> [if] they wanted to kill us off, there is nothing that we could do.
That's why this scenario is not the one we should be worried about. Here's a greater danger -- one plausible enough, that it might cause Earth-bound governments to invest significant resources in detecting extraterrestrial intelligence:
Imagine that the intelligence is intentionally (or even: inadvertently) broadcasting information that can be used by one faction of Earthlings against another. Perhaps they are broadcasting what is to them, basic science information. (but to humans: the next, best, new weapon!) Perhaps they are broadcasting their own philosophy and ideology. (again: that could be used as an info- weapon, here.) Perhaps they have no desire to contact others -- but, inadvertently, there are signatures in their atmosphere(s) that indicate a variety of advanced technologies they're using. (...which would indicate fertile directions for future weapons research, here.)
Just *knowledge* of their existence -- eg: being the first to provably detect such an intelligence -- could give one ideological faction on this planet more power than another.
...Big clarification: Rep. Mica wants to *privatize* the TSA, more than he want to destroy it.
There's evidence that government services provided by private contractors can cost twice as much as the same services, provided by full-time federal employees --- all while doing everything even less efficiently than before. (...Just like it is with private prisons, private war contractors, private health insurance, and many other scams.)
This whole scheme seems like just another RepubliScam(TM), meant to divert taxpayer cash into the pockets of Republican political benefactors.
On the contrary -- this could be a display of an amazingly nuanced kind of intelligence:
Think of this system as somehow capable of modeling knowledge -- and parsing & executing queries on that knowledge. Surely, knowledge that can be modeled includes representations of the knowledge-state of the query-asker -- basically, a "theory of mind."
Indeed, that seems to be what we are witnessing in this video demo: communication centered around ascertaining each other's knowledge. Part of this process could involve gauging the response to nonsense questions. Furthermore, one or both may be have ascertained that they are each instances of the same AI engine!
You misunderstand what "Gaygirlie" said. ("I'd actually be pretty sympathetic with the aliens and wouldn't mind them annihilating the human race completely.")
Translation: "I, for one, WELCOME our pan-galactic, human-exterminating overlords!"
Perhaps, she thinks they'll spare her & her friends, for her cooperation. These aliens don't need to annihilate humanity, if they can just politically & culturally alter it.
Perhaps, her approach is more adaptive than yours, puny human?
> And it's not your place to decide who a company can and can't do business with
Says who? Get your nose out of that sociopathic Ayn Rand/Libertarian propaganda.
"Unregulated free markets" are not some immutable law of Nature, or physics. Nor were they handed-down by god/s. They are a human social constructs. (as is the dysfunctional regulatory framework we have now, and as would be a better, alternative system.) Forget, for the moment, the fact that
corporations benefit form from the stability that government ostensibly provides -- via roads and bridges, national defense, public education, a legal system that enforces contracts, etc.
We, the people -- via government -- have the power to issue and regulate currency. (even if the US Federal Reserve is private, it doesn't have to be that way.) We're already living through a catastrophe of banks that were "too big to fail" -- so of course we need to, and ought to, regulate the banking industry.
And on top of all that, consider that we, the public, basically give away money and power to corporations by allowing them to have limited liability. In exchange, I ask that our government regulate these monopoly credit card companies as a sort of "common carrier," such that they cannot discriminate on the basis of political ideology. Now, you either believe that we can't have government enforce such regulation (within constitutional constraints) -- or, you don't believe in democracy.
If this technology were combined with a space-based infrared-interferometer, we could be detecting the chemical signatures of life around hundreds of nearby star systems -- and resolving continents on many more planets -- possibly, before extraterrestrial microbial life is definitively proven to exist in our own solar system.
an interferometer can destructively cancel light from the central star, allowing planets to be more clearly resolved
the difference in brightness between the central star, and objects orbiting it, is less in the infrared spectrum
> in places like Palestine [...] it is not unusual for jihadis to use ambulances to transport fighters. They try to use our rules against us,
I take exception to the notion Israel's fight against Palestinians is "our" fight. Our interests are not aligned with the ethnocentric and discriminatory policies of the Israeli state, notwithstanding substantial Hasbara that succeeds in convincing Americans otherwise. Forget, for the moment, the fact that many "jihadis" often self-report that the Palestine issue motivates them:
Unlike Israel, the United States is an officially secular state that does not confer rights or privileges to people living within its jurisdiction based on ethnicity or religious belief. The fact that the United States was not *always* that way makes blind U.S. support of Israeli policies even more atrocious -- because different forms of legal equality were only achieved after a long struggle, here, and support of Israel policies are more likely to undermine those accomplishments.
There are still segments of America who want to turn back the clock. (e.g.: the "Hutaree Militia," whose Christian Zionist members would not be out of place visiting the "Holy Land," where they would receive a tour-bus indoctrination from some Israeli who would convince them how underhanded their "shared enemy," the Palestinians, are. These Americans like those Israeli policies because they'd like to see the same sort of discriminatory, settler/colonist caste system, here.)
Ha ha ha! People will eventually write sluggish JavaScript code to animate HTML5/Canvas/SVG -- just wait and see. (and, this sluggish code will be trying to do many of the same things that are done in Flash, now!)
To be fair, Macromedia originally created Flash, not Adobe. Macromedia made a better, more versatile plugin than any of the [also proprietary] competition. Unfortunately, Adobe has now spread their funk to Macromedia. The FTC should never have allowed Adobe to buy their only competitor.
That's Apple's fault for not exposing the relevant APIs, according to Adobe:
In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X. [...] Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases.
Seems like anti-competitive behavior coming from Apple, there.
I fully acknowledge that that is what appears to have happened. They also went so far as to hack/surveil accounts of dissidents outside China. I'm not here to defend the Chinese government.
However, I am exploring what they *could* say, especially in the absence of official Chinese explanations, so far. For example: they could say they were exploring whether those dissidents had contact with foreign intelligence agencies. (Does this line of argument sound familiar?)
What if the Chinese government feared that Google was being used to engage in espionage against its interests? (either by US intelligence authorities, or other actors, like Taiwan?) Hasn't Slashdot reported for years about hardware and software backdoors being mandated by government? Is it so hard to believe that the NSA might pressure Google (or, surreptitiously alter google.cn) to engage in espionage for the United States?
> no one in government cares about you, or your drunken antics posted on facespace
Unless you are considered a political enemy by someone in power. (as some allege happened with Eliot Spitzer) We should not empower government, and whichever political animals control it at a given time, with the ability to selectively enforce the law. That ability is stupendously magnified by the capacity to do a massive, exhaustive search of who commits "crime."
Thus, government would be more just if it arrests everyone who documents their stupid crimes online. This would eliminate the injustice of selective enforcement. And, the massive number of crimes that would be found -- and the ensuing backlog in criminal court -- would likely create pressure to reform what is considered "illegal."
Arrest *everyone* who documents illegal antics on "facespace." Or, restrict government's power, and don't have them in this business, in the first place.
Is it possible to create an algorithm that calculates the Nth "congruent number" in a tractable amount of time -- without having to calculate the intervening N-1 such numbers? (or having to do an exhaustive search up to the *value* of that number)
Is there another algorithm that given N and X (and a radix), can ascertain (yes/no) whether "X is the Nth congruent number"? Does the most efficient possible algorithm for this problem also necessitate calculating N congruent numbers, assuming the first one does?
Why not first create a legally-binding certification that declares that a photo was not manipulated? Similar to the way we have "organic" food or "cage-free" eggs? Such a system could be voluntary.
The (possibly multiple) certifications would be rigorously defined, along the lines of:
"This photo was not altered in a post production process"
"This model was not surgically enhanced"
"This model has her original hair color"
"This model is not wearing makeup"
...All we need now are some short, catchy labels to brand & market these concepts.
I beg to differ on you view of events: The incremental improvements to Flash were going fine when Macromedia was not owned by Adobe. AS3, JIT compiling, and the more advanced "displaylist" rendering were all well on their way to delivery w/ Macromedia. This continuous improvement has ceased -- and now, Flash 10 is a far more buggy, memory-leaking POS than anything that preceded it.
And I think it's Adobe's mis-management that's responsible.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why this scenario is not the one we should be worried about. Here's a greater danger -- one plausible enough, that it might cause Earth-bound governments to invest significant resources in detecting extraterrestrial intelligence:
Imagine that the intelligence is intentionally (or even: inadvertently) broadcasting information that can be used by one faction of Earthlings against another. Perhaps they are broadcasting what is to them, basic science information. (but to humans: the next, best, new weapon!) Perhaps they are broadcasting their own philosophy and ideology. (again: that could be used as an info- weapon, here.) Perhaps they have no desire to contact others -- but, inadvertently, there are signatures in their atmosphere(s) that indicate a variety of advanced technologies they're using. (...which would indicate fertile directions for future weapons research, here.)
Just *knowledge* of their existence -- eg: being the first to provably detect such an intelligence -- could give one ideological faction on this planet more power than another.
I was referring to independent studies, like this:
Report: Government spends billions more hiring contractors over public workers
There's evidence that government services provided by private contractors can cost twice as much as the same services, provided by full-time federal employees --- all while doing everything even less efficiently than before. (...Just like it is with private prisons, private war contractors, private health insurance, and many other scams.)
This whole scheme seems like just another RepubliScam(TM), meant to divert taxpayer cash into the pockets of Republican political benefactors.
On the contrary -- this could be a display of an amazingly nuanced kind of intelligence:
Think of this system as somehow capable of modeling knowledge -- and parsing & executing queries on that knowledge. Surely, knowledge that can be modeled includes representations of the knowledge-state of the query-asker -- basically, a "theory of mind."
Indeed, that seems to be what we are witnessing in this video demo: communication centered around ascertaining each other's knowledge. Part of this process could involve gauging the response to nonsense questions. Furthermore, one or both may be have ascertained that they are each instances of the same AI engine!
That seems pretty sophisticated, to me.
You misunderstand what "Gaygirlie" said. ("I'd actually be pretty sympathetic with the aliens and wouldn't mind them annihilating the human race completely.")
Translation: "I, for one, WELCOME our pan-galactic, human-exterminating overlords!"
Perhaps, she thinks they'll spare her & her friends, for her cooperation. These aliens don't need to annihilate humanity, if they can just politically & culturally alter it.
Perhaps, her approach is more adaptive than yours, puny human?
Could it be a crater from a WW-II depth charge? ...It's only 300 feet from the surface.
>Real professionals never considered Flash in the first place
Wait, so what's youtube? You think all those PhD engineers at Google aren't "professional?"
Real professionals examine the landscape of platforms and runtimes, and make compromises.
> And it's not your place to decide who a company can and can't do business with
Says who? Get your nose out of that sociopathic Ayn Rand/Libertarian propaganda.
"Unregulated free markets" are not some immutable law of Nature, or physics. Nor were they handed-down by god/s. They are a human social constructs. (as is the dysfunctional regulatory framework we have now, and as would be a better, alternative system.) Forget, for the moment, the fact that corporations benefit form from the stability that government ostensibly provides -- via roads and bridges, national defense, public education, a legal system that enforces contracts, etc.
We, the people -- via government -- have the power to issue and regulate currency. (even if the US Federal Reserve is private, it doesn't have to be that way.) We're already living through a catastrophe of banks that were "too big to fail" -- so of course we need to, and ought to, regulate the banking industry.
And on top of all that, consider that we, the public, basically give away money and power to corporations by allowing them to have limited liability. In exchange, I ask that our government regulate these monopoly credit card companies as a sort of "common carrier," such that they cannot discriminate on the basis of political ideology. Now, you either believe that we can't have government enforce such regulation (within constitutional constraints) -- or, you don't believe in democracy.
>I can assure you that banks, foreign exchange brokers and payment processors such as Visa and MasterCard are regulated by government agencies
Hahahah!
Government Regulator leaves FinCEN for Bank of America
Bank of America Acknowledges Illicit Funds Moved Through a Manhattan Branch
Banks Financing Mexico Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal
Nuh-uh: "Time traveler w/ cell phone" is the simplest explanation.
If this technology were combined with a space-based infrared-interferometer, we could be detecting the chemical signatures of life around hundreds of nearby star systems -- and resolving continents on many more planets -- possibly, before extraterrestrial microbial life is definitively proven to exist in our own solar system.
> in places like Palestine [...] it is not unusual for jihadis to use ambulances to transport fighters. They try to use our rules against us,
I take exception to the notion Israel's fight against Palestinians is "our" fight. Our interests are not aligned with the ethnocentric and discriminatory policies of the Israeli state, notwithstanding substantial Hasbara that succeeds in convincing Americans otherwise. Forget, for the moment, the fact that many "jihadis" often self-report that the Palestine issue motivates them:
Unlike Israel, the United States is an officially secular state that does not confer rights or privileges to people living within its jurisdiction based on ethnicity or religious belief. The fact that the United States was not *always* that way makes blind U.S. support of Israeli policies even more atrocious -- because different forms of legal equality were only achieved after a long struggle, here, and support of Israel policies are more likely to undermine those accomplishments.
There are still segments of America who want to turn back the clock. (e.g.: the "Hutaree Militia," whose Christian Zionist members would not be out of place visiting the "Holy Land," where they would receive a tour-bus indoctrination from some Israeli who would convince them how underhanded their "shared enemy," the Palestinians, are. These Americans like those Israeli policies because they'd like to see the same sort of discriminatory, settler/colonist caste system, here.)
The Flex SDK is free.
Absolutely a game charger.
Ha ha ha! People will eventually write sluggish JavaScript code to animate HTML5/Canvas/SVG -- just wait and see. (and, this sluggish code will be trying to do many of the same things that are done in Flash, now!)
To be fair, Macromedia originally created Flash, not Adobe. Macromedia made a better, more versatile plugin than any of the [also proprietary] competition. Unfortunately, Adobe has now spread their funk to Macromedia. The FTC should never have allowed Adobe to buy their only competitor.
That's Apple's fault for not exposing the relevant APIs, according to Adobe:
In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X. [...] Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases.
Seems like anti-competitive behavior coming from Apple, there.
I fully acknowledge that that is what appears to have happened. They also went so far as to hack/surveil accounts of dissidents outside China. I'm not here to defend the Chinese government.
However, I am exploring what they *could* say, especially in the absence of official Chinese explanations, so far. For example: they could say they were exploring whether those dissidents had contact with foreign intelligence agencies. (Does this line of argument sound familiar?)
Redactdebunked.
What if the Chinese government feared that Google was being used to engage in espionage against its interests? (either by US intelligence authorities, or other actors, like Taiwan?) Hasn't Slashdot reported for years about hardware and software backdoors being mandated by government? Is it so hard to believe that the NSA might pressure Google (or, surreptitiously alter google.cn) to engage in espionage for the United States?
So, what you're saying is that neoconservative corporatism is the real terrorist threat?
> no one in government cares about you, or your drunken antics posted on facespace
Unless you are considered a political enemy by someone in power. (as some allege happened with Eliot Spitzer) We should not empower government, and whichever political animals control it at a given time, with the ability to selectively enforce the law. That ability is stupendously magnified by the capacity to do a massive, exhaustive search of who commits "crime."
Thus, government would be more just if it arrests everyone who documents their stupid crimes online. This would eliminate the injustice of selective enforcement. And, the massive number of crimes that would be found -- and the ensuing backlog in criminal court -- would likely create pressure to reform what is considered "illegal."
Arrest *everyone* who documents illegal antics on "facespace." Or, restrict government's power, and don't have them in this business, in the first place.
Is it possible to create an algorithm that calculates the Nth "congruent number" in a tractable amount of time -- without having to calculate the intervening N-1 such numbers? (or having to do an exhaustive search up to the *value* of that number)
Is there another algorithm that given N and X (and a radix), can ascertain (yes/no) whether "X is the Nth congruent number"? Does the most efficient possible algorithm for this problem also necessitate calculating N congruent numbers, assuming the first one does?
That might be interesting.
The (possibly multiple) certifications would be rigorously defined, along the lines of:
...All we need now are some short, catchy labels to brand & market these concepts.
I beg to differ on you view of events: The incremental improvements to Flash were going fine when Macromedia was not owned by Adobe. AS3, JIT compiling, and the more advanced "displaylist" rendering were all well on their way to delivery w/ Macromedia. This continuous improvement has ceased -- and now, Flash 10 is a far more buggy, memory-leaking POS than anything that preceded it.
And I think it's Adobe's mis-management that's responsible.