DOMA was passing a law to invalidate the Constitution's Full Faith and Credit clause. The pro-constitution small government Republicans passed more laws to cause more bureaucracy to invalidate the Constitution, doing the opposite of what they say they are. Yet again.
DOMA did not invalidate anything. It just said for the purposes of the Federal Government certain things would not be recognized.
If you read the history of marriage with respect to the Full Faith and Credit Clause, it has not been used for force States to recognize marriages from other States that the State does not wish to recognize - that does not invalidate the marriage license isssued in the other State in any way whatsoever which is what the Full Faith and Credit Clause requires. So it is completely in applicable here, especially as this is not an inter-State issue but an issue between State and Federal government.
In the case of DOMA the Federal Government was saying "yes, we recognize your marriage license and its validity with respect to the States; but with respect to the Federal Government it doesn't apply".
The authoritarian Nazis are pushing for "states rights" unless the states decide something they don't like, in which case they introduce DOMA. They claim to be for states rights, until they aren't.
DOMA did not affect States and had nothing to do with States rights. It only had to do with the Federal Government, so that's not really a conflict like you make it out to be.
Federal Government can make decisions regarding itself and its own policies, as DOMA was, without affect the States whateversoever.
The issue comes when the Federal Government tries to push its policies and agenda onto the States - e.g Welfare, DOE, Social Security, Health Care, etc - through means not really granted to it via the U.S Constitution - usually through over reach of the Commerce Clause which only regulates inter-state commerce.
First, let's remember that lawmaking politicians of influence of either party are typically what, 60+ years old? 70+? These guys still have their staff print their emails for them and are surprised when a someone says 'let's watch a movie' and it doesn't involve (at best) a VCR. Not super-quick at adapting to change.
While that may be true of some, it's certainly not true of them all - at any age. Many are very much use to using e-mail and computers.
Seriously, go meet your politicians. You'll quickly learn your assumptions above are wrong - very wrong.
You cannot simply point at today's lackey Republicans as the source for these laws, nor claim them to be "anti-Tesla" anymore than 50-year-old telecom laws are "anti-Google".
Very true. It has nothing to do with who is in office today - Republican or Democrat. You can only blame them for not trying to change it to be more friendly.
There's a lot of laws like these that really should be revisited to see if they are still relevant today, and if not update or remote them from the books accordingly.
There are a number of tools that give non-root users root access. It might be "just" sudo, or it might be some GUI tool to allow graphical administration. All it takes is a program that can hijack one of those, or just passively wait until the user issued a sudo command (so their password and access is cached), then it could jump in, grab root, stuff a module in the kernel, and all bets are off from there.
True, but those tools also require the user to have permissions to use them. For instance, sudo requires the user to be part of a group - root, sudo, wheel - that group is configurable so you can call it whatever you want. Even then it usually requires the user's password (which is also required to change the password, so you can't just change the password to be able to use sudo in your script).
Long term, what Linux really should have is the ability to have either signed executables or a manifest list that can whitelist or blacklist. This could be something like Solaris's elfsign or AIX's trustchk, where an admin can make a self-signed key and sign all executables. With this in place, on a production system, if an executable, script, or library isn't signed, it doesn't run. Virtually every other OS has this functionality in place. This doesn't have to rely on an "official" signing key either, and could just be a manifest list generated after install, similar to tripwire's database, and if some executable's signature is different, it doesn't get to run until an admin updates the signature DB.
Check out AppArmor, SELinux, etc - they have the ability to do very fine grain management of the system that really controls every little thing a user or program could do.
So yes, the ability is there. However, it's so easy to screw it up that most don't use it unless they really need it. And honestly most don't need it; the standard permission set (which still runs through SELInux, btw, just being configured with a default that matches the historical permissions) is sufficient enough to deter most things.
And the correct market response to that would have been to call their bluff, and then enjoy the movies from those that survived. The idea that all the studios would have stopped releasing their content anywhere but in theatres is utterly implausible and was never a serious threat.
The idea is that studios would have ignored DVD and stuck to VHS and its generation loss, Rovi Macrovision analog copy protection, and NTSC/PAL/SECAM/MESECAM region lock until they could launch their own competing format with better DRM. Witness Video CD and SVCD never taking off in North America, and witness the industrywide switch from HD DVD to Blu-ray Disc when the latter offered region locking and stronger DRM (BD+, ROM Mark, and lack of rich menus on non-AACS discs).
Yes, HD-DVD did not have region lock where BD-DVD did not. However, that had nothing to do with why BD-DVD won out. IIRC, BD-DVD had a higher amount of data, and simply had a wider deployment since Sony put a BD-DVD player in every Playstation 3, so game makers and more were already pushing BD-DVD for that reason alone. There was no similar push for HD-DVD except the ill-fated Add-on for the XBox that Microsoft did. If Microsoft had made it built-in component, then there probably would have been a bigger battle between the two since the XBox sold nearly as well as the PS3 at the time.
I thought [Blu-ray] got lost in the negative gap between DVD and getting stuff over the internet.
On the contrary. I still use Blu-ray because after I've bought a disc it is mine, permanently and unambiguously, and with the full force of my country's consumer protection laws behind me if anyone tries to interfere with my use of it.
That's why I buy DVD. I don't buy BD-DVDs (aka Blu-Ray DVDs). The movie industry is still having a very hard time with people buying BD-DVDs.
What's in it for you is C# is a very good language.
I wouldn't agree. There's a lot of things in the C# and C++/CLI (aka Managed C++) world that are just ass-backwards.
If I wanted the advantage of what the.NET CLR gives me - supposed platform independences - then I'd write Java.
As it is, I don't write Java b/c Java is a major PITA with no advantages over C++ or Python.
Only advantage of.NET CLR/C#/etc is that it is heavily optimized for the Windows environments so its gets a boost that other frameworks (e.g Java) cannot take advantage of. But that, again, goes against the whole platform independence.
Regarding Mono, it's not worth the bytes that make up the source. Apart from the potential legal issues (patents MS holds wrt to Mono were only licensed to Novell/SuSE users for a 5 year period, which has since expired), the APIs are highly tied to Windows. Yes, Mono has made some Gtk equivalents, but then why use it? Why not just use Gtk/C/C++ to start with?
And.net is a fairly well designed framework/libraries for getting stuff done.
Qt is by far better designed. WxWidgets and Gtk are probably better designed too.
I've said this before Microsoft has never ever acted in a predatory manner towards people using their tools. What I mean by that is they want some nominal amount of money, but they don't want to drink your milkshake. Example game companies have used VC++ and other tools to develop games that have sold hundreds of thousands of copies running on windows and does Microsoft ever demand a cut? No.
MS doesn't take a cut because you're giving it to them by using their Platform - Windows. VC++ is a write off in that manner. They invest highly in it to get Developers to write for their platform and products and write it off as part of the marketing/promotion/etc of the various products and company as a whole. If they didn't have Visual Studios then there would be a lot fewer developers developing specifically for Windows, and thus a lot less incentive for people to use Windows.
It's all nice to bitch about Microsoft but a lot of their competitors are far worse, Apple, Google, Oracle. Ever try and develop a console game? Had your app not approved by Apple, of pulled by Google. Found yourself paying license fees through the nose for Enterprise software with no good options to escape, ALA Oracle. Or try and deal with network products ala Cisco?
Yeah.
Microsoft does the same thing. For instance, one company I know of bought a product. They thought they had all the licensing taken care of, only to later discover that they needed another $500m in Terminal Services licenses. Sure, MS might not have taken a cut from the product developers, but they sure did get a big cut of the sales (possibly more than what the product developers originally got).
Or for instance if you develop using SQL Server Express (or whatever it is called now) and they outgrow what that will do; the choice? You build support for another database (e.g MySQL, MariaDB, PostgresSQL, Oracle, DB2, etc) or you help them upgrade SQLServer Express to SQL Server - which of course carries a lot of licensing and hardware requirements with it. Again, a big cut for Microsoft and one that the customer might not have anticipated.
That depends on where you live. The elected DA is only the one at the top of the DA's office. There are many attorney's under them that also receive the monitor "DA" whom are not elected; they do have to balance out cases against how the elected DA sets priorities, but they are more or less just regular attorney's working as prosecuters.
Again, it's all a matter of where you live. Not all areas even allow the top DA to be elected; while other areas have more of the chain in the election routine.
I would guess there's relatively little crime within a block of the police station. Police should create a mobile platform and move the police stations to where the crime happens every few weeks or months.
Well, you'd be wrong.
My mom once tested out how fast the car could go (when she was a teen) nearby a police station because she figured they wouldn't be looking there. Things have changed a little since, but most likely it's still the case that they tend to turn a blind eye around the station because of the (incorrect) bias that "no would be dumb enough to commit crimes near the station".
The Fourth Amendment doesn't require a warrant. It forbids unreasonable searches and seizures, and lays down some conditions for a valid warrant. There are warrantless searches that are considered reasonable by the court system (such as a check for weapons when arresting somebody).
You example is allowed for the safety of the officer and others (thus you are not allowed to refuse), and is already after probable cause having been established (on account of the grounds for arrest being present); however, in most cases you can refuse unless they have a warrant - even if the court would consider it a valid case of a valid warrantless search.
Because Western Europe is a hotbed of tyranny? I'd say that putting security into people's lives probably increases their ability to pay attention to politics.
It may increase their ability, but the reality is that people are less likely too as it placates them unless someone tries to mess with one of the things that is placating them.
This is why Social Security and Medicare/Medicaide are such hot bed political topics and essentially considered a no-no to touch politically, despite the fact that they need drastic overhauls to be sustainable (assuming that is even possible; for Social Security it isn't as designed).
George Washington the aristocratic slaveholder who crushed the Whiskey Rebellion, screwing over farmers (including many Revolutionary War vets) to pay off bondholders?
George Washington the aristocratic slaveholder who crushed the Whiskey Rebellion
You have to be joking.
I'd say your drop of the rest of the sentence there was its own problem. The parent (quoted by me as well) was probably be facitious in their question.
I would say no. They aren't forcing anyone to incriminate themselves. It is forcing a 3rd party (the phone manufacturer) to help extract the information. Unless the phone manufacturer was the suspect of the crime, then its not a 5th amendment issue.
Well, no it wouldn't be a 5th Amendment Issue, it'd be a 4th Amendment issue since the 4th Amendment requires a Search Warrant for the government, and the Search Warrant must have limits. A Search Warrant, btw, is only issued via the Judicial Branch not the Executive Branch.
So they could still stand up and say "no; provide us a Warrant first".
And that too would also be within the law as the law is superceded by the Constitution and any amendments therein; thus even though it may have been passed prior the Amendment, the Amendment still takes precedent and therefore limits the law and the government thereby still requiring a Warrant and changing to "the government must do what it can (within the law) to obtain the information". If they can't get a warrant than they have still satisfied the law in question.
or through voting for free stuff rather than principles.
People will vote on principles once they don't need the free stuff. You can't eat principles. And they'll have more time to consider their principles if they aren't spending all their time looking for food too.
So give them education + welfare and suddenly they'll develop principles.
Unfortunately that's precisely the free stuff you don't want them to have.
No, you got that wrong. You give them Welfare, Social Security, and Health Care so that you can do whatever you want to do since you can then start finger pointing at the other guy to change the conversation by saying "but he wants to take away X" instead of talking about the actual issue at hand.
Educated people call that ancient text The Bible, specifically Genesis. JFTR, it can be inferred in Gen 1:20-23 that chickens were spoken into existence with the rest of their fowl kind on Day 5.
And prior to land animals and anything in the seas.
Valve has done a huge job in getting rid of those sorts of hacks. But this is and has always been a big arms race.
VAC did defeat most of this crud for quite a while, but there will always be people willing to create new hacks as long as there is money or 'lulz' involved.
Best we can really do is be vigilant and weed out those who ruin the game for the rest. Be it with hacks or just general asshatesque behavior.
Most of those hacks are not really hacks - just things that were there for testing that users discovered; some things will always be possible if you put enough effort into it.
For instance, an easy way to negate the hack my friend did is to force the download of the content in upon the connection to the network; this however has two hacks: (i) doing something that prevents the download and thus forces it back into using whatever is cached on disk which can be manipulated, and (ii) adding some kind of MITM that lets you inject the content you like - this however may be at the cost of some latency which most players wouldn't like.
As you said, it's a bit of an "arms race", but the race is more people discovering what developers did than cracking into the software.
Most researchers ( including AI researchers ) dont do engineering very well, and hence dont understand the basic principles that in engineering everything is a tradeoff. Whether you are trading back and forth around physical resources ( flops, bandwidth , latency, memory ) or more abstract constructs like sockets etc everything is still a tradeoff.
There is a theory that there is significant "resource overhang" ( http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki... ) in our computers today, meaning that we are not really utilizing the physical resources the best, as more efficient algorithms will simply blaze faster on existing hardware. That is another case of "duh, captain obvious" where they do not understand most basic algorithmic optimizations are ALSO tradeoffs.
Given that many programmers take the "path of least resistence" and don't optimize programs much besides what the compiler does, I would certainly agree that we are not utilizing computers to their full potential. However, an AI would not be able to do so either without being trained how to organize itself better for the hardware it is using. It won't just magically come up with a more efficient algorithm to do what it is doing without being taught something about how to optimize and how the hardware it is using works.
In short, all "hard takeoff" AI scenarios are delusional, and most "moderate takeoff" AI scenarios are misguided. "Soft takeoff" however is happening every day, for example case where genetic algorithms for example are used to work out better solutions to isolated problems than human designer could.
True; though the examples for today - such as the genetic one you quote - are considered "specialist AIs" and in some respects are not much of an AI at all, much like IBM's Deep Blue or Watson computers are not really AI, just very fast depth search algorithms that can mimick an AI to some degree in a very specialized field.
I've been invited to several churches by friends while living in Texas, Tennessee, and California. Many of the times I've gone, they're not preaching the gospel. They're talking about how to bypass and abuse the system. And then you realize that about 65% of that congregation is welfare-dependent, and that they're more than willing to drop tens of dollars out of that gov't cheese cheque towards that person just because 'Jesus told him how to make my ends meet.'
Well, technically they're not being good stewards (per Christianity) in doing so, but legally they have probably jeopardized their "church" non-profit status as a result.
No, first we end religious welfare, then we end corporate welfare. A good chunk of the corporate welfare part is almost guaranteed to stem from the religious welfare part.
Funny thing is - the conservative right-wingers will typically take money if you make it available, but they don't typically want it made available as they'd rather not pay the higher taxes that cover it to start with. However, it's the liberal left-wingers that want the higher taxes and all the "free" money programs that everyone (especially the liberals) abuses. The right-wingers would prefer the "market" handle things instead; most will agree that some level of oversight is necessary when it comes to safety, etc but that it should still remain minimal; unlike the left-winger "you didn't build that" sentimentality.
It's half the reason I stopped playing it 15 years ago.
Yep. One friend of mine had a hack that added large rings around each player that you could see nearly all the way across the board, which penetrated walls, etc b/c they were not suppose to be there - simple hack by just replacing the character profile information to include it.
Of course he claimed it was as much a hinderance as an advantage b/c even though the rings were blue/red (to tell you which team) he had a hard time telling which team so would often kill his own team mates too.
Needless to say, I'm surprised Valve hasn't done more to get rid of those kinds of "hacks".
Assume for a second, that you have a pond. And a new type of algae has been introduced into the pond. Algae grows quickly, so let's assume a doubling time of a day. 24 hours. The concern is that this new algae is gross and smells bad and nobody wants to have a pond full of this disgusting algae. Unfortunately, treating the algae is expensive and nobody wants to treat the entire pond.
The question is: One week before the pond is entirely covered in algae, would enough have appeared that you would even notice? At a "gut instinct" level, we'd guess that perhaps a quarter or a third or at least a tenth of the pond would be covered in algae, but that gut level instinct would be completely wrong. Just 1.56% of the pond would be covered - right about the point where it becomes noticeable at all.
The point is this: information processing capabilities, globally, aren't just growing exponentially: the rate of growth is itself also growing exponentially. Just about exactly at the time where we notice actual, verifiable intelligence of any kind is just about exactly the time where we have to assume it's ubiquity.
Well, yes, but no. There's a major difference. The algae can self-replicate in every form required to spread. A computer AI cannot - it's limited to the hardware it was built on, and it would not be able to build new hardware to add to itself. Further, heterogenous processor environments (networks, switches, etc) would also limit it as it would have to be able to reach out across them and assimilate them into itself.
So no; it will be very unlikely that by the time an true AI of any sort at the lowest level of intelligence is created that it would be necessary to assume ubiquity or that a Skynet-like singularity moment will happen. To start, the AI would have to be far smarter than that to be able to move itself to another system. It won't just "magically" happen to be able to run itself on all types of computer infrastructure at the same time.
Previous discussions talk about the number of cross connects and how far away we are from the mark without commenting that the Internet itself allows for an infinite number of cross connects - my laptop can connect directly to billions of resources immediately with an average 10-25ms delay. Now, it's very likely that what is meant by "cross connects" in the context of AI is substantially different than the "cross connect" capability that global networking enables, but it's equally true that people generally fail at understanding exponential growth. It's why 401ks are so universally underutilized, why credit cards are such big business, and why the concept of the "singularity" seems like such hocus pocus at the gut level.
So there's another flaw in your logic. Yes, your laptop may seem to be able to connect to an "infinite" number of inter-connects, but reality is that it can't. For instance, each network connection requires a small chunk of memory to manage it, plus some more for the routing rules for the networking so it can get off the computer and out onto the larger network which then has to have the correct routing rules for it to be able to get to the Internet, assuming that the network is even connected in a way that it could reach the Internet (not every network is Internet connected). As a result Operating Systems impose a limit on the number of network connections; usually done through limit Open File Descriptors. For instance, Linux by default only allows about 4-5 thousand open file descriptors at a time for the entire system, not per application, due to the OS-level memory consumptions required to manage each - this includes all network connections.
Now, you'd say that the AI would "magically" overcome this by developing a new way to track it all, or just use a few at a time. However, that again limits it as it generally takes a lot more than 10-25 ms to establish network connections. Using T
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DOMA was passing a law to invalidate the Constitution's Full Faith and Credit clause. The pro-constitution small government Republicans passed more laws to cause more bureaucracy to invalidate the Constitution, doing the opposite of what they say they are. Yet again.
DOMA did not invalidate anything. It just said for the purposes of the Federal Government certain things would not be recognized.
If you read the history of marriage with respect to the Full Faith and Credit Clause, it has not been used for force States to recognize marriages from other States that the State does not wish to recognize - that does not invalidate the marriage license isssued in the other State in any way whatsoever which is what the Full Faith and Credit Clause requires. So it is completely in applicable here, especially as this is not an inter-State issue but an issue between State and Federal government.
In the case of DOMA the Federal Government was saying "yes, we recognize your marriage license and its validity with respect to the States; but with respect to the Federal Government it doesn't apply".
The authoritarian Nazis are pushing for "states rights" unless the states decide something they don't like, in which case they introduce DOMA. They claim to be for states rights, until they aren't.
DOMA did not affect States and had nothing to do with States rights. It only had to do with the Federal Government, so that's not really a conflict like you make it out to be.
Federal Government can make decisions regarding itself and its own policies, as DOMA was, without affect the States whateversoever. The issue comes when the Federal Government tries to push its policies and agenda onto the States - e.g Welfare, DOE, Social Security, Health Care, etc - through means not really granted to it via the U.S Constitution - usually through over reach of the Commerce Clause which only regulates inter-state commerce.
First, let's remember that lawmaking politicians of influence of either party are typically what, 60+ years old? 70+? These guys still have their staff print their emails for them and are surprised when a someone says 'let's watch a movie' and it doesn't involve (at best) a VCR. Not super-quick at adapting to change.
While that may be true of some, it's certainly not true of them all - at any age. Many are very much use to using e-mail and computers.
Seriously, go meet your politicians. You'll quickly learn your assumptions above are wrong - very wrong.
You cannot simply point at today's lackey Republicans as the source for these laws, nor claim them to be "anti-Tesla" anymore than 50-year-old telecom laws are "anti-Google".
Very true. It has nothing to do with who is in office today - Republican or Democrat. You can only blame them for not trying to change it to be more friendly.
There's a lot of laws like these that really should be revisited to see if they are still relevant today, and if not update or remote them from the books accordingly.
There's the conservative, state's rights, tea party wing that is in the minority.
Is that the "states rights" wing pushing to ban gay marriage on the national level to remove the rights for states?
No. It's the "states rights" wing that is pushing for that to be left to the states
Relevant C 2B || D4 Either learn what you're doing Or stick to the Wii Burma Shave
Fixed that for you.
There are a number of tools that give non-root users root access. It might be "just" sudo, or it might be some GUI tool to allow graphical administration. All it takes is a program that can hijack one of those, or just passively wait until the user issued a sudo command (so their password and access is cached), then it could jump in, grab root, stuff a module in the kernel, and all bets are off from there.
True, but those tools also require the user to have permissions to use them. For instance, sudo requires the user to be part of a group - root, sudo, wheel - that group is configurable so you can call it whatever you want. Even then it usually requires the user's password (which is also required to change the password, so you can't just change the password to be able to use sudo in your script).
Long term, what Linux really should have is the ability to have either signed executables or a manifest list that can whitelist or blacklist. This could be something like Solaris's elfsign or AIX's trustchk, where an admin can make a self-signed key and sign all executables. With this in place, on a production system, if an executable, script, or library isn't signed, it doesn't run. Virtually every other OS has this functionality in place. This doesn't have to rely on an "official" signing key either, and could just be a manifest list generated after install, similar to tripwire's database, and if some executable's signature is different, it doesn't get to run until an admin updates the signature DB.
Check out AppArmor, SELinux, etc - they have the ability to do very fine grain management of the system that really controls every little thing a user or program could do.
So yes, the ability is there. However, it's so easy to screw it up that most don't use it unless they really need it. And honestly most don't need it; the standard permission set (which still runs through SELInux, btw, just being configured with a default that matches the historical permissions) is sufficient enough to deter most things.
And the correct market response to that would have been to call their bluff, and then enjoy the movies from those that survived. The idea that all the studios would have stopped releasing their content anywhere but in theatres is utterly implausible and was never a serious threat.
The idea is that studios would have ignored DVD and stuck to VHS and its generation loss, Rovi Macrovision analog copy protection, and NTSC/PAL/SECAM/MESECAM region lock until they could launch their own competing format with better DRM. Witness Video CD and SVCD never taking off in North America, and witness the industrywide switch from HD DVD to Blu-ray Disc when the latter offered region locking and stronger DRM (BD+, ROM Mark, and lack of rich menus on non-AACS discs).
Yes, HD-DVD did not have region lock where BD-DVD did not. However, that had nothing to do with why BD-DVD won out. IIRC, BD-DVD had a higher amount of data, and simply had a wider deployment since Sony put a BD-DVD player in every Playstation 3, so game makers and more were already pushing BD-DVD for that reason alone. There was no similar push for HD-DVD except the ill-fated Add-on for the XBox that Microsoft did. If Microsoft had made it built-in component, then there probably would have been a bigger battle between the two since the XBox sold nearly as well as the PS3 at the time.
I thought [Blu-ray] got lost in the negative gap between DVD and getting stuff over the internet.
On the contrary. I still use Blu-ray because after I've bought a disc it is mine, permanently and unambiguously, and with the full force of my country's consumer protection laws behind me if anyone tries to interfere with my use of it.
That's why I buy DVD. I don't buy BD-DVDs (aka Blu-Ray DVDs). The movie industry is still having a very hard time with people buying BD-DVDs.
What's in it for you is C# is a very good language.
I wouldn't agree. There's a lot of things in the C# and C++/CLI (aka Managed C++) world that are just ass-backwards. If I wanted the advantage of what the .NET CLR gives me - supposed platform independences - then I'd write Java.
As it is, I don't write Java b/c Java is a major PITA with no advantages over C++ or Python.
.NET CLR/C#/etc is that it is heavily optimized for the Windows environments so its gets a boost that other frameworks (e.g Java) cannot take advantage of. But that, again, goes against the whole platform independence.
Only advantage of
Regarding Mono, it's not worth the bytes that make up the source. Apart from the potential legal issues (patents MS holds wrt to Mono were only licensed to Novell/SuSE users for a 5 year period, which has since expired), the APIs are highly tied to Windows. Yes, Mono has made some Gtk equivalents, but then why use it? Why not just use Gtk/C/C++ to start with?
And .net is a fairly well designed framework/libraries for getting stuff done.
Qt is by far better designed. WxWidgets and Gtk are probably better designed too.
I've said this before Microsoft has never ever acted in a predatory manner towards people using their tools. What I mean by that is they want some nominal amount of money, but they don't want to drink your milkshake. Example game companies have used VC++ and other tools to develop games that have sold hundreds of thousands of copies running on windows and does Microsoft ever demand a cut? No.
MS doesn't take a cut because you're giving it to them by using their Platform - Windows. VC++ is a write off in that manner. They invest highly in it to get Developers to write for their platform and products and write it off as part of the marketing/promotion/etc of the various products and company as a whole. If they didn't have Visual Studios then there would be a lot fewer developers developing specifically for Windows, and thus a lot less incentive for people to use Windows.
It's all nice to bitch about Microsoft but a lot of their competitors are far worse, Apple, Google, Oracle. Ever try and develop a console game? Had your app not approved by Apple, of pulled by Google. Found yourself paying license fees through the nose for Enterprise software with no good options to escape, ALA Oracle. Or try and deal with network products ala Cisco?
Yeah.
Microsoft does the same thing. For instance, one company I know of bought a product. They thought they had all the licensing taken care of, only to later discover that they needed another $500m in Terminal Services licenses. Sure, MS might not have taken a cut from the product developers, but they sure did get a big cut of the sales (possibly more than what the product developers originally got).
Or for instance if you develop using SQL Server Express (or whatever it is called now) and they outgrow what that will do; the choice? You build support for another database (e.g MySQL, MariaDB, PostgresSQL, Oracle, DB2, etc) or you help them upgrade SQLServer Express to SQL Server - which of course carries a lot of licensing and hardware requirements with it. Again, a big cut for Microsoft and one that the customer might not have anticipated.
The DA's job is to get re-elected.
That depends on where you live. The elected DA is only the one at the top of the DA's office. There are many attorney's under them that also receive the monitor "DA" whom are not elected; they do have to balance out cases against how the elected DA sets priorities, but they are more or less just regular attorney's working as prosecuters.
Again, it's all a matter of where you live. Not all areas even allow the top DA to be elected; while other areas have more of the chain in the election routine.
I would guess there's relatively little crime within a block of the police station. Police should create a mobile platform and move the police stations to where the crime happens every few weeks or months.
Well, you'd be wrong.
My mom once tested out how fast the car could go (when she was a teen) nearby a police station because she figured they wouldn't be looking there. Things have changed a little since, but most likely it's still the case that they tend to turn a blind eye around the station because of the (incorrect) bias that "no would be dumb enough to commit crimes near the station".
Why are you biased against the impartiality of the police force?
Because they have guns...
And the beauty of the Second Amendment of the U.S Constitution is that you do too.
The Fourth Amendment doesn't require a warrant. It forbids unreasonable searches and seizures, and lays down some conditions for a valid warrant. There are warrantless searches that are considered reasonable by the court system (such as a check for weapons when arresting somebody).
You example is allowed for the safety of the officer and others (thus you are not allowed to refuse), and is already after probable cause having been established (on account of the grounds for arrest being present); however, in most cases you can refuse unless they have a warrant - even if the court would consider it a valid case of a valid warrantless search.
Because Western Europe is a hotbed of tyranny? I'd say that putting security into people's lives probably increases their ability to pay attention to politics.
It may increase their ability, but the reality is that people are less likely too as it placates them unless someone tries to mess with one of the things that is placating them.
This is why Social Security and Medicare/Medicaide are such hot bed political topics and essentially considered a no-no to touch politically, despite the fact that they need drastic overhauls to be sustainable (assuming that is even possible; for Social Security it isn't as designed).
George Washington the aristocratic slaveholder who crushed the Whiskey Rebellion, screwing over farmers (including many Revolutionary War vets) to pay off bondholders?
George Washington the aristocratic slaveholder who crushed the Whiskey Rebellion
You have to be joking.
I'd say your drop of the rest of the sentence there was its own problem. The parent (quoted by me as well) was probably be facitious in their question.
I would say no. They aren't forcing anyone to incriminate themselves. It is forcing a 3rd party (the phone manufacturer) to help extract the information. Unless the phone manufacturer was the suspect of the crime, then its not a 5th amendment issue.
Well, no it wouldn't be a 5th Amendment Issue, it'd be a 4th Amendment issue since the 4th Amendment requires a Search Warrant for the government, and the Search Warrant must have limits. A Search Warrant, btw, is only issued via the Judicial Branch not the Executive Branch.
So they could still stand up and say "no; provide us a Warrant first".
And that too would also be within the law as the law is superceded by the Constitution and any amendments therein; thus even though it may have been passed prior the Amendment, the Amendment still takes precedent and therefore limits the law and the government thereby still requiring a Warrant and changing to "the government must do what it can (within the law) to obtain the information". If they can't get a warrant than they have still satisfied the law in question.
or through voting for free stuff rather than principles.
People will vote on principles once they don't need the free stuff. You can't eat principles. And they'll have more time to consider their principles if they aren't spending all their time looking for food too.
So give them education + welfare and suddenly they'll develop principles.
Unfortunately that's precisely the free stuff you don't want them to have.
No, you got that wrong. You give them Welfare, Social Security, and Health Care so that you can do whatever you want to do since you can then start finger pointing at the other guy to change the conversation by saying "but he wants to take away X" instead of talking about the actual issue at hand.
Educated people call that ancient text The Bible, specifically Genesis. JFTR, it can be inferred in Gen 1:20-23 that chickens were spoken into existence with the rest of their fowl kind on Day 5.
And prior to land animals and anything in the seas.
Valve has done a huge job in getting rid of those sorts of hacks. But this is and has always been a big arms race.
VAC did defeat most of this crud for quite a while, but there will always be people willing to create new hacks as long as there is money or 'lulz' involved.
Best we can really do is be vigilant and weed out those who ruin the game for the rest. Be it with hacks or just general asshatesque behavior.
Most of those hacks are not really hacks - just things that were there for testing that users discovered; some things will always be possible if you put enough effort into it.
For instance, an easy way to negate the hack my friend did is to force the download of the content in upon the connection to the network; this however has two hacks: (i) doing something that prevents the download and thus forces it back into using whatever is cached on disk which can be manipulated, and (ii) adding some kind of MITM that lets you inject the content you like - this however may be at the cost of some latency which most players wouldn't like.
As you said, it's a bit of an "arms race", but the race is more people discovering what developers did than cracking into the software.
Most researchers ( including AI researchers ) dont do engineering very well, and hence dont understand the basic principles that in engineering everything is a tradeoff. Whether you are trading back and forth around physical resources ( flops, bandwidth , latency, memory ) or more abstract constructs like sockets etc everything is still a tradeoff.
There is a theory that there is significant "resource overhang" ( http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki... ) in our computers today, meaning that we are not really utilizing the physical resources the best, as more efficient algorithms will simply blaze faster on existing hardware. That is another case of "duh, captain obvious" where they do not understand most basic algorithmic optimizations are ALSO tradeoffs.
Given that many programmers take the "path of least resistence" and don't optimize programs much besides what the compiler does, I would certainly agree that we are not utilizing computers to their full potential. However, an AI would not be able to do so either without being trained how to organize itself better for the hardware it is using. It won't just magically come up with a more efficient algorithm to do what it is doing without being taught something about how to optimize and how the hardware it is using works.
In short, all "hard takeoff" AI scenarios are delusional, and most "moderate takeoff" AI scenarios are misguided. "Soft takeoff" however is happening every day, for example case where genetic algorithms for example are used to work out better solutions to isolated problems than human designer could.
True; though the examples for today - such as the genetic one you quote - are considered "specialist AIs" and in some respects are not much of an AI at all, much like IBM's Deep Blue or Watson computers are not really AI, just very fast depth search algorithms that can mimick an AI to some degree in a very specialized field.
I've been invited to several churches by friends while living in Texas, Tennessee, and California. Many of the times I've gone, they're not preaching the gospel. They're talking about how to bypass and abuse the system. And then you realize that about 65% of that congregation is welfare-dependent, and that they're more than willing to drop tens of dollars out of that gov't cheese cheque towards that person just because 'Jesus told him how to make my ends meet.'
Well, technically they're not being good stewards (per Christianity) in doing so, but legally they have probably jeopardized their "church" non-profit status as a result.
No, first we end religious welfare, then we end corporate welfare. A good chunk of the corporate welfare part is almost guaranteed to stem from the religious welfare part.
Funny thing is - the conservative right-wingers will typically take money if you make it available, but they don't typically want it made available as they'd rather not pay the higher taxes that cover it to start with. However, it's the liberal left-wingers that want the higher taxes and all the "free" money programs that everyone (especially the liberals) abuses. The right-wingers would prefer the "market" handle things instead; most will agree that some level of oversight is necessary when it comes to safety, etc but that it should still remain minimal; unlike the left-winger "you didn't build that" sentimentality.
It's half the reason I stopped playing it 15 years ago.
Yep. One friend of mine had a hack that added large rings around each player that you could see nearly all the way across the board, which penetrated walls, etc b/c they were not suppose to be there - simple hack by just replacing the character profile information to include it.
Of course he claimed it was as much a hinderance as an advantage b/c even though the rings were blue/red (to tell you which team) he had a hard time telling which team so would often kill his own team mates too.
Needless to say, I'm surprised Valve hasn't done more to get rid of those kinds of "hacks".
Assume for a second, that you have a pond. And a new type of algae has been introduced into the pond. Algae grows quickly, so let's assume a doubling time of a day. 24 hours. The concern is that this new algae is gross and smells bad and nobody wants to have a pond full of this disgusting algae. Unfortunately, treating the algae is expensive and nobody wants to treat the entire pond.
The question is: One week before the pond is entirely covered in algae, would enough have appeared that you would even notice? At a "gut instinct" level, we'd guess that perhaps a quarter or a third or at least a tenth of the pond would be covered in algae, but that gut level instinct would be completely wrong. Just 1.56% of the pond would be covered - right about the point where it becomes noticeable at all.
The point is this: information processing capabilities, globally, aren't just growing exponentially: the rate of growth is itself also growing exponentially. Just about exactly at the time where we notice actual, verifiable intelligence of any kind is just about exactly the time where we have to assume it's ubiquity.
Well, yes, but no. There's a major difference. The algae can self-replicate in every form required to spread. A computer AI cannot - it's limited to the hardware it was built on, and it would not be able to build new hardware to add to itself. Further, heterogenous processor environments (networks, switches, etc) would also limit it as it would have to be able to reach out across them and assimilate them into itself.
So no; it will be very unlikely that by the time an true AI of any sort at the lowest level of intelligence is created that it would be necessary to assume ubiquity or that a Skynet-like singularity moment will happen. To start, the AI would have to be far smarter than that to be able to move itself to another system. It won't just "magically" happen to be able to run itself on all types of computer infrastructure at the same time.
Previous discussions talk about the number of cross connects and how far away we are from the mark without commenting that the Internet itself allows for an infinite number of cross connects - my laptop can connect directly to billions of resources immediately with an average 10-25ms delay. Now, it's very likely that what is meant by "cross connects" in the context of AI is substantially different than the "cross connect" capability that global networking enables, but it's equally true that people generally fail at understanding exponential growth. It's why 401ks are so universally underutilized, why credit cards are such big business, and why the concept of the "singularity" seems like such hocus pocus at the gut level.
So there's another flaw in your logic. Yes, your laptop may seem to be able to connect to an "infinite" number of inter-connects, but reality is that it can't. For instance, each network connection requires a small chunk of memory to manage it, plus some more for the routing rules for the networking so it can get off the computer and out onto the larger network which then has to have the correct routing rules for it to be able to get to the Internet, assuming that the network is even connected in a way that it could reach the Internet (not every network is Internet connected). As a result Operating Systems impose a limit on the number of network connections; usually done through limit Open File Descriptors. For instance, Linux by default only allows about 4-5 thousand open file descriptors at a time for the entire system, not per application, due to the OS-level memory consumptions required to manage each - this includes all network connections.
Now, you'd say that the AI would "magically" overcome this by developing a new way to track it all, or just use a few at a time. However, that again limits it as it generally takes a lot more than 10-25 ms to establish network connections. Using T
...they adopted Linux or Mach kernels and just wanted a way to differentiate them...
sadly, no that will not be the case.