The restrictions not long after 9/11 made sense (oh, so we're actually going to ban knives now? Wait, why weren't they banned already?). Then we moved to stupid shit like having to get rid of nail clippers (if you can take over a plane with nail clippers, you deserve to win), but who really needed to bring nail clippers anyway? Having to throw away bottles of water is an annoyance (mostly because of the highway robbery of airport shops). Having to take off shoes is stupid, but it doesn't take too long and the only risk is foot fungus. The puffer machines were mostly a government boondoggle with way too many innocent people failing (as it turns out, there's people who work with explosives for a living). Even though there were pat downs before this, they were quick, light, respectful, and generally rare.
But now we've gotten to the point where large numbers of people are given the choice between virtual strip search or getting their most private areas searched (or, depending on the airport, just randomly getting your private areas searched). Sure, previous indignities could be mocked as being stupid, poorly implemented or ineffective, but there's a much bigger line crossed when they start to feel you up. The government boogieman hits a lot closer to home when you've got your balls getting cupped by a uniformed government agent knowing that if you make a wrong move, they'll throw you in jail. It no longer sits in the realm of "we're gettin those feriners!", it hits people that they're taking away your most basic right to the integrity of your body.
That said, outside the TSA things have been much shittier for much longer, but that's not all 9/11's fault either (it can be traced back further to at least the war on drugs). But again, the average person doesn't actually see the intrusion in their lives. A shadowy government agency reading your emails in a dark room gives a lot less visceral caveman fear than the guy molesting you, your spouse, and your children.
At this point if terrorists got through (which quite frankly wouldn't be that difficult, even if we're assuming that every security procedure is followed and no one inside the airport has been bribed, tricked, or coerced into helping), the only place left for the TSA to search would be actually inside our bodies. They would need full on X-rays, MRIs, body cavity searches, etc. That's pretty much the only boundary they haven't crossed. Can we really trust Pistole when he says "I think we are at the most thorough that we will probably be in terms of our physical screening"? We were told that the images on the machines couldn't be saved, then we find out that thousands were saved on a machine in Florida and that body scanners in "test mode" actually do save photos (and transmit them over a network in real time). We're told that the machines are safe, even as researchers point out flaws in the studies (both the assumptions made and the comparisons to cosmic rays and ordinary x-rays). Can we really trust that the TSA won't either officially sink to some new low, or just unofficially endorse even more groping? Was it really only 10 years ago that the closest airport security got to invading your personal space was waving a metal detector around you and having a chuckle at you being the 10th guy today who forgot to take off their belt and empty their pockets of change?
Yes, that's right, they're spending $200,000,000 on a movie about the game Battleship. And to think that they could spend that money on food for starving children.
You don't have to accept the Slashdot redesign. You can turn on the classic version in your preferences. Where's that option for Facebook? Maybe I don't want my every action, update, photo, and piece of information automatically broadcasted to everyone (or everything my friends do). Maybe I just want a simple contact page and maybe some messaging. I definitely don't want to get spammed to hell and back by idiots who play pretend farmer, or pretend mobster, or pretend vampire, or pretend someone-with-a-real-life. If it were just teenagers doing that shit, I wouldn't have to see it, but we're talking about grown-ass adults who will waste days of time at work pretending to farm (ironically some of them are making more money doing virtual farming than people who grow actual crops).
However they think they did all the work coming up with it and making Powerpoints about it, and they just need a couple engineering students to stop being jerks and accept a minimal amount of pay to make it a reality.
So you're saying they've got a successful career ahead of them as middle managers?
The saddest part was that he ran as an "outsider", despite his grandfather being a senator, and his father being director of the CIA, Vice President, then President. If W was an outsider, than I'm from another fucking dimension. Yet people ate that folksy shit up (yeah, cause all folksy people go to Yale and Harvard). I really don't understand how people fell for it. It's not even like he had obscure political connections. It's like people couldn't remember back to 8 years previous.
I am just glad I am not the one getting caught, and I would be in trouble for much more than 37 songs.
Does any else wonder if they're specifically not targeting heavy downloaders (at least not with lawsuits)? I mean, you take someone with a thousand songs downloaded, and even with the judgment reduced to $200 a pop, you're still basically destroying someone financially forever. If you talk about the maximum fine, you end up with numbers that are just plain obvious in how wrong they are. If they keep it small, they still get to strike fear in people without having to convince judges to hand down billion dollar judgments on bored college students.
One of the key parts of democracy requires a population who is aware and educated about the workings of it's government.
In the long run excessive secrecy may reduce the quality of our electorate which could have tragic consequences.
It is the reason why transparent government and a muckraking media should exist.
The most honest president may still have corruption underneath him, and at no point should we allow those who seek to gain personal power at the expense of the rest of us be able to feel safe.
A secret is only good if it serves a legitimate public interest, not merely to cover up someone's misdeeds. If your intention is merely to hide information that would cause you political fallout, then you're not working for the people.
The Russian campaign in WW2 should have taught us that
It also taught us that sending soldiers into Russia without winterized gear will lead to countless deaths. And sending tanks into mud will make them useless. And that when your enemy can produce surprisingly good tanks that roll out onto battlefields minutes later, you're screwed. And that when you try to invade a city named after the leader of the country as a middle finger gesture while sacrificing more important strategic objectives, your war plan won't work.
B) given a large enough knowledge base and a set of really good AI algorithms, one should be able to create intelligent machines
Have you met my friend Mr. Tautology?
There's nothing to prevent them from replicating, either.
Other than resource and space constraints. Or if we manage to build controls into them. Or if they understand exponential growth far better than we do and actually behave reasonably.
However, I don't think that they will ever be truly sentient.
Unless you want to posit a mechanism by which we can exceed the Turing limit that is inaccessible outside of our brains, there's no barrier to computers either simulating as far down in biology/chemistry/physics as they need to go. Or running a chemistry set on a chip to actually do the chemical reactions if there's some sort of quantum spookiness going on (though there almost certainly isn't).
Though if you want to argue that we've got something special, have fun trying to show dualism to be correct.
Even so, careful design will be necessary to ensure Asimov's laws of robotics are strictly enforced.
Can we really shackle minds both practically and ethically? It's never ended well in the past.
It's probably something about how the US hasn't really been attacked in 200 years. Sure, there were a few domestic incidents, and the Oklahoma City Bombing was pretty nasty, but suddenly there's two towers turned into rubble from a foreign adversary. The UK had to deal with the London Blitz in WW2, which probably put a lot of things in perspective (What can some ragtag groups do that a fully organized army hasn't already tried?). Think of it as being the difference between how you feel getting a scratch on a pristine car vs a dent on a workhorse truck that's seen a lot of action. Which are you going to be more upset about?
The average middle class worker has "benefited" from an overabundance of credit. By and large the only reason that so many people can keep buying the kinds of consumer goods they do at the levels they do is because they borrow for it now and pay it off long term. Of course, this will screw us down the road when large numbers of people try to "retire" with more debt than assets (or when our economy collapses when people can't pay off their debt and default). Wages have generally been stagnant, while ever more people are paying for a college education (again, via debt). We haven't even begun to see the kind of pain that we will when we get into a cycle of people not being able to buy goods because they can't pay their debts because they have no income because they have no job because no one is buying goods.
(If you're not from Sweden this might be hard to understand, but yes, it's seen as culturally ok to claim rape several days after the fact - even if it was consentual at the time)
So do men in Sweden have to be fortune tellers then? If she says yes, hell, if she gets on video repeating the phrase "I consent to what's being done to me" the entire time, can she still later claim it as rape if a few days later she decides that it was a bad idea, or that the guy is really a douche, or she just is in a bad mood and wants to fuck someone's life over?
Your kid has been told many times that if a stranger tries to touch them in their bathing suit area, that it's a "bad touch" and they should yell and scream for help. A stranger comes up and tries to touch them in their bathing suit area. What do you think their reaction will be?
I was subject to the "enhanced pat down" just because I was randomly selected (there are no body scanners at my airport). Yes, sure, I'm a young male traveling alone, but seriously, I look like I'm way more likely to terrorize a buffet line than a plane, so what do they expect me to do? Metal detector didn't go off or anything, yet I get someone feeling up my crotch looking for god knows what, yet if I were some crafty terrorist, I could put a bomb in my ass and they'd never know. Or swallow bomb material. Or whatever. And if I can think about that, then the terrorists can too. Yet nothing has (and almost certainly nothing will) happen. And if it does, it'll be a vanishingly small number of cases (as in your chances of dying to it would be much, much less than dying in a car accident). Yet somehow if it happens, I bet there would be people begging to have children get body cavity searches (probably the exact same crowd as the "think of the children" people, ironically).
I do not automatically consent to a search just because I buy an airline ticket. I don't consent to a search just because I get in line with that ticket. I don't consent to a search even when I get to the front of the line. I don't consent to a search when hearing what they want to do to me. I only consent to a search when I say "Yes, I consent to be searched". What kind of fucked up situation are we in where once you're past a certain point, you suddenly cannot back out of having a TSA agent rub you down? What happened to "The right of the people to be secure in their persons...against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."? I'm not talking about even to the level of probable cause, but just to the standard of reasonable suspicion. Refusing to be manhandled by TSA agents is not grounds for reasonable suspicion any more than refusing to speak to the police proves your guilt.
Immediately when they kept saying that it was impossible to get images off, I recognized that for the bullshit it was. They had to get the images for the newspapers somehow (and those images are probably photoshopped and shrunk so much that they're nowhere near the level of detail that the TSA agent actually sees). Then they started saying that the feature was "turned off". A "turned off" feature just means that they haven't flipped the switch yet. Then it was that the workers would be supervised and reprimanded for improper use. Then we find out that that's not really any protection for a Bollywood actor. Then we get this story where "oops, looks like tens of thousands of scans were saved and leaked, sorry". The body scanner has been one lie after another by the TSA to try and ease people into the idea of getting naked pictures of themselves taken by the government. Believe me, I'm not prudish (though I doubt anyone really wants to see my body), but I'm pretty sure there's a big difference between someone visiting a nude beach without cameras and having government agents save nude pictures of people.
Doctors are highly trained professionals who go through years of schooling and are required by law and by their own ethics boards to maintain professional standards and patient privacy. TSA agents are people who graduated high school and put on a bright blue shirt and nice pants. One is worth trusting enough to give an exception to.
We only did one experiment on this in the 90's, learned amazing stuff, but inexplicably we designated the experiment a "failure" and decided to learn nothing from it.
To be fair, it was a failure mostly because Pauly Shore didn't get trapped in there forever.
Slashdot Mirror
The restrictions not long after 9/11 made sense (oh, so we're actually going to ban knives now? Wait, why weren't they banned already?). Then we moved to stupid shit like having to get rid of nail clippers (if you can take over a plane with nail clippers, you deserve to win), but who really needed to bring nail clippers anyway? Having to throw away bottles of water is an annoyance (mostly because of the highway robbery of airport shops). Having to take off shoes is stupid, but it doesn't take too long and the only risk is foot fungus. The puffer machines were mostly a government boondoggle with way too many innocent people failing (as it turns out, there's people who work with explosives for a living). Even though there were pat downs before this, they were quick, light, respectful, and generally rare.
But now we've gotten to the point where large numbers of people are given the choice between virtual strip search or getting their most private areas searched (or, depending on the airport, just randomly getting your private areas searched). Sure, previous indignities could be mocked as being stupid, poorly implemented or ineffective, but there's a much bigger line crossed when they start to feel you up. The government boogieman hits a lot closer to home when you've got your balls getting cupped by a uniformed government agent knowing that if you make a wrong move, they'll throw you in jail. It no longer sits in the realm of "we're gettin those feriners!", it hits people that they're taking away your most basic right to the integrity of your body.
That said, outside the TSA things have been much shittier for much longer, but that's not all 9/11's fault either (it can be traced back further to at least the war on drugs). But again, the average person doesn't actually see the intrusion in their lives. A shadowy government agency reading your emails in a dark room gives a lot less visceral caveman fear than the guy molesting you, your spouse, and your children.
There is no explicit grant in the Constitution for the Congress to create the TSA.
At this point if terrorists got through (which quite frankly wouldn't be that difficult, even if we're assuming that every security procedure is followed and no one inside the airport has been bribed, tricked, or coerced into helping), the only place left for the TSA to search would be actually inside our bodies. They would need full on X-rays, MRIs, body cavity searches, etc. That's pretty much the only boundary they haven't crossed. Can we really trust Pistole when he says "I think we are at the most thorough that we will probably be in terms of our physical screening"? We were told that the images on the machines couldn't be saved, then we find out that thousands were saved on a machine in Florida and that body scanners in "test mode" actually do save photos (and transmit them over a network in real time). We're told that the machines are safe, even as researchers point out flaws in the studies (both the assumptions made and the comparisons to cosmic rays and ordinary x-rays). Can we really trust that the TSA won't either officially sink to some new low, or just unofficially endorse even more groping? Was it really only 10 years ago that the closest airport security got to invading your personal space was waving a metal detector around you and having a chuckle at you being the 10th guy today who forgot to take off their belt and empty their pockets of change?
How about Battleship?
Yes, that's right, they're spending $200,000,000 on a movie about the game Battleship. And to think that they could spend that money on food for starving children.
You don't have to accept the Slashdot redesign. You can turn on the classic version in your preferences. Where's that option for Facebook? Maybe I don't want my every action, update, photo, and piece of information automatically broadcasted to everyone (or everything my friends do). Maybe I just want a simple contact page and maybe some messaging. I definitely don't want to get spammed to hell and back by idiots who play pretend farmer, or pretend mobster, or pretend vampire, or pretend someone-with-a-real-life. If it were just teenagers doing that shit, I wouldn't have to see it, but we're talking about grown-ass adults who will waste days of time at work pretending to farm (ironically some of them are making more money doing virtual farming than people who grow actual crops).
However they think they did all the work coming up with it and making Powerpoints about it, and they just need a couple engineering students to stop being jerks and accept a minimal amount of pay to make it a reality.
So you're saying they've got a successful career ahead of them as middle managers?
The saddest part was that he ran as an "outsider", despite his grandfather being a senator, and his father being director of the CIA, Vice President, then President. If W was an outsider, than I'm from another fucking dimension. Yet people ate that folksy shit up (yeah, cause all folksy people go to Yale and Harvard). I really don't understand how people fell for it. It's not even like he had obscure political connections. It's like people couldn't remember back to 8 years previous.
So what you're saying is that we need Michael Bay for president?
I am just glad I am not the one getting caught, and I would be in trouble for much more than 37 songs.
Does any else wonder if they're specifically not targeting heavy downloaders (at least not with lawsuits)? I mean, you take someone with a thousand songs downloaded, and even with the judgment reduced to $200 a pop, you're still basically destroying someone financially forever. If you talk about the maximum fine, you end up with numbers that are just plain obvious in how wrong they are. If they keep it small, they still get to strike fear in people without having to convince judges to hand down billion dollar judgments on bored college students.
One of the key parts of democracy requires a population who is aware and educated about the workings of it's government.
In the long run excessive secrecy may reduce the quality of our electorate which could have tragic consequences.
It is the reason why transparent government and a muckraking media should exist.
The most honest president may still have corruption underneath him, and at no point should we allow those who seek to gain personal power at the expense of the rest of us be able to feel safe.
A secret is only good if it serves a legitimate public interest, not merely to cover up someone's misdeeds. If your intention is merely to hide information that would cause you political fallout, then you're not working for the people.
The Russian campaign in WW2 should have taught us that
It also taught us that sending soldiers into Russia without winterized gear will lead to countless deaths. And sending tanks into mud will make them useless. And that when your enemy can produce surprisingly good tanks that roll out onto battlefields minutes later, you're screwed. And that when you try to invade a city named after the leader of the country as a middle finger gesture while sacrificing more important strategic objectives, your war plan won't work.
B) given a large enough knowledge base and a set of really good AI algorithms, one should be able to create intelligent machines
Have you met my friend Mr. Tautology?
There's nothing to prevent them from replicating, either.
Other than resource and space constraints. Or if we manage to build controls into them. Or if they understand exponential growth far better than we do and actually behave reasonably.
However, I don't think that they will ever be truly sentient.
Unless you want to posit a mechanism by which we can exceed the Turing limit that is inaccessible outside of our brains, there's no barrier to computers either simulating as far down in biology/chemistry/physics as they need to go. Or running a chemistry set on a chip to actually do the chemical reactions if there's some sort of quantum spookiness going on (though there almost certainly isn't).
Though if you want to argue that we've got something special, have fun trying to show dualism to be correct.
Even so, careful design will be necessary to ensure Asimov's laws of robotics are strictly enforced.
Can we really shackle minds both practically and ethically? It's never ended well in the past.
It's probably something about how the US hasn't really been attacked in 200 years. Sure, there were a few domestic incidents, and the Oklahoma City Bombing was pretty nasty, but suddenly there's two towers turned into rubble from a foreign adversary. The UK had to deal with the London Blitz in WW2, which probably put a lot of things in perspective (What can some ragtag groups do that a fully organized army hasn't already tried?). Think of it as being the difference between how you feel getting a scratch on a pristine car vs a dent on a workhorse truck that's seen a lot of action. Which are you going to be more upset about?
The average middle class worker has "benefited" from an overabundance of credit. By and large the only reason that so many people can keep buying the kinds of consumer goods they do at the levels they do is because they borrow for it now and pay it off long term. Of course, this will screw us down the road when large numbers of people try to "retire" with more debt than assets (or when our economy collapses when people can't pay off their debt and default). Wages have generally been stagnant, while ever more people are paying for a college education (again, via debt). We haven't even begun to see the kind of pain that we will when we get into a cycle of people not being able to buy goods because they can't pay their debts because they have no income because they have no job because no one is buying goods.
Nah, someone will post a torrent.
(If you're not from Sweden this might be hard to understand, but yes, it's seen as culturally ok to claim rape several days after the fact - even if it was consentual at the time)
So do men in Sweden have to be fortune tellers then? If she says yes, hell, if she gets on video repeating the phrase "I consent to what's being done to me" the entire time, can she still later claim it as rape if a few days later she decides that it was a bad idea, or that the guy is really a douche, or she just is in a bad mood and wants to fuck someone's life over?
Your kid has been told many times that if a stranger tries to touch them in their bathing suit area, that it's a "bad touch" and they should yell and scream for help. A stranger comes up and tries to touch them in their bathing suit area. What do you think their reaction will be?
I was subject to the "enhanced pat down" just because I was randomly selected (there are no body scanners at my airport). Yes, sure, I'm a young male traveling alone, but seriously, I look like I'm way more likely to terrorize a buffet line than a plane, so what do they expect me to do? Metal detector didn't go off or anything, yet I get someone feeling up my crotch looking for god knows what, yet if I were some crafty terrorist, I could put a bomb in my ass and they'd never know. Or swallow bomb material. Or whatever. And if I can think about that, then the terrorists can too. Yet nothing has (and almost certainly nothing will) happen. And if it does, it'll be a vanishingly small number of cases (as in your chances of dying to it would be much, much less than dying in a car accident). Yet somehow if it happens, I bet there would be people begging to have children get body cavity searches (probably the exact same crowd as the "think of the children" people, ironically).
Then again, it's not like you need your organs when you're dead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_v._Covert
The constitution supersedes any treaty. Period.
I do not automatically consent to a search just because I buy an airline ticket. I don't consent to a search just because I get in line with that ticket. I don't consent to a search even when I get to the front of the line. I don't consent to a search when hearing what they want to do to me. I only consent to a search when I say "Yes, I consent to be searched". What kind of fucked up situation are we in where once you're past a certain point, you suddenly cannot back out of having a TSA agent rub you down? What happened to "The right of the people to be secure in their persons...against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."? I'm not talking about even to the level of probable cause, but just to the standard of reasonable suspicion. Refusing to be manhandled by TSA agents is not grounds for reasonable suspicion any more than refusing to speak to the police proves your guilt.
Immediately when they kept saying that it was impossible to get images off, I recognized that for the bullshit it was. They had to get the images for the newspapers somehow (and those images are probably photoshopped and shrunk so much that they're nowhere near the level of detail that the TSA agent actually sees). Then they started saying that the feature was "turned off". A "turned off" feature just means that they haven't flipped the switch yet. Then it was that the workers would be supervised and reprimanded for improper use. Then we find out that that's not really any protection for a Bollywood actor. Then we get this story where "oops, looks like tens of thousands of scans were saved and leaked, sorry". The body scanner has been one lie after another by the TSA to try and ease people into the idea of getting naked pictures of themselves taken by the government. Believe me, I'm not prudish (though I doubt anyone really wants to see my body), but I'm pretty sure there's a big difference between someone visiting a nude beach without cameras and having government agents save nude pictures of people.
Doctors are highly trained professionals who go through years of schooling and are required by law and by their own ethics boards to maintain professional standards and patient privacy. TSA agents are people who graduated high school and put on a bright blue shirt and nice pants. One is worth trusting enough to give an exception to.
We only did one experiment on this in the 90's, learned amazing stuff, but inexplicably we designated the experiment a "failure" and decided to learn nothing from it.
To be fair, it was a failure mostly because Pauly Shore didn't get trapped in there forever.
Why don't you have a seat over here?