to do. I've never worked in avionics, but I imagine it's pretty complex.
For me, without knowing much about this case, the concern is a court determining where the distinguishing line between negligence and accident lies. Software like this must be difficult and large and specialised. Is a court qualified to come in and say: you needed an extra programmer - this is manslaughter or it's unfortunate no-one caught that these packets weren't properly terminated according to the protocol and it was an accident.
Heck I got over 8,000 hits for unethical behaviour by aussie bob
I'll admit to about 7,000 of them, The rest were a frame-up.
Wow, I was too quick to judge! I've just checked and it seems that 845,000 of the 8,000 charges are indeed unjust as you say. My bad!
:)
H.
(And cheers for being a good sport and the laugh
And encryption key fingerprints. That's what's on mine!
The Americans overthrew British rule for their own interests. It had nothing to do with The Greater Good.
But I kind of consider that to be the Greater Good. Basically, I have more sympathy for the greater body of people than for the rulers. At the time of the revolution, those rulers were the British government and throne. These days those rulers are home grown. But I still like to see the American people standing up for themselves against unjust rule. Is the rule of the US govt. unjust? Messy and complicated, but there's plenty in there that's worth opposing.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=unethical+behaviour+by+google
;)
About 437,000 results.
Number of hits by a search engine is not a good mode of argument! Heck I got over 8,000 hits for unethical behaviour by aussie bob
I guess you havent noticed but Microsoft is actually paying people to lounge around Slashdot all day and do damage control through some media companies.
Citation? I thought that was Apple. ;)
Well, for a simple example - most countries that can afford some sort of public health option... have one.
Please do not tell me that your entire view of world politics is based on whether they have some sort of public health option or not.
Alternately, please don't tell me that you think you can surmise someone's entire view of world politics by one example they used in a post when asked for one. ;)
Yeah, but as a European who has lived in the USA, I have to say that the disconnect between the general honesty and politeness of the US people and the actions of the government is very striking. It's all but inexplicable until you turn on a TV and see what passes for news in that country. The American people in my experience are polite, generally nice, and massively uninformed / misinformed. Most US citizens if made aware of this behaviour would, I believe, take the attitude of "if we say we'll do something, we should." Even the ones who don't agree with the act are likely to be of the opinion that the US simply shouldn't have agreed to something it wasn't honestly intending to do.
I liked it when you overthrew British rule. You were the best you'd ever been, then. I would love to see a return of that willingness to act.
A gentleman's bet then. You try it too. I bet if you ask 10 people what "borrowing" means, they'll all, or v. nearly all, refer to giving something back / temporary arrangement.
I still don't see how its any different than playing pirated games on a computer. Many pirated games require items that modify the OS to break SecureROM, reroute packets to prevent calling home, etc. There is also the risk of the downloaded game carring a payload that messes with the OS. How is that any different than breaking out of CHROOT jail and running an unapproved app?
True, I was talking primarily about music and movies, rather than games. Modifications to the OS to break SecureROM or whatever probably are pretty significant, though there will be plenty of people lack your understanding to appreciate that the way that. But yeah, I've never pirated a game so perhaps hadn't realised how involved this had become. But music and movies, sure.
Aye, perhaps. But you're not a pirate-pirate. The conversation earlier was about downloading and then someone used needing to have the music in multiple formats as a reason to download songs. I was just pointing out that you can get these in a suitable format by paying for your copy. Indeed, you omitted the part where I don't even have to rip any more as I buy my MP3s directly, encoded at a high bit-rate. Ripping a CD might be a violation of the DMCA in the USA (or might not), but it's definitely not the case that you can say "I had to pirate this song in order to play it both on my CD player and on my iPhone" which is the case which was made.
That's the same definition people would also use for borrowing.
No it isn't. If someone was asked to say what borrowing meant, people would always include the part about giving something back afterwards.
It's the same for music : You buy it for your CD Player, for your iPhone, ...
You might want to look into something called "ripping". And incidentally, I buy most of my music as DRM-free downloads encoded as 320kbps MP3s. I listen to them however I want on whatever I want.
As to being forced to buy new editions of old movies... just don't?
Did you just completely shift arguments, there?
I loved Dragon Age Origins, but Dragon Age 2, while not a bad game, is inferior in almost every way for me.
Uh, shudder. I know what you mean. I almost bought DA2 just on the strength of DA:O. But Bioware were generous enough to release a demo and I cancelled. Possibly I'll get it a year from now when it's cheaper and has all the DLC included in one bundle. But I doubt it.
Point noted about it being "asking price" rather than "for free".
Well she taught me to share what was mine, yes...
There was a time when you could play your music for your friends. Now its unfair use, as its not for personal use, so you have to pay royalties for every song you play at a house party
Can't say I've ever had a problem with that. People vomiting, yes. People fighting, yes. Person having sex with other person over the back of a chair in the living room in front of everyone, yes. Having to pay royalties on the music playing... that's a new one on me. You must be going to some pretty amazing house parties.
http://inflationdata.com/inflation/Consumer_Price_Index/HistoricalCPI.aspx?rsCPI_currentPage=0
Well, I'm sorry, but if they gave up that quickly, it sounds like they are.
I don't think so. I think one of the factors at work here is making people aware that they have to take active steps to do something wrong. It's like a park that has a keep off the grass sign. People may ignore it and go on there anyway. But if there is a fence around the park and they have to unhook part of the gate to get on there, then they wont (or are very much less likely to). Who can't unhook a gate? Not many. But in doing so, they are moving from a casual transgression that they hadn't really thought about, to an actual act of volition that takes an action. And at that point, two things kick in. The first is that they think about what they're doing ("Hey, I'm taking something without paying"), and the second is they realise that they are consciously acting to do something that is a transgression.
You can climb the gate, but you can't climb the gate without knowing that it's there and what it's for.
And DRM is a response to piracy. We have to break the cycle. Of course the only part of the cycle that is in our hands is whether we pirate or not.
Would it be a "good thing"? Here's a different take. What Valve did was to sell to different groups at different prices. They first off sold to the people who really wanted the game at price $X, then later sold to people who valued the game less at a lower price $Y. It was good marketing because they managed to sell at the highest prices people were willng to pay to two different groups.
What you're proposing is that they just forget about the first stage and go straight to selling at $Y. The determinant for whether that is a better strategy is how quickly the number of people who would buy at $Y but not at $X falls with time. If people who would have bought at $Y when the game was released are still likely to do so three months later, then it makes sense to follow Valves strategy of selling at a premium first and then at the reduced cost three months later.
I think the perceived value of a game amongst people who want it cheaper doesn't drop off fast enough to make Valve's strategy the inferior choice. Only Valve's marketing department will be able to give a good answer though.
Theft and stealing to most people means taking something that doesn't belong to you. Ergo, piracy falls into that quite naturally. I think it would be a very unusual person who when asked what stealing was said: "depriving another person of something." After all, there are a tonne of ways to do that which are theft, so it's a very bad definition of theft. "Taking what isn't yours" is what most people would say. To be honest, I'm rather tired of the Slashdot dogma that you can't call piracy theft.