I'm afraid that "Great brands" is not the same as supporting open competition or the marketplace of ideas. What makes you think that a "great brand" would welcome competition?
I'd not meant to conflate them: Darwin's work in physical evolution sets a groundwork to understand the philosophical or social evolution described by Herbert Spencer. I'd meant to illustrate that physical evolution, which cannot be guided by social cooperation, is effective. You've a valid point that it could seem as if I were conflating them: I should have mentioned Herbert Spencer or someone discussing social Darwinism by name.
> Because nothing in this world was ever accomplished through competition that couldn't have been done far better through cooperation.
Please, if you've not read it, read Darwin's work "On the Origin of Species". Or if you'd like entertainment as well as old theories, I'd suggest David Brin's book "Earth". The idea that species change dynamically due to ordinary competition is critical: many contemporary scientists consider the evolution of economies, societies, or even of thought itself to have the same foundations, in competing for resources to survive by reproducing successfully. Competition is critical to such evolution. Even the scientific method is a form of competition, where ideas are tested and those which are effective survive. Eliminating competition is as dangerous as voting on physical reality. A cooperative consensus may be reached, but but the lack of verification or competition can foster destructive wastes of resource.
This is not to say that cooperation is not useful: but pure cooperation has no power to discard wasted or mistaken effort. Even for cooperative efforts, the competition of distinct efforts to get resources or mind share is itself key to selecting the forms of cooperation.
There is only one Nobel prize in physics per year. Picking the one prize for a specific year does not mean other discovers were not important or were not contenders for that award.
> The corollary to Godwin's law is "...and once the Hitler comparison is made, all useful discussion in the thread has terminated." That seems to be accurate.
Please, that is really not a corollary to the law, which in its original form claims that in any online discussion, there will inevitably be a comparison to Nazis. Mike Godwin made no claims that the comparison would be invalid, or that this was automatically the end of useful discussion. These added rules seem to be less effective and less powerful than the original rule. They are also often used as much to silence discussion as the original comparison is often used to horrify and end discussion.
"To obtain a federal forfeiture, the Government must prove the forfeiture and the connection between the property and the crime by a preponderance of the evidence. Forfeiture may be applicable to property that is traceable as proceeds of the offense, that facilitated the offense, or that was involved in money laundering. All claims of interest or ownership in the property, such as property owned by third parties, are resolved in a single trial."
The principal that a vendor is responsible for abuse performed with their goods when it could be reasonably foreseen seems clear. The reasoning that a device has legitimate functions and that a vendor could not reasonably be held responsible criminally or civilly for selling it breaks down when the function of the device is primarily criminal. We see this in my workplace for network monitoring tools: is this tool designed for packet sniffing and doing man-in-the-middle auditing of private information? Do we have the authority to do that, or would we be violating various privacy laws by sniffing the traffic? Do we want to be vulnerable to demands that we turn that information over to local governments?
The relative velocities of objects in orbit can also be quite high. A typical low Earth orbit satellite has an altitude of less than 1200 miles, and a velocity of roughly 18,000 miles/hour. A velocity difference of even one tenth of one percent means an impact speed of 18 miles/hour. That may be survivable, but it will damage both. It will also change the orbit of both, in what is essentially a random direction. It's also likely to change the orbit of the smaller object much more than that of the larger object,
Also, most LEO trajectories are similar. They're on a rough plane around the equator, as low as possible, because different orbits and higher altitudes cost much more fuel to achieve. At their typical orbital speed of 18,000 miles/hour and altitudes , they're sweeping through surprisingly large amounts of space throughout their lifetime. And as their orbits degrade, LEO satellites in general _do not carry a lot of fuel_, Typical launch costs today are roughly $50,000/pound. So armor for spacecraft, or fuel and rockets to change orbit after launch, are prohibitively expensive.
LEO is also becoming prohibitively cluttered. NASA and other space agencies are doing their limited best to control launches and to track objects to avoid collisions, but all LEO satellites have their orbits degrade over time, and that degradation is not completely predictable. The smaller the object, the more difficult it is to track as its orbit degrades.
The far more common form of diabetes, aka Type 2 diabetes, is tied to insulin resistance. This makes it more difficult to exercise, since normal use of glucose is impeded, and the resulting raised insulin level also raises hunger. Between the lethargy, and the hunger, it' can be difficult to avoid weight gain. The weight gain reduces the effect of available insulin several distinct ways. This creates positive feedback. It also lets people blame the victim, thinking that the weight gain is the cause of the diabetes rather than the result of the diabetes.
I'm afraid it's not a good classification system, for exactly the reason you've described. I've done some investigation lately, due to colleagues who handle their diabetes or who've family with diabetes. And since I've become older, it's more common among my older peers, and I've gotten to know a few children with diabetes in my lifetime.
I've found it helpful to segregate by pathology, such as "juvenile onset" which described the auto-immune problem that destroys insulin producing cells. I was also informed of some successful human trials for a cure: See https://www.diabetesdaily.com/... That kind of diabetes is apparently now called "Type 1". It's much less frequent than insulin resistance, but far more difficult to treat because there is no insulin at all available for its victims. I've seen treatment improve for diabetics in my lifetime, such as more concentrated insulin and varieties of insulin, handheld blood glucose tests, and insulin pumps to control insulin. But those treatments are all like an iron lung for polio. If Dr. Faustmann's work is successful, it would be equivalent to the polio vaccine.
If you look at the site: they turn a blind eye to prostitution hosted at www.backpage.com. Picking and choosing which prostitutes are under-age, lying about their age, or are undercover police is a burden for any website which would be a legal nightmare to undertake. There are many others that have carefully turned a blind eye to such traffic: Craigslist used to do so, and withdrew from the business after a notable murder of a prostitute found on craigslist. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for more details.
> there are only a finite number of descriptions possible.
There are a finite number of ways to write them due to, as you mentioned, limits on the availability of matter with which to write them. It is, if I may say, a gross fallacy to say that this therefore limits the maximum value of the descriptions. There are any number of notations available with which to write infinities, and extremely efficient ways to describe values well beyond the size of the numbers of the possible particles in the knowable universe. If I may describe one right now, it's possible to write an 8 on its side to represent a simple infinity symbol, which exceeds that number by a literally infinite factor.
Various math involving infinities is demonstrably effective and useful. To present to others that infinities do not exist with a fallacious analysis of the size of the universe is.... Well, it's disingenuous and discouraging to mathematics and science.
> cross-platform, open spec low level graphics API to the Mac
A "low level graphics API" sounds suspiciously like a standard to me. Doesn't it sound like a standard to you?
> Nor are these APIs competing,
I'm very confused how you might think such a thing. As I understand it, "Vulkan" is competing with "Metal", the Apple published, closed source API. Both compete for market share and developer time with DirectX on Windows based machines. Even if you consider Vulkan to be the software successor to OpenGL, it's competing with the older versions of OpenGL.
The list of countable numbers is quite infinite in number, at least in the mathematical sense. One can always add "one" to the largest known number and generate a new, larger element of the set. The availability of resources with which to write the elements of a set does not mean the set is not infinite.
The idea of computational handling of numbers, and the difficulties of handling larger and larger recorded values, is built into the earliest models of a Turing machine, which assumed an infinitely long recording strip on which to record data and transactions.
> , there is only a finite number of numbers describable.
This is, ff I may say so, nonsense. Describing numbers is easily done at a higher level of abstraction. Given the approximate number of possible partcles in the universe of 10^86, I can trivially describe a far larger numnber as 10^100. We do not have to enumerate every single value in order to discuss a larger number. I think you're confused or being confused by just such an attempt to abstract and automatically apply limitations of one system to a very distinct and richer system, and then to ignore or the built-in structure of the second system. This will lead you to some very confusing places mathematically, philosophically, and even in engineering terms.
I don't wish to sound snide: But I think you'll find, if you look more carefully, that It works very well: Infinite series are much of the foundation of calculus. Even countable numbers, involve "infinities" because they are unbounded.
> The frequency at which a law is violated has no bearing on whether something is illegal or not.
If I may say, it actually does. The existence of prevalent exceptions to a law can demonstrate selective enforcement of the law, which can itself be illegal.
It's retaining distinct copies of a document before, and after, adding fraudulent content that trapped the man. Simply discarding previous, fraudulent versions of the document would have cleared the paper trail. Worse for careless criminals: Word documents normally retain some local history of changes on the author's computer, and are far more dangerous in terms of tracking when someone added fraudulent content. PDF is _much_ safer.
PDF is not as user-familiar, and the better What You See is What You Get editors for it do cost money. But the idea that a criminal is making themselves more vulnerable because they work in PDF, not World, is foolish indeed.
I agree. But if they're not verifying the recorded data, as seems to be the case, than replicating even one such RFID chip en masse helps enable wholesale forgery.
There was an interesting e-passport replication technology reported at the "Black Hat" security conference in 2006 So far as I know, this replication approach has never been disabled
RFID chips are, by their nature, kept very inexpensive and easy to read. Unless the USA and other nations are prepared to invest in more powerful and secure standards for what is supposed to be a very easily scanned and robust technology, I'm afraid that I don't see how they can be made more secure.
If I may? I do understand computers. Many of the concerns about AI are not from designed or evolved malice on the part of the AI. It's from excessive trust in a system that responds in nanoseconds and may have enormous power, power that was granted them by accident or because of excessive trust in a fallible architecture.
>If you go back far enough in PC history, the first PC cases had a switch on the front that switched the incoming power (110v/220v).
Actually, it did not. It required a dual-power power unit, which had a control circuit. Wiring 120 to the front panel would have required far more heavy duty internal wiring.
I remember those days. Wiring the main power to the power supply could be done very badly by the original manufacturer, but even the cheap vendors did not want to pay for a switch that could handle 120 and 220 power directly if they were wise.
Germany has a long history of misuse of large, collected personal data and metadata. The Nazis did a very efective task of seeking out political dissidence and undesirables before and during World War II. The Stasi in East Germany inherited some of the structure, and much of the ruthless and centralized approach to gathering personal data both through organized statistics and through personal informants. Part of the unification of Germany was the rejection of that kind of personal monitoring for the unified nation: they've experienced its broad use against even the most innocent of civilians, and now automatically respond harshly to the possibility of personal monitoring.
Their resulting privacy laws are now a good model in the modern, technological age of protecting individuals. It surprises older people like myself who remember East Germany's abuses, performed with guidance and support from their sponsors in the Soviet Union, very well.
I'm old enough to remember the draft. Some people do consider conscription to be a form of slavery. I'm also old enough to have known people who were desperate, or whose families were desperate enough, to lie to get into military service with food, clothing, and housing as part of the agreement. And there have been people throughout history who willingly entered indentured servitude for personal goals.
Owning a great deal of the manufacturing capacity, raw materials, or intellectual property can create an effective monopoly without a vendor having interest in development of new technologies with new featuresets. There may not be profit there for Qualcomm: Many of the features of the ideal smartwatch are already embodied in the current round of smartphones, and smartwatches lack the screen space, the battery capacity, or the control surfaces to be equivalent to a modern smartphone.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid that "Great brands" is not the same as supporting open competition or the marketplace of ideas. What makes you think that a "great brand" would welcome competition?
I'd not meant to conflate them: Darwin's work in physical evolution sets a groundwork to understand the philosophical or social evolution described by Herbert Spencer. I'd meant to illustrate that physical evolution, which cannot be guided by social cooperation, is effective. You've a valid point that it could seem as if I were conflating them: I should have mentioned Herbert Spencer or someone discussing social Darwinism by name.
> Because nothing in this world was ever accomplished through competition that couldn't have been done far better through cooperation.
Please, if you've not read it, read Darwin's work "On the Origin of Species". Or if you'd like entertainment as well as old theories, I'd suggest David Brin's book "Earth". The idea that species change dynamically due to ordinary competition is critical: many contemporary scientists consider the evolution of economies, societies, or even of thought itself to have the same foundations, in competing for resources to survive by reproducing successfully. Competition is critical to such evolution. Even the scientific method is a form of competition, where ideas are tested and those which are effective survive. Eliminating competition is as dangerous as voting on physical reality. A cooperative consensus may be reached, but but the lack of verification or competition can foster destructive wastes of resource.
This is not to say that cooperation is not useful: but pure cooperation has no power to discard wasted or mistaken effort. Even for cooperative efforts, the competition of distinct efforts to get resources or mind share is itself key to selecting the forms of cooperation.
There is only one Nobel prize in physics per year. Picking the one prize for a specific year does not mean other discovers were not important or were not contenders for that award.
> The corollary to Godwin's law is "...and once the Hitler comparison is made, all useful discussion in the thread has terminated." That seems to be accurate.
Please, that is really not a corollary to the law, which in its original form claims that in any online discussion, there will inevitably be a comparison to Nazis. Mike Godwin made no claims that the comparison would be invalid, or that this was automatically the end of useful discussion. These added rules seem to be less effective and less powerful than the original rule. They are also often used as much to silence discussion as the original comparison is often used to horrify and end discussion.
This is from the Us criminal code, USC 1807:
"To obtain a federal forfeiture, the Government must prove the forfeiture and the connection between the property and the crime by a preponderance of the evidence. Forfeiture may be applicable to property that is traceable as proceeds of the offense, that facilitated the offense, or that was involved in money laundering. All claims of interest or ownership in the property, such as property owned by third parties, are resolved in a single trial."
The principal that a vendor is responsible for abuse performed with their goods when it could be reasonably foreseen seems clear. The reasoning that a device has legitimate functions and that a vendor could not reasonably be held responsible criminally or civilly for selling it breaks down when the function of the device is primarily criminal. We see this in my workplace for network monitoring tools: is this tool designed for packet sniffing and doing man-in-the-middle auditing of private information? Do we have the authority to do that, or would we be violating various privacy laws by sniffing the traffic? Do we want to be vulnerable to demands that we turn that information over to local governments?
The relative velocities of objects in orbit can also be quite high. A typical low Earth orbit satellite has an altitude of less than 1200 miles, and a velocity of roughly 18,000 miles/hour. A velocity difference of even one tenth of one percent means an impact speed of 18 miles/hour. That may be survivable, but it will damage both. It will also change the orbit of both, in what is essentially a random direction. It's also likely to change the orbit of the smaller object much more than that of the larger object,
Also, most LEO trajectories are similar. They're on a rough plane around the equator, as low as possible, because different orbits and higher altitudes cost much more fuel to achieve. At their typical orbital speed of 18,000 miles/hour and altitudes , they're sweeping through surprisingly large amounts of space throughout their lifetime. And as their orbits degrade, LEO satellites in general _do not carry a lot of fuel_, Typical launch costs today are roughly $50,000/pound. So armor for spacecraft, or fuel and rockets to change orbit after launch, are prohibitively expensive.
LEO is also becoming prohibitively cluttered. NASA and other space agencies are doing their limited best to control launches and to track objects to avoid collisions, but all LEO satellites have their orbits degrade over time, and that degradation is not completely predictable. The smaller the object, the more difficult it is to track as its orbit degrades.
The far more common form of diabetes, aka Type 2 diabetes, is tied to insulin resistance. This makes it more difficult to exercise, since normal use of glucose is impeded, and the resulting raised insulin level also raises hunger. Between the lethargy, and the hunger, it' can be difficult to avoid weight gain. The weight gain reduces the effect of available insulin several distinct ways. This creates positive feedback. It also lets people blame the victim, thinking that the weight gain is the cause of the diabetes rather than the result of the diabetes.
I'm afraid it's not a good classification system, for exactly the reason you've described. I've done some investigation lately, due to colleagues who handle their diabetes or who've family with diabetes. And since I've become older, it's more common among my older peers, and I've gotten to know a few children with diabetes in my lifetime.
I've found it helpful to segregate by pathology, such as "juvenile onset" which described the auto-immune problem that destroys insulin producing cells. I was also informed of some successful human trials for a cure: See https://www.diabetesdaily.com/... That kind of diabetes is apparently now called "Type 1". It's much less frequent than insulin resistance, but far more difficult to treat because there is no insulin at all available for its victims. I've seen treatment improve for diabetics in my lifetime, such as more concentrated insulin and varieties of insulin, handheld blood glucose tests, and insulin pumps to control insulin. But those treatments are all like an iron lung for polio. If Dr. Faustmann's work is successful, it would be equivalent to the polio vaccine.
If you look at the site: they turn a blind eye to prostitution hosted at www.backpage.com. Picking and choosing which prostitutes are under-age, lying about their age, or are undercover police is a burden for any website which would be a legal nightmare to undertake. There are many others that have carefully turned a blind eye to such traffic: Craigslist used to do so, and withdrew from the business after a notable murder of a prostitute found on craigslist. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for more details.
Those are very good points. We should expect to see many "think of the children" demands. tied to any such laws.
> there are only a finite number of descriptions possible.
There are a finite number of ways to write them due to, as you mentioned, limits on the availability of matter with which to write them. It is, if I may say, a gross fallacy to say that this therefore limits the maximum value of the descriptions. There are any number of notations available with which to write infinities, and extremely efficient ways to describe values well beyond the size of the numbers of the possible particles in the knowable universe. If I may describe one right now, it's possible to write an 8 on its side to represent a simple infinity symbol, which exceeds that number by a literally infinite factor.
Various math involving infinities is demonstrably effective and useful. To present to others that infinities do not exist with a fallacious analysis of the size of the universe is.... Well, it's disingenuous and discouraging to mathematics and science.
If I may quote your own words:
> cross-platform, open spec low level graphics API to the Mac
A "low level graphics API" sounds suspiciously like a standard to me. Doesn't it sound like a standard to you?
> Nor are these APIs competing,
I'm very confused how you might think such a thing. As I understand it, "Vulkan" is competing with "Metal", the Apple published, closed source API. Both compete for market share and developer time with DirectX on Windows based machines. Even if you consider Vulkan to be the software successor to OpenGL, it's competing with the older versions of OpenGL.
The list of countable numbers is quite infinite in number, at least in the mathematical sense. One can always add "one" to the largest known number and generate a new, larger element of the set. The availability of resources with which to write the elements of a set does not mean the set is not infinite.
The idea of computational handling of numbers, and the difficulties of handling larger and larger recorded values, is built into the earliest models of a Turing machine, which assumed an infinitely long recording strip on which to record data and transactions.
> , there is only a finite number of numbers describable.
This is, ff I may say so, nonsense. Describing numbers is easily done at a higher level of abstraction. Given the approximate number of possible partcles in the universe of 10^86, I can trivially describe a far larger numnber as 10^100. We do not have to enumerate every single value in order to discuss a larger number. I think you're confused or being confused by just such an attempt to abstract and automatically apply limitations of one system to a very distinct and richer system, and then to ignore or the built-in structure of the second system. This will lead you to some very confusing places mathematically, philosophically, and even in engineering terms.
> Math containing infinties doesn't really work.
I don't wish to sound snide: But I think you'll find, if you look more carefully, that It works very well: Infinite series are much of the foundation of calculus. Even countable numbers, involve "infinities" because they are unbounded.
There is a famous XKCD cartoon that describes very well the need for new standards.
https://xkcd.com/927
> The frequency at which a law is violated has no bearing on whether something is illegal or not.
If I may say, it actually does. The existence of prevalent exceptions to a law can demonstrate selective enforcement of the law, which can itself be illegal.
It's retaining distinct copies of a document before, and after, adding fraudulent content that trapped the man. Simply discarding previous, fraudulent versions of the document would have cleared the paper trail. Worse for careless criminals: Word documents normally retain some local history of changes on the author's computer, and are far more dangerous in terms of tracking when someone added fraudulent content. PDF is _much_ safer.
PDF is not as user-familiar, and the better What You See is What You Get editors for it do cost money. But the idea that a criminal is making themselves more vulnerable because they work in PDF, not World, is foolish indeed.
I agree. But if they're not verifying the recorded data, as seems to be the case, than replicating even one such RFID chip en masse helps enable wholesale forgery.
There was an interesting e-passport replication technology reported at the "Black Hat" security conference in 2006 So far as I know, this replication approach has never been disabled
https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
RFID chips are, by their nature, kept very inexpensive and easy to read. Unless the USA and other nations are prepared to invest in more powerful and secure standards for what is supposed to be a very easily scanned and robust technology, I'm afraid that I don't see how they can be made more secure.
If I may? I do understand computers. Many of the concerns about AI are not from designed or evolved malice on the part of the AI. It's from excessive trust in a system that responds in nanoseconds and may have enormous power, power that was granted them by accident or because of excessive trust in a fallible architecture.
>If you go back far enough in PC history, the first PC cases had a switch on the front that switched the incoming power (110v/220v).
Actually, it did not. It required a dual-power power unit, which had a control circuit. Wiring 120 to the front panel would have required far more heavy duty internal wiring.
I remember those days. Wiring the main power to the power supply could be done very badly by the original manufacturer, but even the cheap vendors did not want to pay for a switch that could handle 120 and 220 power directly if they were wise.
Germany has a long history of misuse of large, collected personal data and metadata. The Nazis did a very efective task of seeking out political dissidence and undesirables before and during World War II. The Stasi in East Germany inherited some of the structure, and much of the ruthless and centralized approach to gathering personal data both through organized statistics and through personal informants. Part of the unification of Germany was the rejection of that kind of personal monitoring for the unified nation: they've experienced its broad use against even the most innocent of civilians, and now automatically respond harshly to the possibility of personal monitoring.
Their resulting privacy laws are now a good model in the modern, technological age of protecting individuals. It surprises older people like myself who remember East Germany's abuses, performed with guidance and support from their sponsors in the Soviet Union, very well.
I'm old enough to remember the draft. Some people do consider conscription to be a form of slavery. I'm also old enough to have known people who were desperate, or whose families were desperate enough, to lie to get into military service with food, clothing, and housing as part of the agreement. And there have been people throughout history who willingly entered indentured servitude for personal goals.
Owning a great deal of the manufacturing capacity, raw materials, or intellectual property can create an effective monopoly without a vendor having interest in development of new technologies with new featuresets. There may not be profit there for Qualcomm: Many of the features of the ideal smartwatch are already embodied in the current round of smartphones, and smartwatches lack the screen space, the battery capacity, or the control surfaces to be equivalent to a modern smartphone.