It doesn't matter, that doesn't make him a bad programmer - it just means he got something to market.
Believe it or not, writing the most immaculate, high performance code ever produced in the history of the universe can sometimes prevent you ever actually getting anything released.
A lot of programmers don't get this when they make such claims like "Notch is a bad programmer" - no he isn't, he delivered a product that many more people wanted and love than he could have possibly imagined - that's the only metric of the quality of a programmer that matters - that they can deliver a product that their target user base wants and loves. Any other metric is just a jealousy fuelled pissing contest.
I'm sure if Notch decided to enter a "Perfect code" contest, he could do just as well as most people.
I'm trying to find more information about this, the news that broke also states that BP's affiliates in this incident are banned from government contracts, but I'm trying to find what affiliates are involved.
Specifically, I'm wondering, does this mean Halliburton is also now banned from bidding on government contracts as they were complicit in the spill?
Yes, the problem is that during the incident, Obama repeatedly referred to them as British Petroleum and exploited the situation for his own political gain by explicitly making it about "foreign" companies by resorting to what all politicians do when they need a popularity boost- resorting to populism and nationalism.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Obama won the 2008 election, and I'm glad he won this latest one, but the whole BP incident is one of those few situations where as someone from the UK, I'd rather have seen a Republican running the show, because the Republicans at least do us in the UK the courtesy of giving us a bit of respect given that we've sacrificed 100s of our soldiers lives for Americas wars in the last 10 years.
So yes you're absolutely right, it is as much an American company as anything, but that didn't change the fact Obama made it all about "us" vs. "them" as if there was some foreign element to it all.
It seems you're one of those people that can't read?
As I pointed out, there are plenty of succesful over 40s still in the field. Of those who complain they can't compete in the field I pointed out they tend to fall into one of two categories, either those who don't have time to compete due to greater family commitments etc. which is a more prominent issue at that age, or those who genuinely have become lazy and can't be bothered anymore.
You're obviously very bitter about this given that you completely failed to misread the post and hence miss the point, so I guess your specific problem is that you're simply one of those who can't compete, to be fair I guess that may not be because of laziness, it may be because you obviously a) can't read, or b) if you can read, you can't properly interpret just a few simple paragraphs. In other words, you're too stupid for the field in the first place it would seem. It's no one elses fault you're this way though.
You're reading my suggestion out of context, you're absolutely right that the example I gave was my own moral judgement, but it was also just an example of a possible option should a new treaty be agreed to replace this one.
However, if your implication is that the original treaty was meant to be for all and any laws then you are wrong. The original treaty was sold by citizens on both sides of the pond as being entirely about extradition of terror suspects, many of us complained at the time that the proposed treaty was too vague but we were simply told (on both sides) by our governments "trust us" - of course, we didn't have a choice anyway because they went ahead regardless using the post-9/11 anti-terrorism fear mongering as the justification.
This is why it's a problem, and this is why it's not right that it's being used for every law even those that aren't crimes in both countries - because we were explicitly told that that's not what it was for, both US and UK citizens alike. Again, I only gave the suggestion I did based on my own moral judgement as an example for any future replacement treaty as to what might then be deemed acceptable - that doesn't mean everyone else, including our two governments will agree, but again, it's irrelevant to what we have now which is being used in a way we were told it wouldn't be and it's currently the US that is abusing it beyond it's original intention- more fool our government for believing the vagueness of it wouldn't be abused like this.
"Among other things, extraditing him here would allow the court battle to rage and a decision be reached on what behavior is or is not legal."
I get that you want that, I really do, but using our citizens for it isn't the right thing to do. It's your country and your problem- it's something you can, and should sort out amongst yourselves. You don't need to extradite anyone from here to do it as that's simply an attempt to bring xenophobia in it so the US government can claim evil foreigners are stealing US jobs and so forth. Use a US citizen, there are plenty hosting similar sites and keep that out of it. It's also an attempt at fear mongering, which should have no place in legal process.
This has been discussed here (and many places) before.
The issue exists because when the UK requests extradition it's asking to extradite someone whose actually committed a crime worth extraditing over - things like murder and so forth.
In contrast, US requests are sometimes for the most pathetically petty of things, such as in this case.
As such it's perfectly sensible that the US extradites in the majority of cases because the seriousness warrants it, but it doesn't make so much sense that the UK extradites in every case, because a number of the US requests are completely spurious. In those cases where the US requests are warranted - again, for example, murder, then the UK does tend to honour the request.
The UK does have other hurdles sometimes to deal with, such as European Court of Human Rights appeals and so forth, but fundamentally the issue isn't "how easy it is to extradite someone" but what crimes the extradition requests are actually for - it's this that has most British voters up in arms, and it's this that creates cries of it being one sided. For example, if an American preacher burns a Koran, and British soldiers die in Afghanistan as a result of the uproar that causes there, do you think the US would really extradite him here under the UK's incitement to religious hatred laws? That's effectively how Brits see this case - as America trying to apply it's laws here, that's also why people were angry about McKinnon, because the sentence he could've received was absurd compared to the more sane sentence he'd have received here for the crime.
Ultimately I think the real problem is that the treaty was written post-9/11 in haste for the purpose of terror extraditions, and, like most post-9/11 anti-terrorism laws, was poorly thought through and due to the vagueness of them due to being poorly written has been used well outside it's remit to attempt to extradite over things like file sharing. I, and I think most people here don't have a problem with an extradition treaty with the US per-se, providing it's limited to situations where say, someone in the UK murders someone in the US, then flies back to the UK and that sort of thing. What we take offence to is the sorts of things it's being used for, and the relatively inhumane penal system in the US (America jails far too many people, in jails that are often hopeless at ensuring rehabilitation and reducing reoffending).
You'll have to excuse me if when I saw him start with falsehoods such as:
"I'm fairly certain he was hosting the content himself."
Followed by rhetoric, like:
"stealing my viewers", "I'd fucking kill them." and "Stealing content is stealing content"
You'll have to excuse me if I read it as an uninformed, bile fuelled rant, and continued to read it that way throughout seeing as it was actually like that all the way through.
Maybe you're right though, maybe he suddenly gained an ounce of intelligence, and a slight clue about the topic he was discussing just at the moment he mentioned the GPL, as unlikely as that would seem given the rest of the post.
That's a very generous reading of "and violating" seeing as that doesn't even make any sense.
If he'd said something like "If someone ripped off Libre Office and started selling copies for cash in a manner that was in violation of the GPL" you'd be right, as it stands you're merely applying your own interpretation of his nonsensical statement and asserting it as the only correct interpretation.
But if you're one of those people who likes to feel they're the grand dictator of what was meant by an ambiguity then I'll let you have it, if that's the sort of thing you need to get yourself through life.
Well of course it doesn't make fraud legal, it does however mean that what he was doing - running a website with links to copyright infringing material, even if making money from it - was deemed not to be the crime of fraud under the circumstances of the case.
There was another similar case where a guy was found guilty but it was largely because he made it a professional enterprise actually forming a company out of it making it a genuinely criminal case.
It's funny you mention that, when I was in Arizona on holiday some years back our tour guide around Sedona on a pink jeep tour told us she found the sometimes scary situations she got into with her jeep relatively stress free, having come from New Jersey where the driving was horrendous.
He should've just called their bluff. America wouldn't have got him over this. Public outcry was enough about the McKinnon case, but this guy hadn't actually done anything illegal under UK law so the noise would've only got strong regarding this.
There is already a massive amount of pressure to reform our extradition agreement with the US as is, the US has done this in the hope that avoiding another embarassing turn-around by our government in deciding not to extradite because it would be politically impossible to do so due to the uproar which would've been the final nail in the coffin for what is an already struggling extradition treaty.
I hope this means America is finally realising that if they want to retain an extradition treaty with the UK where they feel it matters, i.e. with terrorism suspects - in other words, what the treaty was generally intended for - then they need to stop abusing it for, and taking the piss with other things.
This is their way of saving face, and simultaneously hoping they don't lose a valuable tool. It's a shame he didn't call their bluff though and become the guy who forced the final nail into the coffin for the extradition treaty, though I do sympathise with him making the decision he has - I imagine it's tough to be willing to put your life on the line for the greater good when your opponent is the most powerful nation and government in the world.
Except he hasn't done anything wrong under UK law. The police and music industry already tried that in the OiNK case and lost their case with the site owner walking free having been found not guilty of the fraud laws they tried to frame him with over it:
"I'm fairly certain he was hosting the content himself."
You can be as fairly certain as you want, but you'd still be completely and utterly wrong.
"If someone ripped off Libre Office and started selling copies for cash and violating the GPL, everyone on slashdot would be going apeshit over it."
Except the GPL allows you to do exactly that providing you also offer the source code for binaries, so no, I doubt they would be going apeshit over it, unless, like you, they knew not what the fuck they were on about. See here:
Yeah, it's all fun and games until someone steals the copper wire or even the tracks to sell illegaly as "scrap metal" and your nuclear engine goes flying off creating a ball of radioactive mess.
Honestly though I suspect this is probably the biggest danger with this sort of thing - you'd probably have to spend an awful lot of time and money securing the track to ensure it's safety.
Or maybe this is just a problem in the UK, where scrap metal theft regularly ruins my morning commute making me wonder why I don't just drive all the way in to the city centre and pay the extortionate parking fees instead!
Yes, it's sounds like the real problem here is that these areas of the US are suffering from a major tailgating problem above all else.
All a red light camera does is catches people who run a red light. I was always taught that when approaching traffic lights, approach them as if they're going to change and that's exactly what they do. I've never had a problem stopping for a red light, not once and neither have I had anyone go into the back of me at traffic lights.
From the comments on this thread it sounds like people in the US race up to lights and then slam their brakes on and everyone behind them tailgates as that's the only reason red light cameras would increase crash risk and cost. If that's the case then it sounds like there's a more fundamental issue here - that driving test standards in the US simply aren't high enough, and policing of bad driving isn't done well enough.
Maybe the US does need more raised roundabouts, you have little choice but to slow down coming up to them, otherwise you crash right into them and have to explain to the cops how the fuck you managed to land your car in the middle of a roundabout. That way people who drive like idiots automatically get caught because with a bit of shrubbery on the roundabout too it makes it hard for them to get away from the scene, assuming their car is even in good enough state to do so still. They soon learn.
I'll admit I've never worked in the valley (I've always lived and worked in the UK) but where I've encountered cries of ageism it's always been strongly correlated with incompetence or laziness.
Like the British tradesman who likes to knock off early, and do a shit job complaining about Polish immigrants taking his work when they do so because they work twice as hard and do a much better job, it's simply an excuse used by who are too lazy to compete in the labour market and want an easy ride handed to them.
It's nothing to do with age and entirely about how much time and effort you spend on remaining relevant and with IT being such a fast moving industry with platforms and technologies changing all the time you can't sit still for long before your skills and knowledge do become outdated. It's just the nature of the industry.
Maybe Silicon Valley is now an anomally, maybe there are a bunch of upstarts (that wasn't intended as a pun on startups, but maybe it works) who have this problem, but if that's the case I expect Silicon Valley's reign as tech central to rapidly suffer because personally, the people I learn the most from, from reading their books, their online articles, their posts and so forth are those who are over 40 who have continued to learn throughout their life. Certainly I've never seen the attitude "Oh, he's too old to do that job" and on the contrary it's always been if anything "At his age, he'll hopefully have a lot of experience", as an aside, I have however seen two cases of people being told they were too young for a particular job even though they were the best candidates, though that was in public sector, and despite all the PC propaganda plastered around most public sector offices and e-mail systems, I don't think I've ever worked in such a racist, ageist, homophobic workplace as I did when I worked in local government in the UK.
Or to give an example of the problem, if someone has been learning day in, day out for 40 years, they're inherently going to have an advantage over someone whose only been doing the same for 20, or 30 years. If however someone has been learning day in day out for 30 years but stopped doing so, then by the age of 40 why would they realistically have an advantage over someone whose been doing so for 30 years? 10 years of stagnation doesn't look good, and it's a much safer option to take the person whose still working hard to keep uptodate.
To be fair, I don't think it's necessarily entirely always laziness (though much of the time it is), sometimes it's the pressures of having a family and so forth, but I'm not sure what the answer is here - that's still a choice you make, expecting to get paid just as well, despite having less talent than someone else who is younger than you just because you chose to have a family, and they haven't yet seems a bit unfair on the younger person- it's not their fault you chose to have kids and dedicate much of your time to that rather than continuous learning either.
But mostly it seems to be people getting to a certain milestone - 40, 50, 60, and looking back on their life and realising they missed a number of opportunities, but rather than accepting that, and simply looking at how they want to live going forward - to try again, or just be happy with what they have, they instead look for someone else to blame for their own failings.
Still, this is just my opinion based on my experiences, as I say, maybe in other places it really is a problem, but I'd be rather surprised as it seems to be entirely contrary to a region being succesful - throwing away the workers with most potential for competence and knowledge. I don't really see how Silicon Valley could have succeded as it has if it was relying entirely on the inexperienced, nor can I see how those many excellent older technical authors and bloggers living in Silicon Valley could have obtained the experience they have, to write about what they do in the level of detail and with the air of competence that they do if they hadn't been given opportunities in the valley, even post-40.
"No, I glossed over that because everyone on/. already realizes that, although you in your arrogance assume you're the only one and that eveyone else is just ignorant and wrong."
Actually, that's probably because my first degree was in AI and I have done much commercial work with it. Most people here actually don't understand AI and only have a sci-fi fed view of it. There are some here that do get it, but most most certainly don't, that much has been clear in the many debates on the topic, this one included. The only have to look through the discussion now to see some people believe AI is purely about concious machines that suffer traits such as malice. This is false, do a poll of real actual AI researches and I absolutely guarantee you that the vast majority (95%+) will tell you that that is not what AI is in reality right now, but merely the focus of one facet of AI research. Saying AI has failed or is nowhere near it's goals is like saying Mathematics has failed because we don't have a grand unified mathematical model of the universe that explains everything. Obviously we'd like that, obviously we're not there yet, but it far from makes mathematics useless and far from means mathematics isn't used day in day out for other things.
"And also because it doesn't matter in this discussion, because this is not a discussion on exactly what all AI could possibly include, but rather a discussion about things that can threaten the very existence of humanity as a species (and potentially all life as we know it on planet earth)."
No, this is a discussion about a new centre in Cambridge, whatever The Daily Mail's warped view on it is is meaningless.
"The rest of your tripe is strictly about AI in the financial world, which, while damaging to our wallets and potentially modern civilization, has no way to actually threaten our species."
You're completely failing to grasp the bigger picture. If you think financial collapse can't be a trigger for larger problems then you're both ignorant of reality, and history. This includes being a trigger for the sort of turmoil that leads to nuclear war, World War II and the subsequent cold war were all triggered initially by financial turmoil.
Besides, I pointed out other issues well beyond finance - that these sorts of systems are being used in more and more places, including target identification which could lead to assasination of the wrong target. Assassination was kind of a big factor in the first World War, which was a catalyst leading to the financial turmoil mentioned above.
"or a planet turned to desert or ice through climate change"
Sensationalist much? If that's what you think climate change will do then it's no wonder you also believe this is about terminators and don't actually understand the reality of what this centre will actually study. It's not going to turn the Earth into a planet with a binary climate where everything is either desert or ice, much of the Earth will be as it is now - part of the spectrum between that. Where that spectrum exists will change and move, but there will still be vast habitable areas capable of sustaining a human population of many billions.
"And as I said in my previous post, any AI we presently have isn't remotely capable of anything like that."
Neither is biotechnology or global warming currently capable of that, your point?
"And yes, the distinction is important here. AI can easily control something like finances that is confined completely to the digital world - but the digital world can't physically harm us or threaten our existence as a species."
No but it can act as a catalyst. It's clear the internet had a major part to play in the arab spring, even if it wasn't the only catalyst. That had real world consequences just as if you hack into the CIA it'll have real world consequences.
"Worst-case scenario, we bomb the power source the AI depends on, game over."
Here we are again believing it's about some kind of Skynet-Terminator fantasist s
"And I think you're grossly misunderstanding AI as used in this context, and grossly overestimating the amount of control it has even on systems where it is present."
Actually, I think you've completely failed to grasp my point of what AI is full stop. You've failed to recognise the underlying point that AI, as we know it, is commonly nothing more than algorithms with emergent properties.
"First, the context here is things that are a threat to human civilization as a whole. The other three things are plausible threats in this context."
Ignoring the fact that I think you're taking The Daily Mail's interpretation of robot terminators running round a little too seriously, rather than the actual underlying story (Cambridge University staff aren't as stupid as you seem to think - trust me, they get it, and don't believe in robot terminators running round being the issue either), I'm not convinced this is true. Global warming is no doubt a problem, but any more a threat to human civilisation as a whole rather than say, a rogue military algorithm hitting the wrong target and triggering a political shit storm? I'm not convinced by that. It's not like we're projecting global temperature increases high enough to wipe out civilisation, merely to make some areas uninhabitable and reduce crop yields etc. in others. There will still be vast amounts of habitable territory, and other areas will even become more habitable. Nuclear war indeed could pretty much whipe out civilisation, and a rogue engineered virus could likely do so too. Global warming? No, it'll just create winners and losers, rather than make everyone a loser like nuclear war would.
"it also has to be able to take the crucial step of cutting off human control entirely and still continue to do its damage."
No it doesn't, that's precisely the point. All that has to happen is that humans have to allow algorithms to take control of important systems where said algorithms are chaotic, and non-deterministic in nature and be left to go down this route. All it requires is that humans pay little attention. This is precisely how a number of automated trading incidents have occured - because by the time a human realises there's a problem, it's already happened.
"Current AI is not even remotely close to this."
Yes it is, there are countless examples of algorithms with chaotic properties running out of control.
"Second, anywhere AI is currently used it has so little control over the systems it's laughable."
I think you have an anthropomorphic view of AI, which further demonstrates my earlier point that I'm not sure you actually understood my original post. Current AI algorithms don't set out to control anything, they're not concious, they don't have the capacity to understand control, or even understand full stop. They are however becoming more and more commonplace in their usage, being placed on more and more systems important, safety critical, and even military.
"Frankly, I'm not convinced we even have the capability to design an AI system that's capable of truly being a threat."
That's okay, some people used to think the Earth was flat, and that to fly, let alone to the moon, was nothing more than a dream.
This is the problem the field of AI faces. I remember some years ago here on Slashdot there was an AI article and people were slagging off the field of AI saying "Where are our intelligent robots? AI is obviously a bunk field" and other such stupidity and it was then I realised the problem AI suffers.
It suffers from the fact that once we commonly understand something, it ceases to be magic. Whilst there is a rough definition of strong and weak AI, and to date, all AI produced has been weak, ultimately the field of AI seeks to produce more intelligent computer systems. It is this research that has given us everything from spell check, to Google search, from gesture recognition, to even some resilient networking technology. The fruits of AI are used by us day in day out and it's an important subject.
When a new idea in AI is envisaged, it sounds like magic, when it's first implemented and seen working, it looks like magic, but when it's published in a paper and everyone read and understands the technique and says "Ah, that's how it works!" it becomes nothing more than just another algorithm.
I see no reason why even if we're able to replicate an intelligence with the same abilities of the human brain that at that point it'd be any different - that when we understand it, the working of the human brain becomes, just another algorithm.
So here's why I think the GPs assertion that AI doesn't exist is wrong, and hence isn't a threat. I think automatic trading algorithms creating financial turmoil that leads to everything from revolutions to suicides, I think facial recognition technology that leads to the security services shooting dead the wrong person, I think when these things happen, AI is already causing us problems precisely because we don't yet have a good understanding of the chaos that can emerge from complex AI systems and hence where it can go wrong. We just don't see it as AI.
The problems that stem from AI are problems where we do not understand emergent chaotic behaviour enough to understand when it can go wrong and why. These are problems we already see in the real world.
I suspect this is what the centre will really be looking at and discussing as much as it will be talking about rogue robots making us their slaves. It's about verifiability, how can we verify that systems that are emergent and often even somewhat non-deterministic in nature, are not going to step outside the bounds we want to set for them? We start answering that by looking at how we can achieve this with current chaotic systems, when we've got it sorted with them, then we can look at our solution's application to more advanced forms of intelligence we may one day create.
Maybe you just have the same biases they do so don't notice them?
The Register definitely has it's biases, it's a very right wing leaning publication. To position it in UK politics it's politically aligned with the furthest right leaning elements of the Tory party, i.e. pretty close to UKIP.
I used to read it a fair bit but gave up when I posted a response to one of Andrew Orlowski's articles (one of the few times he allowed comments) pointing out some shall we say "factual inaccuracies" in his story including sources, it was a perfectly polite post, but it obviously upset Andrew to have his authority questioned because after that my account was banned and every other post I'd made there ever was also deleted.
Amusingly their ban system is made of complete fail though, if you did a reset password request on the login area it reset the password, and removed the ban:)
It didn't matter though because as I say, I stopped reading and posting at that point. Any "journalist" who can't accept corrections to their story and prefers to censor opposing viewpoints can hardly be deemed a journalist. Really, it's the Fox News of the IT world. Lewis Page's articles were always nearly 100% bullshit too, but to give him credit he at least allowed comments and didn't censor the countless people pointing out the hundreds of flaws in his articles- i.e. claiming the Eurofighter wasn't getting a proper bombing capability until 2020 and then hence claiming it had no air to ground capability and that we should've bought F18s, whilst conveniently ignoring the fact that actually the Eurofighter already has Air to Ground missile capability.
Either way The Register is alright I guess if you want to reaffirm your viewpoint if you share that viewpoint, but it's hardly a good source of objective, or even correct news. Often it's just outright quite literally completely wrong about things which doesn't bode well if you actually want to gain anything of actual value from it.
This is what anyone starting their own business deals with. Either you have a business plan that allows you to make enough money to live from it, or, if you don't, you start your business alongside a job and grow it until it's making enough money to quit your full time job.
I started writing a game 2 years ago, I started at christmas, and had 2 weeks off over that period. During this time, as well as learning XNA I managed to build a full blown world editor for manipulating terrain, placing entities, setting properties and basic scripts on them. Had I carried on, by Easter, I would've taken another two weeks off whilst also doing some in my spare time I suspect by this time I'd probably have something beginning to resemble a decent little game and the bulk of the remaining work would've then been art assets and bringing it all together with level building etc. Off loading level building to trusted friends or volunteers, and buying in art assets or using free ones, or again, having friends to do it I believe would've made it feasible to release a sellable indie game within a year whilst also working full time.
I didn't do it though, because I decided to do further studies and get another degree, and when you study full time, and work full time you really do have pick and choose what else you do on top.
A lot of people, not just wannabe game devs, but musicians, artists and so forth too seem to have this entitlement attitude- that the world owes them a reasonable wage doing whatever it is they want to do. That economics and business are irrelevant, they should have the right to profit enjoying themselves engaging in their hobby.
The real world isn't like this though, the real world is a much harsher place, unless you're one of the lucky few that win X-Factor or whatever it's up to you to figure out how to live first and foremost and then try and make money doing what you want to do. Life isn't easy, and I find those with an entitlement attitude are those who most often fail because they have that attitude because they're too damn lazy to work for a living and want everything handed to them on a plate.
Most people have to work hard in life to get what they want, unless you have rich parents, win the lottery, or win some talent show, then life will be no different for you.
For what it's worth, in the UK at least, the UK companies have already had somewhat of a hounding and many cases involving UK companies are currently still going through the courts.
This latest tranche seems to be because US companies are the next biggest problem, and also Apple is one of the companies included though I agree about Microsoft - I'm sure they're just as bad but they don't seem to have been named as a culprit. Amazon seems to have been the worst, paying literally nothing in corporation tax on £7bn, Google has paid a very small amount and Starbucks has been singled out because one of it's main competitors in the UK, Costa Coffee, has been paying not just the full amount of corporation tax, but all other due taxes too to the tune of around 30% of it's revenue in tax IIRC.
As such I don't think it's about finger pointing, this has been an ongoing issue since this government came to power and has been a measure that's been pursued alongside spending cuts, tax increases and so forth as it's been as much part of the governments deficit reduction strategy as those other elements have. Maybe the issue is different in France and Australia, but I don't think so - I think all governments are targetting tax avoidance as much as they are other deficit reduction strategies and that's why this has come about.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter, that doesn't make him a bad programmer - it just means he got something to market.
Believe it or not, writing the most immaculate, high performance code ever produced in the history of the universe can sometimes prevent you ever actually getting anything released.
A lot of programmers don't get this when they make such claims like "Notch is a bad programmer" - no he isn't, he delivered a product that many more people wanted and love than he could have possibly imagined - that's the only metric of the quality of a programmer that matters - that they can deliver a product that their target user base wants and loves. Any other metric is just a jealousy fuelled pissing contest.
I'm sure if Notch decided to enter a "Perfect code" contest, he could do just as well as most people.
I'm trying to find more information about this, the news that broke also states that BP's affiliates in this incident are banned from government contracts, but I'm trying to find what affiliates are involved.
Specifically, I'm wondering, does this mean Halliburton is also now banned from bidding on government contracts as they were complicit in the spill?
Yes, the problem is that during the incident, Obama repeatedly referred to them as British Petroleum and exploited the situation for his own political gain by explicitly making it about "foreign" companies by resorting to what all politicians do when they need a popularity boost- resorting to populism and nationalism.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Obama won the 2008 election, and I'm glad he won this latest one, but the whole BP incident is one of those few situations where as someone from the UK, I'd rather have seen a Republican running the show, because the Republicans at least do us in the UK the courtesy of giving us a bit of respect given that we've sacrificed 100s of our soldiers lives for Americas wars in the last 10 years.
So yes you're absolutely right, it is as much an American company as anything, but that didn't change the fact Obama made it all about "us" vs. "them" as if there was some foreign element to it all.
It seems you're one of those people that can't read?
As I pointed out, there are plenty of succesful over 40s still in the field. Of those who complain they can't compete in the field I pointed out they tend to fall into one of two categories, either those who don't have time to compete due to greater family commitments etc. which is a more prominent issue at that age, or those who genuinely have become lazy and can't be bothered anymore.
You're obviously very bitter about this given that you completely failed to misread the post and hence miss the point, so I guess your specific problem is that you're simply one of those who can't compete, to be fair I guess that may not be because of laziness, it may be because you obviously a) can't read, or b) if you can read, you can't properly interpret just a few simple paragraphs. In other words, you're too stupid for the field in the first place it would seem. It's no one elses fault you're this way though.
You're reading my suggestion out of context, you're absolutely right that the example I gave was my own moral judgement, but it was also just an example of a possible option should a new treaty be agreed to replace this one.
However, if your implication is that the original treaty was meant to be for all and any laws then you are wrong. The original treaty was sold by citizens on both sides of the pond as being entirely about extradition of terror suspects, many of us complained at the time that the proposed treaty was too vague but we were simply told (on both sides) by our governments "trust us" - of course, we didn't have a choice anyway because they went ahead regardless using the post-9/11 anti-terrorism fear mongering as the justification.
This is why it's a problem, and this is why it's not right that it's being used for every law even those that aren't crimes in both countries - because we were explicitly told that that's not what it was for, both US and UK citizens alike. Again, I only gave the suggestion I did based on my own moral judgement as an example for any future replacement treaty as to what might then be deemed acceptable - that doesn't mean everyone else, including our two governments will agree, but again, it's irrelevant to what we have now which is being used in a way we were told it wouldn't be and it's currently the US that is abusing it beyond it's original intention- more fool our government for believing the vagueness of it wouldn't be abused like this.
"Among other things, extraditing him here would allow the court battle to rage and a decision be reached on what behavior is or is not legal."
I get that you want that, I really do, but using our citizens for it isn't the right thing to do. It's your country and your problem- it's something you can, and should sort out amongst yourselves. You don't need to extradite anyone from here to do it as that's simply an attempt to bring xenophobia in it so the US government can claim evil foreigners are stealing US jobs and so forth. Use a US citizen, there are plenty hosting similar sites and keep that out of it. It's also an attempt at fear mongering, which should have no place in legal process.
This has been discussed here (and many places) before.
The issue exists because when the UK requests extradition it's asking to extradite someone whose actually committed a crime worth extraditing over - things like murder and so forth.
In contrast, US requests are sometimes for the most pathetically petty of things, such as in this case.
As such it's perfectly sensible that the US extradites in the majority of cases because the seriousness warrants it, but it doesn't make so much sense that the UK extradites in every case, because a number of the US requests are completely spurious. In those cases where the US requests are warranted - again, for example, murder, then the UK does tend to honour the request.
The UK does have other hurdles sometimes to deal with, such as European Court of Human Rights appeals and so forth, but fundamentally the issue isn't "how easy it is to extradite someone" but what crimes the extradition requests are actually for - it's this that has most British voters up in arms, and it's this that creates cries of it being one sided. For example, if an American preacher burns a Koran, and British soldiers die in Afghanistan as a result of the uproar that causes there, do you think the US would really extradite him here under the UK's incitement to religious hatred laws? That's effectively how Brits see this case - as America trying to apply it's laws here, that's also why people were angry about McKinnon, because the sentence he could've received was absurd compared to the more sane sentence he'd have received here for the crime.
Ultimately I think the real problem is that the treaty was written post-9/11 in haste for the purpose of terror extraditions, and, like most post-9/11 anti-terrorism laws, was poorly thought through and due to the vagueness of them due to being poorly written has been used well outside it's remit to attempt to extradite over things like file sharing. I, and I think most people here don't have a problem with an extradition treaty with the US per-se, providing it's limited to situations where say, someone in the UK murders someone in the US, then flies back to the UK and that sort of thing. What we take offence to is the sorts of things it's being used for, and the relatively inhumane penal system in the US (America jails far too many people, in jails that are often hopeless at ensuring rehabilitation and reducing reoffending).
You'll have to excuse me if when I saw him start with falsehoods such as:
"I'm fairly certain he was hosting the content himself."
Followed by rhetoric, like:
"stealing my viewers", "I'd fucking kill them." and "Stealing content is stealing content"
You'll have to excuse me if I read it as an uninformed, bile fuelled rant, and continued to read it that way throughout seeing as it was actually like that all the way through.
Maybe you're right though, maybe he suddenly gained an ounce of intelligence, and a slight clue about the topic he was discussing just at the moment he mentioned the GPL, as unlikely as that would seem given the rest of the post.
That's a very generous reading of "and violating" seeing as that doesn't even make any sense.
If he'd said something like "If someone ripped off Libre Office and started selling copies for cash in a manner that was in violation of the GPL" you'd be right, as it stands you're merely applying your own interpretation of his nonsensical statement and asserting it as the only correct interpretation.
But if you're one of those people who likes to feel they're the grand dictator of what was meant by an ambiguity then I'll let you have it, if that's the sort of thing you need to get yourself through life.
Well of course it doesn't make fraud legal, it does however mean that what he was doing - running a website with links to copyright infringing material, even if making money from it - was deemed not to be the crime of fraud under the circumstances of the case.
There was another similar case where a guy was found guilty but it was largely because he made it a professional enterprise actually forming a company out of it making it a genuinely criminal case.
O'Dwyer's case is identical to the first case.
Yes, they mean that he doesn't understand that selling GPL'd software doesn't in fact violate the GPL.
It's funny you mention that, when I was in Arizona on holiday some years back our tour guide around Sedona on a pink jeep tour told us she found the sometimes scary situations she got into with her jeep relatively stress free, having come from New Jersey where the driving was horrendous.
He should've just called their bluff. America wouldn't have got him over this. Public outcry was enough about the McKinnon case, but this guy hadn't actually done anything illegal under UK law so the noise would've only got strong regarding this.
There is already a massive amount of pressure to reform our extradition agreement with the US as is, the US has done this in the hope that avoiding another embarassing turn-around by our government in deciding not to extradite because it would be politically impossible to do so due to the uproar which would've been the final nail in the coffin for what is an already struggling extradition treaty.
I hope this means America is finally realising that if they want to retain an extradition treaty with the UK where they feel it matters, i.e. with terrorism suspects - in other words, what the treaty was generally intended for - then they need to stop abusing it for, and taking the piss with other things.
This is their way of saving face, and simultaneously hoping they don't lose a valuable tool. It's a shame he didn't call their bluff though and become the guy who forced the final nail into the coffin for the extradition treaty, though I do sympathise with him making the decision he has - I imagine it's tough to be willing to put your life on the line for the greater good when your opponent is the most powerful nation and government in the world.
Except he hasn't done anything wrong under UK law. The police and music industry already tried that in the OiNK case and lost their case with the site owner walking free having been found not guilty of the fraud laws they tried to frame him with over it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/8461879.stm
"I'm fairly certain he was hosting the content himself."
You can be as fairly certain as you want, but you'd still be completely and utterly wrong.
"If someone ripped off Libre Office and started selling copies for cash and violating the GPL, everyone on slashdot would be going apeshit over it."
Except the GPL allows you to do exactly that providing you also offer the source code for binaries, so no, I doubt they would be going apeshit over it, unless, like you, they knew not what the fuck they were on about. See here:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney
As the rest of your post is based on your false starting assumptions it is all equally wrong.
Yeah, it's all fun and games until someone steals the copper wire or even the tracks to sell illegaly as "scrap metal" and your nuclear engine goes flying off creating a ball of radioactive mess.
Honestly though I suspect this is probably the biggest danger with this sort of thing - you'd probably have to spend an awful lot of time and money securing the track to ensure it's safety.
Or maybe this is just a problem in the UK, where scrap metal theft regularly ruins my morning commute making me wonder why I don't just drive all the way in to the city centre and pay the extortionate parking fees instead!
Yes, it's sounds like the real problem here is that these areas of the US are suffering from a major tailgating problem above all else.
All a red light camera does is catches people who run a red light. I was always taught that when approaching traffic lights, approach them as if they're going to change and that's exactly what they do. I've never had a problem stopping for a red light, not once and neither have I had anyone go into the back of me at traffic lights.
From the comments on this thread it sounds like people in the US race up to lights and then slam their brakes on and everyone behind them tailgates as that's the only reason red light cameras would increase crash risk and cost. If that's the case then it sounds like there's a more fundamental issue here - that driving test standards in the US simply aren't high enough, and policing of bad driving isn't done well enough.
Maybe the US does need more raised roundabouts, you have little choice but to slow down coming up to them, otherwise you crash right into them and have to explain to the cops how the fuck you managed to land your car in the middle of a roundabout. That way people who drive like idiots automatically get caught because with a bit of shrubbery on the roundabout too it makes it hard for them to get away from the scene, assuming their car is even in good enough state to do so still. They soon learn.
I'll admit I've never worked in the valley (I've always lived and worked in the UK) but where I've encountered cries of ageism it's always been strongly correlated with incompetence or laziness.
Like the British tradesman who likes to knock off early, and do a shit job complaining about Polish immigrants taking his work when they do so because they work twice as hard and do a much better job, it's simply an excuse used by who are too lazy to compete in the labour market and want an easy ride handed to them.
It's nothing to do with age and entirely about how much time and effort you spend on remaining relevant and with IT being such a fast moving industry with platforms and technologies changing all the time you can't sit still for long before your skills and knowledge do become outdated. It's just the nature of the industry.
Maybe Silicon Valley is now an anomally, maybe there are a bunch of upstarts (that wasn't intended as a pun on startups, but maybe it works) who have this problem, but if that's the case I expect Silicon Valley's reign as tech central to rapidly suffer because personally, the people I learn the most from, from reading their books, their online articles, their posts and so forth are those who are over 40 who have continued to learn throughout their life. Certainly I've never seen the attitude "Oh, he's too old to do that job" and on the contrary it's always been if anything "At his age, he'll hopefully have a lot of experience", as an aside, I have however seen two cases of people being told they were too young for a particular job even though they were the best candidates, though that was in public sector, and despite all the PC propaganda plastered around most public sector offices and e-mail systems, I don't think I've ever worked in such a racist, ageist, homophobic workplace as I did when I worked in local government in the UK.
Or to give an example of the problem, if someone has been learning day in, day out for 40 years, they're inherently going to have an advantage over someone whose only been doing the same for 20, or 30 years. If however someone has been learning day in day out for 30 years but stopped doing so, then by the age of 40 why would they realistically have an advantage over someone whose been doing so for 30 years? 10 years of stagnation doesn't look good, and it's a much safer option to take the person whose still working hard to keep uptodate.
To be fair, I don't think it's necessarily entirely always laziness (though much of the time it is), sometimes it's the pressures of having a family and so forth, but I'm not sure what the answer is here - that's still a choice you make, expecting to get paid just as well, despite having less talent than someone else who is younger than you just because you chose to have a family, and they haven't yet seems a bit unfair on the younger person- it's not their fault you chose to have kids and dedicate much of your time to that rather than continuous learning either.
But mostly it seems to be people getting to a certain milestone - 40, 50, 60, and looking back on their life and realising they missed a number of opportunities, but rather than accepting that, and simply looking at how they want to live going forward - to try again, or just be happy with what they have, they instead look for someone else to blame for their own failings.
Still, this is just my opinion based on my experiences, as I say, maybe in other places it really is a problem, but I'd be rather surprised as it seems to be entirely contrary to a region being succesful - throwing away the workers with most potential for competence and knowledge. I don't really see how Silicon Valley could have succeded as it has if it was relying entirely on the inexperienced, nor can I see how those many excellent older technical authors and bloggers living in Silicon Valley could have obtained the experience they have, to write about what they do in the level of detail and with the air of competence that they do if they hadn't been given opportunities in the valley, even post-40.
"No, I glossed over that because everyone on /. already realizes that, although you in your arrogance assume you're the only one and that eveyone else is just ignorant and wrong."
Actually, that's probably because my first degree was in AI and I have done much commercial work with it. Most people here actually don't understand AI and only have a sci-fi fed view of it. There are some here that do get it, but most most certainly don't, that much has been clear in the many debates on the topic, this one included. The only have to look through the discussion now to see some people believe AI is purely about concious machines that suffer traits such as malice. This is false, do a poll of real actual AI researches and I absolutely guarantee you that the vast majority (95%+) will tell you that that is not what AI is in reality right now, but merely the focus of one facet of AI research. Saying AI has failed or is nowhere near it's goals is like saying Mathematics has failed because we don't have a grand unified mathematical model of the universe that explains everything. Obviously we'd like that, obviously we're not there yet, but it far from makes mathematics useless and far from means mathematics isn't used day in day out for other things.
"And also because it doesn't matter in this discussion, because this is not a discussion on exactly what all AI could possibly include, but rather a discussion about things that can threaten the very existence of humanity as a species (and potentially all life as we know it on planet earth)."
No, this is a discussion about a new centre in Cambridge, whatever The Daily Mail's warped view on it is is meaningless.
"The rest of your tripe is strictly about AI in the financial world, which, while damaging to our wallets and potentially modern civilization, has no way to actually threaten our species."
You're completely failing to grasp the bigger picture. If you think financial collapse can't be a trigger for larger problems then you're both ignorant of reality, and history. This includes being a trigger for the sort of turmoil that leads to nuclear war, World War II and the subsequent cold war were all triggered initially by financial turmoil.
Besides, I pointed out other issues well beyond finance - that these sorts of systems are being used in more and more places, including target identification which could lead to assasination of the wrong target. Assassination was kind of a big factor in the first World War, which was a catalyst leading to the financial turmoil mentioned above.
"or a planet turned to desert or ice through climate change"
Sensationalist much? If that's what you think climate change will do then it's no wonder you also believe this is about terminators and don't actually understand the reality of what this centre will actually study. It's not going to turn the Earth into a planet with a binary climate where everything is either desert or ice, much of the Earth will be as it is now - part of the spectrum between that. Where that spectrum exists will change and move, but there will still be vast habitable areas capable of sustaining a human population of many billions.
"And as I said in my previous post, any AI we presently have isn't remotely capable of anything like that."
Neither is biotechnology or global warming currently capable of that, your point?
"And yes, the distinction is important here. AI can easily control something like finances that is confined completely to the digital world - but the digital world can't physically harm us or threaten our existence as a species."
No but it can act as a catalyst. It's clear the internet had a major part to play in the arab spring, even if it wasn't the only catalyst. That had real world consequences just as if you hack into the CIA it'll have real world consequences.
"Worst-case scenario, we bomb the power source the AI depends on, game over."
Here we are again believing it's about some kind of Skynet-Terminator fantasist s
"And I think you're grossly misunderstanding AI as used in this context, and grossly overestimating the amount of control it has even on systems where it is present."
Actually, I think you've completely failed to grasp my point of what AI is full stop. You've failed to recognise the underlying point that AI, as we know it, is commonly nothing more than algorithms with emergent properties.
"First, the context here is things that are a threat to human civilization as a whole. The other three things are plausible threats in this context."
Ignoring the fact that I think you're taking The Daily Mail's interpretation of robot terminators running round a little too seriously, rather than the actual underlying story (Cambridge University staff aren't as stupid as you seem to think - trust me, they get it, and don't believe in robot terminators running round being the issue either), I'm not convinced this is true. Global warming is no doubt a problem, but any more a threat to human civilisation as a whole rather than say, a rogue military algorithm hitting the wrong target and triggering a political shit storm? I'm not convinced by that. It's not like we're projecting global temperature increases high enough to wipe out civilisation, merely to make some areas uninhabitable and reduce crop yields etc. in others. There will still be vast amounts of habitable territory, and other areas will even become more habitable. Nuclear war indeed could pretty much whipe out civilisation, and a rogue engineered virus could likely do so too. Global warming? No, it'll just create winners and losers, rather than make everyone a loser like nuclear war would.
"it also has to be able to take the crucial step of cutting off human control entirely and still continue to do its damage."
No it doesn't, that's precisely the point. All that has to happen is that humans have to allow algorithms to take control of important systems where said algorithms are chaotic, and non-deterministic in nature and be left to go down this route. All it requires is that humans pay little attention. This is precisely how a number of automated trading incidents have occured - because by the time a human realises there's a problem, it's already happened.
"Current AI is not even remotely close to this."
Yes it is, there are countless examples of algorithms with chaotic properties running out of control.
"Second, anywhere AI is currently used it has so little control over the systems it's laughable."
I think you have an anthropomorphic view of AI, which further demonstrates my earlier point that I'm not sure you actually understood my original post. Current AI algorithms don't set out to control anything, they're not concious, they don't have the capacity to understand control, or even understand full stop. They are however becoming more and more commonplace in their usage, being placed on more and more systems important, safety critical, and even military.
"Frankly, I'm not convinced we even have the capability to design an AI system that's capable of truly being a threat."
That's okay, some people used to think the Earth was flat, and that to fly, let alone to the moon, was nothing more than a dream.
This is the problem the field of AI faces. I remember some years ago here on Slashdot there was an AI article and people were slagging off the field of AI saying "Where are our intelligent robots? AI is obviously a bunk field" and other such stupidity and it was then I realised the problem AI suffers.
It suffers from the fact that once we commonly understand something, it ceases to be magic. Whilst there is a rough definition of strong and weak AI, and to date, all AI produced has been weak, ultimately the field of AI seeks to produce more intelligent computer systems. It is this research that has given us everything from spell check, to Google search, from gesture recognition, to even some resilient networking technology. The fruits of AI are used by us day in day out and it's an important subject.
When a new idea in AI is envisaged, it sounds like magic, when it's first implemented and seen working, it looks like magic, but when it's published in a paper and everyone read and understands the technique and says "Ah, that's how it works!" it becomes nothing more than just another algorithm.
I see no reason why even if we're able to replicate an intelligence with the same abilities of the human brain that at that point it'd be any different - that when we understand it, the working of the human brain becomes, just another algorithm.
So here's why I think the GPs assertion that AI doesn't exist is wrong, and hence isn't a threat. I think automatic trading algorithms creating financial turmoil that leads to everything from revolutions to suicides, I think facial recognition technology that leads to the security services shooting dead the wrong person, I think when these things happen, AI is already causing us problems precisely because we don't yet have a good understanding of the chaos that can emerge from complex AI systems and hence where it can go wrong. We just don't see it as AI.
The problems that stem from AI are problems where we do not understand emergent chaotic behaviour enough to understand when it can go wrong and why. These are problems we already see in the real world.
I suspect this is what the centre will really be looking at and discussing as much as it will be talking about rogue robots making us their slaves. It's about verifiability, how can we verify that systems that are emergent and often even somewhat non-deterministic in nature, are not going to step outside the bounds we want to set for them? We start answering that by looking at how we can achieve this with current chaotic systems, when we've got it sorted with them, then we can look at our solution's application to more advanced forms of intelligence we may one day create.
Maybe you just have the same biases they do so don't notice them?
The Register definitely has it's biases, it's a very right wing leaning publication. To position it in UK politics it's politically aligned with the furthest right leaning elements of the Tory party, i.e. pretty close to UKIP.
I used to read it a fair bit but gave up when I posted a response to one of Andrew Orlowski's articles (one of the few times he allowed comments) pointing out some shall we say "factual inaccuracies" in his story including sources, it was a perfectly polite post, but it obviously upset Andrew to have his authority questioned because after that my account was banned and every other post I'd made there ever was also deleted.
Amusingly their ban system is made of complete fail though, if you did a reset password request on the login area it reset the password, and removed the ban :)
It didn't matter though because as I say, I stopped reading and posting at that point. Any "journalist" who can't accept corrections to their story and prefers to censor opposing viewpoints can hardly be deemed a journalist. Really, it's the Fox News of the IT world. Lewis Page's articles were always nearly 100% bullshit too, but to give him credit he at least allowed comments and didn't censor the countless people pointing out the hundreds of flaws in his articles- i.e. claiming the Eurofighter wasn't getting a proper bombing capability until 2020 and then hence claiming it had no air to ground capability and that we should've bought F18s, whilst conveniently ignoring the fact that actually the Eurofighter already has Air to Ground missile capability.
Either way The Register is alright I guess if you want to reaffirm your viewpoint if you share that viewpoint, but it's hardly a good source of objective, or even correct news. Often it's just outright quite literally completely wrong about things which doesn't bode well if you actually want to gain anything of actual value from it.
This is what anyone starting their own business deals with. Either you have a business plan that allows you to make enough money to live from it, or, if you don't, you start your business alongside a job and grow it until it's making enough money to quit your full time job.
I started writing a game 2 years ago, I started at christmas, and had 2 weeks off over that period. During this time, as well as learning XNA I managed to build a full blown world editor for manipulating terrain, placing entities, setting properties and basic scripts on them. Had I carried on, by Easter, I would've taken another two weeks off whilst also doing some in my spare time I suspect by this time I'd probably have something beginning to resemble a decent little game and the bulk of the remaining work would've then been art assets and bringing it all together with level building etc. Off loading level building to trusted friends or volunteers, and buying in art assets or using free ones, or again, having friends to do it I believe would've made it feasible to release a sellable indie game within a year whilst also working full time.
I didn't do it though, because I decided to do further studies and get another degree, and when you study full time, and work full time you really do have pick and choose what else you do on top.
A lot of people, not just wannabe game devs, but musicians, artists and so forth too seem to have this entitlement attitude- that the world owes them a reasonable wage doing whatever it is they want to do. That economics and business are irrelevant, they should have the right to profit enjoying themselves engaging in their hobby.
The real world isn't like this though, the real world is a much harsher place, unless you're one of the lucky few that win X-Factor or whatever it's up to you to figure out how to live first and foremost and then try and make money doing what you want to do. Life isn't easy, and I find those with an entitlement attitude are those who most often fail because they have that attitude because they're too damn lazy to work for a living and want everything handed to them on a plate.
Most people have to work hard in life to get what they want, unless you have rich parents, win the lottery, or win some talent show, then life will be no different for you.
"While Nintendo is certainly a profitable company"
Is it? Last I heard they were making a loss now.
For what it's worth, in the UK at least, the UK companies have already had somewhat of a hounding and many cases involving UK companies are currently still going through the courts.
This latest tranche seems to be because US companies are the next biggest problem, and also Apple is one of the companies included though I agree about Microsoft - I'm sure they're just as bad but they don't seem to have been named as a culprit. Amazon seems to have been the worst, paying literally nothing in corporation tax on £7bn, Google has paid a very small amount and Starbucks has been singled out because one of it's main competitors in the UK, Costa Coffee, has been paying not just the full amount of corporation tax, but all other due taxes too to the tune of around 30% of it's revenue in tax IIRC.
As such I don't think it's about finger pointing, this has been an ongoing issue since this government came to power and has been a measure that's been pursued alongside spending cuts, tax increases and so forth as it's been as much part of the governments deficit reduction strategy as those other elements have. Maybe the issue is different in France and Australia, but I don't think so - I think all governments are targetting tax avoidance as much as they are other deficit reduction strategies and that's why this has come about.
If you can stop with the tears and name calling for just a moment, you'll find plenty here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_States