".. Why would anyone but an idiot believe that the same group of criminals won't also be able to discover and exploit the ones put in intentionally?"
100,000+ professional hackers employed by the Chinese state - (or North Korea - or ISIS - or Israel or..) and funded with $$$ tens of millions or billions? 4 million US government employees records hacked and stolen. 21 million US Social Security numbers hacked and stolen. And the US government is about 100 times more security aware and well defended than the UK government.
Half wrong half right. Lets assume that government has directly killed 250 million people over the last 100 years. - That's more than burning coal (100 to 200 million), or the car industry (50 to 100 million), but a lot less than the cigarette industry which has killed some 1 to 1.5 billion. Another generalized group - is global capitalism, which in total has also killed about the same (1 to 1.5 billion). I suppose that most governments today are in the pockets of global capitalism so I suppose you are kind of right.
In comparison terrorists have only killed about 0 to 0.1 million - statistical noise.
But the intelligence agencies in the UK have always colluded with organised crime. They don't care if your bank details or money are easier to steal. They are merely doing their criminal buddies a 'Biggie'.
One of the big problems with government holding all these keys is the potential for them being lost or stolen. - Stolen by hackers or physically stolen by criminals or by corrupt employees. ~ The worst case scenario though is a large scale theft by a foreign government or terrorist group, which then uses the keys for large scale cyber attacks, for large scale theft from bank accounts and savings, for blackmail and political manipulation... Imagine a *Snowden* working in the NSA for a political enemy like North Korea or ISIS who wants to fight a clandestine war against the US or Europe.. .
Watch out they will be trying to contaminate your sacred bodily fluids. They will be putting fluorine in the tap water, the damn 'commies'. Even our tin foil hats wont be enough then.
"Can we have a vaguely believable source for the "for economic gain" part of NSA spying? Seriously? I keep asking, and get sources even less credible then Fox News."
But an anonymous kid in a playground is a more reliable source than Fox, Fox / News International.
Dune is full of subtexts and secret meanings, some of which cannot be decoded without very specific knowledge. It might use many Arabic idioms in its setting but its message is profoundly anti-Islamic. It is a book of religious mysticism, psychic power, and deep magical secrets set in a sci-fi setting. (eg Paul Atreides gains immortality by becoming a god!) Maybe not surprising that it momentarily 'synchronises' with events and people start reading it as 'prophesy'. If it is a book about prophesy it certainly isn't about the Middle East today..
There have always been people like you - arguing that man will never fly in lighter than air aircraft, that no rocket will ever make orbit, that humans will never walk on the moon, that computers are to expensive & cumbersome to ever be useful, that we will never understand or map DNA, that video phones will never be possible..
All it takes is the will and the money - and space is getting cheaper. Technologies like Skylon or closed cycle nuclear rockets could make it 10 or 100 times cheaper still. Then there are laser lifters, Lofstrom loops, space elevators, kinetic towers, orbital rings - some of those could put the costs to space at as much as 10,000 times lower. I bet that before 2100 there will at least several hundred people living in orbit & on the moon & on Mars and maybe Venus, and there will be regular tourist trips out to places like the moon.
Don't believe me? look back to 1900 and see what you predict from there - a place with a few very primitive airships, no planes, very few cars, most people travel by horse and cart, or trolley bus, or on foot. No TV, no cinema, no radio, no internet, no smart phones. Almost everything is done or made by hand, calculations require human labour, no calculators, no computers. People like you then were predicting that scientific progress had basically come to an end - you were wrong.
This is exactly the kinds of things we should be doing and should be funding, I like the idea of using the shade from the solar panels to grow crops. It is a scheme that can be scaled to power the whole world.. One of the things I might add is to use some of the solar energy to make algal biofuels or ethanol or even gas. With enough ethanol for instance the world could have carbon neutral cars and trucks and maybe even aircraft. An even bigger advantage is that making and shipping fuels over very long distances (over water) should have lower energy losses than transmitting electricity the same distance. On site CHP that powers heating and air conditioning can improve that efficiency even further.
I just took a look and you are correct, the stats do look pretty odd. The sets of stats pos and neg don't add up to 100 so they are including those who returned no answer - That's why only 98% of the AAAS 'believe' in evolution.. the other 2% didn't answer.
The proportion for conservative is still far lower than those for Republican, but the proportion for moderates is about the same as Republican. Probably a lot of the conservatives are Tea Party supporters.
"As such, keeping out of it seems like a wise thing to have done"
Hardly. The wests not intervening in Syria was as big a mistake as invading Iraq in the first place, and both lead pretty directly to the creation of ISIS. Two sets of rebels in Syria, The pro-freedom and pro-democracy groups basically depended on help and military aid form the west. The jihadi factions were helped by other Jihadi groups and supplied with weapons and supplies - mainly from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.. Assad was being helped and funded and armed by the Russians. Result : pro democracy groups all but obliterated, Assad in retreat, and ISIS ascendant in Syria and Iraq, and growing elsewhere..
The UK is building one of the worlds biggest and most vulnerable terrorist targets - HS2.. Our government is also helping ISIS to grow by totally failing to understand what they are and calling them terrorists. ISIS Goals - - To create a new Caliphate. (inc slavery, constant war, and full Sharia law) - To conquer the whole Middle East and probably beyond. - To exterminate all Shia Muslims and other 'Apostates'. - To kill or convert all liberal Muslims. - To die in an apocalypse, either in a stand up fighting war with the west or in a nuclear war.
They only care about us as an enemy to fight and as a propaganda tool to help encourage more recruits.. All they have to do is continue to survive and they will continue to grow bigger and stronger. They also know that even if they are destroyed they will inspire the next ISIS which they hope will be even worse and even more extreme. They want to invade Israel so they can steal its nuclear weapons. They want the same from Pakistan. To them terrorism is more entertainment than anything else.
"Almost all of the current state overreach started during Labour governments (Blair and Brown)."
Blair was and is an anti-socialist. He helped deregulate the financial industry and banking and gave tax cuts to the richest while raising taxes on the poorest.. Blair was best friends with George W Bush, not exactly a left wing president..
Sorry the Chinese might have called it socialism but it definitely wasn't / isn't.
What is the true heart of any socialist system? a legally bound police force and fair universal justice system paid for through general taxation.. China falls down on that very first precept. Since socialism requires taxation to work it is in fact a sub-type of capitalism. True Socialists believe in equality, freedom, justice, general human rights, and above all democracy. What China had/has is a corrupt form of Soviet Communism. It has more in common with fascism or dictatorship than true socialism..
BTW Capitalism without socialist restraints looks more like ISIS or Somalia than the modern USA or Europe. Is murder illegal? is slavery? is rape? is paedophilia? all laws that are essentially socialist inventions.
"Fascism uses the power of the state to oppress its citizens."
If only it was that simple. Nazi Fascism used/s the power of words and the media and the manipulating power of propaganda to make the citizens oppress themselves. They specifically use the power of hate and tribal instinct to whip the population into an emotional frenzy. In a free and open election 75% of Germans voted for Hitler. In exactly the same way Murdock manipulated the people into putting Cameron into office. - That is why Cameron is attacking the BBC, to pay his master back.
"Mr. Prime Minister of England, you, sir, can go eat out a latrine." You obviously don't know a lot about Cameron, him eating out of a toilet would be cannibalism..
Agree totally. a lot of tinfoil hats on here today.
If you actually take any big manufacturer legitimate toner cartridge to pieces you will find the mechanical components have a very high quality and quite a high manufacturing cost. I suspect they test the mechanism, and if ok then - refill the cartridge, reset the chips, and sell the thing back as new.. if not ok then they dissemble and recycle the materials and components. Either way recycling is hugely profitable. Why wouldn't any company do it?
"Unfortunately SlashDot editors deleted the key take home paragraph and instead sensationalized my submission...."
Sad, from my perspective its an interesting question. I am developing real Strong AI systems - that are intended to achieve self awareness.. With real Strong AI it is a very complex question. The basic answer is that the core design will become mostly unchanging once working, and that an AI can be moved from an obsolete or broken hardware core to a new one. The machines will generally also carry a complete up to date backup as part of normal function.
The big problem though is with security. To be safe Strong AI's will be build with a very strong virtually unbreakable security shield to prevent tampering or infiltration. Each machine will be driven by a unique code, and it cannot be repaired without that code - and this code will only exist inside a secure server at the creating company. So if the manufacturer goes out of business, someone else will have to keep those servers operating or the machines will become completely un-repairable. Since the servers will be a massive target for terrorists or enemy states that someone will very probably be the military or military intelligence.
As technology advances the AI core design will improve until it can function for many years before needing maintenance. For instance having many extra redundant CPU's and other backup elements. If we want to get really crazy within maybe 30 years 3D printers should improve to the point where machines can fabricate their own new chips inside the box.
BTW Strong AI is not likely to be developed using the consumerist disposable-tech model as it is not really appropriate. - Machine base costs will range from maybe $20,000 for the most basic non-sentient non-autonomous version. What we picture as robots will probably cost from about $200,000 to over $1 million. Bigger more advanced machines will cost even more. There will also be big service and maintenance costs.. A big problem with advanced or sentient type robots at least in the first few years will be that their MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) will be pretty low - for a robot doing physical work probably less than a day, and for really heavy work that could fall to minutes.. Then there will also be complex moral and safety constraints and issues like machine rights...
There is the 'tiny' problem that Strong AI's will kill people - even with human safety as a primary design constraint. Many of the real applications of Strong AI involve safety in dangerous environments (ie cars) so even with machines performing much better than a person there will still be deaths. There is also the issue of machine stupidity, in which dumb Strong AI's accidentally kill people or get tricked by their users into killing people.. Then there are situations where the only way to save lives is to kill (think of 9/11), or places like war zones where protecting your own 'group' of people may involve defending against others or harming/killing them. I've been working on this since the 1990's and I'm still finding new issues today..
Fundamentally theoretically humans should be able to live almost forever.. Aging is effectively a suicide program, because to nature once you have reproduced you are disposable..
When simulating analogue systems using digital systems you ideally want both 1 and 0 to be in the same noise margin, so effectively 1 does = 0. Of course in reality you normally have considerably bigger noise margins but 1 still equals zero./0 is a similar kind of question and a pretty important one given that its at the very heart of calculus h = limit(n --> 0)..
Slashdot Mirror
".. Why would anyone but an idiot believe that the same group of criminals won't also be able to discover and exploit the ones put in intentionally?"
100,000+ professional hackers employed by the Chinese state - (or North Korea - or ISIS - or Israel or ..) and funded with $$$ tens of millions or billions?
4 million US government employees records hacked and stolen. 21 million US Social Security numbers hacked and stolen. And the US government is about 100 times more security aware and well defended than the UK government.
Half wrong half right. Lets assume that government has directly killed 250 million people over the last 100 years. -
That's more than burning coal (100 to 200 million), or the car industry (50 to 100 million), but a lot less than the cigarette industry which has killed some 1 to 1.5 billion.
Another generalized group - is global capitalism, which in total has also killed about the same (1 to 1.5 billion). I suppose that most governments today are in the pockets of global capitalism so I suppose you are kind of right.
In comparison terrorists have only killed about 0 to 0.1 million - statistical noise.
The man is a moron, but then the voting majority are pretty much morons too.
Cameron and the rest have pretty much already surrendered to ISIS. I don't see much security in that.
Like it says on the packet in a world of morons the idiot is a genius... :D
But the intelligence agencies in the UK have always colluded with organised crime. They don't care if your bank details or money are easier to steal. They are merely doing their criminal buddies a 'Biggie'.
In the days of the Stasi EVERYONE was known to the authorities.
One of the big problems with government holding all these keys is the potential for them being lost or stolen. - Stolen by hackers or physically stolen by criminals or by corrupt employees. ~ The worst case scenario though is a large scale theft by a foreign government or terrorist group, which then uses the keys for large scale cyber attacks, for large scale theft from bank accounts and savings, for blackmail and political manipulation... Imagine a *Snowden* working in the NSA for a political enemy like North Korea or ISIS who wants to fight a clandestine war against the US or Europe.. .
Watch out they will be trying to contaminate your sacred bodily fluids. They will be putting fluorine in the tap water, the damn 'commies'. Even our tin foil hats wont be enough then.
"Can we have a vaguely believable source for the "for economic gain" part of NSA spying? Seriously? I keep asking, and get sources even less credible then Fox News."
But an anonymous kid in a playground is a more reliable source than Fox, Fox / News International.
Dune is full of subtexts and secret meanings, some of which cannot be decoded without very specific knowledge. It might use many Arabic idioms in its setting but its message is profoundly anti-Islamic. It is a book of religious mysticism, psychic power, and deep magical secrets set in a sci-fi setting. (eg Paul Atreides gains immortality by becoming a god!)
Maybe not surprising that it momentarily 'synchronises' with events and people start reading it as 'prophesy'. If it is a book about prophesy it certainly isn't about the Middle East today..
The problem is that Murdock agrees with them, and Murdock controls the minds of many voters.
There have always been people like you - arguing that man will never fly in lighter than air aircraft, that no rocket will ever make orbit, that humans will never walk on the moon, that computers are to expensive & cumbersome to ever be useful, that we will never understand or map DNA, that video phones will never be possible..
All it takes is the will and the money - and space is getting cheaper. Technologies like Skylon or closed cycle nuclear rockets could make it 10 or 100 times cheaper still. Then there are laser lifters, Lofstrom loops, space elevators, kinetic towers, orbital rings - some of those could put the costs to space at as much as 10,000 times lower. I bet that before 2100 there will at least several hundred people living in orbit & on the moon & on Mars and maybe Venus, and there will be regular tourist trips out to places like the moon.
Don't believe me? look back to 1900 and see what you predict from there - a place with a few very primitive airships, no planes, very few cars, most people travel by horse and cart, or trolley bus, or on foot. No TV, no cinema, no radio, no internet, no smart phones. Almost everything is done or made by hand, calculations require human labour, no calculators, no computers. People like you then were predicting that scientific progress had basically come to an end - you were wrong.
This is exactly the kinds of things we should be doing and should be funding, I like the idea of using the shade from the solar panels to grow crops. It is a scheme that can be scaled to power the whole world..
One of the things I might add is to use some of the solar energy to make algal biofuels or ethanol or even gas. With enough ethanol for instance the world could have carbon neutral cars and trucks and maybe even aircraft. An even bigger advantage is that making and shipping fuels over very long distances (over water) should have lower energy losses than transmitting electricity the same distance. On site CHP that powers heating and air conditioning can improve that efficiency even further.
I just took a look and you are correct, the stats do look pretty odd. The sets of stats pos and neg don't add up to 100 so they are including those who returned no answer - That's why only 98% of the AAAS 'believe' in evolution.. the other 2% didn't answer.
The proportion for conservative is still far lower than those for Republican, but the proportion for moderates is about the same as Republican. Probably a lot of the conservatives are Tea Party supporters.
"As such, keeping out of it seems like a wise thing to have done"
Hardly. The wests not intervening in Syria was as big a mistake as invading Iraq in the first place, and both lead pretty directly to the creation of ISIS. Two sets of rebels in Syria, The pro-freedom and pro-democracy groups basically depended on help and military aid form the west. The jihadi factions were helped by other Jihadi groups and supplied with weapons and supplies - mainly from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.. Assad was being helped and funded and armed by the Russians.
Result : pro democracy groups all but obliterated, Assad in retreat, and ISIS ascendant in Syria and Iraq, and growing elsewhere..
The UK is building one of the worlds biggest and most vulnerable terrorist targets - HS2.. Our government is also helping ISIS to grow by totally failing to understand what they are and calling them terrorists.
ISIS Goals -
- To create a new Caliphate. (inc slavery, constant war, and full Sharia law)
- To conquer the whole Middle East and probably beyond.
- To exterminate all Shia Muslims and other 'Apostates'.
- To kill or convert all liberal Muslims.
- To die in an apocalypse, either in a stand up fighting war with the west or in a nuclear war.
They only care about us as an enemy to fight and as a propaganda tool to help encourage more recruits.. All they have to do is continue to survive and they will continue to grow bigger and stronger. They also know that even if they are destroyed they will inspire the next ISIS which they hope will be even worse and even more extreme. They want to invade Israel so they can steal its nuclear weapons. They want the same from Pakistan.
To them terrorism is more entertainment than anything else.
"Almost all of the current state overreach started during Labour governments (Blair and Brown)."
Blair was and is an anti-socialist. He helped deregulate the financial industry and banking and gave tax cuts to the richest while raising taxes on the poorest.. Blair was best friends with George W Bush, not exactly a left wing president..
Sorry the Chinese might have called it socialism but it definitely wasn't / isn't.
What is the true heart of any socialist system? a legally bound police force and fair universal justice system paid for through general taxation.. China falls down on that very first precept.
Since socialism requires taxation to work it is in fact a sub-type of capitalism. True Socialists believe in equality, freedom, justice, general human rights, and above all democracy.
What China had/has is a corrupt form of Soviet Communism. It has more in common with fascism or dictatorship than true socialism..
BTW Capitalism without socialist restraints looks more like ISIS or Somalia than the modern USA or Europe. Is murder illegal? is slavery? is rape? is paedophilia? all laws that are essentially socialist inventions.
"Fascism uses the power of the state to oppress its citizens."
If only it was that simple. Nazi Fascism used/s the power of words and the media and the manipulating power of propaganda to make the citizens oppress themselves. They specifically use the power of hate and tribal instinct to whip the population into an emotional frenzy.
In a free and open election 75% of Germans voted for Hitler.
In exactly the same way Murdock manipulated the people into putting Cameron into office. - That is why Cameron is attacking the BBC, to pay his master back.
"Mr. Prime Minister of England, you, sir, can go eat out a latrine." You obviously don't know a lot about Cameron, him eating out of a toilet would be cannibalism..
Ur.. original commenters age detected - 7 to 10 years old. Talking to them might get you labelled as a pedo... :)
Tin foil hat.
Agree totally. a lot of tinfoil hats on here today.
If you actually take any big manufacturer legitimate toner cartridge to pieces you will find the mechanical components have a very high quality and quite a high manufacturing cost. I suspect they test the mechanism, and if ok then - refill the cartridge, reset the chips, and sell the thing back as new.. if not ok then they dissemble and recycle the materials and components. Either way recycling is hugely profitable. Why wouldn't any company do it?
"Unfortunately SlashDot editors deleted the key take home paragraph and instead sensationalized my submission. ..."
Sad, from my perspective its an interesting question. I am developing real Strong AI systems - that are intended to achieve self awareness.. With real Strong AI it is a very complex question. The basic answer is that the core design will become mostly unchanging once working, and that an AI can be moved from an obsolete or broken hardware core to a new one. The machines will generally also carry a complete up to date backup as part of normal function.
The big problem though is with security. To be safe Strong AI's will be build with a very strong virtually unbreakable security shield to prevent tampering or infiltration. Each machine will be driven by a unique code, and it cannot be repaired without that code - and this code will only exist inside a secure server at the creating company. So if the manufacturer goes out of business, someone else will have to keep those servers operating or the machines will become completely un-repairable. Since the servers will be a massive target for terrorists or enemy states that someone will very probably be the military or military intelligence.
As technology advances the AI core design will improve until it can function for many years before needing maintenance. For instance having many extra redundant CPU's and other backup elements. If we want to get really crazy within maybe 30 years 3D printers should improve to the point where machines can fabricate their own new chips inside the box.
BTW Strong AI is not likely to be developed using the consumerist disposable-tech model as it is not really appropriate. - ..
Machine base costs will range from maybe $20,000 for the most basic non-sentient non-autonomous version. What we picture as robots will probably cost from about $200,000 to over $1 million. Bigger more advanced machines will cost even more. There will also be big service and maintenance costs.. A big problem with advanced or sentient type robots at least in the first few years will be that their MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) will be pretty low - for a robot doing physical work probably less than a day, and for really heavy work that could fall to minutes.. Then there will also be complex moral and safety constraints and issues like machine rights.
There is the 'tiny' problem that Strong AI's will kill people - even with human safety as a primary design constraint. Many of the real applications of Strong AI involve safety in dangerous environments (ie cars) so even with machines performing much better than a person there will still be deaths. There is also the issue of machine stupidity, in which dumb Strong AI's accidentally kill people or get tricked by their users into killing people.. Then there are situations where the only way to save lives is to kill (think of 9/11), or places like war zones where protecting your own 'group' of people may involve defending against others or harming/killing them. I've been working on this since the 1990's and I'm still finding new issues today..
Fundamentally theoretically humans should be able to live almost forever.. Aging is effectively a suicide program, because to nature once you have reproduced you are disposable..
When simulating analogue systems using digital systems you ideally want both 1 and 0 to be in the same noise margin, so effectively 1 does = 0. Of course in reality you normally have considerably bigger noise margins but 1 still equals zero. /0 is a similar kind of question and a pretty important one given that its at the very heart of calculus h = limit(n --> 0)..