That was an example in reply to your statement "If you look at attempts to formalize the scientific method, you probably won't see a step that is, "convince other people"" That was a site on which the British Science Council "attempted to formalize the scientific method", and it did include the final step.
Ok, so to add a bit of emphasis and interpretation here, "If you look at attempts to formalize the scientific method, you probably won't see a step that is, 'convince other people'." The reason I put that word "probably" in there is that, well... you never know what some idiot is going to put in his attempt to formalize the scientific method. And let's not pretend like there's nobody saying stupid things in political councils.
But that aside, as I pointed out, it doesn't say, "convince other people". It says that you should make your work available for public scrutiny, and I could present a rationale for why that makes sense. One very good reason to put that into the formalized form of the "scientific method" is science is iterative, and the knowledge gained from it is refined over history as it's taken up by new people. In that sense, it's important that the output of the scientific endeavor is shared publicly.
But "convince other people"? That way madness lies. You're basically leaving open the possibility that Creationism might be "better science" than Evolution, depending on which side has convinced the greater number of people.
The final step: "critical exposure to scrutiny, peer review and assessment" In other words: convince other scientists.
So I'm not sure I'm ready to accept that web page as a definitive authority. I can understand if you get annoyed at that and say it's bullshit, but the fact is, it's just a political body making a claim at what they think science is, and I'm more concerned with what science has claimed to be over the past few centuries, as well as a logical view of what it makes sense for science to be. If convincing others is the end-point then the rest of the process is vaguely irrelevant.
I don't know if you'll immediately grasp the meat of this objection, but if the convictions of other people is a requirement for science, then it kind of undermines the hopes at developing certain/reliable knowledge. It's like, "Investigate. Come up with a hypothesis. Run tests. Collect data. Analyze your data. Come to a conclusion. Now all of that is irrelevant, because it doesn't matter whether your experiments are designed well or executed well, whether your analysis was correct. What matters is the political process of getting a bunch of self-involved hairless monkeys to form a consensus that you're correct." You may as well skip all that experimentation stuff and just figure out how to be a better salesman. At that rate, cult leaders are great scientists, because the ultimate test of your theory is just whether or not you can convince a large group of people.
And maybe the Science Council knows this, and that's why their last step is "exposure to scrutiny" rather than "convince others". Exposure to scrutiny only implies that other people are able to pick apart the experiment and look for problems, but it doesn't require explicitly require that everyone is immediately convinced. I'd agree that in the overall larger scheme of science, part of the process is "making my experiment public, allowing other people to perform their own tests and build off my what I've learned." However, I just think it's really screwing with the idea of science to require that people are generally convinced.
And it might even be worse if you say, "Oh no, not people in general, but only scientists," because it sets up "scientists" to be a special class of priests that are "the keepers of truth". Science should not judged based on who performs the experiment or who reads the paper.
In general, I wish people would be much more careful about how they use any metrics. The problem is, if you're lazy and/or stupid, you're just going to pick a readily available metric that sounds like it measures what you want to know, and then you're going to run with it. If I want to know what people want and like, I measure what they click on. If I want to know if a programmer is good, I measure how many lines of code he writes. If I want to know what the best political decision would be, I look at the polls.
It's science when that scientist convinces other scientists using evidence and clear, step by step reasoning that their theory is right.
Well... honestly, no, that's not science. If you look at attempts to formalize the scientific method, you probably won't see a step that is, "convince other people", and there's a reason for that. The process of convincing other people is political, and not really a scientific process.
Now there's a good reason people talk about reaching a scientific consensus, which implies that they're reaching a consensus on a scientific concept by using scientific evidence. The word "scientific" here is a modifier to indicate the subject matter. It's like saying, "I'm going to a scientific lecture at school." It doesn't make lectures part of the scientific method, it just indicates the kind of lecture you're going to.
Science is not a body of canonized knowledge. It's not "the collection of all ideas that you can convince scientists of." Science is a process that aims to develop certainty based on empirical evidence, regardless of whether you can convince a single other person.
Marketing people tend to do this. "You might think that [X] would be successful. But we tried [X] once, and it didn't work, so obviously [X] doesn't work."
In fairness, it's not just marketing people, but stupid people in general do this. It's just that marketing people (and this author) are stupid.
"Science" is a branch of philosophy, natural philosophy to be precise. The "scientific method" is a process. Refusing to jump off a building is common-sense,
I'm with you so far...
the scientific method is formalised common-sense. They are very much the same thing at a philosophical level.
No, "the scientific method" and "common sense" and not "very much the same thing at a philosophical level". The scientific method is a method. A process. A procedure. The scientific method may lead to the same conclusion as "common sense", but if that conclusion is not arrived at through the scientific method, then it's not "science".
Until such time that one of them correctly predicts something that the others don't they are all equally valid
Until there's some kind of evidence, or until they can provide some kind of predictive power, they're all equally valid scientifically. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're equally valid according to all philosophic thought. For example, we have equal scientific reason to believe that intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the universe as we have to believe that invisible purple unicorns live on Uranus. However, one of those beliefs may be more reasonable for non-scientific reasons.
That is a great example of begging the question [wikipedia.org].
Again, it seems you have no idea what you're talking about. I wasn't begging the question, I was rephrasing for the benefit of someone who appears to be pointless. There's no significant argumentation happening here on either side, so we aren't even to the point where we can claim that someone's argument is bad or invalid.
You don't have to codify the method of study to use it.
The "scientific method" is precisely the codification of reasoning techniques that were in use long before. Observing something falling from a significant height, seeing it get damaged, and deciding, "I don't want that to happen to me," is not science. Science is a process involving a hypothesis, experimentation, and collection of reproducible empirical evidence. You might believe any number of rational and true things, but without engaging in some kind of experimentation or testing, those beliefs aren't science.
And that's what this whole discussion is about. People are discussing the extent to which current theoretical physics can be considered "science", since there may not be any way to directly test the models that theoretical physicists are creating.
If you don't accept that the scientific method is a viable approach to uncovering the manner in which the universe behaves
I don't think anyone is saying that the scientific method isn't a viable approach to uncover the manner in which the universe behaves. I think the implication is that the scientific method may not be the best approach to uncover the manner in which the scientific method behaves.
...I would ask why you don't step off the ledge at the top of a tall building.
This is a terrible example. The scientific method is entirely unnecessary to decide whether to step off of a tall building. People knew not do do that before the scientific method was codified. I doubt anyone has ever done a rigorous study as to whether people should step off of tall buildings, so I'm not even sure we have a solid scientific basis for a theory of stepping off of tall buildings.
I think you misunderstand what science actually does.
if he wanted to get all his money in a pile and burn it, that would be his right.
Actually, I think it's technically illegal to destroy money.
I dont get why people care what others do with their own money
Well first, money itself is a societal thing. Like, if you live all by yourself on an island, not interacting with the rest of the world, there's not really any such thing as "money". Those little slips of paper are worthless, except maybe as paper. But really, that's just one of the many ways in which "money" belongs to and is part of a society, and not an individual in isolation.
There's no way to spend billions of dollars that will not have a substantial effect on the lives of a lot of people, so yes, we get to care how people spend their money. If you spend $1 billion buying me luxurious presents, I'm allowed to be happy about that. If you spend $1 billion to dump human waste in the empty lot next door to my house, I'm allowed to be a bit miffed. It's absurd and childish to think that we shouldn't care how people spend their money.
There's an even more disturbing belief underlying your post: that the government has no right to tax the rich. This line of thinking shows your stupidity and gullibility-- that you've been persuaded by the rich that they are entitled to have the government tax you in order to give your money to someone more wealthy.
Giving selective tax breaks to the rich is the same as giving them handouts and subsidies. They should be taxed like the rest of us.
Sort of. I wouldn't say consciousness and understanding don't have agreed-upon definitions as much as we have no method of determining whether they exist. But even if we agree that those terms are not well understood, it only furthers my point: this is more of a linguistic question than anything else.
Ah, yes, this argument again. "Rich people are better at knowing what to do with money than the rest of us. Therefore, if we want to fix all of society's ills, we should try to take as much money as we can away from the poor, the middle class, and organizations with any public accountability, and concentrating all the money in the hands of a few rich people. After all, those rich people must be smart, or they never would have become rich."
No thank you. Subsidizing the rich is stupid. Yeah, yeah, a few of the rich people are trying to do good things with their money, and a couple of those are succeeding in doing good things.
If that is the case it would make sense that if you want to perform altruistic acts and have the power to get them to work a corporation isn't a bad idea.
Yes, that would make sense from the standpoint of an uber-rich person who wants to perform altruistic acts. Of course, that doesn't mean that it's necessarily the best thing for the rest of us. It's sort of like how cartoon villains want to consolidate power under themselves, with the mindset of "If I ruled the world, I could fix everything!"
At least for some of us, the idea of replacing our ruling class of greedy uber-rich assholes with a ruling class of trying-to-be-benevolent uber-rich assholes doesn't really sound like an ideal solution, even if though it would probably be a minor improvement.
I think the problem is that people expect machine intelligence to look like human intelligence. Machine intelligence exists and is strong in some areas. Modern chess programs are an example.
I think this is a bit of a linguistic issue in that we all keep using the word "intelligence" without really agreeing on what it means. You're talking about an idea that you have of intelligence that means that chess-playing computers are "intelligent", but the concept others have in mind might rule out any existing chess-playing computer from being considered "intelligent". For myself, the word "intelligent" implies not only an ability to adapt to solve a problem, but also an understanding of what the problem is, and an awareness that it's trying to solve the problem. It's one thing to mechanically select the best chess move, but another to understand that you're playing a game.
To me, when you talk about "artificial intelligence" without any qualifier, you're talking about what I've seen variously called "true AI", "real AI", "strong AI", or "general AI". You're talking about a machine consciousness that has an understanding of itself in the world. Often, this isn't even the goal of "AI researchers".
Still, the governments of the world have been asking us to give up on having any level of privacy so that they can "catch terrorists". I think they need to demonstrate some things before I can even think about accepting that idea.
1) There's oversight over the collection and storage of the data that guarantees that it's being used for that purpose. There's no possibility that it can be used for other law enforcement operations, for blackmail, or for looking at dick pics (thank you, John Oliver).
2) The program is effective. If you're collecting my SMS messages so that you can stop terrorist attacks, show me that you're catching terrorists that way. Don't collect SMS messages preemptively and then go, "Well after the fact, we found that the terrorists used SMS and we just didn't catch it. But after we caught people who were involved and found their cell phones, we thought it was kind of helpful to see those SMS messages."
3) Explain why the terrorists won't just change their methods. People say things like, "When guns are illegal, only criminals will have guns," and then the same people say, "We need to make it illegal to send encrypted messages that we can't break." It doesn't make sense.
That's just to start. I'll think about more questions when those can be answered.
This isn't FUD. FUD = "Fear, uncertainty, and doubt." He's not even implying that the Surface will possibly eat your babies. He's not even saying that it sucks. He's just saying that it's not great.
Pretty much plan isn't going to work if you allow for blatant rule-breaking. Make it so if you have a "junior apprentice programmer" that has 20 years of experience and is running the project, the company gets fined and the hiring manager risks jail time. Have random audits to confirm people are following the rules. Enforce those rules.
Besides, if someone is applying for an H-1B visa for a "junior apprentice programmer" on the basis that they need a specialist that isn't available in the US population, that application should be rejected on it's face.
Yeah, but some of that data is straight-up garbage. I doubt we're producing books, music, and movies at a rate that outpaces our ability to store them. I'm sure we have plenty of storage to archive all the important works of art that are being created. I'm sure we could archive the source code of every piece of software-- even including all the various versions. I even bet we have plenty to to archive every tweet, blog post, and instagram pic.
If I had to guess, I'd guess the problem would come from trying to archive every phone call, text message, IM, email, and download-- including metadata, including redundant copies of everything transferred. That is, if I send an email to 20 people containing a 50 MB PDF, keeping each copy, 50 MB * 21. If you're trying to store a copy of every movie every time it's streamed from Netflix, that's going to add up really quick.
So the real trick is going to be to make sure we have an archival procedure for the data we care about. We don't need to store everything.
Video games aren't "nascent" at all, they've been around since the 1970s
Well in comparison to other art forms-- e.g. painting, sculpture, writing-- that's nascent. And part of my point here is that we've probably already lost some of that art from the first few decades due to DRM, or just due to the software being locked to specific hardware. I'm possibly a little radical in that I've supported the idea that, if developers want to enjoy legal copyright protection, they should be submitting their source code to some governmental body (Library of Congress?) for preservation. When the copyright expires, the source should be put into public domain.
and were better quality in previous decades too.
I don't know why you're even bringing up this idea. Some people are going to argue with you, but it's completely irrelevant to what I was saying.
[I] had to install Windows 95 using VMWare to get it to play.
This reminds me of a thought that I've had about Linux gaming. Basically, it would be really great if the whole Steam Machine thing took off, and Linux became the de facto platform for PC gaming-- not because of immediate problems that it might solve, but because of this issue of archiving old games. Even if the game itself was never open sourced, you would always have the option of tracking down the specific Linux version/revision that the game was designed to play on, virtualize that platform, and then play the game. Right now, playing games in virtual machines doesn't make for great performance, but old games were designed for slower computers, so perfomance is less of an issue.
In fact, what would be ideal is if games could be bundled in some kind of container that had it running on a stripped-down VM, making it completely portable and archivable. I'm sure it'd be a technical challenge to make that happen in such a way that the game ran well, but I feel like if you made a VM OS optimized just for playing games (including no other components) you could make it fairly small and lightweight.
Today, we learned how to understand Egyptian hieroglyphs by looking at the Rosetta Stone. I doubt whoever made that stone understood the importance at the time. Jumping ahead to something more modern, a lot of early Doctor Who episodes were lost because they taped over them. The idea of reruns wasn't quite a thing yet, and the people making the show apparently didn't think anyone would be interested in watching them again.
So those are just two examples, but there are many writers and artists and engineers throughout history whose work became important or relevant much later on. Meanwhile, we're basically throwing away all the examples of a nascent art form that combines art and engineering like nothing that came before. The way we're locking games into specific hardware platforms and requiring DRM-- it'd be like if we burned all books 7 years after they're completed, for fear that someone might read them without paying a licensing fee.
I think the GP post was pointing out that if its FOSS, they can also compare the code before and after the fix, and see what the fox was. If you're frequently charging them for fixes that are suspiciously obscure-but-simple-to-fix, they're in a position to review the changes and call you out.
Innovation 2: Hidden cost reductions - getting Gateway boxes with "missing" SIMM slots, expansion card slots, etc.
Also, using low quality/defective parts. I don't know quite what they were doing, but I owned one Gateway computer, and almost every part failed at some point. The hard drive failed 4 times. The tape backup drive failed twice. The CD-ROM drive failed 3 times. The video card died once. The monitor died at one point. All of this was within the first 2 years and was covered under warranty, but it was a mess.
A few years later, my parents bought another one. Same basic deal.
In hindsight, I wonder how they did it, picking so many failed parts. For example, they used Western Digital hard drives. Did they make a deal with Western Digital to buy defective drives at a discount? How did Western Digital sort out drives that would work for at least 3 months, but fail within the first 6 months? It doesn't really make sense. But Gateway sure seemed to know how to scoop up every defective drive Western Digital put out.
Slashdot Mirror
That was an example in reply to your statement "If you look at attempts to formalize the scientific method, you probably won't see a step that is, "convince other people"" That was a site on which the British Science Council "attempted to formalize the scientific method", and it did include the final step.
Ok, so to add a bit of emphasis and interpretation here, "If you look at attempts to formalize the scientific method, you probably won't see a step that is, 'convince other people'." The reason I put that word "probably" in there is that, well... you never know what some idiot is going to put in his attempt to formalize the scientific method. And let's not pretend like there's nobody saying stupid things in political councils.
But that aside, as I pointed out, it doesn't say, "convince other people". It says that you should make your work available for public scrutiny, and I could present a rationale for why that makes sense. One very good reason to put that into the formalized form of the "scientific method" is science is iterative, and the knowledge gained from it is refined over history as it's taken up by new people. In that sense, it's important that the output of the scientific endeavor is shared publicly.
But "convince other people"? That way madness lies. You're basically leaving open the possibility that Creationism might be "better science" than Evolution, depending on which side has convinced the greater number of people.
The final step: "critical exposure to scrutiny, peer review and assessment" In other words: convince other scientists.
So I'm not sure I'm ready to accept that web page as a definitive authority. I can understand if you get annoyed at that and say it's bullshit, but the fact is, it's just a political body making a claim at what they think science is, and I'm more concerned with what science has claimed to be over the past few centuries, as well as a logical view of what it makes sense for science to be. If convincing others is the end-point then the rest of the process is vaguely irrelevant.
I don't know if you'll immediately grasp the meat of this objection, but if the convictions of other people is a requirement for science, then it kind of undermines the hopes at developing certain/reliable knowledge. It's like, "Investigate. Come up with a hypothesis. Run tests. Collect data. Analyze your data. Come to a conclusion. Now all of that is irrelevant, because it doesn't matter whether your experiments are designed well or executed well, whether your analysis was correct. What matters is the political process of getting a bunch of self-involved hairless monkeys to form a consensus that you're correct." You may as well skip all that experimentation stuff and just figure out how to be a better salesman. At that rate, cult leaders are great scientists, because the ultimate test of your theory is just whether or not you can convince a large group of people.
And maybe the Science Council knows this, and that's why their last step is "exposure to scrutiny" rather than "convince others". Exposure to scrutiny only implies that other people are able to pick apart the experiment and look for problems, but it doesn't require explicitly require that everyone is immediately convinced. I'd agree that in the overall larger scheme of science, part of the process is "making my experiment public, allowing other people to perform their own tests and build off my what I've learned." However, I just think it's really screwing with the idea of science to require that people are generally convinced.
And it might even be worse if you say, "Oh no, not people in general, but only scientists," because it sets up "scientists" to be a special class of priests that are "the keepers of truth". Science should not judged based on who performs the experiment or who reads the paper.
In general, I wish people would be much more careful about how they use any metrics. The problem is, if you're lazy and/or stupid, you're just going to pick a readily available metric that sounds like it measures what you want to know, and then you're going to run with it. If I want to know what people want and like, I measure what they click on. If I want to know if a programmer is good, I measure how many lines of code he writes. If I want to know what the best political decision would be, I look at the polls.
It's science when that scientist convinces other scientists using evidence and clear, step by step reasoning that their theory is right.
Well... honestly, no, that's not science. If you look at attempts to formalize the scientific method, you probably won't see a step that is, "convince other people", and there's a reason for that. The process of convincing other people is political, and not really a scientific process.
Now there's a good reason people talk about reaching a scientific consensus, which implies that they're reaching a consensus on a scientific concept by using scientific evidence. The word "scientific" here is a modifier to indicate the subject matter. It's like saying, "I'm going to a scientific lecture at school." It doesn't make lectures part of the scientific method, it just indicates the kind of lecture you're going to.
Science is not a body of canonized knowledge. It's not "the collection of all ideas that you can convince scientists of." Science is a process that aims to develop certainty based on empirical evidence, regardless of whether you can convince a single other person.
Marketing people tend to do this. "You might think that [X] would be successful. But we tried [X] once, and it didn't work, so obviously [X] doesn't work."
In fairness, it's not just marketing people, but stupid people in general do this. It's just that marketing people (and this author) are stupid.
"Science" is a branch of philosophy, natural philosophy to be precise. The "scientific method" is a process. Refusing to jump off a building is common-sense,
I'm with you so far...
the scientific method is formalised common-sense. They are very much the same thing at a philosophical level.
No, "the scientific method" and "common sense" and not "very much the same thing at a philosophical level". The scientific method is a method. A process. A procedure. The scientific method may lead to the same conclusion as "common sense", but if that conclusion is not arrived at through the scientific method, then it's not "science".
Until such time that one of them correctly predicts something that the others don't they are all equally valid
Until there's some kind of evidence, or until they can provide some kind of predictive power, they're all equally valid scientifically. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're equally valid according to all philosophic thought. For example, we have equal scientific reason to believe that intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the universe as we have to believe that invisible purple unicorns live on Uranus. However, one of those beliefs may be more reasonable for non-scientific reasons.
That is a great example of begging the question [wikipedia.org].
Again, it seems you have no idea what you're talking about. I wasn't begging the question, I was rephrasing for the benefit of someone who appears to be pointless. There's no significant argumentation happening here on either side, so we aren't even to the point where we can claim that someone's argument is bad or invalid.
You don't have to codify the method of study to use it.
The "scientific method" is precisely the codification of reasoning techniques that were in use long before. Observing something falling from a significant height, seeing it get damaged, and deciding, "I don't want that to happen to me," is not science. Science is a process involving a hypothesis, experimentation, and collection of reproducible empirical evidence. You might believe any number of rational and true things, but without engaging in some kind of experimentation or testing, those beliefs aren't science.
And that's what this whole discussion is about. People are discussing the extent to which current theoretical physics can be considered "science", since there may not be any way to directly test the models that theoretical physicists are creating.
If you don't accept that the scientific method is a viable approach to uncovering the manner in which the universe behaves
I don't think anyone is saying that the scientific method isn't a viable approach to uncover the manner in which the universe behaves. I think the implication is that the scientific method may not be the best approach to uncover the manner in which the scientific method behaves.
...I would ask why you don't step off the ledge at the top of a tall building.
This is a terrible example. The scientific method is entirely unnecessary to decide whether to step off of a tall building. People knew not do do that before the scientific method was codified. I doubt anyone has ever done a rigorous study as to whether people should step off of tall buildings, so I'm not even sure we have a solid scientific basis for a theory of stepping off of tall buildings.
I think you misunderstand what science actually does.
if he wanted to get all his money in a pile and burn it, that would be his right.
Actually, I think it's technically illegal to destroy money.
I dont get why people care what others do with their own money
Well first, money itself is a societal thing. Like, if you live all by yourself on an island, not interacting with the rest of the world, there's not really any such thing as "money". Those little slips of paper are worthless, except maybe as paper. But really, that's just one of the many ways in which "money" belongs to and is part of a society, and not an individual in isolation.
There's no way to spend billions of dollars that will not have a substantial effect on the lives of a lot of people, so yes, we get to care how people spend their money. If you spend $1 billion buying me luxurious presents, I'm allowed to be happy about that. If you spend $1 billion to dump human waste in the empty lot next door to my house, I'm allowed to be a bit miffed. It's absurd and childish to think that we shouldn't care how people spend their money.
There's an even more disturbing belief underlying your post: that the government has no right to tax the rich. This line of thinking shows your stupidity and gullibility-- that you've been persuaded by the rich that they are entitled to have the government tax you in order to give your money to someone more wealthy.
Giving selective tax breaks to the rich is the same as giving them handouts and subsidies. They should be taxed like the rest of us.
Sort of. I wouldn't say consciousness and understanding don't have agreed-upon definitions as much as we have no method of determining whether they exist. But even if we agree that those terms are not well understood, it only furthers my point: this is more of a linguistic question than anything else.
Ah, yes, this argument again. "Rich people are better at knowing what to do with money than the rest of us. Therefore, if we want to fix all of society's ills, we should try to take as much money as we can away from the poor, the middle class, and organizations with any public accountability, and concentrating all the money in the hands of a few rich people. After all, those rich people must be smart, or they never would have become rich."
No thank you. Subsidizing the rich is stupid. Yeah, yeah, a few of the rich people are trying to do good things with their money, and a couple of those are succeeding in doing good things.
If that is the case it would make sense that if you want to perform altruistic acts and have the power to get them to work a corporation isn't a bad idea.
Yes, that would make sense from the standpoint of an uber-rich person who wants to perform altruistic acts. Of course, that doesn't mean that it's necessarily the best thing for the rest of us. It's sort of like how cartoon villains want to consolidate power under themselves, with the mindset of "If I ruled the world, I could fix everything!"
At least for some of us, the idea of replacing our ruling class of greedy uber-rich assholes with a ruling class of trying-to-be-benevolent uber-rich assholes doesn't really sound like an ideal solution, even if though it would probably be a minor improvement.
I think the problem is that people expect machine intelligence to look like human intelligence. Machine intelligence exists and is strong in some areas. Modern chess programs are an example.
I think this is a bit of a linguistic issue in that we all keep using the word "intelligence" without really agreeing on what it means. You're talking about an idea that you have of intelligence that means that chess-playing computers are "intelligent", but the concept others have in mind might rule out any existing chess-playing computer from being considered "intelligent". For myself, the word "intelligent" implies not only an ability to adapt to solve a problem, but also an understanding of what the problem is, and an awareness that it's trying to solve the problem. It's one thing to mechanically select the best chess move, but another to understand that you're playing a game.
To me, when you talk about "artificial intelligence" without any qualifier, you're talking about what I've seen variously called "true AI", "real AI", "strong AI", or "general AI". You're talking about a machine consciousness that has an understanding of itself in the world. Often, this isn't even the goal of "AI researchers".
Still, the governments of the world have been asking us to give up on having any level of privacy so that they can "catch terrorists". I think they need to demonstrate some things before I can even think about accepting that idea.
1) There's oversight over the collection and storage of the data that guarantees that it's being used for that purpose. There's no possibility that it can be used for other law enforcement operations, for blackmail, or for looking at dick pics (thank you, John Oliver).
2) The program is effective. If you're collecting my SMS messages so that you can stop terrorist attacks, show me that you're catching terrorists that way. Don't collect SMS messages preemptively and then go, "Well after the fact, we found that the terrorists used SMS and we just didn't catch it. But after we caught people who were involved and found their cell phones, we thought it was kind of helpful to see those SMS messages."
3) Explain why the terrorists won't just change their methods. People say things like, "When guns are illegal, only criminals will have guns," and then the same people say, "We need to make it illegal to send encrypted messages that we can't break." It doesn't make sense.
That's just to start. I'll think about more questions when those can be answered.
This isn't FUD. FUD = "Fear, uncertainty, and doubt." He's not even implying that the Surface will possibly eat your babies. He's not even saying that it sucks. He's just saying that it's not great.
Yeah, rules don't work. That's why we should just make murder and theft legal.
Pretty much plan isn't going to work if you allow for blatant rule-breaking. Make it so if you have a "junior apprentice programmer" that has 20 years of experience and is running the project, the company gets fined and the hiring manager risks jail time. Have random audits to confirm people are following the rules. Enforce those rules.
Besides, if someone is applying for an H-1B visa for a "junior apprentice programmer" on the basis that they need a specialist that isn't available in the US population, that application should be rejected on it's face.
Yeah, but some of that data is straight-up garbage. I doubt we're producing books, music, and movies at a rate that outpaces our ability to store them. I'm sure we have plenty of storage to archive all the important works of art that are being created. I'm sure we could archive the source code of every piece of software-- even including all the various versions. I even bet we have plenty to to archive every tweet, blog post, and instagram pic.
If I had to guess, I'd guess the problem would come from trying to archive every phone call, text message, IM, email, and download-- including metadata, including redundant copies of everything transferred. That is, if I send an email to 20 people containing a 50 MB PDF, keeping each copy, 50 MB * 21. If you're trying to store a copy of every movie every time it's streamed from Netflix, that's going to add up really quick.
So the real trick is going to be to make sure we have an archival procedure for the data we care about. We don't need to store everything.
Video games aren't "nascent" at all, they've been around since the 1970s
Well in comparison to other art forms-- e.g. painting, sculpture, writing-- that's nascent. And part of my point here is that we've probably already lost some of that art from the first few decades due to DRM, or just due to the software being locked to specific hardware. I'm possibly a little radical in that I've supported the idea that, if developers want to enjoy legal copyright protection, they should be submitting their source code to some governmental body (Library of Congress?) for preservation. When the copyright expires, the source should be put into public domain.
and were better quality in previous decades too.
I don't know why you're even bringing up this idea. Some people are going to argue with you, but it's completely irrelevant to what I was saying.
[I] had to install Windows 95 using VMWare to get it to play.
This reminds me of a thought that I've had about Linux gaming. Basically, it would be really great if the whole Steam Machine thing took off, and Linux became the de facto platform for PC gaming-- not because of immediate problems that it might solve, but because of this issue of archiving old games. Even if the game itself was never open sourced, you would always have the option of tracking down the specific Linux version/revision that the game was designed to play on, virtualize that platform, and then play the game. Right now, playing games in virtual machines doesn't make for great performance, but old games were designed for slower computers, so perfomance is less of an issue.
In fact, what would be ideal is if games could be bundled in some kind of container that had it running on a stripped-down VM, making it completely portable and archivable. I'm sure it'd be a technical challenge to make that happen in such a way that the game ran well, but I feel like if you made a VM OS optimized just for playing games (including no other components) you could make it fairly small and lightweight.
The problem is that we don't know.
Today, we learned how to understand Egyptian hieroglyphs by looking at the Rosetta Stone. I doubt whoever made that stone understood the importance at the time. Jumping ahead to something more modern, a lot of early Doctor Who episodes were lost because they taped over them. The idea of reruns wasn't quite a thing yet, and the people making the show apparently didn't think anyone would be interested in watching them again.
So those are just two examples, but there are many writers and artists and engineers throughout history whose work became important or relevant much later on. Meanwhile, we're basically throwing away all the examples of a nascent art form that combines art and engineering like nothing that came before. The way we're locking games into specific hardware platforms and requiring DRM-- it'd be like if we burned all books 7 years after they're completed, for fear that someone might read them without paying a licensing fee.
I think the GP post was pointing out that if its FOSS, they can also compare the code before and after the fix, and see what the fox was. If you're frequently charging them for fixes that are suspiciously obscure-but-simple-to-fix, they're in a position to review the changes and call you out.
Sounds to me like you have horrible hearing.
Innovation 2: Hidden cost reductions - getting Gateway boxes with "missing" SIMM slots, expansion card slots, etc.
Also, using low quality/defective parts. I don't know quite what they were doing, but I owned one Gateway computer, and almost every part failed at some point. The hard drive failed 4 times. The tape backup drive failed twice. The CD-ROM drive failed 3 times. The video card died once. The monitor died at one point. All of this was within the first 2 years and was covered under warranty, but it was a mess.
A few years later, my parents bought another one. Same basic deal.
In hindsight, I wonder how they did it, picking so many failed parts. For example, they used Western Digital hard drives. Did they make a deal with Western Digital to buy defective drives at a discount? How did Western Digital sort out drives that would work for at least 3 months, but fail within the first 6 months? It doesn't really make sense. But Gateway sure seemed to know how to scoop up every defective drive Western Digital put out.