Maybe Google should be working with a company like Tesla instead. It seems like Google would need to find a partner that a background in manufacturing cars, but was a little more innovative and forward-thinking than the big guys in Detroit have historically been.
Along with everything else, my guess is that if this technology really becomes commonplace, it will be disruptive and it will likely result in fewer people actually owning cars. In cases like this, sometimes getting businesses with entrenched interests onboard is not only difficult, but counter productive.
As far as I could tell from reading about this, they didn't change what people said.
Here's the thing, Facebook already filters what you see with the default setup. Your 500 friends each post 10 posts today, and when you load up your page on a social networking site, the page only displays 15. So how are those 15 chosen? (I'm making up numbers here, obviously)
The obvious choice would be to show the 15 most recent posts, but that means there's a good chance you'll miss posts that are important and that you'd like to see, since you're only getting a brief snapshot of what's going on in that social networking site. Facebook instead has an algorithm that tries to determine which of those 5,000 posts you'll care most about. I don't know the specifics, but it includes things like favoring the people who you interact with most on Facebook.
So what Facebook did in this study is they tweaked that algorithm to also favor posts that included negative words. The posts were still from that 5,000 post pool and the contents of the posts were unedited, but they subjected you to a different selection in order to conduct the research.
It's still an open question as to whether this sort of thing is appropriate, but it's important to note that this is something Facebook does all the time anyway. I think where is gets creepy is that Facebook is also an ad-driven company, so you have to wonder what the eventual goal of this research is. I can imagine Facebook favoring posts that include pictures of food to go along with an ad campaign for Seamless. Maybe they'll make a deal with pharmaceutical companies to adjust your feed to make you depressed, while at the same time plastering your feed with ads for antidepressants.
I feel like archival settings might be even trickier. There are two additional problems that jump to my mind.
First, it would mean you'd want to recheck the hash on a regular basis, and doing that cheaply is a bit of a logistical problem to solve in itself, but it only raises the question: what do you do when the hash comes back bad? The best solution that I can think of is to develop a system where the data is automatically duplicated to another medium and both are checked regularly, and if either one turns up defective, you restore it from the other copy. I don't know if this is what you had in mind, but the best option in this case might be to load all the data from the flash media you receive into your own server and use a filesystem with it's own check-summing to prevent bitrot. You could then keep that server backed up effectively and efficiently and reuse the USB keys. All this would increase the complexity of the operation, but probably work better.
The second problem is making sure clients can manage, find, recall, and decrypt their data once you have it. Imagine I periodically ship a 32 GB drive to you, and eventually I've shipped 20 of them out to you. I'm a good customer, spending a bunch of money with you. Now I go, "Hey, I want this specific file back, but I don't remember what key it's on, and I don't have the decryption key anymore." Yes, if I do this, I'm an idiot, but when you're dealing with customer service for the general public, you're dealing with idiots. So my question would be, how are you going to keep that from happening?
So there are a couple different problems here. One might already be solved by the software you plan on using to encrypt/hash the data. Does it keep an index of all of these archives that the user can search? Ideally, if you dumped things to a server like I mentioned earlier, there would also be a way for clients to connect remotely and view the contents of their archive, assuming that they have the correct encryption key or password. But then there's a second problem: If you're safeguarding against people losing this data due to a computer crash, fire, flood, etc., how do you make sure they have a backup of that index and the encryption keys? I kind of feel like, now you need a second service that does the same thing, just so I can ship the index and keys to *that* service. Or only require a password and not encryption keys, I suppose.
The idea has some potential. Figure out the best media for it-- a specific model of external drive that's rugged, high capacity, but also light/thin for cheap shipping costs. Figure out a fitting rotation scheme to keep the price down. For example, if you dropped a new backup in the mail every morning and kept them all offsite for a month, you would need at least 30 drives (ignoring the time it takes to ship the drive offsite and back). That's potentially a lot of money, plus shipping and warehousing costs.
Alternatively, you could do something where you try to time it so they drop it in the mail at the end of each week, and they receive it back two weeks later-- basically they ship it to you and you almost immediately ship it back-- so then they'd only need 2-3 drives. If you held onto one drive per month for 3 months, and then 3 monthly snapshots per year, indefinitely, then that means you'd need 3 drives to be in the weekly rotation plus 3 for the monthly rotation, plus 3/year for permanent offsite, it means you (or the client) need to buy 6 drives + 3/year. That doesn't seem so bad.
Like you said, make sure they're encrypted and hashed, not just to guard against bitrot, but to guard against snooping and damage in transport. All in all, that might not be a bad solution for areas that are rural enough that you can't get Iron Mountain, and your Internet connection is too slow to push your backups over the Internet. I don't know how large that market is or how much they'd be willing to pay.
I don't think you necessarily need to backup to tapes yourself. If you backed up your Amazon stuff to Rackspace, for example, you would be protected both against someone gaining access to your Amazon account, as well as a systemic problem with Amazon. Just so long as there's nothing in your Amazon account that would allow an attacker to access your Rackspace account, that should be a pretty good solution.
No solution is perfect. You're just looking for one that's extremely unlikely to break.
There was a large hurricane and we found some flaws in the system to say the least.
That's why you have backups in different geographical areas.
The sites where local admins stored the tapes at local banks faired the best.
Have you considered a service like Iron Mountain? They'll send out a truck to pick up your backups every day, if you like, and store it in a very safe location.
I'm not sure why you're surprised at all. Spam is still a huge problem. You might be lucky enough that you don't get spam, but it's a relentless arms race, and it's intimately connected with the issue of viruses/malware. Of course it would have the attention of researchers.
...I don't associate making money with being immoral or evil.
Neither do I, at least not inherently or necessarily. But Microsoft has not earned a reputation for being an ethical company that puts "solving the world's problems" ahead of making a profit. Hell, Google's motto of "don't be evil" seemed to have been partially in response to Microsoft. Not that they're selling chemical weapons to warlords or anything, but they've had a long history of screwing over their customers and partners, even forgetting the underhanded tactics used against their competition. And some of the worst stuff took place while Gates was still the acting CEO of the company.
Sorry, you don't get a pass on being an unethical asshole just because you've given money to the poor. Yes, you should give money to the poor! That's a great thing to do. Curing Malaria? Fantastic! But that doesn't give you license to go around acting self-righteous while still collecting profits from your previous unethical (at times arguably illegal) business tactics.
I always try to point out this kind of thing when people go off about what a saint Bill Gates is. He became the richest man in the word by being a ruthless, cut-throat businessman, and then donates some of it to charity, and suddenly he's the best person in the world, going on tour with the "hey everyone, I'm such a good guy!" act.
I may sound crazy, but it's sort the only metaphor I can think of: Imagine you had a really crappy roommate. He throws parties and doesn't clean up after himself. He never does the dishes or buys the toilet paper. He plays loud music in the middle of the night. He steals money out of your wallet, and once took a dump on your bed because he thought it was funny. He's just generally an asshole and a terrible roommate. And then one day, he decides that he's going to donate $10/month to the local homeless shelter, and suddenly he's going around telling everyone about his wonderful charity work, and everyone is telling you what a great guy his is, but you keep coming home to find that there's poop in your bed.
Doing one nice thing doesn't absolve you of your other ethical obligations. If Bill Gates wants my respect as a "good guy" and he wants credit for his wisdom, he'll publicly apologize for the unethical business practices conducted by Microsoft under his watch, and use his influence to set things right.
If I remember correctly, that's not how Apple's current backup system works. Every time a file gets written to, there's a log someplace that records that the file was modified. Next time Time Machine runs, it backs up the files in that log. If the OS didn't actually modify the file, it won't get backed up.
Actually no, odds are you can't pull something physical from shelves
Well as I said, depending on the distribution deal you have with the stores that carry it. The point is that stores tend to have specific deals relating to distribution, which is a bit different from other copyright/patent licensing.
That was my point with respect to patents. If you licensed a patent, and the patent was sold, your use of the patent to that point is safe they can't go back after what you did with it in the past, but gong forward you may not be able to keep using the patent.
It depends on the license, which was my point with respect to patents. If I have a license to use the patent for 5 years, then I have those 5 years. The new owner can choose not to renew the license at the end of 5 years, but they can't just tell me to stop using it immediately. Likewise, if I have a perpetual license, then the new content owner can't stop me from using the patent in the future.
But if Tesla then sold the patents, and your permission to use them is terminated
Again, it depends on the legal interpretation of what's happening here. Is Tesla only saying, "We don't plan on suing you, assuming we feel like you're acting in good faith"? Then Tesla themselves could still suddenly tell you to stop using the license. Or are they offering everyone a blanket perpetual license to use the patents? In that case, a new owner wouldn't be able tell you to stop using that technology, because they need to honor the existing license.
All true. However, you might not be able to continue to sell copies of that movie.
It recently happened on GoG and Steam just recently for example; they each had a licenses to sell Fallout; Bethesda got rights to all the Fallout IP from Interplay, and Steam and GoG had to remove the games from the catalog; at least until they get a new licensing deal from Bethesda (which may or may not happen).
You're confusing different things. GOG and Steam are stores. If I make a movie, and then I sell the copyright to that movie, the new copyright holder can pull copies of that movie from store shelves, depending on the distribution deals they have with the stores that carry it. However, if I've sold a license to HBO to show that movie for the next year, the new copyright holder can't simply pull the movie from HBO.
You'll also see it with movies etc where it gets REALLY stupid, where the company that holds the rights to the movie can't make a DVD release because they only have the rights to soundtrack/music for VHS. (Which is one reason you'll sometimes see a DVD release with an altered soundtrack)
But that's not because the company that holds the rights to the music was allowed to revoke the license to have that music in the show. It's because the original license didn't cover DVD distribution, so the show's producer would need to acquire an additional license for that.
Bottom line: AFAIK, licensing isn't invalidated by sale of the IP.
For example, Musk's good will is nice, but what if someone else were to acquire Tesla's IP?
IANAL, but I believe that if you have a license to use intellectual property, and the owner of the IP is acquired, the license would still be valid. For example, if you hold the copyright to a song and I pay you $10k to license that song in a movie, and then you sold the copyright to that song, the new owner can't turn around sue me for using the song in my movie. I believe the same thing holds for patents.
So the question is, can Tesla's promise not to sue be construed as a "license". I believe that if it's not a license and he's just saying, "I probably won't sue," then he could legally change his mind even if he didn't sell the company.
Or it may be that "intelligent" beings who build spaceships and radio broadcasts are also the forms of "intelligent" life that are stupid enough to wipe themselves out by destroying their own environment.
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
It's a great joke, but it also makes an interesting point about "intelligence". When we go looking for it, in space or on our own planet, it may be a mistake to assume that intelligent creatures would build up the kinds of civilizations and technologies that we use. It certainly seems foolishly egocentric to assume that all "intelligence" should work like ours, and we can judge "intelligence" as a single one-dimensional scale, placing every creature on it as either "more intelligent" or "less intelligent" than us.
Maybe there's intelligent life out there that just isn't bothering to develop space travel or radio antennas.
Maybe it's not a completely new OS? IIRC they still own what's left of BeOS and HP-UX, along with having access to the BSDs. I agree it'd be dumb to start from scratch, but you could pilfer what you want from those sources and build something "new" from it without even needing to worry about the GPL.
You can't conceive of an argument of conscience that results in disagreement with your viewpoint and dismissal of your ridiculously overstated fears...
It's not about people who "disagree with my viewpoint". It's about people who are are spreading misinformation which results in deaths. You do understand that people have died, and people will continue to die, as a result of people who refuse to vaccinate their children, right? And it's not just their children who die. It's other people who would not have been infected.
Those are not "overstated fears". Those are facts. I'm not ranting about the possible dangers of the anti-vaccination zealots. I'm saying those people are kind of assholes because they've killed others through their own willful ignorance. It's like if I suddenly decided that I believed that arsenic was important for a balanced diet, so I went around to different schools leaving bags of poisoned candy sitting around. Your response shouldn't be, "We should all be tolerant to different belief systems and accept this person's right to do what they like." You should be thinking about ways to stop such things from happening.
And if your response is, "People trying to get rid of the bags of poisoned candy is just another example of the government coming to get me, and people trying to inflict their will on me!" then you're paranoid. If your response to the whole controversy is, "I'm a better person because I'm tolerant of these alternative beliefs. Don't be so self-righteous!" then you're an asshole.
I don't particularly think it's "honest and decent" to call people assholes. But I don't think it's dishonest or indecent to call assholes assholes. You've shown yourself to be a paranoid, smug, willfully ignorant asshole, and the most honest and decent thing I can do is tell you that.
That was my general understanding of it too. It was less about devising an actual test for computer intelligence, and more about making a philosophic point that we never directly observe intelligence. We only observe the effects-- either in words or actions-- and then guess whether something is intelligent by working backward from those effects. For example, my coworker is sitting next to me, and I see him talking in sentences that appear to make sense. I ask him a question, and I get a response back. When I listen to his response, I analyze it and decide whether it seems like an appropriate or insightful response to my question. As I result, I guess that he's reasonably intelligent, but that's the only thing I have to go on.
So in talking about machine intelligence, Turing suggested that it may not be worthwhile to dwell on whether the machine is actually intelligent, but instead look at whether it can present behavior capable of convincing people that it's intelligent. If I can present questions to a machine and analyze the response, finding that it's as appropriate and insightful as when I'm talking to a human, then maybe we should consider that machine to be intelligent whether it "actually" is intelligent or not.
Still, to me it seems like there's some room for debate and room for problems. For example, do we want to consider it intelligent when a machine can convince me that it's a person of average intelligence, or do we want to require that it's actually sensible and smart? It may be that if an AI gets to be really intelligent, it starts failing the test again because it's answers are too correct, specific, and precise.
There's a further problem in asking the question, once we have AI that we consider "intelligent", will it be worth talking to it? Maybe it will fool us by telling us what we want to hear or expect to hear.
I'm not sure Turing had the answers to whether an AI was intelligent any more than Asimov has the perfect rules to keeping AI benign.
Yes, that's the theory behind "sexual selection". Now go back to my point: People cite "sexual selection" as a convenient explanation for any evolutionary trait that doesn't otherwise seem to be advantageous to survival. Really, it just raises the question, what that feature?
So ok, fine, peacocks grow long flashy feathers to attract mates. So the next question you should ask yourself, why would flashy feathers be attractive to mates? At least in the question of peacocks, we have the beginnings of an answer: in birds, brightly colored feathers can be an indication of health. That possibly raises the question, why is that an indication of health? Sexual selection is an insufficient explanation for the origin of a trait. It only serves to explain how you could get a feedback loop that exaggerates a trait that is otherwise attractive to the opposite sex, but it doesn't begin to explain why that trait was attractive in the first place.
So yes, getting back on topic, it may be that male facial bone structure was exaggerated by sexual selection, but in that case, you would have to argue that the basic facial structure was somehow an indicator of health, and that it became exaggerated through sexual selection.
"Why was this trait considered attractive in the first place?" kind of does not matter. The choice can be arbitrary (random)...
Well that's one kind of statement. Then there's this:
as long as it is a proxy for fitness that is hard to fake and has some type of cost associated with it.
... which pretty well contradicts the idea of it being arbitrary or random. People think that sexual selection is a convenient way to explain any evolution that we can't otherwise explain, but normally it has to start off as a signal of health. That concept brings me back to my original point: It's not really a complete answer. Instead, it raises the question of "why was this trait considered attractive in the first place?" That is, why did those facial features in particular signal fitness in men?
I understand the concept of sexual selection. My point is that sexual selection really only explains how there could be a feedback loop that causes a trait to become exaggerated, but even then it's usually just speculation. And it doesn't address the question of "why was this trait considered attractive in the first place?"
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe Google should be working with a company like Tesla instead. It seems like Google would need to find a partner that a background in manufacturing cars, but was a little more innovative and forward-thinking than the big guys in Detroit have historically been.
Along with everything else, my guess is that if this technology really becomes commonplace, it will be disruptive and it will likely result in fewer people actually owning cars. In cases like this, sometimes getting businesses with entrenched interests onboard is not only difficult, but counter productive.
As far as I could tell from reading about this, they didn't change what people said.
Here's the thing, Facebook already filters what you see with the default setup. Your 500 friends each post 10 posts today, and when you load up your page on a social networking site, the page only displays 15. So how are those 15 chosen? (I'm making up numbers here, obviously)
The obvious choice would be to show the 15 most recent posts, but that means there's a good chance you'll miss posts that are important and that you'd like to see, since you're only getting a brief snapshot of what's going on in that social networking site. Facebook instead has an algorithm that tries to determine which of those 5,000 posts you'll care most about. I don't know the specifics, but it includes things like favoring the people who you interact with most on Facebook.
So what Facebook did in this study is they tweaked that algorithm to also favor posts that included negative words. The posts were still from that 5,000 post pool and the contents of the posts were unedited, but they subjected you to a different selection in order to conduct the research.
It's still an open question as to whether this sort of thing is appropriate, but it's important to note that this is something Facebook does all the time anyway. I think where is gets creepy is that Facebook is also an ad-driven company, so you have to wonder what the eventual goal of this research is. I can imagine Facebook favoring posts that include pictures of food to go along with an ad campaign for Seamless. Maybe they'll make a deal with pharmaceutical companies to adjust your feed to make you depressed, while at the same time plastering your feed with ads for antidepressants.
Is "Blackhawk" considered an ethnic slur?
I feel like archival settings might be even trickier. There are two additional problems that jump to my mind.
First, it would mean you'd want to recheck the hash on a regular basis, and doing that cheaply is a bit of a logistical problem to solve in itself, but it only raises the question: what do you do when the hash comes back bad? The best solution that I can think of is to develop a system where the data is automatically duplicated to another medium and both are checked regularly, and if either one turns up defective, you restore it from the other copy. I don't know if this is what you had in mind, but the best option in this case might be to load all the data from the flash media you receive into your own server and use a filesystem with it's own check-summing to prevent bitrot. You could then keep that server backed up effectively and efficiently and reuse the USB keys. All this would increase the complexity of the operation, but probably work better.
The second problem is making sure clients can manage, find, recall, and decrypt their data once you have it. Imagine I periodically ship a 32 GB drive to you, and eventually I've shipped 20 of them out to you. I'm a good customer, spending a bunch of money with you. Now I go, "Hey, I want this specific file back, but I don't remember what key it's on, and I don't have the decryption key anymore." Yes, if I do this, I'm an idiot, but when you're dealing with customer service for the general public, you're dealing with idiots. So my question would be, how are you going to keep that from happening?
So there are a couple different problems here. One might already be solved by the software you plan on using to encrypt/hash the data. Does it keep an index of all of these archives that the user can search? Ideally, if you dumped things to a server like I mentioned earlier, there would also be a way for clients to connect remotely and view the contents of their archive, assuming that they have the correct encryption key or password. But then there's a second problem: If you're safeguarding against people losing this data due to a computer crash, fire, flood, etc., how do you make sure they have a backup of that index and the encryption keys? I kind of feel like, now you need a second service that does the same thing, just so I can ship the index and keys to *that* service. Or only require a password and not encryption keys, I suppose.
The idea has some potential. Figure out the best media for it-- a specific model of external drive that's rugged, high capacity, but also light/thin for cheap shipping costs. Figure out a fitting rotation scheme to keep the price down. For example, if you dropped a new backup in the mail every morning and kept them all offsite for a month, you would need at least 30 drives (ignoring the time it takes to ship the drive offsite and back). That's potentially a lot of money, plus shipping and warehousing costs.
Alternatively, you could do something where you try to time it so they drop it in the mail at the end of each week, and they receive it back two weeks later-- basically they ship it to you and you almost immediately ship it back-- so then they'd only need 2-3 drives. If you held onto one drive per month for 3 months, and then 3 monthly snapshots per year, indefinitely, then that means you'd need 3 drives to be in the weekly rotation plus 3 for the monthly rotation, plus 3/year for permanent offsite, it means you (or the client) need to buy 6 drives + 3/year. That doesn't seem so bad.
Like you said, make sure they're encrypted and hashed, not just to guard against bitrot, but to guard against snooping and damage in transport. All in all, that might not be a bad solution for areas that are rural enough that you can't get Iron Mountain, and your Internet connection is too slow to push your backups over the Internet. I don't know how large that market is or how much they'd be willing to pay.
I don't think you necessarily need to backup to tapes yourself. If you backed up your Amazon stuff to Rackspace, for example, you would be protected both against someone gaining access to your Amazon account, as well as a systemic problem with Amazon. Just so long as there's nothing in your Amazon account that would allow an attacker to access your Rackspace account, that should be a pretty good solution.
No solution is perfect. You're just looking for one that's extremely unlikely to break.
There was a large hurricane and we found some flaws in the system to say the least.
That's why you have backups in different geographical areas.
The sites where local admins stored the tapes at local banks faired the best.
Have you considered a service like Iron Mountain? They'll send out a truck to pick up your backups every day, if you like, and store it in a very safe location.
I'm not sure why you're surprised at all. Spam is still a huge problem. You might be lucky enough that you don't get spam, but it's a relentless arms race, and it's intimately connected with the issue of viruses/malware. Of course it would have the attention of researchers.
...I don't associate making money with being immoral or evil.
Neither do I, at least not inherently or necessarily. But Microsoft has not earned a reputation for being an ethical company that puts "solving the world's problems" ahead of making a profit. Hell, Google's motto of "don't be evil" seemed to have been partially in response to Microsoft. Not that they're selling chemical weapons to warlords or anything, but they've had a long history of screwing over their customers and partners, even forgetting the underhanded tactics used against their competition. And some of the worst stuff took place while Gates was still the acting CEO of the company.
Sorry, you don't get a pass on being an unethical asshole just because you've given money to the poor. Yes, you should give money to the poor! That's a great thing to do. Curing Malaria? Fantastic! But that doesn't give you license to go around acting self-righteous while still collecting profits from your previous unethical (at times arguably illegal) business tactics.
I always try to point out this kind of thing when people go off about what a saint Bill Gates is. He became the richest man in the word by being a ruthless, cut-throat businessman, and then donates some of it to charity, and suddenly he's the best person in the world, going on tour with the "hey everyone, I'm such a good guy!" act.
I may sound crazy, but it's sort the only metaphor I can think of: Imagine you had a really crappy roommate. He throws parties and doesn't clean up after himself. He never does the dishes or buys the toilet paper. He plays loud music in the middle of the night. He steals money out of your wallet, and once took a dump on your bed because he thought it was funny. He's just generally an asshole and a terrible roommate. And then one day, he decides that he's going to donate $10/month to the local homeless shelter, and suddenly he's going around telling everyone about his wonderful charity work, and everyone is telling you what a great guy his is, but you keep coming home to find that there's poop in your bed.
Doing one nice thing doesn't absolve you of your other ethical obligations. If Bill Gates wants my respect as a "good guy" and he wants credit for his wisdom, he'll publicly apologize for the unethical business practices conducted by Microsoft under his watch, and use his influence to set things right.
If I remember correctly, that's not how Apple's current backup system works. Every time a file gets written to, there's a log someplace that records that the file was modified. Next time Time Machine runs, it backs up the files in that log. If the OS didn't actually modify the file, it won't get backed up.
I may be wrong, but that's how I understood it.
How long has Microsoft been promising WinFS?
I thought Microsoft gave up on WinFS. Are they still promising it?
Actually no, odds are you can't pull something physical from shelves
Well as I said, depending on the distribution deal you have with the stores that carry it. The point is that stores tend to have specific deals relating to distribution, which is a bit different from other copyright/patent licensing.
That was my point with respect to patents. If you licensed a patent, and the patent was sold, your use of the patent to that point is safe they can't go back after what you did with it in the past, but gong forward you may not be able to keep using the patent.
It depends on the license, which was my point with respect to patents. If I have a license to use the patent for 5 years, then I have those 5 years. The new owner can choose not to renew the license at the end of 5 years, but they can't just tell me to stop using it immediately. Likewise, if I have a perpetual license, then the new content owner can't stop me from using the patent in the future.
But if Tesla then sold the patents, and your permission to use them is terminated
Again, it depends on the legal interpretation of what's happening here. Is Tesla only saying, "We don't plan on suing you, assuming we feel like you're acting in good faith"? Then Tesla themselves could still suddenly tell you to stop using the license. Or are they offering everyone a blanket perpetual license to use the patents? In that case, a new owner wouldn't be able tell you to stop using that technology, because they need to honor the existing license.
All true. However, you might not be able to continue to sell copies of that movie.
It recently happened on GoG and Steam just recently for example; they each had a licenses to sell Fallout; Bethesda got rights to all the Fallout IP from Interplay, and Steam and GoG had to remove the games from the catalog; at least until they get a new licensing deal from Bethesda (which may or may not happen).
You're confusing different things. GOG and Steam are stores. If I make a movie, and then I sell the copyright to that movie, the new copyright holder can pull copies of that movie from store shelves, depending on the distribution deals they have with the stores that carry it. However, if I've sold a license to HBO to show that movie for the next year, the new copyright holder can't simply pull the movie from HBO.
You'll also see it with movies etc where it gets REALLY stupid, where the company that holds the rights to the movie can't make a DVD release because they only have the rights to soundtrack/music for VHS. (Which is one reason you'll sometimes see a DVD release with an altered soundtrack)
But that's not because the company that holds the rights to the music was allowed to revoke the license to have that music in the show. It's because the original license didn't cover DVD distribution, so the show's producer would need to acquire an additional license for that.
Bottom line: AFAIK, licensing isn't invalidated by sale of the IP.
For example, Musk's good will is nice, but what if someone else were to acquire Tesla's IP?
IANAL, but I believe that if you have a license to use intellectual property, and the owner of the IP is acquired, the license would still be valid. For example, if you hold the copyright to a song and I pay you $10k to license that song in a movie, and then you sold the copyright to that song, the new owner can't turn around sue me for using the song in my movie. I believe the same thing holds for patents.
So the question is, can Tesla's promise not to sue be construed as a "license". I believe that if it's not a license and he's just saying, "I probably won't sue," then he could legally change his mind even if he didn't sell the company.
Or it may be that "intelligent" beings who build spaceships and radio broadcasts are also the forms of "intelligent" life that are stupid enough to wipe themselves out by destroying their own environment.
I've always liked this quote from HHGTTG:
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
It's a great joke, but it also makes an interesting point about "intelligence". When we go looking for it, in space or on our own planet, it may be a mistake to assume that intelligent creatures would build up the kinds of civilizations and technologies that we use. It certainly seems foolishly egocentric to assume that all "intelligence" should work like ours, and we can judge "intelligence" as a single one-dimensional scale, placing every creature on it as either "more intelligent" or "less intelligent" than us.
Maybe there's intelligent life out there that just isn't bothering to develop space travel or radio antennas.
Maybe it's not a completely new OS? IIRC they still own what's left of BeOS and HP-UX, along with having access to the BSDs. I agree it'd be dumb to start from scratch, but you could pilfer what you want from those sources and build something "new" from it without even needing to worry about the GPL.
You can't conceive of an argument of conscience that results in disagreement with your viewpoint and dismissal of your ridiculously overstated fears...
It's not about people who "disagree with my viewpoint". It's about people who are are spreading misinformation which results in deaths. You do understand that people have died, and people will continue to die, as a result of people who refuse to vaccinate their children, right? And it's not just their children who die. It's other people who would not have been infected.
Those are not "overstated fears". Those are facts. I'm not ranting about the possible dangers of the anti-vaccination zealots. I'm saying those people are kind of assholes because they've killed others through their own willful ignorance. It's like if I suddenly decided that I believed that arsenic was important for a balanced diet, so I went around to different schools leaving bags of poisoned candy sitting around. Your response shouldn't be, "We should all be tolerant to different belief systems and accept this person's right to do what they like." You should be thinking about ways to stop such things from happening.
And if your response is, "People trying to get rid of the bags of poisoned candy is just another example of the government coming to get me, and people trying to inflict their will on me!" then you're paranoid. If your response to the whole controversy is, "I'm a better person because I'm tolerant of these alternative beliefs. Don't be so self-righteous!" then you're an asshole.
I don't particularly think it's "honest and decent" to call people assholes. But I don't think it's dishonest or indecent to call assholes assholes. You've shown yourself to be a paranoid, smug, willfully ignorant asshole, and the most honest and decent thing I can do is tell you that.
That was my general understanding of it too. It was less about devising an actual test for computer intelligence, and more about making a philosophic point that we never directly observe intelligence. We only observe the effects-- either in words or actions-- and then guess whether something is intelligent by working backward from those effects. For example, my coworker is sitting next to me, and I see him talking in sentences that appear to make sense. I ask him a question, and I get a response back. When I listen to his response, I analyze it and decide whether it seems like an appropriate or insightful response to my question. As I result, I guess that he's reasonably intelligent, but that's the only thing I have to go on.
So in talking about machine intelligence, Turing suggested that it may not be worthwhile to dwell on whether the machine is actually intelligent, but instead look at whether it can present behavior capable of convincing people that it's intelligent. If I can present questions to a machine and analyze the response, finding that it's as appropriate and insightful as when I'm talking to a human, then maybe we should consider that machine to be intelligent whether it "actually" is intelligent or not.
Still, to me it seems like there's some room for debate and room for problems. For example, do we want to consider it intelligent when a machine can convince me that it's a person of average intelligence, or do we want to require that it's actually sensible and smart? It may be that if an AI gets to be really intelligent, it starts failing the test again because it's answers are too correct, specific, and precise.
There's a further problem in asking the question, once we have AI that we consider "intelligent", will it be worth talking to it? Maybe it will fool us by telling us what we want to hear or expect to hear.
I'm not sure Turing had the answers to whether an AI was intelligent any more than Asimov has the perfect rules to keeping AI benign.
the computer must convince the judge it is a human with it's full mental capacity,
And I'd like to suggest that this is a tricky qualifier, given the number of people reading Gawker and watching "Keeping up with the Kardashians".
No, seriously. Given some of the stupid things people say and do, it would make more sense if they were poorly written AIs.
Yes, that's the theory behind "sexual selection". Now go back to my point: People cite "sexual selection" as a convenient explanation for any evolutionary trait that doesn't otherwise seem to be advantageous to survival. Really, it just raises the question, what that feature?
So ok, fine, peacocks grow long flashy feathers to attract mates. So the next question you should ask yourself, why would flashy feathers be attractive to mates? At least in the question of peacocks, we have the beginnings of an answer: in birds, brightly colored feathers can be an indication of health. That possibly raises the question, why is that an indication of health? Sexual selection is an insufficient explanation for the origin of a trait. It only serves to explain how you could get a feedback loop that exaggerates a trait that is otherwise attractive to the opposite sex, but it doesn't begin to explain why that trait was attractive in the first place.
So yes, getting back on topic, it may be that male facial bone structure was exaggerated by sexual selection, but in that case, you would have to argue that the basic facial structure was somehow an indicator of health, and that it became exaggerated through sexual selection.
"Why was this trait considered attractive in the first place?" kind of does not matter. The choice can be arbitrary (random)...
Well that's one kind of statement. Then there's this:
as long as it is a proxy for fitness that is hard to fake and has some type of cost associated with it.
... which pretty well contradicts the idea of it being arbitrary or random. People think that sexual selection is a convenient way to explain any evolution that we can't otherwise explain, but normally it has to start off as a signal of health. That concept brings me back to my original point: It's not really a complete answer. Instead, it raises the question of "why was this trait considered attractive in the first place?" That is, why did those facial features in particular signal fitness in men?
I understand the concept of sexual selection. My point is that sexual selection really only explains how there could be a feedback loop that causes a trait to become exaggerated, but even then it's usually just speculation. And it doesn't address the question of "why was this trait considered attractive in the first place?"
who says all selection is driven by female choice?
The person I was responding to, when he suggested this was the result of sexual selection.