To be fair, both the US and EU are guilty of this to some degree, but nowhere near what China does.
You have to be joking. Aside from Tibet, how many countries has China invaded in the last 50 years? The US has thrown it's weight around enormously more than China, right from installing Dictators (e.g. Shah of Iran) to direct invasions and much of this has been about securing access to resources and markets. The US even engineered the overthrow of the Guatemalan government just so that United Fruits could avoid paying taxes. China's brutality is mostly internal, in contrast to the US which is free internally but brutal externally.
The EU is not throwing it's weight around on a US level, but there are a few nasty examples. Britain was of course involved in the installation of the Shah of Iran (to secure access to the oil) but France has been waging a secret war in the mineral-rich Central African Republic for decades. Right now they have "peace keeping" troops there, but they used to control it directly and basically used the population as slave labour.
I'm sure that if/when China starts overthrowing governments all over the Middle East and in South America, we kill kick up a huge fuss and be on the brink of World War 3, but western countries have been doing this sort of thing for the last 50 years or more. We don't complain about it too much because we are rarely on the receiving end of all the violence but if we were, we would probably be just as angry as people like Chavez and Ortega.
I get the feeling that in a modern war against an advanced nation, these carriers would be sitting ducks for anti-ship missiles. The US Navy would probably be forced to keep them well out of harms way. They're certainly good for attacking third world countries though, so despite their vulnerabilities, they are bound to be in service for a long time.
Nobody in congress is serving the interests of the people.
Quite true, and it's annoying that the media do not address this side of things. They either talk about Republicans or Democrats but never the issue that neither really serve the peoples interests.
...is the title of a book I have seen reviewed a few times recently and is due out shortly. As the title suggests, the author explores the possibilities of love and physical relationships with robots. There is also a discussion over at New Scientist magazine about the book.
All sorts of issues come to mind. If androids are self-aware, it would be wrong to use them as sex slaves. If we make androids find humans physically attractive, that would be a very artificial thing to program in. How much worse would it be to go further and make an android artificially attracted to a particular individual?
If there is an eventual robot revolution, I suppose it would be much easier on the eye if it was an army of sexy fembots rather than terminators.
It's kind of a conspiratorial diversion, but you do raise an important issue. When corporations are under threat from foreign competition, they go crying to government who then step in and protect them in various ways using our hard earned money. In contrast, when we are under threat, it is apparently tough and a case of "how dare we expect a well paid job just because we spent years studying hard".
How can you compete with an equivalently intelligent person in a country where the cost of living is so much lower? Anything you try to do to get the upper hand, they can do too. As communications technology improves, this problem is only going to get worse. Eventually company CEOs themselves may be replaced with cheaper versions from overseas, but as amusing and satisfying as this will be, it won't help people who have lost jobs to outsourcing. Then again, perhaps when globalisation starts hurting the rich as well, we will start to see some government action over the issue.
I'm not defending Yahoo, they deserve a kick in the ass. It's just that there needs to be more internal Government scrutiny like this. Financially the US is a giant, but like Yahoo, morally it is also a pygmy.
It seems like a dumb way to do things as well. I believe it has loads of cameras inside. The thing is, there are already multi-touch technologies than just use one touch-sensitive layer, so all that bulk is unnecessary.
I read somewhere that Wacom (the leading manufacturer of Graphics tablets) owns many of the necessary patents for tablets/tabletPCs. This could explain why Tablet PCs are so overpriced. Certainly their own stuff is overpriced. For example, Wacom do a Graphics tablet with a built in screen called Cintiq, but it costs more than an entire PC.
LCD screens are pretty cheap these days, and Graphics tablet technology is really very old and mature. Why should the marriage of the two be so overpriced?
With snail mail it would require someone to sustain their craziness for the long process of writing and posting a letter. Someone who is able to do that is more likely to actually be crazy. With email a sudden bout of crazy anger is all that is required and even the average person is capable of that, especially after a drink or two.
But honestly, the failure of most amateur and professional narrative (fiction -and- nonfiction) films is not the framing or the filming or the colors or the shots or the material. The failure is that not nearly as many people are as funny or as clever as they think they are. They don't have good senses of timing, of editing, of rhythm, or of narrative structure.
Well sound tends to be awful, lighting tends to be awful (because proper lighting is expensive and awkward) and the actors tend to be pretty ugly.
Right now the problem is that you need a scale - if you have a stick you use to measure things by, you add to the error of *every* measurement with each generation... which prevents self-replication.
It's not just that. Because we can't yet build at the molecular level, we have created all sorts of diverse and complex ways of achieving what we want using bulk processes. The diversity of these means that we need hundreds of huge factories to make all the components for a typical piece of gadgetry. So for example, if a hand-held video camera breaks on a future base on Mars, there is no way they can make another one without thousands of square miles of factories and thousands of workers to produce the components they need. With molecular level manufacturing, you eliminate the necessity of needing a huge set of factories.
With a molecular manufacturing machine, building something would be a case of having the required data file. I should imagine that there would be a vibrant open-source community designing all sorts of weird and wonderful things which you could download and "print". The potential of such a technology is enormous. There will be all sorts of issues to consider though. How do you prevent people from "printing" hand grenades and machine guns or Sarin?
If you are interested in this sort of thing, you should read "Engines of Creation" by Eric Drexler which is a non fiction book that explores these ideas. Drexler is the guy who coined the term "Nanotechnology" back in the 80s. You can read it all online here.
Whenever governments want some new power, the major threat is nearly always "Mission Creep". They start off by saying that the new measures will only apply to terror suspects (or whatever) and things will have to be approved etc. A year or so down the line though, once people are used to it, they extend things a little. Then a while later, they do it again. Before you know it, you can end up with a real big brother situation.
An example of this is the criminal genetic database in the UK. Initially it was only for convicted criminals, but there has been mission creep for years and they now keep huge amounts of genetic data, even from people who are completely innocent.
It would be far better if the politicians had to worry about being vaporised. Instead it's the other way around. The politicians are the only ones who get a shelter (unless you live in a country that cares about it's population, like Switzerland).
Absolutely. The same goes for foreign competition. When you or I are threatened by cheaper workers overseas/outsourcing, we are told that it's tough and it's a harsh business reality etc. Yet when the same companies are threatened by foreign competition, they go complaining to the government, who very often take action to protect them and use our money to do it!
[Capo di tutti capi, Steve Ballmer] - "That's a nice set of users ya got there. Shame if anything were to happen to 'em. I'm a reasonable Mafia don though, I just want to 'Wet my beak' as they say."
"Perhaps I can interest you in this very reasonably priced enchanted Viagra. Oh you're not interested in Viagra? Well perhaps I can help you in your quest to retrieve the mighty blade KitchenDevilbre. In order to complete the quest you will need this magical book. Just go to the section on magical swords. Of course, before you can reach the index to find the relevant page, you will have to flip through about 40 pages of adverts."
Suddenly Eula the city Sheriff interrupts your conversation
[Eula] - "Greetings young knight. I detect the presence of photoshop. Do you actually have a licence for it?"
I have a friend in the recording industry, and he says that whenever someone wants to use some famous pop song in an advert or documentary, they nearly always have a heart attack over the amount the record company wants. Instead they usually ditch the idea and get someone to play something similar. However, in a future where the bands themselves are in charge, I think using their work for other projects will become much cheaper. It may even become feasible for amateur film-makers to get permission to use famous tracks for a minimal fee.
Democracy doesn't work. We've had them for thousands of years, and they always fail as the majority learns they can just vote to steal from the minority
Whereas with the current system the minority steal from the majority on a massive scale. I can't think of a better example of this than the current theft of billions from the US public by corporations via Iraq. The truth is that the rich minority have not been paying their fair share of the tax burden for some time. Increasingly the taxes have been forced onto the public and away from the corporations.
The problem with democracies (or at least the way we run them) is that the rich basically end up in control via the funding of political parties and other channels. This might not be so bad if the interests of the rich coincided with the interests of the poor, but sadly this is rarely the case. For example, it might be in the interests of the rich to have a war (which makes money for their companies), but it is not so much in the interests of the poor, who end up doing the fighting and dying.
The other problem is that people who seek power are often the very people who should never receive it. It's a bit like asking a crowd of people who would like a machine gun. The people who put their hands up are the last people you want to give a machine gun to.
A possible alternative to democracy is Demarchy, where the government is randomly selected, a bit like jury duty. This largely avoids the problem of power hungry and rich people seizing control.
I think the Swiss have a pretty good system though. The Swiss people can instigate a referendum all by themselves if they feel strongly enough and via this mechanism they can block government policies.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to be joking. Aside from Tibet, how many countries has China invaded in the last 50 years? The US has thrown it's weight around enormously more than China, right from installing Dictators (e.g. Shah of Iran) to direct invasions and much of this has been about securing access to resources and markets. The US even engineered the overthrow of the Guatemalan government just so that United Fruits could avoid paying taxes. China's brutality is mostly internal, in contrast to the US which is free internally but brutal externally.
The EU is not throwing it's weight around on a US level, but there are a few nasty examples. Britain was of course involved in the installation of the Shah of Iran (to secure access to the oil) but France has been waging a secret war in the mineral-rich Central African Republic for decades. Right now they have "peace keeping" troops there, but they used to control it directly and basically used the population as slave labour.
I'm sure that if/when China starts overthrowing governments all over the Middle East and in South America, we kill kick up a huge fuss and be on the brink of World War 3, but western countries have been doing this sort of thing for the last 50 years or more. We don't complain about it too much because we are rarely on the receiving end of all the violence but if we were, we would probably be just as angry as people like Chavez and Ortega.
I get the feeling that in a modern war against an advanced nation, these carriers would be sitting ducks for anti-ship missiles. The US Navy would probably be forced to keep them well out of harms way. They're certainly good for attacking third world countries though, so despite their vulnerabilities, they are bound to be in service for a long time.
Quite true, and it's annoying that the media do not address this side of things. They either talk about Republicans or Democrats but never the issue that neither really serve the peoples interests.
...is the title of a book I have seen reviewed a few times recently and is due out shortly. As the title suggests, the author explores the possibilities of love and physical relationships with robots. There is also a discussion over at New Scientist magazine about the book.
All sorts of issues come to mind. If androids are self-aware, it would be wrong to use them as sex slaves. If we make androids find humans physically attractive, that would be a very artificial thing to program in. How much worse would it be to go further and make an android artificially attracted to a particular individual?
If there is an eventual robot revolution, I suppose it would be much easier on the eye if it was an army of sexy fembots rather than terminators.
It's kind of a conspiratorial diversion, but you do raise an important issue. When corporations are under threat from foreign competition, they go crying to government who then step in and protect them in various ways using our hard earned money. In contrast, when we are under threat, it is apparently tough and a case of "how dare we expect a well paid job just because we spent years studying hard".
How can you compete with an equivalently intelligent person in a country where the cost of living is so much lower? Anything you try to do to get the upper hand, they can do too. As communications technology improves, this problem is only going to get worse. Eventually company CEOs themselves may be replaced with cheaper versions from overseas, but as amusing and satisfying as this will be, it won't help people who have lost jobs to outsourcing. Then again, perhaps when globalisation starts hurting the rich as well, we will start to see some government action over the issue.
I'm not defending Yahoo, they deserve a kick in the ass. It's just that there needs to be more internal Government scrutiny like this. Financially the US is a giant, but like Yahoo, morally it is also a pygmy.
...You're Black!"
I think that would be a pretty good response to the statement "While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies"
It seems like a dumb way to do things as well. I believe it has loads of cameras inside. The thing is, there are already multi-touch technologies than just use one touch-sensitive layer, so all that bulk is unnecessary.
I read somewhere that Wacom (the leading manufacturer of Graphics tablets) owns many of the necessary patents for tablets/tabletPCs. This could explain why Tablet PCs are so overpriced. Certainly their own stuff is overpriced. For example, Wacom do a Graphics tablet with a built in screen called Cintiq, but it costs more than an entire PC.
LCD screens are pretty cheap these days, and Graphics tablet technology is really very old and mature. Why should the marriage of the two be so overpriced?
Perhaps a new state should be created to house them all. Each county in the state could be named after a different crime.
With snail mail it would require someone to sustain their craziness for the long process of writing and posting a letter. Someone who is able to do that is more likely to actually be crazy. With email a sudden bout of crazy anger is all that is required and even the average person is capable of that, especially after a drink or two.
Well sound tends to be awful, lighting tends to be awful (because proper lighting is expensive and awkward) and the actors tend to be pretty ugly.
Indeed. To borrow the words of a famous voice synthesizer, "The only winning move is not to play."
It's not just that. Because we can't yet build at the molecular level, we have created all sorts of diverse and complex ways of achieving what we want using bulk processes. The diversity of these means that we need hundreds of huge factories to make all the components for a typical piece of gadgetry. So for example, if a hand-held video camera breaks on a future base on Mars, there is no way they can make another one without thousands of square miles of factories and thousands of workers to produce the components they need. With molecular level manufacturing, you eliminate the necessity of needing a huge set of factories.
With a molecular manufacturing machine, building something would be a case of having the required data file. I should imagine that there would be a vibrant open-source community designing all sorts of weird and wonderful things which you could download and "print". The potential of such a technology is enormous. There will be all sorts of issues to consider though. How do you prevent people from "printing" hand grenades and machine guns or Sarin?
If you are interested in this sort of thing, you should read "Engines of Creation" by Eric Drexler which is a non fiction book that explores these ideas. Drexler is the guy who coined the term "Nanotechnology" back in the 80s. You can read it all online here.
That's a shame because using your children as test subjects looks like a lot of fun :)
Rocket Skateboard Accident http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRsEvsdNXLA
Whenever governments want some new power, the major threat is nearly always "Mission Creep". They start off by saying that the new measures will only apply to terror suspects (or whatever) and things will have to be approved etc. A year or so down the line though, once people are used to it, they extend things a little. Then a while later, they do it again. Before you know it, you can end up with a real big brother situation.
An example of this is the criminal genetic database in the UK. Initially it was only for convicted criminals, but there has been mission creep for years and they now keep huge amounts of genetic data, even from people who are completely innocent.
It would be far better if the politicians had to worry about being vaporised. Instead it's the other way around. The politicians are the only ones who get a shelter (unless you live in a country that cares about it's population, like Switzerland).
You joke, but these days, with so many portable video devices, what is the point of buying media you can't rip?
Absolutely. The same goes for foreign competition. When you or I are threatened by cheaper workers overseas/outsourcing, we are told that it's tough and it's a harsh business reality etc. Yet when the same companies are threatened by foreign competition, they go complaining to the government, who very often take action to protect them and use our money to do it!
[Capo di tutti capi, Steve Ballmer] - "That's a nice set of users ya got there. Shame if anything were to happen to 'em. I'm a reasonable Mafia don though, I just want to 'Wet my beak' as they say."
"Perhaps I can interest you in this very reasonably priced enchanted Viagra. Oh you're not interested in Viagra? Well perhaps I can help you in your quest to retrieve the mighty blade KitchenDevilbre. In order to complete the quest you will need this magical book. Just go to the section on magical swords. Of course, before you can reach the index to find the relevant page, you will have to flip through about 40 pages of adverts."
Suddenly Eula the city Sheriff interrupts your conversation
[Eula] - "Greetings young knight. I detect the presence of photoshop. Do you actually have a licence for it?"
I have a friend in the recording industry, and he says that whenever someone wants to use some famous pop song in an advert or documentary, they nearly always have a heart attack over the amount the record company wants. Instead they usually ditch the idea and get someone to play something similar. However, in a future where the bands themselves are in charge, I think using their work for other projects will become much cheaper. It may even become feasible for amateur film-makers to get permission to use famous tracks for a minimal fee.
Yes, I think the original Groucho Marx eyebrows and moustache should be restored.
I hope the power does go up because at the moment reception with an indoor aerial is next to impossible.
Whereas with the current system the minority steal from the majority on a massive scale. I can't think of a better example of this than the current theft of billions from the US public by corporations via Iraq. The truth is that the rich minority have not been paying their fair share of the tax burden for some time. Increasingly the taxes have been forced onto the public and away from the corporations.
The problem with democracies (or at least the way we run them) is that the rich basically end up in control via the funding of political parties and other channels. This might not be so bad if the interests of the rich coincided with the interests of the poor, but sadly this is rarely the case. For example, it might be in the interests of the rich to have a war (which makes money for their companies), but it is not so much in the interests of the poor, who end up doing the fighting and dying.
The other problem is that people who seek power are often the very people who should never receive it. It's a bit like asking a crowd of people who would like a machine gun. The people who put their hands up are the last people you want to give a machine gun to.
A possible alternative to democracy is Demarchy, where the government is randomly selected, a bit like jury duty. This largely avoids the problem of power hungry and rich people seizing control.
I think the Swiss have a pretty good system though. The Swiss people can instigate a referendum all by themselves if they feel strongly enough and via this mechanism they can block government policies.