... is fucking complicated. Especially if you have a good idea of what principles need to be followed as how to make decisions on what stays and what goes in terms of quality or goal of the overall project.
There's lots of people out there who THINK they have skill but are garbage since most people suffer from the Dunning Krueger effect in a similar way that most people believe they are 'above average'.
"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes."
The problem is as you advance in skill you have limited time and options in order to convey the vast warehouse of knowledge in your brain as whether to something stays or goes on any given project. Any project has a tendency to become a big mess or fall apart over time since. How many OSS projects are started only to be abandoned? Lots.
Someone has to make the big decisions and when you have seen and worked on so many projects you develop techniques to quickly shut down bad ideas and often time that means being direct and even rude to the clueless because you simply don't have the time, energy, means to communicate to the other party on what's and why's.
... CPU performance has stalled. Software tools and programmers are still decades away from re-learning how to code in parallel. Lastly many programs cannot be parallelized.
CPU's have hit a brick wall in terms of clock speed/power. Until the next breakthrough in materials science that allows clockspeed/heat to not be an issue again performance will remain mediocre.
"but realistically I suspect (unproductive) laziness combine with a lack of empathy for non-experts is the real culprit."
Reality is no one predicted the internet and that the human mind never evolved defense mechanisms for electronic and invasive spying. If you follow someone around with a camera, they get upset and/or call the police. Do even worse electronically and the human mind for many doesn't give a fuck.
It just comes down to the fact the human brain did not evolve mechanisms to safeguard oneself in this kind of environment.
"Why do people passively accept the presence of fixed security cameras everywhere, but get agitated when there is a person aiming a camera at them?"
The brain did not evolve a threat response to cameras in an environment. It really has to do with proximity and the fact that the human observer is within proximity.
Most of our problems come from the idea that 'we are free' when we are not. People don't get emotionally upset simply because the human mind doesn't get emotionally upset enough because it wasn't part of our evolutionary history. Guy + cam = upsetting and creepy, camera hanging somewhere in or out of sight = little reaction.
Most of our responses our emotional responses cue based and automatic. Only a smaller percentage of the more intelligent population has a more advanced manner in how emotions are activated that registers things like all pervasive surveillance.
Given the above chart what kind of credibility do moderates have, seriously? They have been saying the same bullshit for over 100 years already and as we can see from the chart 'moderation' never occured. The power of the law was just abused and endlessly expanded. What we consider normal today is already too much abused. Consider videogames for instance, why can't customers repair software and get access to old PC game source code for instance after a decade? Why should a bunch of private dickheads be able to confiscate historical and cultural works in the name of profit through abuse of the law?
Things like the above Freespace 2 SCP (open source) are totally dependent no the 'good will' and luck of developer/publishers combination, it's total bullshit to just allow these works to lay fallow when there are legions of amateurs/fans/pro's that would pick up the slack to learn form and innovate, build on these past works, which is currently impossible for most works in the current climate.
What has come to be seen as "normal" is already deeply corrupt and anyone who says otherwise is not intelligent enough, ethical enough and historically well read enough to even begin to take part in the discussion.
Copyright law has only continually expanded since it's implementation. He's historically illiterate, the people who want to abolish it are correct. The idea that innovation would stop without enforced monopoly is bullshit, we'd just be forced to find other ways to solve the problem which is a good thing. History has proven that human beings will just expand their desire for power indefinitely and can wait out 'moderates' like himself. He doesn't understand that people with money will just outlast you until you are weak/exhausted with all the $ they have. Corporations can outlast your for an eternity, moderate people just refuse to understand this because they are stupid.
The argument for 'moderation' was how copyright was endlessly expanded. Human beings are too stupid and ever expanding the definition of what is considered 'moderate' there is no fixed definition of what is moderate or not moderate. Which is why we have the giant clusterfuck we have today, i.e. once you allow dumb humans in the door to get their way, the endless greedy fucks come in and ruin what could be sane and just laws. The best law is no law at all at this point from point of view, the fact that we have works that some curious person would love to enhance/work with/build upon and is just sitting collecting dust under some corporate bullshit law is the insanity.
Human beings were inventors and innovators long before monopoly laws were a gleam in anyone's eyes.
"Human minds are pretty intelligent, and we don't have any of those problems."
We do, think about how trivial it is to kill another human being or for there to be developmental problems or to get sick. You've obviously not payed much attention to what I said.
"updating and improving the exploiters faster than anyone could take them apart?"
Not likely since there are trivial ways around such an idea, for instance any machine that is compromised STILL requires electricity. It's highly likely AI will be very computerized (flip a switch to reboot) and come with simple kill switches. Not only that laws would be enforced if any machine became sufficiently advanced, i.e. you'd have AI crime laws on the books, if you do this, we unplug you, don't give you energy, etc. It's very very unlikely that all machines would agree with one another (i.e. mutliple AI's, multiple human brains, etc).
We're talking true AI here, if true AI exists then there will be many versions and variations just like there are human brains. There will be many generations of AI as well. It just wont' fall out of the sky, there will be tonnes of flaws, defects and bugs in any sufficiently advanced intelligence. There won't be one uni-dimensional AI perspective.
"I find it interesting that you mention taking out smart machines with simple measures"
All smart machines require energy, everything you do in the universe requires energy. You run out of gas, it's game over regardless of how advanced your intelligence is. You still run up against the laws of nature. You seem not to have any kind of scientific understanding. Human beings have significant down time, the F-22 and F-35 - hugely expensive tech, has significant downtime for maintence and repair. The same would be required of anything with any reasonable level of complexity.
Intelligence fundamentally is still a physical structure that needs maintenance, energy and resources to exist. You act like AI is going to exist on some otherworldy plane when it's going to be mundane and boring and highly constrained by the laws of nature.
Almost all human advancements are rather mundane and only seem amazing because of flaws and limits in human brains. We've been offloading intelligent activities to machines for a while now. Developing and modelling environments is a costly endeavor, when you think of 'super AI' think of weather and/or nuclear weapon simulations requiring huge infrastructure investments and layouts of power. The same would be required of any advanced intelligence. It would be a software running on a bunch of giant boxes in a room somewhere and highly specialized.
I find it interesting you don't find the evolution of intelligence through billions of years a mountain of evidence against the idea of god like super intelligence without massive trade offs, not only that human beings will also be co-augmented with any AI developments just like as genetic engineering takes off and human beings start to be genetically selected for more intelligence/biologically and technologicaly augmented.
You can think of plastic surgery today as one of the forms of primitive and crude form of human augmentation that will get better as time goes on.
... it is still bound by energy requirements and the laws of nature. All this fear mongering is bs. If you look at the evolution of life on earth, even tiny 'low intelligence' beings can take out huge intellectual behemoths like human beings.
Not only that, you have things like EMP and nukes, not even the best AI is capable of thwarting getting bombed or nuked. Intelligence is a rather demanding, costly and fragile thing in nature. All knowledge perception has costs in terms of storage, time to access, problems of interpreting the data one is seeing and whatnot.
Consider the recent revelations by the NSA spying on everyone, there are plenty of easy low tech measures to defeat high tech spying. The same way there will be plenty of easy low tech ways to cripple a higher intelligence which is bound by the laws of nature in terms of resource and energy requirements. Anything that has physical structure in the universe requires energy and resources to maintain itself.
"Really strange - the lefts HATRED of brothers promoting freedom with their own money."
It's really strange that you are so uninformed. Both parties are owned and could give less of a shit about you, the fact that you think the Koch brothers are 'promoting freedom' means you are seriously ignorant about politics and history.
... I know 99% of the email I get is easily ignored. It's either bills, something I signed up for or ads from some website I last purchased something telling me something something is on sale.
Have you ever examined the history of why these things came into being? Thomas jefferson never lived in a highly specialized technocratic society, hence the many founders views whom you worship aren't even relevant in a modern economy.
The amount of lies and propaganda in your post is disturbing. You are operating off a false understanding of the world.
"This should not be rocket surgery for a bunch of card-carrying Slashdot nerds and geeks, unless they've sold their geek cards to emotional rather than logical identity politics and class warfare, and abandoned logic and intellectual honesty"
Anyone who DOESN'T believe in class warefare HAS lost their logic and intellectual honesty. My god, you are one of the historically illiterate people here. People had to fight for social security and the eight hour work day. It wasn't just handed to them by the glorious free market gods you worship.
... the gaming industry has turned into a crime syndicate over the last 6-7 years. It's been discusting with the rise of F2P and charging for virtual items in MMO's with both WoW and diablo 3 being among the biggest offenders.
Reality is we need to crack down on software you can never own and can be "turned off" whenever a company says so. So many older apps/games functionality is fubar because of current anti-customer industry practices. The bad thing is kids and stupid adults feed these companies money year after year.
"but whose business model consists of stripping us of our privacy and funneling our Internet experience through its pipes."
You already have that with your regular ISP. Most ISP's would capitulate in the face of any legal challenge or are already mining/selling your customer info. Since most ISP's people have are from regular monopolies (cable TV and telco companies). Not to mention many traditional ISP's hate their customers. I remember when you could get unlimited internet and now it's completely metered (at least in north america) and there is no good for it since bandwidth not utilized is forever gone.
The breakneck pace of innovation we saw for the last 30 years is slowing down. The reality is as hardware power increased software cost (like games) increased in time and money to develop. Compare a game that is ugly by today standards - descent - to any modern game.
Then on top of that add ghz and heat break wall that was hit around the time of the pentium 4. If you all remember right the P4 was to scale towards 10Ghz eventually it never got even close and the industry went a bit nuts because not all software can be parralelized. Just many trends have converged is all that makes PC's last a lot longer.
... the best way to go about improving the 'linux inside' brand is to avoid it entirely. The same way blackwater a private military company kept changing it's name when it's name became known in the media. Linux has the stigma so it would be best to rename and disassociate from linux and call it ANYTHING other then linux.
Most people are not hardware/software geeks. They just want something that works and pay someone else to take care of their worries. Linux biggest problem is that there needs to be an actual commercial incentive to develop a 'commercial fork' that just deals with things like drivers, compatability, etc. OS's are complicated and it's a full time job to manage all that complexity and that means it needs to earn $.
And this right here is the problem. The whole idea of game licensing is bullshit. I can only imagine what future gaming history is going to look like with the inability to preserve older games because they are all locked down and defectively designed by the corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
... is fucking complicated. Especially if you have a good idea of what principles need to be followed as how to make decisions on what stays and what goes in terms of quality or goal of the overall project.
There's lots of people out there who THINK they have skill but are garbage since most people suffer from the Dunning Krueger effect in a similar way that most people believe they are 'above average'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes."
The problem is as you advance in skill you have limited time and options in order to convey the vast warehouse of knowledge in your brain as whether to something stays or goes on any given project. Any project has a tendency to become a big mess or fall apart over time since. How many OSS projects are started only to be abandoned? Lots.
Someone has to make the big decisions and when you have seen and worked on so many projects you develop techniques to quickly shut down bad ideas and often time that means being direct and even rude to the clueless because you simply don't have the time, energy, means to communicate to the other party on what's and why's.
... CPU performance has stalled. Software tools and programmers are still decades away from re-learning how to code in parallel. Lastly many programs cannot be parallelized.
CPU's have hit a brick wall in terms of clock speed/power. Until the next breakthrough in materials science that allows clockspeed/heat to not be an issue again performance will remain mediocre.
"but realistically I suspect (unproductive) laziness combine with a lack of empathy for non-experts is the real culprit."
Reality is no one predicted the internet and that the human mind never evolved defense mechanisms for electronic and invasive spying. If you follow someone around with a camera, they get upset and/or call the police. Do even worse electronically and the human mind for many doesn't give a fuck.
It just comes down to the fact the human brain did not evolve mechanisms to safeguard oneself in this kind of environment.
... store knowledge within.
One wonders what would could be saved if things like pyramids and tombs are used to save a cubic ass tonne of knowledge.
"Why do people passively accept the presence of fixed security cameras everywhere, but get agitated when there is a person aiming a camera at them?"
The brain did not evolve a threat response to cameras in an environment. It really has to do with proximity and the fact that the human observer is within proximity.
Most of our problems come from the idea that 'we are free' when we are not. People don't get emotionally upset simply because the human mind doesn't get emotionally upset enough because it wasn't part of our evolutionary history. Guy + cam = upsetting and creepy, camera hanging somewhere in or out of sight = little reaction.
Most of our responses our emotional responses cue based and automatic. Only a smaller percentage of the more intelligent population has a more advanced manner in how emotions are activated that registers things like all pervasive surveillance.
... is that history contradicts that human beings are capable of "just the right amount".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_extension
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Copyright_term.svg
Given the above chart what kind of credibility do moderates have, seriously? They have been saying the same bullshit for over 100 years already and as we can see from the chart 'moderation' never occured. The power of the law was just abused and endlessly expanded. What we consider normal today is already too much abused. Consider videogames for instance, why can't customers repair software and get access to old PC game source code for instance after a decade? Why should a bunch of private dickheads be able to confiscate historical and cultural works in the name of profit through abuse of the law?
FS2 Open / SCP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhAR8rWPluQ
Things like the above Freespace 2 SCP (open source) are totally dependent no the 'good will' and luck of developer/publishers combination, it's total bullshit to just allow these works to lay fallow when there are legions of amateurs/fans/pro's that would pick up the slack to learn form and innovate, build on these past works, which is currently impossible for most works in the current climate.
What has come to be seen as "normal" is already deeply corrupt and anyone who says otherwise is not intelligent enough, ethical enough and historically well read enough to even begin to take part in the discussion.
Copyright law has only continually expanded since it's implementation. He's historically illiterate, the people who want to abolish it are correct. The idea that innovation would stop without enforced monopoly is bullshit, we'd just be forced to find other ways to solve the problem which is a good thing. History has proven that human beings will just expand their desire for power indefinitely and can wait out 'moderates' like himself. He doesn't understand that people with money will just outlast you until you are weak/exhausted with all the $ they have. Corporations can outlast your for an eternity, moderate people just refuse to understand this because they are stupid.
The argument for 'moderation' was how copyright was endlessly expanded. Human beings are too stupid and ever expanding the definition of what is considered 'moderate' there is no fixed definition of what is moderate or not moderate. Which is why we have the giant clusterfuck we have today, i.e. once you allow dumb humans in the door to get their way, the endless greedy fucks come in and ruin what could be sane and just laws. The best law is no law at all at this point from point of view, the fact that we have works that some curious person would love to enhance/work with/build upon and is just sitting collecting dust under some corporate bullshit law is the insanity.
Human beings were inventors and innovators long before monopoly laws were a gleam in anyone's eyes.
"Human minds are pretty intelligent, and we don't have any of those problems."
We do, think about how trivial it is to kill another human being or for there to be developmental problems or to get sick. You've obviously not payed much attention to what I said.
"updating and improving the exploiters faster than anyone could take them apart?"
Not likely since there are trivial ways around such an idea, for instance any machine that is compromised STILL requires electricity. It's highly likely AI will be very computerized (flip a switch to reboot) and come with simple kill switches. Not only that laws would be enforced if any machine became sufficiently advanced, i.e. you'd have AI crime laws on the books, if you do this, we unplug you, don't give you energy, etc. It's very very unlikely that all machines would agree with one another (i.e. mutliple AI's, multiple human brains, etc).
We're talking true AI here, if true AI exists then there will be many versions and variations just like there are human brains. There will be many generations of AI as well. It just wont' fall out of the sky, there will be tonnes of flaws, defects and bugs in any sufficiently advanced intelligence. There won't be one uni-dimensional AI perspective.
"I find it interesting that you mention taking out smart machines with simple measures"
All smart machines require energy, everything you do in the universe requires energy. You run out of gas, it's game over regardless of how advanced your intelligence is. You still run up against the laws of nature. You seem not to have any kind of scientific understanding. Human beings have significant down time, the F-22 and F-35 - hugely expensive tech, has significant downtime for maintence and repair. The same would be required of anything with any reasonable level of complexity.
Intelligence fundamentally is still a physical structure that needs maintenance, energy and resources to exist. You act like AI is going to exist on some otherworldy plane when it's going to be mundane and boring and highly constrained by the laws of nature.
Almost all human advancements are rather mundane and only seem amazing because of flaws and limits in human brains. We've been offloading intelligent activities to machines for a while now. Developing and modelling environments is a costly endeavor, when you think of 'super AI' think of weather and/or nuclear weapon simulations requiring huge infrastructure investments and layouts of power. The same would be required of any advanced intelligence. It would be a software running on a bunch of giant boxes in a room somewhere and highly specialized.
I find it interesting you don't find the evolution of intelligence through billions of years a mountain of evidence against the idea of god like super intelligence without massive trade offs, not only that human beings will also be co-augmented with any AI developments just like as genetic engineering takes off and human beings start to be genetically selected for more intelligence/biologically and technologicaly augmented.
You can think of plastic surgery today as one of the forms of primitive and crude form of human augmentation that will get better as time goes on.
... it is still bound by energy requirements and the laws of nature. All this fear mongering is bs. If you look at the evolution of life on earth, even tiny 'low intelligence' beings can take out huge intellectual behemoths like human beings.
Not only that, you have things like EMP and nukes, not even the best AI is capable of thwarting getting bombed or nuked. Intelligence is a rather demanding, costly and fragile thing in nature. All knowledge perception has costs in terms of storage, time to access, problems of interpreting the data one is seeing and whatnot.
Consider the recent revelations by the NSA spying on everyone, there are plenty of easy low tech measures to defeat high tech spying. The same way there will be plenty of easy low tech ways to cripple a higher intelligence which is bound by the laws of nature in terms of resource and energy requirements. Anything that has physical structure in the universe requires energy and resources to maintain itself.
... like copyright did. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Copyright_term.svg
"Really strange - the lefts HATRED of brothers promoting freedom with their own money."
It's really strange that you are so uninformed. Both parties are owned and could give less of a shit about you, the fact that you think the Koch brothers are 'promoting freedom' means you are seriously ignorant about politics and history.
... I know 99% of the email I get is easily ignored. It's either bills, something I signed up for or ads from some website I last purchased something telling me something something is on sale.
"If you don't like a product with DRM, don't buy it."
Problem is most people buying products are addicts. Diablo 3 and starcraft 2 are a case in point.
"I hope not"
You are naive.
http://www.trueachievements.com/forum/viewthread.aspx?threadid=1632336
Have you ever examined the history of why these things came into being? Thomas jefferson never lived in a highly specialized technocratic society, hence the many founders views whom you worship aren't even relevant in a modern economy.
The amount of lies and propaganda in your post is disturbing. You are operating off a false understanding of the world.
"This should not be rocket surgery for a bunch of card-carrying Slashdot nerds and geeks, unless they've sold their geek cards to emotional rather than logical identity politics and class warfare, and abandoned logic and intellectual honesty"
Anyone who DOESN'T believe in class warefare HAS lost their logic and intellectual honesty. My god, you are one of the historically illiterate people here. People had to fight for social security and the eight hour work day. It wasn't just handed to them by the glorious free market gods you worship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
Not to mention the pro-active monitoring and co-opting of political dissent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
"Corporation gets out of control, "BUY THIS BUY THIS BUY THIS!""
Tell that to blackwater.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi
... the gaming industry has turned into a crime syndicate over the last 6-7 years. It's been discusting with the rise of F2P and charging for virtual items in MMO's with both WoW and diablo 3 being among the biggest offenders.
Reality is we need to crack down on software you can never own and can be "turned off" whenever a company says so. So many older apps/games functionality is fubar because of current anti-customer industry practices. The bad thing is kids and stupid adults feed these companies money year after year.
"but whose business model consists of stripping us of our privacy and funneling our Internet experience through its pipes."
You already have that with your regular ISP. Most ISP's would capitulate in the face of any legal challenge or are already mining/selling your customer info. Since most ISP's people have are from regular monopolies (cable TV and telco companies). Not to mention many traditional ISP's hate their customers. I remember when you could get unlimited internet and now it's completely metered (at least in north america) and there is no good for it since bandwidth not utilized is forever gone.
The games robots are butt ugly. :P
... sometime.
The breakneck pace of innovation we saw for the last 30 years is slowing down. The reality is as hardware power increased software cost (like games) increased in time and money to develop. Compare a game that is ugly by today standards - descent - to any modern game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=_-slr7wL8KE#t=85s
Then on top of that add ghz and heat break wall that was hit around the time of the pentium 4. If you all remember right the P4 was to scale towards 10Ghz eventually it never got even close and the industry went a bit nuts because not all software can be parralelized. Just many trends have converged is all that makes PC's last a lot longer.
... the best way to go about improving the 'linux inside' brand is to avoid it entirely. The same way blackwater a private military company kept changing it's name when it's name became known in the media. Linux has the stigma so it would be best to rename and disassociate from linux and call it ANYTHING other then linux.
Most people are not hardware/software geeks. They just want something that works and pay someone else to take care of their worries. Linux biggest problem is that there needs to be an actual commercial incentive to develop a 'commercial fork' that just deals with things like drivers, compatability, etc. OS's are complicated and it's a full time job to manage all that complexity and that means it needs to earn $.
"The productive people IN society who do the innovation and perform the real work"
Most productive things are done by machines, gas and electricity. The idea that you are some cowboy superhero is a nice part of american mythology.
"I don't mind licensing a game."
And this right here is the problem. The whole idea of game licensing is bullshit. I can only imagine what future gaming history is going to look like with the inability to preserve older games because they are all locked down and defectively designed by the corporations.