Robots don't have spirituality, morality, etc. Humans do. Human military personnel can look at illegal orders, recognize them, and either refuse to act or directly contravene them. Robots rely on their programming, which I seriously doubt would go anywhere near that far in terms of safeguarding standards of civilization and military conduct.
I don't want a roboticized military that can be controlled from the Pentagon and White House because that is far, far worse than having a nation defended by mercenaries. Even mercenaries can decide that the money doesn't justify their orders and quit. One of our strengths is that enlisted men and field-grade officers are in control of the day-to-day things. If the shit hits the fan, as long as they are decent men and women, we can trust that it won't get but so bad.
It won't be Skynet, but it could be a dictator who is in control of such a roboticized army. Fighting it would be very difficult as the government could largely rule without the support of the population. Even a hostile population would be largely irrelevant.
What you may want is a Software Engineering degree. I went into Computer Science since my university didn't offer SWE, and occasionally I took a CIS/IT course. What I noticed was that the students were typically very low quality students and had little interest beyond what was right in front of them for the assignment. The course material was also very superficial, even where we had overlaps. Our CS networking classes could actually train you to be an entry-level admin. Not at all true of the IT program. Programming? Our freshman entered CS with almost as many credits as their seniors graduated with.
You can focus on whatever you want in CS, so take it if you like IT work. It'll pay a lot more than an IT degree and carry more weight when you switch jobs.
One would think it would be about economies of scale, stupid AT&T, et al. Seriously, if you offer a base broadband package for $10/month with 2GB of download bandwidth included, and $0.25/GB after that, I bet that would reliably generate a lot more revenue, in a more efficient way, than mucking around with websites, contracts, etc. Anyone remember the telecoms trying to make companies like Google out to be robber barons, foisting all of the costs onto the public? That's how ridiculous it's gotten. Unlimited bandwidth may be sensible someday, but not right now. The rest of the network just isn't up to handling many users maxing out their pipe every month. Metered bandwidth would solve that in a market-friendly way.
Losing 15% of your income is a lot of money when you are that big. That's about the point that shareholders want to hear about cost-cutting measures to regain what they have lost--namely downsizing and such. For Apple, it would be a blow, but it would also not be nearly as bad because they still have so many content providers to work with.
If Apple and Universal cannot come to an agreement, Apple should bide its time, wait for them to weaken and strike. Buy out their catalog for a cool few billion dollars in cash and license it exclusively through the ITMS.
It's not Microsoft you should be worried about
on
Vista is Watching You
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· Score: 1
It's the government. If the government leans on them to ramp up the monitoring of their users, then the public will be truly SOL. Right now Microsoft seems to be content with detailed diagnostic information and preventing piracy, not spying on their users. In fact, there would be precious little they could gain versus the heaping cargo ship loads of what they would lose by preemptively spying on their users.
Far fetched? The government just demanded all of those search records a while ago. I think that speaks for itself as to where things are going.
As Windows' defenders are wont to say, "Windows only has more known defects because it is the most popular OS." In this case, Linux and OSX have more security defects because they have had more exposure, right?
I am now basically convinced that only people from an engineering field should be allowed to draft laws. Why? Things like this. All it will end up doing is driving up the costs of cable service, undermining the buying power of families.
But politicians are, in general, too stupid to understand that. So are the American people, in general, because they keep electing leaders who are leading us toward national economic suicide. More regulations, more taxes. Gee, you wonder why jobs are leaving America? Could it be the cost of compliance with every asinine regulation that some moron drafts?
Sheesh. The people who are too lazy to regulate their own kids' use of TV will love this. They'll get their "family tier," only it'll probably cost them about $20-$30 more per month than the current system costs.
Then they'll institute price controls because these same whiners will demand $45-$50 or less. Then, the cable companies will make less money per customer, weakening their position.
The government should not be putting him away for 11 years, it should be making him pay the bills of the resources his spam consumed and a punitive restitution fine to Time Warner. That would be far more helpful to Time Warner than just locking him up.
The Constitution doesn't spell out the way IP has to work. Congress actually has the power to grant patents for only certain industries if it chooses to do so. Personally, that's the way I lean these days because so little seems to be new and innovative outside a select few industries. It would be perfectly fair--and legal!!--for Congress to issue 10 year patents for nanotechnology, 20 year patents for drugs and 2 year patents for software algorithms.
Dual platform. If they alienate either market, they're going to lose whatever influence Final Fantasy has left. It cannot make or break the PS3 right now because the PS3 is too expensive. Most people cannot afford to spend nearly $700 ($600 console, $60 game, at least $40 in sales tax in many places) for a single game. It has to be available in both, or it will be as though it weren't available in one of their target markets.
His approval ratings are so low that the Democrats could safely bring impeachment charges without any real damage if they stick to what are the more sober charges:
1) Violating the 4th amendment. 2) Failing to protect the border, which is a legal obligation under Article 4, Section IV of the US Constitution. 3) Lying to Congress about the intelligence that lead us into Iraq. 4) Lying to Congress about the true cost of his medicare expansion.
#2 would go over very well with a lot of the public because in most polls, about 70% of the population, cutting across ideology, firmly opposes Bush's amnesty plan.
Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury, and should have been removed. He didn't just lie, he lied while under oath in a court of law, which is a **felony**. Bush did far worse. The case against him should be a lot easier.
But that won't be popular in many states, especially the red states, where there is not as much online business. The tax should be collected by the company that sells the goods and services for the state they reside in because that is how it would be done if you went to their store and bought it in person.
There is now a small, but growing movement within the psychological profession to abolish the concept of adolescence. All I can say is, IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME! Teenagers are not children. They are physically closer to adults both in terms of their physical/sexual maturity and the ability of their brains to function. In other words, a 14 year old is physically capable both in their brain and the rest of their body of assuming a position as a young, but real, adult in modern society. We just don't let them do it!
Our ancestors knew this. That is why even the advanced societies of the classical age regarded teenagers as adults, rather than as children. Even our own legal system on some level recognizes that teens are capable of functioning identically to adults because it allows them to be tried as such in violent crimes cases.
1) Psycho plays video game 2) Psycho likes what he did in fantasy world 3) Psycho goes outside and lives out his fantasy world with the best weapons he can find
They strongly favor a policy that effectively destroys common law protections of property rights, subordinates physical property rights to IP rights and the presumption that all property rights to IP belong to the creator. They are, in effect, rabidly pro-government on IP and are against even moderate supporters of strong copyright law like myself. Even my views, which I have stated in blog discussions with them, are unacceptable to them, and they include:
1) Prosecuting file sharers under the No Electronic Theft Act for any serious sharing of data. 2) Throwing the book at college students who use most of the bandwidth on the network for sharing, using college policy to suspend or expel them. 3) Making IP conform to the same law and expectations that physical property is governed by. This means I fully support normalizing the relationship between the two, with the only caveat being maintaining the sole "right to copy" in the hands of the creator.
Perhaps a lot of the problem is that Linus doesn't have as much authority over Linux as Gates and Jobs do over their companies' platforms. Linus may play gatekeeper with the official Linux kernel, but he hardly has any power at places like Red Hat, Novell or IBM where many important decisions about getting Linux out there are made. It would make about as much sense to have Miguel De Icaza join in because of his standing with GNOME development.
Things like this bring to mind my dad's grumbling about them. He was a Customs special agent, and used to grumble about how the FBI spent more of its time posing in front of the camera as though it were the hottest shit in the federal law enforcement world, than doing good casework. The FBI are camera hounds compared to the other agencies. They are a highly dysfunctional agency, and 9-11 proved that. Three of their offices noticed serious warning signs about Islamic activity in the US, but didn't work together because of rivalry and turf. Sounds more like a group of federalized local cops if you ask me...
This comes not long after the FBI blew $500M on a series of hardware and software upgrades. Is anyone surprised that this agency can't get its act together by now?
Movies fly off the shelf at places like Wal-Mart where you can pick up a lot of movies for $10 or under. Economies of scale work at beating back the effects of piracy. If they would charge $15 for regular new releases, they would make plenty of money off of them, and be at a price range where most people would just buy the real thing even if there were no DRM to make them have to buy them.
Most Linux fanboys are like audiophiles. They'll never understand why regular, "less powerful" products appeal to the masses. They'll dismiss them as simpletons with simple tastes. In reality, Windows works very well for many common tasks. Today, most of its problems are more of a function of bad third party software and user habits than the OS itself. If you coded Windows apps to use the same security model that is expected of Unix apps (nothing in the registry, all settings in the user's home folder or read-only in C:\Program Files) and made users run as a hybrid of admin and unprivileged user, Windows would actually be a very, very competitive platform. A lot of the dissatisfaction has been the result of the crap that has been attracted to it by external sources.
And I say this not as a Windows fanboy, but as someone who is counting down the months until I can afford and justify buying a new MacBook.
This is what happens when you socialize young people in a setting where adult presence and guidance is nearly non-existent. You can't blame the students because their elders created an environment that is a more civilized version of Lord of the Flies.
What possible control could the publishers and raters have over Target, BestBuy, Wal-Mart, etc.? Stores like those represent the real weak link here. They're the ones that allow an unsupervised pre-teen to buy a sex and violence-heavy game like God of War I/II. Why aren't local vice squads going after them on obscenity charges?
Oh, right, because if the vice squads used existing laws the government might be a functional organization rather than a platform for personal success for scumbag politicians.
As if we didn't have enough problems with the "anti-snitch culture" that prevents law enforcement from finding witnesses in places like the inner cities when serious crimes are committed! Now we'd end up with a sex offender-style registry of people who have cooperated. This sort of thing has to go, unless you want such things as secret evidence and witnesses to start becoming topics for debates on constitutional amendments.
Make people pay a nominal fee to join. To do that, they'll need a real name and contact information. If Johnny the moronic, racist, foul-mouthed 14 year old gets on and breaks the ToS for spewing more racist filth than a 1940s klan rally, blacklist him for a while. Yes, blacklist him as in ban him from that game, and every game the publisher makes for several years. Go one step better and share the list between publishers. Ohhhh little Johnny want to play Halo 3? Too bad, you shouldn't have been acting like a racist fucktard in World of Warcraft.
Your "solutions" appeal to the primitive, emotional side of humanity. They feel good, but they create the very thing they purport to work against.
Funny you should say that. According to evolutionary science, behavior is regulated by appealing to an animal's survival instinct and/or its ability to reproduce. It thus stands to reason that if you want to stop a behavior like honor killings, which is extreme enough on many levels to need an extreme reaction, that "you kill her, we kill you" is the fastest way to appeal to the fundamental instincts of the men who might kill a girl for being "allegedly, a slut."
I know your type. You think violence never solves anything. Unfortunately, there is a whole body of evidence throughout human history that shows that violence is a terribly effective way of controlling violent criminals. If anything, history has shown that when normal society eschews violence, violence overtakes it.
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Robots don't have spirituality, morality, etc. Humans do. Human military personnel can look at illegal orders, recognize them, and either refuse to act or directly contravene them. Robots rely on their programming, which I seriously doubt would go anywhere near that far in terms of safeguarding standards of civilization and military conduct.
I don't want a roboticized military that can be controlled from the Pentagon and White House because that is far, far worse than having a nation defended by mercenaries. Even mercenaries can decide that the money doesn't justify their orders and quit. One of our strengths is that enlisted men and field-grade officers are in control of the day-to-day things. If the shit hits the fan, as long as they are decent men and women, we can trust that it won't get but so bad.
It won't be Skynet, but it could be a dictator who is in control of such a roboticized army. Fighting it would be very difficult as the government could largely rule without the support of the population. Even a hostile population would be largely irrelevant.
We need to be careful with this sort of thing.
What you may want is a Software Engineering degree. I went into Computer Science since my university didn't offer SWE, and occasionally I took a CIS/IT course. What I noticed was that the students were typically very low quality students and had little interest beyond what was right in front of them for the assignment. The course material was also very superficial, even where we had overlaps. Our CS networking classes could actually train you to be an entry-level admin. Not at all true of the IT program. Programming? Our freshman entered CS with almost as many credits as their seniors graduated with.
You can focus on whatever you want in CS, so take it if you like IT work. It'll pay a lot more than an IT degree and carry more weight when you switch jobs.
One would think it would be about economies of scale, stupid AT&T, et al. Seriously, if you offer a base broadband package for $10/month with 2GB of download bandwidth included, and $0.25/GB after that, I bet that would reliably generate a lot more revenue, in a more efficient way, than mucking around with websites, contracts, etc. Anyone remember the telecoms trying to make companies like Google out to be robber barons, foisting all of the costs onto the public? That's how ridiculous it's gotten. Unlimited bandwidth may be sensible someday, but not right now. The rest of the network just isn't up to handling many users maxing out their pipe every month. Metered bandwidth would solve that in a market-friendly way.
Losing 15% of your income is a lot of money when you are that big. That's about the point that shareholders want to hear about cost-cutting measures to regain what they have lost--namely downsizing and such. For Apple, it would be a blow, but it would also not be nearly as bad because they still have so many content providers to work with.
If Apple and Universal cannot come to an agreement, Apple should bide its time, wait for them to weaken and strike. Buy out their catalog for a cool few billion dollars in cash and license it exclusively through the ITMS.
It's the government. If the government leans on them to ramp up the monitoring of their users, then the public will be truly SOL. Right now Microsoft seems to be content with detailed diagnostic information and preventing piracy, not spying on their users. In fact, there would be precious little they could gain versus the heaping cargo ship loads of what they would lose by preemptively spying on their users.
Far fetched? The government just demanded all of those search records a while ago. I think that speaks for itself as to where things are going.
As Windows' defenders are wont to say, "Windows only has more known defects because it is the most popular OS." In this case, Linux and OSX have more security defects because they have had more exposure, right?
Just sayin...
I am now basically convinced that only people from an engineering field should be allowed to draft laws. Why? Things like this. All it will end up doing is driving up the costs of cable service, undermining the buying power of families.
But politicians are, in general, too stupid to understand that. So are the American people, in general, because they keep electing leaders who are leading us toward national economic suicide. More regulations, more taxes. Gee, you wonder why jobs are leaving America? Could it be the cost of compliance with every asinine regulation that some moron drafts?
Sheesh. The people who are too lazy to regulate their own kids' use of TV will love this. They'll get their "family tier," only it'll probably cost them about $20-$30 more per month than the current system costs.
Then they'll institute price controls because these same whiners will demand $45-$50 or less. Then, the cable companies will make less money per customer, weakening their position.
Need I go on?
The government should not be putting him away for 11 years, it should be making him pay the bills of the resources his spam consumed and a punitive restitution fine to Time Warner. That would be far more helpful to Time Warner than just locking him up.
The Constitution doesn't spell out the way IP has to work. Congress actually has the power to grant patents for only certain industries if it chooses to do so. Personally, that's the way I lean these days because so little seems to be new and innovative outside a select few industries. It would be perfectly fair--and legal!!--for Congress to issue 10 year patents for nanotechnology, 20 year patents for drugs and 2 year patents for software algorithms.
Dual platform. If they alienate either market, they're going to lose whatever influence Final Fantasy has left. It cannot make or break the PS3 right now because the PS3 is too expensive. Most people cannot afford to spend nearly $700 ($600 console, $60 game, at least $40 in sales tax in many places) for a single game. It has to be available in both, or it will be as though it weren't available in one of their target markets.
His approval ratings are so low that the Democrats could safely bring impeachment charges without any real damage if they stick to what are the more sober charges:
1) Violating the 4th amendment.
2) Failing to protect the border, which is a legal obligation under Article 4, Section IV of the US Constitution.
3) Lying to Congress about the intelligence that lead us into Iraq.
4) Lying to Congress about the true cost of his medicare expansion.
#2 would go over very well with a lot of the public because in most polls, about 70% of the population, cutting across ideology, firmly opposes Bush's amnesty plan.
Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury, and should have been removed. He didn't just lie, he lied while under oath in a court of law, which is a **felony**. Bush did far worse. The case against him should be a lot easier.
But that won't be popular in many states, especially the red states, where there is not as much online business. The tax should be collected by the company that sells the goods and services for the state they reside in because that is how it would be done if you went to their store and bought it in person.
Take a good look at the countries that commonly use AK-47s. You're not likely to find a whole of big fans of intellectual property rights there.
There is now a small, but growing movement within the psychological profession to abolish the concept of adolescence. All I can say is, IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME! Teenagers are not children. They are physically closer to adults both in terms of their physical/sexual maturity and the ability of their brains to function. In other words, a 14 year old is physically capable both in their brain and the rest of their body of assuming a position as a young, but real, adult in modern society. We just don't let them do it!
Our ancestors knew this. That is why even the advanced societies of the classical age regarded teenagers as adults, rather than as children. Even our own legal system on some level recognizes that teens are capable of functioning identically to adults because it allows them to be tried as such in violent crimes cases.
How video games inspire violence in 3 easy steps:
1) Psycho plays video game
2) Psycho likes what he did in fantasy world
3) Psycho goes outside and lives out his fantasy world with the best weapons he can find
There's the issue, in a nutshell.
They strongly favor a policy that effectively destroys common law protections of property rights, subordinates physical property rights to IP rights and the presumption that all property rights to IP belong to the creator. They are, in effect, rabidly pro-government on IP and are against even moderate supporters of strong copyright law like myself. Even my views, which I have stated in blog discussions with them, are unacceptable to them, and they include:
1) Prosecuting file sharers under the No Electronic Theft Act for any serious sharing of data.
2) Throwing the book at college students who use most of the bandwidth on the network for sharing, using college policy to suspend or expel them.
3) Making IP conform to the same law and expectations that physical property is governed by. This means I fully support normalizing the relationship between the two, with the only caveat being maintaining the sole "right to copy" in the hands of the creator.
Perhaps a lot of the problem is that Linus doesn't have as much authority over Linux as Gates and Jobs do over their companies' platforms. Linus may play gatekeeper with the official Linux kernel, but he hardly has any power at places like Red Hat, Novell or IBM where many important decisions about getting Linux out there are made. It would make about as much sense to have Miguel De Icaza join in because of his standing with GNOME development.
Things like this bring to mind my dad's grumbling about them. He was a Customs special agent, and used to grumble about how the FBI spent more of its time posing in front of the camera as though it were the hottest shit in the federal law enforcement world, than doing good casework. The FBI are camera hounds compared to the other agencies. They are a highly dysfunctional agency, and 9-11 proved that. Three of their offices noticed serious warning signs about Islamic activity in the US, but didn't work together because of rivalry and turf. Sounds more like a group of federalized local cops if you ask me...
This comes not long after the FBI blew $500M on a series of hardware and software upgrades. Is anyone surprised that this agency can't get its act together by now?
Movies fly off the shelf at places like Wal-Mart where you can pick up a lot of movies for $10 or under. Economies of scale work at beating back the effects of piracy. If they would charge $15 for regular new releases, they would make plenty of money off of them, and be at a price range where most people would just buy the real thing even if there were no DRM to make them have to buy them.
Most Linux fanboys are like audiophiles. They'll never understand why regular, "less powerful" products appeal to the masses. They'll dismiss them as simpletons with simple tastes. In reality, Windows works very well for many common tasks. Today, most of its problems are more of a function of bad third party software and user habits than the OS itself. If you coded Windows apps to use the same security model that is expected of Unix apps (nothing in the registry, all settings in the user's home folder or read-only in C:\Program Files) and made users run as a hybrid of admin and unprivileged user, Windows would actually be a very, very competitive platform. A lot of the dissatisfaction has been the result of the crap that has been attracted to it by external sources.
And I say this not as a Windows fanboy, but as someone who is counting down the months until I can afford and justify buying a new MacBook.
This is what happens when you socialize young people in a setting where adult presence and guidance is nearly non-existent. You can't blame the students because their elders created an environment that is a more civilized version of Lord of the Flies.
What possible control could the publishers and raters have over Target, BestBuy, Wal-Mart, etc.? Stores like those represent the real weak link here. They're the ones that allow an unsupervised pre-teen to buy a sex and violence-heavy game like God of War I/II. Why aren't local vice squads going after them on obscenity charges?
Oh, right, because if the vice squads used existing laws the government might be a functional organization rather than a platform for personal success for scumbag politicians.
As if we didn't have enough problems with the "anti-snitch culture" that prevents law enforcement from finding witnesses in places like the inner cities when serious crimes are committed! Now we'd end up with a sex offender-style registry of people who have cooperated. This sort of thing has to go, unless you want such things as secret evidence and witnesses to start becoming topics for debates on constitutional amendments.
Make people pay a nominal fee to join. To do that, they'll need a real name and contact information. If Johnny the moronic, racist, foul-mouthed 14 year old gets on and breaks the ToS for spewing more racist filth than a 1940s klan rally, blacklist him for a while. Yes, blacklist him as in ban him from that game, and every game the publisher makes for several years. Go one step better and share the list between publishers. Ohhhh little Johnny want to play Halo 3? Too bad, you shouldn't have been acting like a racist fucktard in World of Warcraft.
Funny you should say that. According to evolutionary science, behavior is regulated by appealing to an animal's survival instinct and/or its ability to reproduce. It thus stands to reason that if you want to stop a behavior like honor killings, which is extreme enough on many levels to need an extreme reaction, that "you kill her, we kill you" is the fastest way to appeal to the fundamental instincts of the men who might kill a girl for being "allegedly, a slut."
I know your type. You think violence never solves anything. Unfortunately, there is a whole body of evidence throughout human history that shows that violence is a terribly effective way of controlling violent criminals. If anything, history has shown that when normal society eschews violence, violence overtakes it.