Who says the chinese internet belongs to the people? your worldview? your philosophy? international law? sorry but those things don't exist nor matter when guns and death is involved.
To say the Chinese Internet belongs to the people is absurd.
To say that something doesn't belong to its rightful owner because a criminal has taken it by force and continues to control it, is absurd. If a carjacker puts a gun to your head then drives off with your car, is it absurd to say the car belongs to you, even though you no longer possess it? Might doesn't make right. The Chinese people were forced with a gun to their head, to produce the wealth needed to build their internet. The fruits of their labor belong to the people, even if those fruits have been stolen. This isn't just my worldview or philosophy, it's practically universal. Even the Chinese government would probably agree with me! Then they would just lie about whether it had been stolen.
Uh huh... and there we have the arrogance which surely states that a country *must* have elections?
You can't impose democracy on a people. That doesn't make sense. It would be like trying to force someone to do whatever they want. Anything ELSE but democracy is an imposition. If you don't think the Chinese people want democracy, then maybe we should ask them. Oh wait, the only way to do that is an election. Who decides how their country should be run if they don't vote on it? What other just system is there?
Kent State? Civil Rights? Chemical/Biological warfare tests on unsuspecting civilians, Amendments against Gay Marriage? Facist politics from the right that silences detractors through character assassination.
Not even the best democracy can be expected to be without serious flaws (especially in the past). But if you can't see that there is a massive difference between the justice of the US government and the Chinese government, then you have a serious problem with bias. Do you seriously equate one tragic incident at Kent State decades ago, with the massive ongoing campain of murder by the Chinese government. How many open protests and calls for a change of government have there been in the US since Kent State? How many have there been in China since Tienanmen square? How many Americans have been killed for protesting? If any, not too many seem to be disappearing. How many Chinese have been killed for protesting?
How I wish this was true for everything else as well. Yet somehow the US governement still likes to stick their nose into real democracies whenever they ("the US governement") decide it is something they ("the US governement") don't like.
Be it software patents, privacy laws, TLDs or overtrowing a governement.
There is nothing wrong with sticking your nose into other countries business as long as you do it fairly and peacefully. There will of course be disagreements and mistakes with regards to what is fair. It wasn't until after the US abolished segregation that it could claim much moral authority. I can't think of any occasion since then when the US has used violence against another free country.
And no matter if you like it or agree with it, it is their network. It is their laws. I live in a country where the drinkingage is 16. I disagree with a drinkingage of 21, yet that is their ("the US governement") law and I have to respect that law when I am in that country.
You're still getting mixed up with "they". The Chinese internet was built with the wealth of the Chinese people. It's "theirs" (the people's). The Chinese government has stolen it from the people. Stolen property doesn't belong to the thief. The Chinese laws are the laws of the criminals, not the people. You have to respect the laws of free countries where the people can change them, but you shouldn't respect the laws of the criminals.
Unfortunately, at this point the Chinese internet *does* belong to the Chinese government, because the people of China obviously are not willing to stand up and possibly die for self-government. Until they decide to have a revolution (armed or not), they can lie in the bed their complacency has made for them.
Even if the majority in China deserved their fate, many are good people who risk their lives to effect change, and don't deserve the oppression they get. Furthermore, the Chinese people haven't had the education or access to information they need to appreciate the importance of freedom. That's not entirely their fault. They're victims. Just because they don't know they should rise up, or they're to scared to rise up, doesn't mean we shouldn't help them. Freedom seems obvious when you've been taught it all your life. It may not be so obvious to you if you hadn't been taught it.
It is irresponsible for people to post ways of bypassing the security restrictions a sovereign nation has enacted upon its people. If the Chinese people don't like the way their government is restricting their access to information then they have a moral obligation to overthrow that government,
The Chinese government isn't legitimate and therefore doesn't deserve the respect of a sovereign government.
That's like saying that if a gang of criminals were holding a gun to your head, the police shouldn't help, you should just fight them off yourself. It's the moral responsibility of good people to help liberate the oppressed as much as is practical. Unfortunately they have nukes on ICBMs so we cant just go in like we did in Iraq.
>No matter how "horrible" Chinese internet policy is by US standards, it's their damned network segment. Let them work it out for themselves.
The chinese internet doesn't belong to the chinese government, it belongs to the chinese people. When they have a real democracy then "they" (the people) can decide how to run it. Until then we shouldn't respect how "they" (the government) want to run the internet any more than we would if some bank robbers were holding hostages and "they" (the robbers) wanted to decide how to run the bank.
We are having some confusion here about what constitutes accurate or inaccurate prediction. It would be nice if we could predict which STATE a hurricane will hit. I'm not sure about the current state of the art, but it seems that currently they can only do this reliably about two maybe three days ahead. I doubt they will ever be able to predict a hurricane path say, ten days ahead, because the weather is chaotic enough that it is sensitive to small changes like butterflies and forrest fires, which simply can't be predicted.
Forcasts that go years ahead are subject to an even more huge array of uncertainties. A species of algae may evolve a one percent more efficient metabolism thus changing the influence of the ocean. A human inventor may develop a more popular diesel car engine. We may find out that Saudi Arabia has been grossly exaggerating their oil reserves. A volcanic eruption can throw things out of whack for quite a while. Forecasts that go years in advance can barely be considered "predictions" at all. Rough estimate would be a generous description.
Good point about trade winds and such. But while some weather features are long term predictable to some degree, I think for the most part weather really is quite chaotic. I doubt forcasts more than a couple days will ever be very precise. If you can't appreciate the large influence of a small butterfly on a partially chaotic system, then consider the forest fire. It will probably always be impossible to predict where someone will throw down their cigarette and start a forest fire. After a day or two a forest fire will have effects that will significantly alter the weather around the world, thus making precise prediction impossible because you never know what the inputs to the system are going to be.
Can this router be used as a client so that I can connect to the access point of my wireless internet service provider and distribute the connection over cat5 to my computers.
The possibility that the AI may go bad is the biggest problem. The payoff in terms of increasing our understanding of the universe and improving the state of humanity would be so huge that it justifies a huge risk.
You have to stop and think a while about how massively revolutionary super intelligence would be.
The cost of physical items or materials won't plummet to zero, but very close. Currently, most of the cost of everything including materials comes from labor costs. The cost of materials is mainly prospecting, excavating, refining, delivery, energy, scarcity, etc. When robots are doing the labor, management, and engineering, all those costs except scarcity will plummet to practically zero. See my earlier post about robots making robots. With superior prospecting, economical exploitation of very deep mines and asteroids, and the ability to economically use alternative materials, scarcity ceases to be a problem also.
Keep in mind I'm not talking about 10x Buffet's fortune, or even a thousand times, I'm talking BILLIONS of times his wealth. Or at least so much massively more wealth than is available to humanity today, that everything would change DRASTICALLY. Don't think small.
I think human beings would mostly turn into robots (we already are soft squishy ones). They wouldn't be lazy at all. In fact one of the coolest ideas that occurred to me was that we would no longer be limited to one body. Part of you could go to work at the same time another part of you went to vacation on mars. But ultimately the main purpose of super intelligence would be to understand the universe. That might not require a whole lot more power than the human brain. Who knows what we would spend our lives on if we thouroughly understood the purpose of life and the universe.
At this point I'm not convinced that the investment would pay off, but it might. The hardware just might not be ready yet, and the software might be much more difficult than I think. The difference between AI and space elevators, asteroid mining, hydrogen energy, and jetpacks, is that those things would be great, but nothing near as valuable as super intelligence. After super intelligence all those other things would be trivial.
With current funding AI will take considerably longer to develop. With more funding it is reasonable to expect that it may come significantly sooner. What makes this plausible now is that super computers are finally getting close to some reasonably well informed estimates of human brain power.
It's not certain, but maybe it can work sooner rather than later. We weren't sure we could make it to the moon either. I'm not advocating quadrillions or even trillions. But a few tens of billions on some really good hardware is a small price to pay even for a small chance of success. If it doesn't pan out we will probably still learn a lot about how to make or not to make the hardware and software.
I am speculating of course, but you have to speculate whenever you decide how to invest your money.
The basis of my speculation rests on two things.
Until Blue Gene, no other computer even reached the lower ranges of the estimates of the computational power of the human brain.
Second, how can you expect to fully develop the algorithms of intelligence if you don't have the hardware to experiment with? We may have already developed almost all the algorithms we need, but how would we know if we don't have the computational power to put them together and try them out? Of course I think we are lacking some and probably many of the algorithms needed. It's clear that the hardware most AI researchers work with is nowhere near the human brain. It would be nice if there was some magnificent algorithm that could turn a mouse brain into an Einstein, or even a regular human, but that doesn't seem realistic.
Of course just because it CAN'T be done without the hardware, doesn't mean it CAN be done (easily) with the hardware. I suspect it may be like chess. The algorithms weren't the hard part, we just needed the computational power to match humans. Of course general intelligence is a lot more complicated than chess.
Even with a high risk of failure, the rewards would be well worth risking the billions.
Stupid? Utopia Boy?
If you would dare to state your reasons for these statements, I may be able to explain why my position is quite plausible if not probable.
All the essentials would be free if super intelligence were available, because it would only take one philanthropist like Buffet to feed house and educate everyone on the planet. Imagine you have a robot that is smart enough to replicate itself. After say a week, you'd have two. After 33 weeks you'd have 8 billion. Enough for everyone on the planet. In ten more weeks each person could have a thousand robots for themselves. Maybe It would take ten years instead of 33 weeks, and maybe resources would be a big issue, but you've got to realize what a massive change would come from such a revolutionary technology. Traditional economics, and issues like rich and poor would become things of the past. More realistically, the computers could figure out how to download peoples brains into computers for enhancement and more importantly - backup.
I suspect that the lack of progress in AI isn't due to the difficulty of developing the algorithms, but rather the lack of sufficiently powerfull hardware. No matter how cleverly you rewire the neurons of a lizard brain, you will never match Einstein's intelligence, because the lizard brain simply lacks sufficient computing power. What's more is it's difficult to even discover the algorithms if you don't have the hardware to experiment with. If I gave Charles Babage my calculator wristwatch, he probably couldn't do what Linus Torvalds did, because he wouldn't be able to experiment enough to develop the linux kernel. It's not that the linux kernel is beyond human capabilities, it's that you need the hardware to experiment with.
I don't think there are any grants available that are big enough to hire IBM to make a custom version of Blue Gene to dedicate to AI research. With tens of billions though, you could get one built, and it might have enough computing power.
We've already created intelligent entities smarter than the smartest humans. And we've taken advantage of the increased intelligence to do what no human could ever achieve alone. The intelligent systems of this type currently rely on crude electro-mechanical and optical interface circuits (keyboards and monitors). The combination of a computer and a human can be thought of as a single thing with more intelligence than the human alone. The fact that computers and humans aren't welded together makes it hard to recognize, but a keyboard is no less a connection than an electro-chemical neuron interface, just slower.
Increasing our knowledge has solved a lot of problems. Computers, or in other words, increased intelligence, has helped us solve a lot of problems. Nothing is for certain, but it's a good bet that more intelligence would be very helpful.
The responses to my post mostly don't seem to have an appreciation for the importance and massively revolutionary consequences of AI. It would change everything. And I don't mean change a lot, I mean REALLY change everything. For example poverty would be completely eliminated. DEATH would be eliminated. If it's possible in the near future, then it needs to be done as soon as we can. With the billions available, IBM may be able to make a version of Blue Gene optimized for AI that could actually work.
If these ISPs ask Google for money, Google will just put a notice on their page to that ISPs customers, telling the customers that the ISP is slowing down their service and ripping them off by not giving them the bandwidth they paid for. THE CUSTOMER DECIDES which websites they want fast. Google will conveniently give them their representative's phone number and list alternative ISPs. That should take care of the problem real quick.
If you're sort of on the inside, let IBM know you'd like to see Cyclops 64 or it's successors optimized for AI. By some estimates Blue Gene was the first computer to exceed the computational power of the human brain. But of course it's not intelligent because it's not optimized for that. A wee bit of software still needs to be developed also. That's kind of big news when you think about it. A computer's power may now be more than the human brain. The singularity is near indeed.
I think the "materially" part could be an excuse in this situation. It seems immaterial if an email to someone who asked for it, has the from header changed. But then the word "materially" probably has a precise legal definition. If you're not doing anything crooked I don't think a prosecutor would waste time on it. I don't think a jury would find against you either.
As for the interstate commerce part, some courts have basically found that when you thought about the act, your brain waves may have bounced off the moon and then down into another state and affected someone buying something, therefore affecting interstate commerce. Yes that's an exaggeration but seriously not by much.
Non-freedom licenses are OK for some things. The only problem with Creative Commons is that it causes a little confusion in that it lumps together free licenses with restricted ones. It tries to take advantage of the goodness of the free licenses rubbing off onto the restricted ones. This is actually a minor flaw. Simply having a different name for the free licenses and the restricted ones would be fine. Of course then the name recognition of "Creative Commons" would be diluted. It's actually a close call, but overall I'd say its not a good thing to lump them all together.
Slashdot Mirror
That was very kind of them to shoot the protesters instead of running them over.
The chinese internet doesn't belong to the chinese government, it belongs to the chinese people. When they have a real democracy then "they" (the people) can decide how to run it. Until then we shouldn't respect how "they" (the government) want to run the internet any more than we would if some bank robbers were holding hostages and "they" (the robbers) wanted to decide how to run the bank.
Wouldn't this be easily detectable and probably illegal (for someone in china)? It sounds like a good way to get in trouble.
Forcasts that go years ahead are subject to an even more huge array of uncertainties. A species of algae may evolve a one percent more efficient metabolism thus changing the influence of the ocean. A human inventor may develop a more popular diesel car engine. We may find out that Saudi Arabia has been grossly exaggerating their oil reserves. A volcanic eruption can throw things out of whack for quite a while. Forecasts that go years in advance can barely be considered "predictions" at all. Rough estimate would be a generous description.
Good point about trade winds and such. But while some weather features are long term predictable to some degree, I think for the most part weather really is quite chaotic. I doubt forcasts more than a couple days will ever be very precise. If you can't appreciate the large influence of a small butterfly on a partially chaotic system, then consider the forest fire. It will probably always be impossible to predict where someone will throw down their cigarette and start a forest fire. After a day or two a forest fire will have effects that will significantly alter the weather around the world, thus making precise prediction impossible because you never know what the inputs to the system are going to be.
Can this router be used as a client so that I can connect to the access point of my wireless internet service provider and distribute the connection over cat5 to my computers.
The possibility that the AI may go bad is the biggest problem. The payoff in terms of increasing our understanding of the universe and improving the state of humanity would be so huge that it justifies a huge risk.
The cost of physical items or materials won't plummet to zero, but very close. Currently, most of the cost of everything including materials comes from labor costs. The cost of materials is mainly prospecting, excavating, refining, delivery, energy, scarcity, etc. When robots are doing the labor, management, and engineering, all those costs except scarcity will plummet to practically zero. See my earlier post about robots making robots. With superior prospecting, economical exploitation of very deep mines and asteroids, and the ability to economically use alternative materials, scarcity ceases to be a problem also.
Keep in mind I'm not talking about 10x Buffet's fortune, or even a thousand times, I'm talking BILLIONS of times his wealth. Or at least so much massively more wealth than is available to humanity today, that everything would change DRASTICALLY. Don't think small.
I think human beings would mostly turn into robots (we already are soft squishy ones). They wouldn't be lazy at all. In fact one of the coolest ideas that occurred to me was that we would no longer be limited to one body. Part of you could go to work at the same time another part of you went to vacation on mars. But ultimately the main purpose of super intelligence would be to understand the universe. That might not require a whole lot more power than the human brain. Who knows what we would spend our lives on if we thouroughly understood the purpose of life and the universe.
With current funding AI will take considerably longer to develop. With more funding it is reasonable to expect that it may come significantly sooner. What makes this plausible now is that super computers are finally getting close to some reasonably well informed estimates of human brain power.
It's not certain, but maybe it can work sooner rather than later. We weren't sure we could make it to the moon either. I'm not advocating quadrillions or even trillions. But a few tens of billions on some really good hardware is a small price to pay even for a small chance of success. If it doesn't pan out we will probably still learn a lot about how to make or not to make the hardware and software.
The basis of my speculation rests on two things.
Until Blue Gene, no other computer even reached the lower ranges of the estimates of the computational power of the human brain.
Second, how can you expect to fully develop the algorithms of intelligence if you don't have the hardware to experiment with? We may have already developed almost all the algorithms we need, but how would we know if we don't have the computational power to put them together and try them out? Of course I think we are lacking some and probably many of the algorithms needed. It's clear that the hardware most AI researchers work with is nowhere near the human brain. It would be nice if there was some magnificent algorithm that could turn a mouse brain into an Einstein, or even a regular human, but that doesn't seem realistic.
Of course just because it CAN'T be done without the hardware, doesn't mean it CAN be done (easily) with the hardware. I suspect it may be like chess. The algorithms weren't the hard part, we just needed the computational power to match humans. Of course general intelligence is a lot more complicated than chess.
Even with a high risk of failure, the rewards would be well worth risking the billions.
All the essentials would be free if super intelligence were available, because it would only take one philanthropist like Buffet to feed house and educate everyone on the planet. Imagine you have a robot that is smart enough to replicate itself. After say a week, you'd have two. After 33 weeks you'd have 8 billion. Enough for everyone on the planet. In ten more weeks each person could have a thousand robots for themselves. Maybe It would take ten years instead of 33 weeks, and maybe resources would be a big issue, but you've got to realize what a massive change would come from such a revolutionary technology. Traditional economics, and issues like rich and poor would become things of the past. More realistically, the computers could figure out how to download peoples brains into computers for enhancement and more importantly - backup.
I don't think there are any grants available that are big enough to hire IBM to make a custom version of Blue Gene to dedicate to AI research. With tens of billions though, you could get one built, and it might have enough computing power.
We've already created intelligent entities smarter than the smartest humans. And we've taken advantage of the increased intelligence to do what no human could ever achieve alone. The intelligent systems of this type currently rely on crude electro-mechanical and optical interface circuits (keyboards and monitors). The combination of a computer and a human can be thought of as a single thing with more intelligence than the human alone. The fact that computers and humans aren't welded together makes it hard to recognize, but a keyboard is no less a connection than an electro-chemical neuron interface, just slower. Increasing our knowledge has solved a lot of problems. Computers, or in other words, increased intelligence, has helped us solve a lot of problems. Nothing is for certain, but it's a good bet that more intelligence would be very helpful.
The responses to my post mostly don't seem to have an appreciation for the importance and massively revolutionary consequences of AI. It would change everything. And I don't mean change a lot, I mean REALLY change everything. For example poverty would be completely eliminated. DEATH would be eliminated. If it's possible in the near future, then it needs to be done as soon as we can. With the billions available, IBM may be able to make a version of Blue Gene optimized for AI that could actually work.
That's the point. It would relieve EVERYONE of their jobs. Then we could do what we want.
I wish they would put the money into AI research. If it worked it would help poor people and everyone else more than anything else.
If these ISPs ask Google for money, Google will just put a notice on their page to that ISPs customers, telling the customers that the ISP is slowing down their service and ripping them off by not giving them the bandwidth they paid for. THE CUSTOMER DECIDES which websites they want fast. Google will conveniently give them their representative's phone number and list alternative ISPs. That should take care of the problem real quick.
If you're sort of on the inside, let IBM know you'd like to see Cyclops 64 or it's successors optimized for AI. By some estimates Blue Gene was the first computer to exceed the computational power of the human brain. But of course it's not intelligent because it's not optimized for that. A wee bit of software still needs to be developed also. That's kind of big news when you think about it. A computer's power may now be more than the human brain. The singularity is near indeed.
As for the interstate commerce part, some courts have basically found that when you thought about the act, your brain waves may have bounced off the moon and then down into another state and affected someone buying something, therefore affecting interstate commerce. Yes that's an exaggeration but seriously not by much.
Non-freedom licenses are OK for some things. The only problem with Creative Commons is that it causes a little confusion in that it lumps together free licenses with restricted ones. It tries to take advantage of the goodness of the free licenses rubbing off onto the restricted ones. This is actually a minor flaw. Simply having a different name for the free licenses and the restricted ones would be fine. Of course then the name recognition of "Creative Commons" would be diluted. It's actually a close call, but overall I'd say its not a good thing to lump them all together.