Well not "nothing" exactly. If Windows forces people to go with a subscription plan where their computers stop working when they stop paying the subscription, I'll warn my clients of that danger. I'll probably recommend against going along with the whole thing, and offer help them look for alternatives if possible (e.g. standardizing on the last version of Windows without that requirement, evaluating alternative operating systems). Given my experiences, I'd expect that a few will switch to Mac, most will want to standardize on Windows 8.1 and wait to see how things shake out. A lot of clients didn't want to upgrade from XP, and we're only getting the last few to upgrade now that Microsoft has officially dropped support, so if we recommend going no further than Windows 8 or 10 or whichever is the last version you can "buy", then I doubt clients will object.
Of course, though, some clients will still want to go with Windows, and some won't have a choice. Microsoft has a long history of trying to make sure you have no choice other than to go along with buying the products they want you to buy. In the end, if my client has a business need that requires Windows, and they choose to spend their money on paying a subscription, I'll set it up for them. It's not my job to tell my clients what to do. I advise them on what choice I think is good, and then help them with whatever choice they make.
The profit comes first. The full outline would be something like this.
* Do unethical things.
* ????
* Profit
* Deny the unethical things happened
* Admit something unethical may have happened, but ask people to wait before passing judgment
* Delay
* Admit the whole thing, but claim that the time for a response has already passed.
Yes, that's likely, but what I was saying is, I won't do that kind of subscription. I won't do it in general, but specifically not for an operating system. I will pay for a subscription to updates, but not to continue to use the same software I've been using.
That might be more palatable to many people, but it wouldn't do a thing for me -- mostly because I actively do not want frequent Windows updates, Microsoft AV updates, MDM functionality, or any OneDrive storage at all.
Well you're not alone in that, but I doubt you represent "most people" either. Most people with Windows do want Windows updates and access to the latest versions of Windows and Office. Many want some kind of "Dropbox"-like service, and don't care an awful lot what the particular service is. And most people who know what they're doing would like some level of MDM-- if only device tracking and possibly patch-management type stuff. Actually I would say that those things are becoming pretty much a requirement for most of the small businesses that I deal with, though most of the individuals I deal with don't necessarily understand what these things are.
But I also see a possible objection in that Microsoft shouldn't tie all these things together, but should continue to offer them as separate services. That makes sense to me. I'd hate to have to subscribe to all of those things just because I wanted one of them. But I don't think your objection holds up very well, because I'm suggesting that Microsoft should offer a perpetual license to Windows and Office for $100, which includes 1 year of all the updates, plus a couple of services that you can use or not. Still, getting Windows and Office for $100 isn't a bad deal. Continuing to use those services and continuing to receive updates would require that you pay the $100/year subscription.
Now, whether that exact pricing works out, I don't know, but I think it's a general model that would work for a lot of people, for both personal and business use. Speaking more generally, I think a lot of people are turned off by the idea of a "subscription" where their computer stops working when you stop paying a monthly fee, but the idea of paying a subscription to continue to receive updates is less objectionable. If you could wrap together most of the services that people actually want, along with a subscription for continued updates, all under a single reasonable monthly/yearly fee, I think Microsoft would do well. But I think all the product activation and DRM, and making things expire when you don't pay... it all just creates more confusion and annoyances for personal users, and more headaches for IT personnel. And I also think they should provide basic security updates no matter what, insecure installs only make them look bad, and hacked machines cause problems for everyone online.
Queue all the posts of "Why are you surprised! of course they were doing this!"
I wish people would understand that this response is a standard rhetorical technique. You see it happen all the time in various scandals and cover-ups. Essentially the aim is to diffuse the response by delaying it until people can be persuaded not to care.
A few years ago, if someone suggested that the CIA is torturing people, they'd be accused of being unpatriotic and paranoid. As the news starts to come up, defenders change their message to, "Hold on there. There are some unproven allegations, but you should wait until all the evidence is in before getting upset." They drag the whole thing out for years, and when the evidence is in, the defenders say, "Well we knew all of this years ago. Why are you upset now?!"
Lots of things follow this pattern. CIA torture, NSA spying, unethical/illegal actions leading to the financial system meltdown, invading other countries, global climate change, and even Clinton sexually harassing White House interns. It's very often those same three steps: (a) Deny it happened; (b) Admit something happened, but ask people to wait before passing judgment; (d) Delay; and finally (e) Admit the whole thing, but claim that the time for a response has already passed.
It's intentional, and people will keep doing it because it works.
The only way I'd do a subscription for Windows is if I could stop paying without my current version self-destructing. Honestly, I'd prefer they did away with "product activation" and "Windows Genuine Advantage" (or whatever they're calling it now) in favor of a simple subscription for updates.
I think Microsoft would be smart to offer something like, "Pay $100/year, and get an always-up-to-date version of Windows, Office, antivirus updates, some basic MDM functionality, and 100 GB of OneDrive storage. Cancel at any time, and keep your current version of Windows and Office, but you won't get any updates or patches beyond critical security updates." If that were the deal, I'd probably go with it. Make it $150-$200/year for business accounts that offer Office 365 and some additional bells and whistles, and I think you have a business model.
For one thing, I'll concede that I'm kind of with you in that I'm very averse to lying. In reality, there's a good chance that I would be honest and advise someone else to be honest.
But really all I'm saying is, I could admit some kind of hypothetical situation where I'd be like, "Sure, yeah. I can understand someone lying in that situation." The hypothetical situation is that you're truly desperate for a job, you're willing to work anywhere, even a terribly bureaucratic place with people who lack the backbone to make their own decisions, but you need a job right away. And then you get a job interview where everything is going well, and you essentially have the job, and the interviewer says, "Oh, and you have this certification, right? It doesn't matter and we'll never check up on it, but my boss unfortunately will not let me hire someone without that certification under any circumstances."
Sure, yeah. I can understand someone lying in that situation. That's not the sort of situation most of us are in most of the time.
However, the best reason to not lie is that it is not ethical.
I think the best reason is, job interviews should be as much about you testing the company as it is about the company testing you. Do I want to work for a company who will fail to select a good candidate because of some technicality? Assuming I'm a good candidate for the job, do I want to work in an atmosphere that's so bureaucratic and ineffective that the person doing the hiring isn't empowered to hire a good candidate because he lacks a meaningless certification? Not particularly.
I can see someone objecting, "What if you're not a good candidate?" Personally, I don't want a job that I'm not able to do a good job at. That sounds like a nightmare. I could see lying if I were absolutely desperate, with starving kids, about to lose my home, and I just really wanted a job. As an employer, I'd also probably forgive a white lie from someone in that situation. But if the situation isn't dire, don't lie. It's not doing anyone any favors.
It is different. But consider that an insurance company can hire a private detective to follow you and record your activities, check on your Facebook page, subpoena your health club records or your ski lift tracking data...
Yes, and that's really my only point. A subpoena asking for fitbit records should be thought of more like a subpoena for health club records, and not the same as your insurance company asking for medical records from your doctor.
Seriously, what numbskull thinks you can file an insurance claim and then claim medical privacy in order to avoid handing over data necessary to evaluate your claim???
I think the fitbit issue is a bit different, though, since it's not clear that it constitutes a 'medical record' that you'd expect your insurance company to have access to. An insurance company demanding access to fitbit records feels a little more like if they demanded access to your home movies. Sure, there may be some relevant information there, but it was information gathered by yourself for personal reasons which may not be strictly 'medical'. Besides, I would hope there'd be a legal challenge against using it as evidence, unless they can verify that the patient was actually wearing it, that the results are relevant to the case, and that the data collected is reliable.
This is all done under the supposed auspices of saying there aren't enough "qualified" workers in the US. "Qualified" usually meaning "won't work peanuts like we want".
I think this is an important point in the debate. They're not exactly wrong when they say that they can't find qualified workers, but the problem is that they have trouble finding qualified workers within the salary range that they've already determined. Given this, there are two different conclusions that can be reached: either (a) there are not enough qualified applicants; or (b) the pool of 'qualified applicants' is being restricted too much by low wages.
Both are true, from a certain point of view. Any time you would say, "there are not enough qualified applicants", there's a good chance that you could still find enough if you were willing to pay enough. But perhaps the "enough" that you'd have to pay is simply unreasonable. So in my opinion, that's really the question that we need to answer: Is the 'enough' that you'd have to pay in order to attract qualified applicants unreasonably high?
There's a big part that I didn't explain. It's not about your emotional state. It's about your state of mind. Happiness isn't joy, it's contentment.
I would raise many of the same questions. How good are you at judging your own contentment? You may be good, or you may not be so good. I can't tell you how good you are at it, because I don't know you at all. You can't even tell yourself, because it's the nature of things that you can't tell how good you are at something (a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect">the Dunning–Kruger effect). If you were bad at assessing your own emotional state or your own state of mind, then you wouldn't be good enough at assessing it that you would understand how bad you were at it.
And are you metrics doing a good job at assessing your state of mind accurately? Well, in order to try to answer that question, you'd have to know your real state of mind, along with what your metrics indicate your state of mind is, and then compare them for accuracy. If you're not very good at assessing your state of mind (keeping the previous paragraph in mind), then you won't be able to verify your metrics.
It's a little unclear to me that science can completely tackle this problem, either. Even if we can study neurotransmitter levels and perform fMRI scans on active brains, those are just other, perhaps better, metrics that still need to be correlated with emotional states and your "state of mind". So even those may fall prey to the problem of the above paragraph.
However, I don't think it's completely hopeless. I do think that some people are better at understanding and assessing themselves than others, but a certain amount of human judgement (and not simply "objectivity") is required.
See what happens to your happiness measurements. Maybe they'll go up. Maybe they'll go down.
Taking a step back, I see there being a potential philosophic question raised by this: Is your self-measurement of happiness really the metric that you want to optimize?
There are some potential problems that go beyond "whether the specific metric you're using is accurate." One of the questions I would ask is, even if your assessment is accurate, is your personal happiness the most important thing? I know a lot of people who would say yes, but I don't think the answer is really so obvious. For example, there have been a couple of studies that suggest that people with children are generally less happy than those without children, yet people with children are overwhelmingly glad that they have children even after learning the results of the test.
But then even if your own personal happiness is paramount and you've chosen a metric that is accurate in gauging your sense of your own happiness, it's not clear that it actually reflects your own happiness. So here's the question: Is it possible to be in denial, or to misunderstand yourself, in such a way that you believe yourself to be happy, and your metric suggests that you're happy, when you in fact are not? Or conversely, to believe yourself to be unhappy when you are actually happy?
That will probably sound silly to you, but my experience suggests that it's very possible for a person to be mistaken about their own emotional state. I don't know what that means about emotions and self-knowledge, but I think it actually happens fairly frequently that people do not fully understand themselves and their own emotional states. If anything, I'm tempted to ask whether we can ever feel completely certain about our own emotional states, given the amount of unconscious activity that goes on.
None of this addresses the possibility of choosing a bad metric. You could try to measure your quality of sleep, for example, when sleep patterns can be thrown off by many different factors.
Aside from these kinds of concerns, I like your method a lot. I think people have a tendency to decide what they think they should like, and then proceed to force themselves to like those things. It seems like it's probably a smarter idea to observe your own reaction to things, and use that as a basis for deciding whether you like it. Blue cheese, for example: When I was young, I thought I didn't really like strong blue cheese. Even now, I recognize that it's kind of gross. But if you sit me down in front of a plate with bread/crackers and an assortment of cheese, I guarantee that I'm going to end up eating the blue cheese. I don't know why, but after a couple of experiences of eating blue cheese and thinking, "Why am I eating this stuff? It's kind of gross..." I had to accept that I like blue cheese.
The stupidest part of this is not really necessarily that you're required to pay for trash collection regardless of whether you use it. The stupidest part is that they don't just tax you and run a public garbage pickup.
It's a monopoly, so there's no competition, and therefore there are no "market forces" to improve efficiency, improve service, or draw down the price. It's a mandatory fee, which means it's effectively the same exact thing as a tax. The only thing gained by having it run by a private company is that someone gets to siphon money out of the system in the form of "profits", even though those profits are for running a tax-funded public service. That's the really stupid part of all of this.
Your argument is nonsensical. You're objecting to a hypothetical discussion about possible future technologies by demanding evidence that we can produce that technology today. I understand it makes you feel smart to be a contrarian, but it would help if your opposing position weren't completely off-base and stupid.
The first step in trying to figure this out is to figure out what systems and services you're trying to secure. Are you trying to secure a web application? A specific file server? Are you trying to make it so people don't have to remember passwords for Dropbox? Are you trying to include your phone system, physical security to your systems, and the network AD login? Make a list of everything you're trying to secure, and then figure out what alternatives those systems support. Then cross-reference all those different systems to see what sign-on technologies and services support all of them (or the most, or the most important systems).
Maybe you don't want to go about it quite that way, but the point is, you need to know your requirements before you try to select a solution. Your biggest problem is going to be finding a single product/service that supports replacing all of your passwords, since there isn't really a universally-supported standard replacement for passwords. One of the reasons passwords have been so successful and stuck around for so long is, you don't need to support any particular hardware or software. It's just text entry.
So if you really want to pursue this, figure out what systems you want to secure, and then figure out what alternative methods support and are supported by those systems. I really wish that, instead of having 50 different companies trying to come up with their own clever little app with pretty animations to provide multi-factor authentication, there were a concerted effort to develop a set of standards that various developers could build from.
However you would need to add some meaningful brute-force and weak pw recognition.
A lot of systems and settings to prevent "weak passwords" are pretty dumb. I've seen things that failed to have a problem with me using my own username (or 'password') as a password as long as I substituted in some symbols and added numbers. So "P@ssw0rd" is fine but "correcthorsebatterystaple" is not allowed.
Considering the human civilization is a few thousand years old, I don't think we have any way of knowing the limits of what we might achieve in the next million years, assuming we survive that long. I think the next big stumbling block we need to tackle is sustainability. How can we create a system as closed off as a spaceship or a space colony that can survive indefinitely without resupply? For that matter, how can we create an economy here on Earth that can survive indefinitely without self-destructing?
If we can figure that out, we'll be in much better shape for long term survival.
however were not any closer to real, self aware and acting, AI now than we were 20 years ago.
A lot of people have responded with some variation of this idea: It is silly to think that AI would be dangerous, because we can't produce a real AI right now.
That's not really an argument. It's a little like saying, "It's silly to think that it would be dangerous for terrorists to have a nuclear bomb. We don't have any evidence that terrorists currently have a nuclear bomb." It's phrased as a hypothetical. If [something] happens that would make for a dangerous situation. Whether it's true or not is not dependent on whether or not that "something" has happened or is particularly likely to happen in the near future.
talking shit about "singularity" being right over the corner is stuff best left for hipster cafes.
First of all, I'm not sure what hipsters have to do with this. It's not hipsters who think that the singularity will happen. It's largely over-eager geek "transhuman" fetishists who fantasize about that kind of thing in detail, and relatively normal people who have a passing interest in the idea if you bring it up. It's an interesting idea, but I agree, there's no reason to think we're particularly close to that kind of thing.
But note that I'm not talking about an "evil scheming plotting AI", or at least not necessarily. And I'm not necessarily talking about the "singularity" either. I'm just pointing out that it's the nature of intelligent beings to not-agree, and if we started building a real AI, there would, sooner or later, have some important subject on which it did not agree with us. If we succeeded in building an AI more intelligent then us, then it becomes a possibly dangerous situation, to have something much smarter than you who strongly disagrees with you on important subjects.
I don't really see a counter-argument to that. It's something you may not have realized, but if we can control what an AI believes and thinks, then it's not a real AI. If we can't control it, then it may derive ideas, form conclusions, and develop plans that we didn't intend, didn't anticipate, and would not have come up with on our own. Indeed, that's part of the interesting potential of AI-- the idea that it might develop ideas that we hadn't considered. However, it's also a source of potential danger, if the AI is given any ability to carry out its own plans, and especially so if we were to assume such an AI is capable of out-planning and outsmarting us.
Again, this is hypothetical. But if we want to pursue development of a real AI, we should be aware of the possible dangers and consequences.
because that story has a plausible AI. the AI itself doesn't have any motive in that story
Actually, if you mean a "true artificial intelligence," then that may be implausible. There are many reasons to believe that you could not have a true intelligence that had no motivations.
But even talking about the sort of fake "AI" we have today, it's worth noting that it still can be dangerous to trust the conclusions of that kind of AI. It's almost more dangerous to trust those conclusions without critical thought, because at least a real AI might be able to notice and point out shortcomings of its own analysis.
To turn things around, I'll support the developers when they get rid of the DRM. I've had reasonably good experience with Steam and their DRM, but every other DRM I've run into recently has created some kind of problem resulting in the game being unplayable. I'm not familiar with Origin, but I've read bad things.
I actually went looking to buy Dragon Age last week, but when it wasn't available either DRM-free or on Steam, I decided not to bother.
Slashdot Mirror
Well not "nothing" exactly. If Windows forces people to go with a subscription plan where their computers stop working when they stop paying the subscription, I'll warn my clients of that danger. I'll probably recommend against going along with the whole thing, and offer help them look for alternatives if possible (e.g. standardizing on the last version of Windows without that requirement, evaluating alternative operating systems). Given my experiences, I'd expect that a few will switch to Mac, most will want to standardize on Windows 8.1 and wait to see how things shake out. A lot of clients didn't want to upgrade from XP, and we're only getting the last few to upgrade now that Microsoft has officially dropped support, so if we recommend going no further than Windows 8 or 10 or whichever is the last version you can "buy", then I doubt clients will object.
Of course, though, some clients will still want to go with Windows, and some won't have a choice. Microsoft has a long history of trying to make sure you have no choice other than to go along with buying the products they want you to buy. In the end, if my client has a business need that requires Windows, and they choose to spend their money on paying a subscription, I'll set it up for them. It's not my job to tell my clients what to do. I advise them on what choice I think is good, and then help them with whatever choice they make.
Yes. You got a problem with that?
The profit comes first. The full outline would be something like this.
* Do unethical things.
* ????
* Profit
* Deny the unethical things happened
* Admit something unethical may have happened, but ask people to wait before passing judgment
* Delay
* Admit the whole thing, but claim that the time for a response has already passed.
I already don't! But honestly I will still be setting up businesses with Windows, I'm sure, no matter what. It's their money.
Yes, that's likely, but what I was saying is, I won't do that kind of subscription. I won't do it in general, but specifically not for an operating system. I will pay for a subscription to updates, but not to continue to use the same software I've been using.
That might be more palatable to many people, but it wouldn't do a thing for me -- mostly because I actively do not want frequent Windows updates, Microsoft AV updates, MDM functionality, or any OneDrive storage at all.
Well you're not alone in that, but I doubt you represent "most people" either. Most people with Windows do want Windows updates and access to the latest versions of Windows and Office. Many want some kind of "Dropbox"-like service, and don't care an awful lot what the particular service is. And most people who know what they're doing would like some level of MDM-- if only device tracking and possibly patch-management type stuff. Actually I would say that those things are becoming pretty much a requirement for most of the small businesses that I deal with, though most of the individuals I deal with don't necessarily understand what these things are.
But I also see a possible objection in that Microsoft shouldn't tie all these things together, but should continue to offer them as separate services. That makes sense to me. I'd hate to have to subscribe to all of those things just because I wanted one of them. But I don't think your objection holds up very well, because I'm suggesting that Microsoft should offer a perpetual license to Windows and Office for $100, which includes 1 year of all the updates, plus a couple of services that you can use or not. Still, getting Windows and Office for $100 isn't a bad deal. Continuing to use those services and continuing to receive updates would require that you pay the $100/year subscription.
Now, whether that exact pricing works out, I don't know, but I think it's a general model that would work for a lot of people, for both personal and business use. Speaking more generally, I think a lot of people are turned off by the idea of a "subscription" where their computer stops working when you stop paying a monthly fee, but the idea of paying a subscription to continue to receive updates is less objectionable. If you could wrap together most of the services that people actually want, along with a subscription for continued updates, all under a single reasonable monthly/yearly fee, I think Microsoft would do well. But I think all the product activation and DRM, and making things expire when you don't pay... it all just creates more confusion and annoyances for personal users, and more headaches for IT personnel. And I also think they should provide basic security updates no matter what, insecure installs only make them look bad, and hacked machines cause problems for everyone online.
Queue all the posts of "Why are you surprised! of course they were doing this!"
I wish people would understand that this response is a standard rhetorical technique. You see it happen all the time in various scandals and cover-ups. Essentially the aim is to diffuse the response by delaying it until people can be persuaded not to care.
A few years ago, if someone suggested that the CIA is torturing people, they'd be accused of being unpatriotic and paranoid. As the news starts to come up, defenders change their message to, "Hold on there. There are some unproven allegations, but you should wait until all the evidence is in before getting upset." They drag the whole thing out for years, and when the evidence is in, the defenders say, "Well we knew all of this years ago. Why are you upset now?!"
Lots of things follow this pattern. CIA torture, NSA spying, unethical/illegal actions leading to the financial system meltdown, invading other countries, global climate change, and even Clinton sexually harassing White House interns. It's very often those same three steps: (a) Deny it happened; (b) Admit something happened, but ask people to wait before passing judgment; (d) Delay; and finally (e) Admit the whole thing, but claim that the time for a response has already passed.
It's intentional, and people will keep doing it because it works.
The only way I'd do a subscription for Windows is if I could stop paying without my current version self-destructing. Honestly, I'd prefer they did away with "product activation" and "Windows Genuine Advantage" (or whatever they're calling it now) in favor of a simple subscription for updates.
I think Microsoft would be smart to offer something like, "Pay $100/year, and get an always-up-to-date version of Windows, Office, antivirus updates, some basic MDM functionality, and 100 GB of OneDrive storage. Cancel at any time, and keep your current version of Windows and Office, but you won't get any updates or patches beyond critical security updates." If that were the deal, I'd probably go with it. Make it $150-$200/year for business accounts that offer Office 365 and some additional bells and whistles, and I think you have a business model.
For one thing, I'll concede that I'm kind of with you in that I'm very averse to lying. In reality, there's a good chance that I would be honest and advise someone else to be honest.
But really all I'm saying is, I could admit some kind of hypothetical situation where I'd be like, "Sure, yeah. I can understand someone lying in that situation." The hypothetical situation is that you're truly desperate for a job, you're willing to work anywhere, even a terribly bureaucratic place with people who lack the backbone to make their own decisions, but you need a job right away. And then you get a job interview where everything is going well, and you essentially have the job, and the interviewer says, "Oh, and you have this certification, right? It doesn't matter and we'll never check up on it, but my boss unfortunately will not let me hire someone without that certification under any circumstances."
Sure, yeah. I can understand someone lying in that situation. That's not the sort of situation most of us are in most of the time.
Well if you're a member of G.I. Joe, that's pretty impressive already.
However, the best reason to not lie is that it is not ethical.
I think the best reason is, job interviews should be as much about you testing the company as it is about the company testing you. Do I want to work for a company who will fail to select a good candidate because of some technicality? Assuming I'm a good candidate for the job, do I want to work in an atmosphere that's so bureaucratic and ineffective that the person doing the hiring isn't empowered to hire a good candidate because he lacks a meaningless certification? Not particularly.
I can see someone objecting, "What if you're not a good candidate?" Personally, I don't want a job that I'm not able to do a good job at. That sounds like a nightmare. I could see lying if I were absolutely desperate, with starving kids, about to lose my home, and I just really wanted a job. As an employer, I'd also probably forgive a white lie from someone in that situation. But if the situation isn't dire, don't lie. It's not doing anyone any favors.
It is different. But consider that an insurance company can hire a private detective to follow you and record your activities, check on your Facebook page, subpoena your health club records or your ski lift tracking data...
Yes, and that's really my only point. A subpoena asking for fitbit records should be thought of more like a subpoena for health club records, and not the same as your insurance company asking for medical records from your doctor.
Seriously, what numbskull thinks you can file an insurance claim and then claim medical privacy in order to avoid handing over data necessary to evaluate your claim???
I think the fitbit issue is a bit different, though, since it's not clear that it constitutes a 'medical record' that you'd expect your insurance company to have access to. An insurance company demanding access to fitbit records feels a little more like if they demanded access to your home movies. Sure, there may be some relevant information there, but it was information gathered by yourself for personal reasons which may not be strictly 'medical'. Besides, I would hope there'd be a legal challenge against using it as evidence, unless they can verify that the patient was actually wearing it, that the results are relevant to the case, and that the data collected is reliable.
The market only decides the market value. Whether that market value is reasonable and acceptable is a different question.
This is all done under the supposed auspices of saying there aren't enough "qualified" workers in the US. "Qualified" usually meaning "won't work peanuts like we want".
I think this is an important point in the debate. They're not exactly wrong when they say that they can't find qualified workers, but the problem is that they have trouble finding qualified workers within the salary range that they've already determined. Given this, there are two different conclusions that can be reached: either (a) there are not enough qualified applicants; or (b) the pool of 'qualified applicants' is being restricted too much by low wages.
Both are true, from a certain point of view. Any time you would say, "there are not enough qualified applicants", there's a good chance that you could still find enough if you were willing to pay enough. But perhaps the "enough" that you'd have to pay is simply unreasonable. So in my opinion, that's really the question that we need to answer: Is the 'enough' that you'd have to pay in order to attract qualified applicants unreasonably high?
There's a big part that I didn't explain. It's not about your emotional state. It's about your state of mind. Happiness isn't joy, it's contentment.
I would raise many of the same questions. How good are you at judging your own contentment? You may be good, or you may not be so good. I can't tell you how good you are at it, because I don't know you at all. You can't even tell yourself, because it's the nature of things that you can't tell how good you are at something (a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect">the Dunning–Kruger effect). If you were bad at assessing your own emotional state or your own state of mind, then you wouldn't be good enough at assessing it that you would understand how bad you were at it.
And are you metrics doing a good job at assessing your state of mind accurately? Well, in order to try to answer that question, you'd have to know your real state of mind, along with what your metrics indicate your state of mind is, and then compare them for accuracy. If you're not very good at assessing your state of mind (keeping the previous paragraph in mind), then you won't be able to verify your metrics.
It's a little unclear to me that science can completely tackle this problem, either. Even if we can study neurotransmitter levels and perform fMRI scans on active brains, those are just other, perhaps better, metrics that still need to be correlated with emotional states and your "state of mind". So even those may fall prey to the problem of the above paragraph.
However, I don't think it's completely hopeless. I do think that some people are better at understanding and assessing themselves than others, but a certain amount of human judgement (and not simply "objectivity") is required.
See what happens to your happiness measurements. Maybe they'll go up. Maybe they'll go down.
Taking a step back, I see there being a potential philosophic question raised by this: Is your self-measurement of happiness really the metric that you want to optimize?
There are some potential problems that go beyond "whether the specific metric you're using is accurate." One of the questions I would ask is, even if your assessment is accurate, is your personal happiness the most important thing? I know a lot of people who would say yes, but I don't think the answer is really so obvious. For example, there have been a couple of studies that suggest that people with children are generally less happy than those without children, yet people with children are overwhelmingly glad that they have children even after learning the results of the test.
But then even if your own personal happiness is paramount and you've chosen a metric that is accurate in gauging your sense of your own happiness, it's not clear that it actually reflects your own happiness. So here's the question: Is it possible to be in denial, or to misunderstand yourself, in such a way that you believe yourself to be happy, and your metric suggests that you're happy, when you in fact are not? Or conversely, to believe yourself to be unhappy when you are actually happy?
That will probably sound silly to you, but my experience suggests that it's very possible for a person to be mistaken about their own emotional state. I don't know what that means about emotions and self-knowledge, but I think it actually happens fairly frequently that people do not fully understand themselves and their own emotional states. If anything, I'm tempted to ask whether we can ever feel completely certain about our own emotional states, given the amount of unconscious activity that goes on.
None of this addresses the possibility of choosing a bad metric. You could try to measure your quality of sleep, for example, when sleep patterns can be thrown off by many different factors.
Aside from these kinds of concerns, I like your method a lot. I think people have a tendency to decide what they think they should like, and then proceed to force themselves to like those things. It seems like it's probably a smarter idea to observe your own reaction to things, and use that as a basis for deciding whether you like it. Blue cheese, for example: When I was young, I thought I didn't really like strong blue cheese. Even now, I recognize that it's kind of gross. But if you sit me down in front of a plate with bread/crackers and an assortment of cheese, I guarantee that I'm going to end up eating the blue cheese. I don't know why, but after a couple of experiences of eating blue cheese and thinking, "Why am I eating this stuff? It's kind of gross..." I had to accept that I like blue cheese.
The stupidest part of this is not really necessarily that you're required to pay for trash collection regardless of whether you use it. The stupidest part is that they don't just tax you and run a public garbage pickup.
It's a monopoly, so there's no competition, and therefore there are no "market forces" to improve efficiency, improve service, or draw down the price. It's a mandatory fee, which means it's effectively the same exact thing as a tax. The only thing gained by having it run by a private company is that someone gets to siphon money out of the system in the form of "profits", even though those profits are for running a tax-funded public service. That's the really stupid part of all of this.
“A witty saying proves nothing.” --Voltaire
Your argument is nonsensical. You're objecting to a hypothetical discussion about possible future technologies by demanding evidence that we can produce that technology today. I understand it makes you feel smart to be a contrarian, but it would help if your opposing position weren't completely off-base and stupid.
The first step in trying to figure this out is to figure out what systems and services you're trying to secure. Are you trying to secure a web application? A specific file server? Are you trying to make it so people don't have to remember passwords for Dropbox? Are you trying to include your phone system, physical security to your systems, and the network AD login? Make a list of everything you're trying to secure, and then figure out what alternatives those systems support. Then cross-reference all those different systems to see what sign-on technologies and services support all of them (or the most, or the most important systems).
Maybe you don't want to go about it quite that way, but the point is, you need to know your requirements before you try to select a solution. Your biggest problem is going to be finding a single product/service that supports replacing all of your passwords, since there isn't really a universally-supported standard replacement for passwords. One of the reasons passwords have been so successful and stuck around for so long is, you don't need to support any particular hardware or software. It's just text entry.
So if you really want to pursue this, figure out what systems you want to secure, and then figure out what alternative methods support and are supported by those systems. I really wish that, instead of having 50 different companies trying to come up with their own clever little app with pretty animations to provide multi-factor authentication, there were a concerted effort to develop a set of standards that various developers could build from.
However you would need to add some meaningful brute-force and weak pw recognition.
A lot of systems and settings to prevent "weak passwords" are pretty dumb. I've seen things that failed to have a problem with me using my own username (or 'password') as a password as long as I substituted in some symbols and added numbers. So "P@ssw0rd" is fine but "correcthorsebatterystaple" is not allowed.
Considering the human civilization is a few thousand years old, I don't think we have any way of knowing the limits of what we might achieve in the next million years, assuming we survive that long. I think the next big stumbling block we need to tackle is sustainability. How can we create a system as closed off as a spaceship or a space colony that can survive indefinitely without resupply? For that matter, how can we create an economy here on Earth that can survive indefinitely without self-destructing?
If we can figure that out, we'll be in much better shape for long term survival.
however were not any closer to real, self aware and acting, AI now than we were 20 years ago.
A lot of people have responded with some variation of this idea: It is silly to think that AI would be dangerous, because we can't produce a real AI right now.
That's not really an argument. It's a little like saying, "It's silly to think that it would be dangerous for terrorists to have a nuclear bomb. We don't have any evidence that terrorists currently have a nuclear bomb." It's phrased as a hypothetical. If [something] happens that would make for a dangerous situation. Whether it's true or not is not dependent on whether or not that "something" has happened or is particularly likely to happen in the near future.
talking shit about "singularity" being right over the corner is stuff best left for hipster cafes.
First of all, I'm not sure what hipsters have to do with this. It's not hipsters who think that the singularity will happen. It's largely over-eager geek "transhuman" fetishists who fantasize about that kind of thing in detail, and relatively normal people who have a passing interest in the idea if you bring it up. It's an interesting idea, but I agree, there's no reason to think we're particularly close to that kind of thing.
But note that I'm not talking about an "evil scheming plotting AI", or at least not necessarily. And I'm not necessarily talking about the "singularity" either. I'm just pointing out that it's the nature of intelligent beings to not-agree, and if we started building a real AI, there would, sooner or later, have some important subject on which it did not agree with us. If we succeeded in building an AI more intelligent then us, then it becomes a possibly dangerous situation, to have something much smarter than you who strongly disagrees with you on important subjects.
I don't really see a counter-argument to that. It's something you may not have realized, but if we can control what an AI believes and thinks, then it's not a real AI. If we can't control it, then it may derive ideas, form conclusions, and develop plans that we didn't intend, didn't anticipate, and would not have come up with on our own. Indeed, that's part of the interesting potential of AI-- the idea that it might develop ideas that we hadn't considered. However, it's also a source of potential danger, if the AI is given any ability to carry out its own plans, and especially so if we were to assume such an AI is capable of out-planning and outsmarting us.
Again, this is hypothetical. But if we want to pursue development of a real AI, we should be aware of the possible dangers and consequences.
because that story has a plausible AI. the AI itself doesn't have any motive in that story
Actually, if you mean a "true artificial intelligence," then that may be implausible. There are many reasons to believe that you could not have a true intelligence that had no motivations.
But even talking about the sort of fake "AI" we have today, it's worth noting that it still can be dangerous to trust the conclusions of that kind of AI. It's almost more dangerous to trust those conclusions without critical thought, because at least a real AI might be able to notice and point out shortcomings of its own analysis.
To turn things around, I'll support the developers when they get rid of the DRM. I've had reasonably good experience with Steam and their DRM, but every other DRM I've run into recently has created some kind of problem resulting in the game being unplayable. I'm not familiar with Origin, but I've read bad things.
I actually went looking to buy Dragon Age last week, but when it wasn't available either DRM-free or on Steam, I decided not to bother.