Time to identify correct drivers and settings to use with each single model produced by Dell: x.
Resources provided by Microsoft to help Dell with configuring Windows on Dell machines: y.
Resources provided by Red Hat to help Dell with configuring Linux on Dell machines: z.
Expected sales of Dell machines with Windows: a
Expected sales of Dell machines with Linux: b.
(x-y)/a (x-z)/b. The cost of supporting the hardware with the environments is spread out over the number of predicted orders. That's the essence of an economy of scale.
I do know something about this. Many SGI's are used for high-end video processing, editing, and compositing. The people who use these systems (some of which sell for over a million dollars per system, and then allow them to do work that they bill out for several hundred dollars per hour or more.) know the technology of video like the back of their hands - realms of knowledge that would make the knowledge your typical Perl-monkey know pale in comparison. And they know virtually nothing about the systems underneath - it's essentially a black box to them. They don't know/dev/ from/bin/, they don't know a single shell script, they never have installed a piece of software, a browser, or a patch. They don't know much on graphics programming, any more than a writer knows the source code to a word processor. For a million dollars per seat, they get tech support that protects them from having to worry about it.
Look, it's one thing to ask whether tax policy is good or bad in any given situation. It's another thing to call it 'stealing.'
We earn our money in a specific context - the money is printed by a government, in a society that has by decree and habit accepted money as "legal tender for all debts private and public," kept in banks producted by the FDIC, in the context of a society that has created a sophisticated and extensive infrastructure in which we operate - an infrastructure that enables us to transport goods and travel with relative safety (freeways, air traffic control), that limits epidemics with public health works, that educates us to a literacy rate in the 90%s (compare that with previous centuries), and in this context we work and get income, some of which is then given back in the form of taxes. The context itself provides for the possibility of owning anything at all: it is the legal and social ground rules of commerce and property that make the very idea of 'stealing' possible. Virtually no one earns money without being aware of the fact that they are going to be taxed on it - to call it stealing is naive and absurd.
Newbies shouldn't run a DNS server, true. But I think that the tools simply hide/etc/resolv.conf from the newbie, or allow the newbie to mount an NFS volume.
There's a big, big space between administer-server-and-high-end-workstation and just-play-with-your-Etch-A-Sketch. Business users on laptops, for example, will want to be able to edit their TCP/IP settings if they have to without reading the freakin' Red Book. Scientists and engineers who could figure it out if they had an extra day a week to screw around with it probably would simply choose not to. They also will not really want to ever learn how to set up ipchains - and they shouldn't have to worry about it.
The phenomenon you describe above betrays 2 different philosophies, with deeply distinct consequences.
In the US, a new technology is likely to be immediately introduced into the market, in order to return a profit on the investment as soon as possible and bring a benefit to the current consumers. The fact that future generations could be saddled with a suboptimal legacy that they have to endure (since other technologies will be built upon them, like we have our apparata using 110 v. power) is not a consideration.
The slower rate of introduction in Europe means that it may take longer for the return on investment to come in, and that they current generation of consumers may have to wait longer before they see the benefits of the new technology. However, their children will then benefit from a more mature and considered technology.
The question is whether the lead that the US approach creates is a net advantage or a net disadvantage. We really don't have enough history to come to any conclusions about it yet.
So why does it break down? I don't think it's the system that is broken so much as the consumer these days. This, I feel, is one of the biggest problems in America today. People don't accept their responsibility as consumers. I think that a lot of people are just too taken in by marketing to sit down and rationally consider their choices.
The completely informed, completely rational consumer with no external pressures of time or demands on attention is one of the great myths of the 'perfectly operating market.' The truth is that people can't afford the time or energy to be completely informed on all the purchases they make, especially with the current rate of consumption. We allocate our attention and our intake of information as well as we reasonably can, but we have a distinctly finite bandwidth for that process.
Marketing and advertising also have an effect. First of all, they exploit the fact that humans operate heuristically, not algorithmicly, for decisions (for the reasons of limited bandwidth I mentioned above, and also because of the reality of how human minds are constructed.) After all, only a tiny percentage of our mind's processes are conscious and thus amenable to pure rational analysis - the process of rational analysis relies on the pre-rational, pre-conscious acts of perception by which we mentally create the 'facts' that we are analyzing.
Obviously, if you couldn't sell cars and computers with images of sex and power, there wouldn't be a several hundred-million dollar advertising industry that thrives by doing so.
Additionally, even for the theoretically rational consumer, there are always time limit - ultimately, our mortality, and realistically, the constraints on how much time we can go without deciding.
What is ironic - and fucked - is this: that's almost entirely how I do use Napster, to put songs I already on onto my laptop's hard drive, to hear songs I already own while I'm travelling. And I'm almost always travelling.
Oh, did I mention I usually travel without a CD drive? Or that I use my CD at home for other things while I listen to music? Or that it's easier by far to do a batch download than to sit around recording mp3's?
And, from a legal perspective, I expect my fair and legitimate use of Napster to vindicate it against even an order of magnitude of abuse by others.
Besides, the most interesting aspect of Napster's case remains the claim that not-for-profit individual music-sharing is legal. It's a stance I would agree with, completely consistent with the common-sense behavior of people on a day-to-day level.
By the way, I like the idea of Gnutella, but not the reality of it - I just never have found the relatively obscure musics I listen to there.
Individualism and the community.
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Selfish Society
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Ayn Rand was, I would assume, estranged from her family. I know she had no children. If you view the family, including your children, as a community, then most people - who would happily sacrifice themselves for the children - would see the poverty of the objectivist line, from a darwinist as well as a moral-intuitionist perspective.
Do doctors sit around saying "Kevorkian and Mengele weren't doctors, they were murderers?"
No, the were doctors who killed. They were still doctors (aside - I am not anti-Kevorkian.)
The trouble with the hacker/cracker distinction as made by hackers is that it is too self-serving, and relies on a simplistic good-vs-bad dichotamy.
For most people, including many technical people, a hacker is anyone with a high level of technical understanding, whether or not they are a programmer. People who break into computer systems, *if they understand what they are doing* (and more do than the vanities of some would like to admit) are hackers-who-crack. What makes the press identify them as hackers is that they know more about systems and security than the media or the public at large.
Arguably, there are also many programmers who aren't hackers - programmers who rely on pre-canned libraries and hand-holding IDE's to develop what they want, without the intellectual curiousity to look under the hood or cultivate an understanding of the principles beneath the program.
I will endorse a distinction between possibly-miscreant-but-knowledgeable/curious hacker-who-cracks and miscreant-and-nasty non-hacker script-kiddy who uses canned exploits to annoy people and impress the ignorant, but I can't endorse a naive effort to simply say 'hacker good, cracker bad.'
The problem with the 'many targets' strategy is that the value of being using Napster or Gnutella or any of the alternatives is the diverse number of people who are also using it. If only 10 highly-technical people (who, let's be fair, probably are less likely to have the breadth of taste and musical knowledge that less-technical-but-more-artistic types would have) have a great but obscure technology, it has almost no use to me, if I want to use it to discover and explore new and unusual musics. And I have found some *very* interesting new music - experimental noise bands from Japan that I hadn't heard about, obscure European prog-rock bands, forgotten punk masterpieces from the 70's, new Brazilian music - on Napster, by viewing the collections of people who had music that I liked. And I assure you - I have bought hard copies of music of every artist I discovered on Napster, when I could find them.
Remember, the value of one telephone is virtually nothing; the value of two is substantially higher. The tech-clueless Napster users who work at college radio stations are much more likely to have interesting music than the Rush-and-Phish-bound geeks who are ken to a dozen alternative technologies. Any alternative needs to be able to bring in the former in order to really recreate the value of Napster elsewhere.
Wittgenstein could be seen as a bridge between the logical positivists and European phenomenology, and actually, he didn't say that. That was Augustus Comte, the father of logical positivism. And while I think logical positivism has its limits, I don't think it's fair to characterize it as being that naive about signification.
To be fair to the original researchers, very few of them would have claimed that a system which successfully manipulated symbols in and generated accurate inferences with them were necessarily conscious. It's not a given that intelligent behavior requires consciousness.
After all, the problem presented by interpreting sensory data as 'pornographic' or not is distinct from creating meaningful strings once given a binding with 'pornography.' I do, however, personally agree that you can't have semantics without ontology.
That's only 10% of the problem. Another 30% or so is that even for any given human "pornography" is not well-defined. "I know it when I see it" they say, while reading Playboy and rejecting Hustler.
Well, that is the political problem with having an AI that could successfully select photos based on criteria that a human being might use to change porn. But, as far as I know, the "I know it when I see it" rule of thumb for obscenity is a valid one legally. An AI that came up with a human-like ability to distinguish porn from not-porn would, obviously, be modelling just one person's ability to identify porn - it would be a faster version of a single censor sitting at your ISP; if you take issue with that (as I would), that's essentially a political problem - exactly identical with the one of a human censor. But the fact that there is neither an ontology nor a useful semantics for pornography means we aren't even at that level of discourse yet - instead of a relatively average censor, we have a wordless, blind idiot censor.
Cartoon history of AI: at one time, it was believed that rules-based AI, manipulating symbols (e.g., words) would be able to resemble thought and make smart decisions like "this is porn, that is a face." In a nutshell, the presumptions were that we could attach a series of rules and claims about a word, and it would be essentially the same as the rules and claims we derive from our experience of the thing that the word describes.
In other words, AI was completely based on explicit semantics, without ontology. It sort of flopped.
About 15 years ago, the emphases shifted to things like neural networks, which are excellent at pattern matching. That is what BAIR is supposed to do: without having any idea what pornography is (i.e., the semantics of pornography) it is supposed to find patterns that probabilistically predict that a photo is a nudey photo. That the system have no idea what pornography or nudity is, isn't considered relevant by BAIR.
The problem is that porn is semantics. This isn't like trying to distinguih the sonar patterns of submarines from those of rocks - something nn's have been really good at.
Trying to generate nn's that can do real semantics is a huge challenge. Check out the Neural Theory of Language project for some interesting work in that endeavour.
You know, I used to smoke, and do all sorts of stuff that was really risky to my health, with pretty much the same attitude. "We don't live for ever," "live fast, die young," etc.
Try to take care of a relative dying of emphysema and cancer, and then see how flip you feel. Visit an oncologist and ask him what brain cancer is like.
I went out with a woman who was an ER doctor, too. She used to drive like a maniac - until she began her internship.
I don't believe that you need to be scrupulous or paranoid or hypochondriacal, or even serious all the time, but understand that actions have consequences, and if you are really making a choice with your eyes truly open, you should really fully understand what the consequences of that choice could be.
What unnerves me is the fact that cell-phone use is, in a job-environment, adaptive. So the choice to not use one would could put one in an economic disadvantage. I try to use an earpiece with mine when possible - but it's true that I would hamstring my career if I gave up on them altogether.
That depends on a lot of things, including the modularity of the code and the usefulness of its comments, etc. Best-case scenario I see is that it gets cannibalized: that, for example, file format import/export filters and image import filters will be useable by other projects (including my personal favorite, AbiWord.) Worst-case scenario: Mozilla
I don't mean to say that Mozilla is bad, it's doing really well now. But just dumping the source into open-ness didn't work. It was a mess, it was unuseable and unsalvageable. Essentially it had to be completely ransacked for useable components (note: I'm not in the Mozilla dev effort, so I am interpreting their remarks and the remarks of people associated with it, so I may well be amended. I don't think my interpretation of the reality of the situation is completely off the mark, though.)
I did not make not-carpooling equivalent with "the Nazis." No where. I will tell you what I did say, you semi-illiterate boob:
I said there is a similarity in kind between normal people causing harm in two different situations, one of which happens to be one of the worst episodes blah blah.
Look, no one does everything they could, but you seem to take it as some kind of personal affront to anyone refusing to canonizing your contentious ass.
I'm not even a dye-in-the-wool environmentalist, it was just an issue to prove a point (as was the original poster's) about the everyday compromises that people make. And that is the point: especially as we get older, we make compromises. Which is OK and normal as our lives grow more complex, but we should still be made aware that they are compromises, and they have consequences.
By the way, I can keep this going as long as you can, until you slip into complete irrationality.
No, what we need are people honest enough to say "this is the consequence of that behaviour." When you don't like what they say, you call them condescending hypocrites.
I'm not interested in a 'purity test' or contest for sainthood. No one wins those. I just would rather good things happened than bad. You've inherited some sort of perverse damnation-theory, whereby any sort of criticism of a behaviour is tantamount to being damned to being not-a-good-person. Sorry about that, but there's a real world with shades of grey, in which harm is caused inadvertently. My point about the good old Third Reich is that the Germans who supported the system were not essentially different that the rest of us. They weren't even Nazi's - they were just minding their own business.
The reason I say "not yet" is because, even if it is not *currently* yet the case, it is at least possible that the environmental destruction caused by a model in which each individual worker commutes alone some 20 to 40 miles in a fossil-fuel based vehicle will be responsible for as much destruction as the holocaust. 12 million people were killed in the holocaust: 6 million jews, and 6 million representatives of other groups. It is not a stretch of the imagination to suggest that widespread destruction of air quality could end up costing more. (Imagine what will happen when our patterns of car ownership and commuting are echoed in China and India.
That is not *yet* the case, although the health consequences of the massive pollution in Mexico City have yet to be quantified. What is the case is that no one *intends* to cause this damage, they are just taking care of families and trying to get by.
Your huffy self-justification is just like that of every individual who would be responsible for such destruction, just like the Good German who only voted for the Nazi's because they improved the economy and reduced crime, and turned a blind eye to the consequences. You are actually worse than Joe Everyman, because you would pursue the behaviour out of defensive spite.
The Nazi reference was to highlight the tendency to migrate towards entirely local concerns, despite global issues. The fact that the Holocaust has now been enshrined as The Great Evil of History obscures the fact that the Third Reich functioned on a day-to-day basis, largely by meeting the quotidian needs of (many of) the German people. While I don't yet claim that unwillingness to carpool is morally equivalent to tacit cooperation with the Third Reich (I hadn't mentioned the Holocaust) I do claim that the fact that most people base their daily choices on local concerns rather than broader ones is responsible for both facts.
In fact, I am a Grown Up in my thirties who knows LOTS of people who juggle careers and family (and non-profit commitments and hobbies and more.) I even know single-parent families with incomes of less than $25000 a year who do the same - and show more conscientiousness about their effects on the world than either you or I. (Since my family is from Latin America, I probably have points of references that you can't even imagine, if you really want to play the You Don't Know So You Can't Say game.) I'm not that judgemental of those who don't do all they can: I just note that they aren't doing all they can. There's a differencing between moralizing and observing, and when the latter is demonized as the former, God help us all.
And as I understand it, the issue isn't "Linux," but specific models for software development, some of which are based on a model of closed development that we at least nominally consider sub-optimal.
You've proved the point - most people are willing to be conscientious about things up to the point where there's real inconvenience. It's not judgemental to point that out - apparently it pushed your button somehow. In fact, I think the originally poster had his finger on the pulse of "most people's reality" pretty well. The 'car pool' example is one where individuals seeking local optima create a global pessima.
A lot of corporations will tout how 'socially responsible' they are, but in fact are only willing to 'do good' as long as it has zero effect on their profitability. Very few are willing to make actual sacrifices in the interests of what they believe is right or good. And most people are the same way. Which doesn't stop them from complaining about, say, the traffic and the pollution.
I flirt with Godwin's law when I point out that most people are able to accomodate anything, and most people living in the Third Reich were more concerned about holding their jobs and making more money and having their taxes lowered than about any moral or ethical issues.
Yes, it'll pass. These little slights to human enthusiasm and imagination will come and go. The 'owners' of popular culture will do whatever they can make happen - will lobby for the appropriate laws, when possible - to allow them to wrench every penny they can out of their products, even at the cost of the freedom of human expression.
But the damage is done. Enthusiasms are punished. The work that people do to express their fondness for something gets reduced to naught. (How come so many defenders of the right of IP owners to 'make money from their work' never consider the value of the work of those 'downstream' from them?)
This, to me, is one of the most subtle, yet most festering injustices of current times. In the years after the second world war, European thinkers used to remark that "the Americans have colonized our subconscious." (I'm focusing on the phrase "colonizing the subconscious," not the word "American," oh ye pedant who is compelled to tell me that Fuji is a Japanese company). Now, the owners of cultural property are trying to consolidate their conquest and turn it into franchise. The works of pop culture are *part of my subconscious.* I have dreams with Bugs Bunny and Gilligan's Island and Star Trek in it. Compelling images from TV and cinema have been flash-burned into memory. I quote films I've seen to comment on quotidian events with the same fluid ease that, I imagine, the ancient Athenians used to refer to Olympean deities. But the tycoons of culture can and will keep me from expressing the ebb and flow of these cultural elements, just to protect their profits. All in all, it's a more egregious slight on the liberty of the human spirit than most people will care to admit. It has to be stopped.
Don't get me wrong, if you can learn on your own *well,* go for it. But there are some big drawbacks, and things that would make me wary of hiring someone with no formal education:
A tendency to create and keep bad habits. Without the input of more experienced and more theoretically grounded people around you, you will tend to stick with and cultivate your workarounds - which can lead to problems down the road.
Wheel reinvention: you may take several hours to learn what someone might have been able to explain to you in 5 minutes. When you have access to several hundred other people's wrong turns, distilled into a formal training environment, you can get a lot more bang for your training buck.
All-the-world's-a-nail: you can fail to learn how to deal with exceptional and unusual cases if you just learn based on the problems you encounter most frequently.
Surface familiarity: this is a problem I fall into unless I have something semi-external goading me, I will move over material once I sort of 'understand' it in a hand-wavey sort of way, unless I put it into practice. Good formal training overcomes this.
The lone wolf syndrome: learning how to work on projects with others is something you just don't get on your own; it's a whole array of practices that takes a long time to learn in the field.
In many situations, one doesn't have the financial or time luxury required for formal training, and you do the best you can. But don't kid yourself about its advantages.
We are talking distributions here, but this is the sum of it:
Someone who has been given a musical training is going to have a region of his cortex given over to acoustic processing that otherwise wouldn't. All other things being equal that is matter that isn't available to other functions. And all things being equal, the more neural resources you throw at a problem, the better you will do at it.
Now, it's also true that musical training can enhance other types of cognition, including mathematical reasoning, because the associative cortex's structures can be 'lended' to other functions (it's why people tend to use their own fields of expertise as source-metaphors for understanding other fields.) And, of course, someone who is given a good literary education in addition to a musical one will have stronger language skills than one who has had neither; it is most certainly not a zero-sum game.
I do hope you aren't someone who thinks that an exception will invalidate rules, when those rules are about probabilities (i.e., more/less likely, not either/or). However, if we are going to be anecdotal, I will cite my own brother, a Julliard graduate and musical prodigy from age 5, with sadly compromised verbal expression skills - he's a born hemmer-and-hawer, with lots of um's and frustrations trying to express himself verbally. He also has perfect pitch. I've seen this trait in many other musicians, including Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern.
Besides, the only conclusion that I drew was that Lars was incoherent and circular in his interview, and I didn't need an fMRI for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Time to identify correct drivers and settings to use with each single model produced by Dell: x. Resources provided by Microsoft to help Dell with configuring Windows on Dell machines: y. Resources provided by Red Hat to help Dell with configuring Linux on Dell machines: z. Expected sales of Dell machines with Windows: a Expected sales of Dell machines with Linux: b. (x-y)/a (x-z)/b. The cost of supporting the hardware with the environments is spread out over the number of predicted orders. That's the essence of an economy of scale.
I do know something about this. Many SGI's are used for high-end video processing, editing, and compositing. The people who use these systems (some of which sell for over a million dollars per system, and then allow them to do work that they bill out for several hundred dollars per hour or more.) know the technology of video like the back of their hands - realms of knowledge that would make the knowledge your typical Perl-monkey know pale in comparison. And they know virtually nothing about the systems underneath - it's essentially a black box to them. They don't know /dev/ from /bin/, they don't know a single shell script, they never have installed a piece of software, a browser, or a patch. They don't know much on graphics programming, any more than a writer knows the source code to a word processor. For a million dollars per seat, they get tech support that protects them from having to worry about it.
The point is, in that case the gambler is breaking the law, not the casino.
We earn our money in a specific context - the money is printed by a government, in a society that has by decree and habit accepted money as "legal tender for all debts private and public," kept in banks producted by the FDIC, in the context of a society that has created a sophisticated and extensive infrastructure in which we operate - an infrastructure that enables us to transport goods and travel with relative safety (freeways, air traffic control), that limits epidemics with public health works, that educates us to a literacy rate in the 90%s (compare that with previous centuries), and in this context we work and get income, some of which is then given back in the form of taxes. The context itself provides for the possibility of owning anything at all: it is the legal and social ground rules of commerce and property that make the very idea of 'stealing' possible. Virtually no one earns money without being aware of the fact that they are going to be taxed on it - to call it stealing is naive and absurd.
There's a big, big space between administer-server-and-high-end-workstation and just-play-with-your-Etch-A-Sketch. Business users on laptops, for example, will want to be able to edit their TCP/IP settings if they have to without reading the freakin' Red Book. Scientists and engineers who could figure it out if they had an extra day a week to screw around with it probably would simply choose not to. They also will not really want to ever learn how to set up ipchains - and they shouldn't have to worry about it.
In the US, a new technology is likely to be immediately introduced into the market, in order to return a profit on the investment as soon as possible and bring a benefit to the current consumers. The fact that future generations could be saddled with a suboptimal legacy that they have to endure (since other technologies will be built upon them, like we have our apparata using 110 v. power) is not a consideration.
The slower rate of introduction in Europe means that it may take longer for the return on investment to come in, and that they current generation of consumers may have to wait longer before they see the benefits of the new technology. However, their children will then benefit from a more mature and considered technology.
The question is whether the lead that the US approach creates is a net advantage or a net disadvantage. We really don't have enough history to come to any conclusions about it yet.
Marketing and advertising also have an effect. First of all, they exploit the fact that humans operate heuristically, not algorithmicly, for decisions (for the reasons of limited bandwidth I mentioned above, and also because of the reality of how human minds are constructed.) After all, only a tiny percentage of our mind's processes are conscious and thus amenable to pure rational analysis - the process of rational analysis relies on the pre-rational, pre-conscious acts of perception by which we mentally create the 'facts' that we are analyzing.
Obviously, if you couldn't sell cars and computers with images of sex and power, there wouldn't be a several hundred-million dollar advertising industry that thrives by doing so.
Additionally, even for the theoretically rational consumer, there are always time limit - ultimately, our mortality, and realistically, the constraints on how much time we can go without deciding.
Oh, did I mention I usually travel without a CD drive? Or that I use my CD at home for other things while I listen to music? Or that it's easier by far to do a batch download than to sit around recording mp3's?
And, from a legal perspective, I expect my fair and legitimate use of Napster to vindicate it against even an order of magnitude of abuse by others.
Besides, the most interesting aspect of Napster's case remains the claim that not-for-profit individual music-sharing is legal. It's a stance I would agree with, completely consistent with the common-sense behavior of people on a day-to-day level.
By the way, I like the idea of Gnutella, but not the reality of it - I just never have found the relatively obscure musics I listen to there.
Ayn Rand was, I would assume, estranged from her family. I know she had no children. If you view the family, including your children, as a community, then most people - who would happily sacrifice themselves for the children - would see the poverty of the objectivist line, from a darwinist as well as a moral-intuitionist perspective.
No, the were doctors who killed. They were still doctors (aside - I am not anti-Kevorkian.)
The trouble with the hacker/cracker distinction as made by hackers is that it is too self-serving, and relies on a simplistic good-vs-bad dichotamy.
For most people, including many technical people, a hacker is anyone with a high level of technical understanding, whether or not they are a programmer. People who break into computer systems, *if they understand what they are doing* (and more do than the vanities of some would like to admit) are hackers-who-crack. What makes the press identify them as hackers is that they know more about systems and security than the media or the public at large.
Arguably, there are also many programmers who aren't hackers - programmers who rely on pre-canned libraries and hand-holding IDE's to develop what they want, without the intellectual curiousity to look under the hood or cultivate an understanding of the principles beneath the program.
I will endorse a distinction between possibly-miscreant-but-knowledgeable/curious hacker-who-cracks and miscreant-and-nasty non-hacker script-kiddy who uses canned exploits to annoy people and impress the ignorant, but I can't endorse a naive effort to simply say 'hacker good, cracker bad.'
Remember, the value of one telephone is virtually nothing; the value of two is substantially higher. The tech-clueless Napster users who work at college radio stations are much more likely to have interesting music than the Rush-and-Phish-bound geeks who are ken to a dozen alternative technologies. Any alternative needs to be able to bring in the former in order to really recreate the value of Napster elsewhere.
To be fair to the original researchers, very few of them would have claimed that a system which successfully manipulated symbols in and generated accurate inferences with them were necessarily conscious. It's not a given that intelligent behavior requires consciousness.
After all, the problem presented by interpreting sensory data as 'pornographic' or not is distinct from creating meaningful strings once given a binding with 'pornography.' I do, however, personally agree that you can't have semantics without ontology.
Well, that is the political problem with having an AI that could successfully select photos based on criteria that a human being might use to change porn. But, as far as I know, the "I know it when I see it" rule of thumb for obscenity is a valid one legally. An AI that came up with a human-like ability to distinguish porn from not-porn would, obviously, be modelling just one person's ability to identify porn - it would be a faster version of a single censor sitting at your ISP; if you take issue with that (as I would), that's essentially a political problem - exactly identical with the one of a human censor. But the fact that there is neither an ontology nor a useful semantics for pornography means we aren't even at that level of discourse yet - instead of a relatively average censor, we have a wordless, blind idiot censor.
In other words, AI was completely based on explicit semantics, without ontology. It sort of flopped.
About 15 years ago, the emphases shifted to things like neural networks, which are excellent at pattern matching. That is what BAIR is supposed to do: without having any idea what pornography is (i.e., the semantics of pornography) it is supposed to find patterns that probabilistically predict that a photo is a nudey photo. That the system have no idea what pornography or nudity is, isn't considered relevant by BAIR.
The problem is that porn is semantics. This isn't like trying to distinguih the sonar patterns of submarines from those of rocks - something nn's have been really good at.
Trying to generate nn's that can do real semantics is a huge challenge. Check out the Neural Theory of Language project for some interesting work in that endeavour.
Try to take care of a relative dying of emphysema and cancer, and then see how flip you feel. Visit an oncologist and ask him what brain cancer is like.
I went out with a woman who was an ER doctor, too. She used to drive like a maniac - until she began her internship.
I don't believe that you need to be scrupulous or paranoid or hypochondriacal, or even serious all the time, but understand that actions have consequences, and if you are really making a choice with your eyes truly open, you should really fully understand what the consequences of that choice could be.
What unnerves me is the fact that cell-phone use is, in a job-environment, adaptive. So the choice to not use one would could put one in an economic disadvantage. I try to use an earpiece with mine when possible - but it's true that I would hamstring my career if I gave up on them altogether.
I don't mean to say that Mozilla is bad, it's doing really well now. But just dumping the source into open-ness didn't work. It was a mess, it was unuseable and unsalvageable. Essentially it had to be completely ransacked for useable components (note: I'm not in the Mozilla dev effort, so I am interpreting their remarks and the remarks of people associated with it, so I may well be amended. I don't think my interpretation of the reality of the situation is completely off the mark, though.)
WindeX?
U-knows?
I thik maybe I should call it maybe the McGuyver Operating Environment. (MOE.)
I did not make not-carpooling equivalent with "the Nazis." No where. I will tell you what I did say, you semi-illiterate boob:
I said there is a similarity in kind between normal people causing harm in two different situations, one of which happens to be one of the worst episodes blah blah.
Look, no one does everything they could, but you seem to take it as some kind of personal affront to anyone refusing to canonizing your contentious ass.
I'm not even a dye-in-the-wool environmentalist, it was just an issue to prove a point (as was the original poster's) about the everyday compromises that people make. And that is the point: especially as we get older, we make compromises. Which is OK and normal as our lives grow more complex, but we should still be made aware that they are compromises, and they have consequences.
By the way, I can keep this going as long as you can, until you slip into complete irrationality.
I'm not interested in a 'purity test' or contest for sainthood. No one wins those. I just would rather good things happened than bad. You've inherited some sort of perverse damnation-theory, whereby any sort of criticism of a behaviour is tantamount to being damned to being not-a-good-person. Sorry about that, but there's a real world with shades of grey, in which harm is caused inadvertently. My point about the good old Third Reich is that the Germans who supported the system were not essentially different that the rest of us. They weren't even Nazi's - they were just minding their own business.
That is not *yet* the case, although the health consequences of the massive pollution in Mexico City have yet to be quantified. What is the case is that no one *intends* to cause this damage, they are just taking care of families and trying to get by.
Your huffy self-justification is just like that of every individual who would be responsible for such destruction, just like the Good German who only voted for the Nazi's because they improved the economy and reduced crime, and turned a blind eye to the consequences. You are actually worse than Joe Everyman, because you would pursue the behaviour out of defensive spite.
In fact, I am a Grown Up in my thirties who knows LOTS of people who juggle careers and family (and non-profit commitments and hobbies and more.) I even know single-parent families with incomes of less than $25000 a year who do the same - and show more conscientiousness about their effects on the world than either you or I. (Since my family is from Latin America, I probably have points of references that you can't even imagine, if you really want to play the You Don't Know So You Can't Say game.) I'm not that judgemental of those who don't do all they can: I just note that they aren't doing all they can. There's a differencing between moralizing and observing, and when the latter is demonized as the former, God help us all.
And as I understand it, the issue isn't "Linux," but specific models for software development, some of which are based on a model of closed development that we at least nominally consider sub-optimal.
A lot of corporations will tout how 'socially responsible' they are, but in fact are only willing to 'do good' as long as it has zero effect on their profitability. Very few are willing to make actual sacrifices in the interests of what they believe is right or good. And most people are the same way. Which doesn't stop them from complaining about, say, the traffic and the pollution.
I flirt with Godwin's law when I point out that most people are able to accomodate anything, and most people living in the Third Reich were more concerned about holding their jobs and making more money and having their taxes lowered than about any moral or ethical issues.
But the damage is done. Enthusiasms are punished. The work that people do to express their fondness for something gets reduced to naught. (How come so many defenders of the right of IP owners to 'make money from their work' never consider the value of the work of those 'downstream' from them?)
This, to me, is one of the most subtle, yet most festering injustices of current times. In the years after the second world war, European thinkers used to remark that "the Americans have colonized our subconscious." (I'm focusing on the phrase "colonizing the subconscious," not the word "American," oh ye pedant who is compelled to tell me that Fuji is a Japanese company). Now, the owners of cultural property are trying to consolidate their conquest and turn it into franchise. The works of pop culture are *part of my subconscious.* I have dreams with Bugs Bunny and Gilligan's Island and Star Trek in it. Compelling images from TV and cinema have been flash-burned into memory. I quote films I've seen to comment on quotidian events with the same fluid ease that, I imagine, the ancient Athenians used to refer to Olympean deities. But the tycoons of culture can and will keep me from expressing the ebb and flow of these cultural elements, just to protect their profits. All in all, it's a more egregious slight on the liberty of the human spirit than most people will care to admit. It has to be stopped.
In many situations, one doesn't have the financial or time luxury required for formal training, and you do the best you can. But don't kid yourself about its advantages.
Someone who has been given a musical training is going to have a region of his cortex given over to acoustic processing that otherwise wouldn't. All other things being equal that is matter that isn't available to other functions. And all things being equal, the more neural resources you throw at a problem, the better you will do at it.
Now, it's also true that musical training can enhance other types of cognition, including mathematical reasoning, because the associative cortex's structures can be 'lended' to other functions (it's why people tend to use their own fields of expertise as source-metaphors for understanding other fields.) And, of course, someone who is given a good literary education in addition to a musical one will have stronger language skills than one who has had neither; it is most certainly not a zero-sum game.
I do hope you aren't someone who thinks that an exception will invalidate rules, when those rules are about probabilities (i.e., more/less likely, not either/or). However, if we are going to be anecdotal, I will cite my own brother, a Julliard graduate and musical prodigy from age 5, with sadly compromised verbal expression skills - he's a born hemmer-and-hawer, with lots of um's and frustrations trying to express himself verbally. He also has perfect pitch. I've seen this trait in many other musicians, including Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern.
Besides, the only conclusion that I drew was that Lars was incoherent and circular in his interview, and I didn't need an fMRI for that.