I'm not sure why there is this weird myth in the US about Sweden being "socialist". We've had a right wing government for the past 8 years. There has also been in the past two decades a sharp turn towards libertarian ideology in Sweden (our right is not socially conservative) and this is also true for the social democrats who have very little of socialism left in them.
Health care isn't free, nor are child care and social services. They are in some cases heavily subsidized, but definitely not free. It is accessible to everyone and it works very well for most people and their needs. It sort of sucks for more advanced medicine: If you are going to have a child for instance, it's superb while if you have say lung cancer, your chances are much better if you have the operation in the US.
The rather dysfunctional medical care system in the US is not a socialist/capitalist thing - it's just a system that doesn't work very well for a lot of people. The insurance model of financing healthcare is for instance very questionable etc.
As for other stuff such as taxes, I could mention stuff like that Sweden has no inheritance taxes, no real estate taxes or that the financial system is orders of magnitude less regulated than the US one etc Sweden is also somewhat of a corporate tax haven - with the right corporate structure you can get away with paying very little taxes. The bottom line is that from a Swedish perspective at least in in some respects the US is far more socialist than Sweden.
Ideologically you could say that the typical Swede is a pragmatic individualist who thinks that the role of the state is to protect, liberate and enable the individual. Unlike a 'pure' socialist system the role of the state is limited to problems it actually can solve. Unlike a 'pure' capitalist system the state has an enabling role as well (positive freedoms) rather than just a protective role (negative freedoms). If you things those concepts are muddled, you are quite right. Hence the pragmatism. And it sort of works. It's far from perfect. It's very disappointing to those that wish to classify it ideologically. There are many small issues and some huge ones (integration into society of immigrants is one example) but on the whole it is a decent society - and much better off than 30 years ago when it was much easier to classify ideologically.
I work for a company that develops neural network software which is used for face recognition on a number of airports. The problem we've had over and over again is that government officials and airport security personnel have great difficulty understanding some elementary statistics.
Let me give you an example. One version of the software offers 99.99% accuracy (symmetrical true positive and true negative), a number that always seems very impressive to various officials.
What they don't understand and what we have to remind them all the time is that they need to take into account the large number of faces that are scanned by the software and that a 0.01% false positive rate isn't something you can ignore.
For instance in a large airport that has say a million people getting scanned yearly it means that 100 people will be incorrectly flagged by the system. The prior probability that a traveler is a 'person of interest' is less than 1/100,000. Plugging the number into Bayes' theorem you get that when the system flags a passenger, the probability that the passenger was actually a person of interest is around 9%.
The officials typically only listen to the 99.99% figure and ignore the reality of the relatively large numbers of false positives when dealing with huge numbers of people. Subsequently they treat the people the systems flag much worse than they would if they realized that the probability of a 'catch' being correct was less than 10%. We've done our best to try to educate them but usually they don't want to listen as it's an uncomfortable truth and it's much more convenient to say that the system has an accuracy of 99.99%.
On the face of it this may be silly as EU law obviously doesn't apply to US companies. That however would be misreading the whole thing. The EU is controlled by two entities the European Parliament and the Commission. The latter writes the laws and proposals and the former votes for or against them.
Members of European Parliament (MEPs) are democratically elected. Their primary problem is that nobody in Europe cares what they do or what they say. The EU decisions are in practice always complex compromises. The UK may vote for privacy laws the Netherlands wants in exchange for increased fishing quotas and the Netherlands wants it because the Dutch government can use it as a political tool for some other purpose. In short political ideology does not exist in the EU. This is a big problem for MEPs as they can't get reelected unless they get enough publicity and look as if they are doing something the voters care about. The system works against them and so on occasion they make loud noises about any issue they think will be of interest to the voters. Given the complex nature of compromises in the EU they seldom have the opportunity to do this. In this case the opportunity they saw was in the word "twitter". They know that voters recognize it and have scrambled to make themselves look like they are doing something decisive in the public interest. It's not real, it's just collecting brownie points from the public and getting their name in the papers. So you can forget about it. It has nothing to do with EU privacy laws or the US or twitter - it's strictly a PR thing.
The other branch of the EU executive and legislative power is the Commission. It has two functions. One is to act in the interest of the entity that controls it - the EU's civil service and the other is to provide a mechanism for national level politicians to get unpopular decisions through. The EU is run and controlled by the EU bureaucracy - it's civil servants. The Commissioners represent primarily the interest of their departments. The interest of the civil service is entirely self serving. They are for sending SWIFT data to the US as it will mean many fact finding trips to the US and other countries for the people in the departments. They are strongly for the introduction of checks and balances for sending the data as it creates more work for the civil service and ultimately increases their budget. The politicians on the national level have no problem with this as their use of the Commission is to get through unpopular legislation. When something popular is introduced it's always handled at the national level and the local politicians take credit for it. When it's something unpopular they simply say "we hate it too, but it's EU legislation, we can't do anything about it".
That's how the system works and it's not easy for the MEPs as they are not civil servants, they are politicians and need publicity and votes while they are not really meant to have any significant political power. That's why there was such an outrage at the EP rejecting a gay bashing candidate for the post of the Commissioner for Justice a few years back. Things like that are not supposed to happen and as a rule they don't. So when you hear that the EP is making an inquiry or that MEPs are making noises about something, you can safely ignore it. It doesn't have to make sense as nothing will ever come of it - they are just trying to get themselves noticed in order to get reelected.
Since little information is available in English, here are some points of clarification:
-The main charge was "aiding copyright violation". The decision of the court is mainly based on the fact that TPB did nothing to prevent it and that they in every way advertised that you could download copyrighted stuff on their site. The fact that this can be done with Google or any other search engine is beside the point according to the court. Google cooperates at least to a limited extent with copyright holders while TPB made a point of pissing them off.
- According to the court indifference to the possibility of the copyright violations occurring is not enough as an argument to let them off the hook. This is not so much a controversial point in the guilty verdict but a very controversial one when it comes to sentencing.
-According to Swedish law you can be found guilty of aiding even if the perpetrators of the main crime (i.e copyright violations) is unknown and the full extent of the crime is unknown as well.
-According to the court information provider neutrality as defined in among other things the EU's e-commerce law does not apply to TPB. Their main argument is that TPB was not a general service provider but a search service largely aimed at facilitating downloading copyrighted material.
-The most controversial point is the sentencing. The basic question is if the three specific persons could really be sentenced for crimes that they did not and could not have had information about (each individual download). The court's answer is yes and the reasoning behind it is fairly vague and general in nature. When it comes to the damages the reasoning is rather strange:
Basically they say the following: The industry claims X million Euros in directly lost profits. This is clearly absurd as not all who download would have actually bought the product in question. So we'll split the difference and put the damages to X/2. X/2 turned out to be 46 million Swedish crowns. (€5 million)
Apart from the questionable reasoning one should put into context that a premeditated murder will in Sweden cost you on average 5 years in prison and 100,000 (~€10.7k) crowns in damages to the relatives. So although the guilty verdict of the court may be reasonable, the sentencing is very extreme by Swedish standards. As a rule damages are never in the millions and the idea is that the guilty party should have a chance to actually pay them. The sentence of 46 million crowns in damages is simply outside any Swedish legal practice.
That's a factor of 680 in six years. Ok, the 295 is a dual GPU solution, but Nvidia is set to release the nv300 series this year that will have twice the number of cores. So he's actually predicting that the increase in computing power will be smaller than in the previous seven year period.
I'm not quite sure what it is, but it looks like that there is some government regulation in the US that makes the situation so bad. Compared to what we have in Sweden, the US mobile phone network is abysmal. In the US networks have poor coverage, high prices and long contracts that lock you in to one provider for a long time. If you thing it is geography, think again - Sweden has about the same population density as the US. We have some regions that are relatively densely populated but large parts of the country are not. Yet you can basically go to the point furtherest from civilization and you'll still have full 3G coverage.
Now to my point: Sweden has almost no regulations of the mobile phone market. Although we have a government that is rather regulation-happy, mobile networks and internet providers have been excepted. We have a large number of mobile providers (I would guess something like ten times more mobile providers per capita than the US) so you can pick and choose. Prices are low and coverage and speeds are good. All that is accomplished without any interference from the government (there has been some interference from the EU regarding roaming charges, but that's a different story).
Another example are mobile networks in Africa. Guess which country in Africa has the best and cheapest mobile networks? You probably guessed wrong: It's Somalia. Apparently mobile network companies thrive under anarchy.
So, as it seems to me, less government regulations of mobile networks seems to produce better results for the consumers. The question is what kind of government involvement is making problems in the US? Or is it something else?
This is due to the neo-Liberal tenet that people are entirely selfish entities, plotting and scheming against one-another, the only way they should be able to express themselves is through the free market.[1] The point being that these raves were legal, but were not taking part in government-approved capitalist venues, people there were not consuming government-approved drugs (such as alcohol) and even more galling: they went against the principle that people are essentially selfish.
Wow indeed. You have been watching too many Adam Curtis movies. Even taking that into account it is still remarkable how many errors you can put into a few sentences.
Neo-liberals (or libertarians as they are called in the US) are as a rule against laws banning drugs. Their main tenet is that individual liberties should be maximized and government influence minimized. So they are generally vehemently to government regulations - be it of drugs or of the market. Saying that neo-liberals see people as "entirely selfish entities, plotting and scheming against one-another" is a very slanted and twisted version of the of their core belief: that each individual is an end in himself/herself. Put in other words that your life belongs to you and that nobody has the right to enslave you, be it for the benefit for one other individual or a whole society.
As for raves going "against the principle that people are essentially selfish" - i think it's rather difficult to find a more selfish activity than getting stoned and listening to music that you like. It certainly isn't something that neo-liberals would find offending.
Note: For those of you who haven't seen any Adam Curtis documentaries: He's like Michael Moore, but without the humor and with less fact checking. The documentaries are similar in style and quality to "Moon Hoax" documentaries and have the same ratio of facts to speculation.
In the early 80's when VHS became popular there was a strong movement in Sweden for banning all video imports. The reason cited was that the children would become hooligans at best and mass murderers at worst if they were to exposed to so much violence. Until the early 90's, there were no private TV channels in Sweden. There were two state owned and controlled channels that were very proactive in censoring violence. Movies in theaters were heavily censored as well.
In a way the fear of video was more justified than the fear of video games - there was no prior data on how people react in general when exposed to displays of graphic violence on a regular basis. As it turns out, photorealistic video did not make mass murderers out of the population, so there is really no reason why we should expect the video game generation to be any more violent than the VHS generation.
The video ban in Sweden? It was never introduced, but not for a lack of trying. The reason why it was scrapped was because a ban would have violated some trade agreements. It is a rather remarkable human trait - the desire to stop *other* people from doing something they like. Note that it's always stopping others for their own good. You'll never find somebody saying: Please pass this ban so that I'll stop doing that thing that I know I shouldn't be doing.
Stockab has fibers connected to municipal housing. That's about 20% of all fiber, and they cost more as both ISP and stockab get paid. The reason why it's so cheap is because of fierce competition between the different broadband providers. There was zero regulation and great tax benefits during the IT-boom era which led to a large number of broadband providers. That made a huge difference.
I pay (in Stockholm) about $7/month for a 100 Mbit connection and that's through privately owned fiber, not the municipal one. It also varies from city to city. In the case of Västerås (another Swedish city) they did actually build a full municipal fiber network and through laws and regulations made it a monopoly (the fibers, not the service). Prices there are about $30-40/month for a 20 Mbit connection.
Re:oh goody.
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C# In-Depth
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually, with the latest incarnation of C#, it gets much more compact. I don't know how to get indentation to work within the ecode tag but you should still get the idea:
class foo { public int dontTouch { get; set; } }
class bar { public void someMethod() { foo ourFoo = new foo() { dontTouch = 5 }; int asdf = ourFoo.dontTouch; } }
The summary implies that TradElect was responsible for the shutdown, but according to the stock exchange itself, it wasn't the case. They say instead it was a network problem.
While their research is certainly interesting it does suffer from them using PCA for creating the map. PCA is a linear transform that finds the axes of an ellipsoid that encompasses the data. This is an enormous simplification that seldom works well on real-world data. For an illustration of what PCA does and the problems with the simplification, see this. For the math, see this.
Now, the problem is that with such a simplification the resulting map is nearly meaningless. It only shows how things would have been distributed had the genetic data and the geographic data been neatly ordered in a form that could be described with a second degree n-dimensional body (i.e. an ellipsoid). There are much better non-linear methods, such as kernel PCA that most likely would have produced a much more accurate picture. PCA does have its uses and can indeed be used for mapping geo-genetic information, but the data needs to be statistically separated to a very large degree. This is an impossibility for Europe that has a limited genetic diversity and where the overlap between different groups is large.
I'd love to see their data analyzed with a bit more powerful algorithms.
I spent some time in Ghana last year and the computer situation there is rather interesting. In all internet cafes the computers are ancient (we're talking 486 and first generation Pentium boxes). The monitors are on the other hand excellent. After we in the west switched to TFTs, they got our CRTs and kept the good ones. They are however of limited use due to the weakness of the computer hardware. It's really atrocious to see Windows 95 in 640x480 on a 21" monitor.
Now as for the computers that don't work, while it is certainly not nice with the child labour and the pollution, if you ask the Ghanaians they would tell you that they would rather get our computer junk than not. The junk does have value and can provide them with an income that they would not have otherwise.
Speaking of pollution, the really damaging thing we are exporting are our old cars from the 80's. They don't have cat-cons and from most cars you can see a black cloud of exhaust gases. Again however, they are happier with the cars than without them.
The junk that we dump on them does nowhere near the damage that our blind and misdirected aid programs do. They result in two things: 1)financing of corrupt government officials 2)increasing the population beyond sustainable levels.
Ultimately however they need to get their shit together. Ghana is one of the more developed west African countries, but the situation is quite bad. The politicians are corrupt beyond belief and the only type of business that thrives is one that colludes with the politicians. In short their local industry doesn't actually do anything. Every engineering project of value has been done by westerners. The talented and able leave the country as soon as they can. There was also from what I could see a complete lack of entrepreneurial spirit. All the smaller businesses are run by foreigners (westerners, lebanese, chinese..).
When you drive down any of the main roads every 500m you have somebody with a small stand selling pineapples. That is as far as the local entrepreneurial spirit extends: street vendors. They sell exactly the same thing and nobody gets the idea of joining up with other vendors, expanding and centralizing etc.. in short running a business.
My conclusion from my stay was that it is a very difficult problem. I'm not sure that it is solvable - they are currently in so deep shit that it's difficult to see a way out. And we can't really help them either in a meaningful way. Investments are impossible as they have a history of nationalizing any successful industry and running it in the ground. In addition you could not make any investments without upholding the corrupt political system. You can't do anything on a larger scale without having resort to massive bribes.
It's however more than that - they not only have to fix their system, but they first have to want to fix their system. Yes, the people are complaining about the politicians, but the first chance they get they elect the rawest populist they can find. And when the government nationalizes foreign industries and seize the property of industrialists (that haven't greased the machinery enough), the people cheer. I know this is not a popular thing to say but to a large degree it's their own fault. Unlike pineapples, industry does not grow on trees (well, actually neither do pineapples as they grow in bushes, but you get the point) and they have to choose between their current style of political and economic management and having a working economy.
Well, this goes hand in hand with another law proposed in the EU. If it passes all blogs of EU citizens will have to be registered with the government. So now the US can get private data on EU citizens and perhaps in return the EU can get a list of those criminal Europeans that have unregistered blogs on US servers.
A quote from the MEP that was responsible for the proposal:
I think the public is still very trusting towards blogs, it is still seen as sincere. And it should remain sincere. For that we need a quality mark, a disclosure of who is really writing and why.
I may have to flee to China to keep some of my individual rights. Lovely.
I would love to hear under what philosophical premise you claim the automatic right to prevent others from saying (or singing!) something simply by virtue of you having uttered it first.
You making up that I claim something doesn't make it my claim. Patents do not prevent you from discussing an idea that somebody else came up with - it only gives the inventor the exclusive right to make money from his idea. Normally this is handled simply trough trade secrets but in some cases this is not possible. In those situations your right is protected by patents which are a temporary protection from others cashing in from your work at your expense. They are reasonably time limited and are granted with caution (well, they should be anyway) in order not to prevent others to independently come to the same idea and use it for a financial gain. Copyrights on the other hand are a much more simple thing - it is plainly that you are the owner of the product of your work. To put it in a way a typically slashdotter would understand: If you take a picture and post it on your blog it doesn't give a company taking stock photos the right to take your picture, without your consent and sell it. Or if you wish a different example: If you write a brilliant piece of code it does not give Microsoft the right to take your code, incorporate it in its product and sell it.
That is incredibly naive. If you think that individual rights are never in conflict you are sadly mistaken. Let me give you another example: contractual rights vs free speech. If you work for a company and sign a non-confidentiality agreement that agreement supersedes your right to free speech. In the age of information technology it is inevitable that free speech and property rights on occasion come in conflict. The resolution is obvious: property rights supersede free speech. The reason for that is obvious: without property rights you can't have any other rights. If you don't have the right to your own food no other right will be of any use to you.
In the bad old days, you wouldn't be able to make a living at all if your sole "profession" was telling stories, or simply thinking of a better plow blade shape. The fact that "the public"--- via its proxy, congress--- has deigned to grant you a means of making such endeavors profitable is a favor granted with the understanding that by all logic such information has no market value in and of itself once it passes into common knowledge.
Let me see if I get this right - you are saying that a better plow blade shape has no market by the virtue of being a better plow shape but that the market value comes from the exclusivity of the information? Boy, is that some twisted logic. The market value of a better plow blade comes from it being a better plow blade - that people are willing to pay for it more than for an inferior plow blade. The rest is just maneuvering in order to make sure that the primary profits go to the person or company that created that additional market value.
I think it is probably the ridiculous insistence that you have the natural right to dictate what others say or do based simply upon the fact that you said or did it first. You're like the classic overeducated idiot Marxist who continuously insists that all work adds value. Your insistence that you somehow own an idea by virtue of having worked hard to come up with it is ridiculous.
Ridiculous? Well, perhaps if you are of the communist persuasion and think that an in individual lives for the sake of society. For obvious reasons that kind of society wipes itself out pretty soon. Sure you can convince people for a while that the interest of others should have a higher priority. As has been historically demonstrated it is not an impossibility to get the consent of the victim - because that is what is required. As long as the producers bow to the parasites your system will indeed work. The key of course is not of you having "worked hard" but having created
Why should someone born with a genetic disorder have pay premium for something that is absolutely out of their control?
Why should somebody else not born with a genetic disorder be forced to pay for somebody else that has one? It is as much out of their control as for the person that carries the disorder. There is a much greater violation of individual rights when you by the threat of violence force somebody to part with their money. Just because you need something doesn't give you the right to by force take it from somebody else.
Being able to aquire medical care when in need is a basic human right.
First, that is highly debatable. I don't believe in slavery and that includes doctors not being slaves. Second, there is a big difference between getting medical care when in need and getting it for free.
If you don't like that fact, then there are plenty of third world countries you can ove to where the evil state won't "steal" your money to provide health care for the sick.
Actually, there are no real capitalist countries in the world. The US is the closest you get, but it is a very poor approximation. Still, even the remnants of the free market make a big difference. I live in Sweden where health care is is "free". That's "free" as in you pay it through the taxes to state hospitals, doctors, pharmacies etc.. you name it. The consequence? All our brightest medical researchers flee to the US as soon as they get the chance. And the result of that? All our medical technology comes from the US. I really fear what will happen to the field medicine if the US health care goes socialist. It won't help you that you can get an MRI scan for "free" if an MRI scanner hasn't been invented.
The current US health care system is really fucked up, I don't deny that. The problem however is government intervention, not the free market. The system needs a reform, but not one using the defunct socialist model but the healthy capitalist one. You really don't want to go to where we in Europe are now. Incidentally in a number of European countries there is a process of de-socializing health care as people have begun to realize the disastrous consequences that it has had.
No. It is not equivalent. Moreover, that is exactly why patents are public information. In return for a temporary monopoly, you must publish the process, and make it available to the public. Similarly, the constitution provides authors (or their employers, in most cases) with a temporary exclusive right to distribute copies of the works. In return for that temporary protection, after the copyright expires, it goes into the public domain to promote the useful arts.
That "temporary protection" is a fundamental individual right. That it is temporary in the form that the government dictates how long you are the owner of your the product of your work is obscene. Of course, the issue is more complicated as the basic idea is that your intellectual property should be protected from blatant reproduction but not to prevent others independently coming up with a similar idea. That is the only justification to it being temporary.
As for the "to promote the useful arts", that the US constitution uses for justification is the same statement that the previous poster stated. It says that the result of your work does not belong to you but that you are working for the public good. Your existence is justified by serfdom to society. To sweeten the deal they grant you a bit of temporary exclusivity on your own work.
The "slavery" you fear is already embodied in the current (very) feudal system of lords and vassals, where the lords (employers) provides the vassals (authors) with infrastructure, and the vassals generate intellectual property wholly owned (in *perpetuity*) by the lords.
Yes, there is definitely something feudal about the current system, but not in the way you imply. The fact that it's the banks/publishers/record companies that make all the money and not the investors/writers/artists is often criticised but in fact it should be celebrated as a great victory for individual rights. You see, it is based on the voluntary cooperation of traders. Using reason (instead of guns) the trade is done with people and companies with equal rights. The artist doesn't have to get financing from a record company and the record company is not forced to provide financing. A deal will be made if both are happy. If the deal is that the record company takes 99.9% of the profits it is not an issue as long a both sides have agreed on it. Typically the artist understands the need for financing and that without a deal with a record company there won't be anything produced. 0.1% of a huge sum of money is far better than 100% of zero.
Voluntary trade is the moral way of doing business. The only other option is by the use of force (this is where the government comes in).
Your attitude is the *repulsive* one.
Is because I am an unapologetic defender of individual rights or because I advocate the use of reason instead the use of force? I'm really curious as you probably represent a larger group here on slashdot. My original post was modded down to -1p (Flamebait) from its 2p starting position, so I'm guessing you are not alone and it tends to happen every time I speak my political views here. The only time I've been modded down more when I let slip that I thought the iPhone was 'a bit gay' and got charged by a horde of Apple fanboys.
So, is it the defense individual rights that offends you or the defense of voluntary trade?
I find them tolerable as long as it's a temporary monopoly designed as an incentive to contribute to the public knowledge space.
This is I believe the single most repulsive sentence I've read on slashdot. I can only hope that it is based on ignorance. Your statement is the equivalent of saying "Free speech is tolerable as long as people use it to say nice things about the government".
What you are saying is that you are only granted a limited right to your own work and ideas in order to work for the interest of others. In short you are advocating something that can only be categorized as slavery. No, it is not whites forcing blacks to work doing manual labor for them. As repulsive as that was, this is even worse. What you are suggesting is the talentless and the incompetent making slaves out of the able and intelligent. While being condemned to be a slave because of your skin color is bad indeed being condemned to be a slave because of your virtues and your ability is much worse.
Copyrights and patents are defenders of individual rights - they embody your right to your own work and ideas and prevents others from expropriating them without your consent. If you don't like the conditions under which a product is sold, the solution is simple: don't buy it. It is not yours and you do not have an automatic right to it or a right to dictate under which terms it should be sold.
The problem with that kind of reasoning can be easily shown with another example. A few hundred years or so we didn't know what caused disease. Religion played an important role as an interpreter of the cause of disease - it had a lot to say on the subject. Does it mean that it was correct? No. Once we developed the germ theory of disease it was quite clear that the religious interpretation was wrong. When you have a bacterial infection you don't get better by not sinning or by praying or by donating money to the church - you take antibiotics.
The argument that since science can't explain X, religion must provide the explanation is a false dichotomy. If religion wants to make a case for a claim it must do so by providing evidence - something that it doesn't.
Folk 'wisdom' and folk science - or as you put it the "collective intuition of A developed by hundreds of generations of many million people" - tends to be completely wrong. We live on a sphere, not on a plane, we are not at the centre of the universe and force is proportional to acceleration, not to velocity - just to take a few examples of incorrect intuition. If our 'collective intuition' failed us in these rather elementary cases, what makes you think that it is correct on the much more complex question of how the brain and consciousness works?
It's the same old problem of infinite regress when you try to state that a complex thing has to have a more complex designer. An über-powerful deity has to be much more complex than a human (or alien) and you end up with a bigger problem than the one you started with and you have explained exactly zero. And that's without even mentioning that there is no evidence of any form of supernatural creation of living beings (or anything else for that matter).
This is a sort of continuation of the parent post.
The comedian Emo Philips once remarked that "I used to think my brain was the most important organ in my body until I realized what was telling me this."
We have tendency to use human intelligence as a benchmark and as the ultimate example of intelligence. There is a mystery surrounding consciousness and many people, including prominent philosophers such as Roger Penrose, ardently try to keep it that way.
Given however what we through biological research actually know about the brain and the evolution of it there is essentially no justification for attributing mystical properties to our data processing wetware. Steadily with increased capabilities of brain scanning we have been developing functional models for describing many parts of the brain. For other parts that need still more investigation we do have a picture, even if rough.
The sacred consciousness has not been untouched by this research. Although far from a final understanding we have a fairly good idea, backed by solid empirical evidence that consciousness is a post-processing effect rather than being the first cause of decision. The quantity of desperation can be seen in attempts to explain away the delay between conscious response and the activations of other parts of the brain. Penrose for instance suggests that yes, there is an average 500 ms delay, but that is compensated by quantum effects that are time symmetric - that the brain actually sees into the future, which then is delayed to create a real-time decision process. While this is rejected as absurd by a majority of neuroscientists and physicists, it is a good example of how passionately some people feel about the role of the brain. It is however painstakingly clear that just like we were forced to abandon an Earth-centered universe we do need to abandon the myth of the special place of human consciousness.
The important point here is that once we rid ourselves of the self-imposed veil of mystery of human intelligence we can have a sober view on what artificial intelligence could be. The brain has developed through an evolutionary optimization process and while getting a lot of benefits it has taken the full blow of the limitations and problems with this process and also its context.
Evolution through natural selection is far from the best optimizing method imaginable. One major problem with it is that it is a so called "greedy" algorithm - it does not have any look ahead or planning capabilities. Every improvement, every payoff needs to be immediate. This creates systems that carry a lot of historical baggage - an improvement isn't made as a stand-alone feature but as a continuation of the previous state. It is not a coincidence that a brain cell is a cell like any other - nucleus and all. Nor is it a cell because it is the optimal structure for information processing. It was what could be done by modifying the existing wetware. It is not hard to imagine how that structure could be improved upon if not limited by the biological building blocks that were available to the genetic machinery.
Another point worth making is that our brains are optimized not for the modern type of information processing that humans engage in - such as writing software for instance. Humans have changed little in the last 50,000 years in terms of intellectual capacity but our societies have changed greatly. Our technological progress is a side effect of the capabilities we evolved that increased survivability when we roamed the plains of Africa in small family hunter-gatherer groups. To assume the resulting information processing system (the brain) would the ultimately optimal solution for anything else is not justifiable.
There has been since the 1950's ongoing research to create biologically inspired computer algorithms and methods. Some of the research has been very successful with simplified models that actually did do something useful (artificial neural networks for instance). Progress has however been agonizi
It is not too much of an overstatement to say that the field of AI has not significantly progressed since the 1980's. The advancements have been largely superficial with better and more efficient algorithms being created but without any major insights and much less a road map for the future. While methods that originated as AI research are more common in real-world applications, the research and development of new concepts has made a grinding halt - not that it was ever a question of smooth continuous progress.
It might seem like the lack of AI development is a temporary problem and altogether a peripheral issue. It is however neither - it is a fundamental problem and it affects all software development.
Early in the history of computing, software and hardware development progressed at a similar pace. Today there is a giant and growing gap between the rate of hardware improvements and software improvements. As most people involved in the study of the field of software engineering are aware of, software development is in a deep crisis.
The problem can be summarized in one word: complexity. The approach to building software has largely been based on traditional engineering principles and approaches. Traditional engineering projects never reached the level of complexity that software projects have. As it turns out humans are not very good at handling and predicting complex system.
A good example of the problems facing software developers is Microsoft's new operating system Windows Vista. It took half a decade to build and cost nearly 10 billion dollars. At two orders of magnitude higher costs than the previous incarnation it featured relatively minor improvements - almost every single new radical feature (such as a new file system) that was originally planned was abandoned. The reason for this is that the complexity of the code base had become unmanageable. Adequate testing and quality assurance proved to be impossible and the development cycle became painfully slow. Not even Microsoft with its virtually unlimited resources could handle it.
At this point, it is important to note that this remains an unsolved problem. It would have not been solved by a better structured development process or directly by better computer hardware. The number of free variables in such a system are simply too great to be handled manually. A structured process and standardized information transfer protocols won't do much good either. Complexity is not just a quantitative problem but at a certain level you'll get emergent phenomena in the system.
Sadly artificial intelligence research which is supposed to be the vanguard of software development is facing the same problems. Although complexity is not (yet) the primary problem there manual design has proved very inefficient. While there are clever ideas that move the field forward on occasion there is nothing to match the relentless progress of computer hardware. There exists no systematic recipe for progress.
Software engineering is intelligent design and AI is no exception. The fundamental idea persists that it takes a clever mind to produce a good design. The view, that it takes a very intelligent thing to design a less intelligent thing is deeply entrenched on every level. This clearly pre-Darwinian view of design isn't based on some form of dogma, but a pragmatism and common sense that aren't challenged where they should be. While intelligent design was a good approach while software was trivial enough to be manageable, it should have become blindingly obvious that it was an untenable approach in the long run. There are approaches that take the meta level - neural networks, genetic algorithms etc, but it is thoroughly insufficient. All these algorithms are still results of intelligent design.
So what Darwinian lessons should we have learned?
We have learned that a simple, dumb optimization algorithm can produce very clever designs. The important insight is that intelligence can be traded for time. In a short in
When a man creates something it is the work of his mind and is his property. If his work is of value of you then you may exchange it for something of value to him if he agrees to the transaction. It's called trade. Your right and his is also not to trade. If you do not find the creation of some crappy pop one-hit wonder from the 60's worth your money, then don't buy it. You do not however have an automatic right to the work, not two years and not 95 years after it. The creator determines the license as Linus Torvalds correctly puts it.
As I've repeated this often enough here on Slashdot, I know what will happen - I'll get modded down and get a few standard counter arguments, so I'll cover them briefly here:
Q: Yes, but what about his grand-children who have not done anything to earn the rights to that work?
A: The creator has the right to do whatever he wishes with his work - including giving it to his undeserving children. The children will then be the legitimate owners and may pass it on further down the generations. If they don't deserve it, don't be jealous - you don't either nor does the 'public'. Having a million parasites is hardly an improvement over having one.
Q: Yes, but it isn't the creator that actually owns the copyright, it's evil record companies and they are represented by the RIAA and other bastards. Why should they have the right to it?
A: The record companies provided the needed cash for the creator and he agreed to let them have the copyright. Again, they may be evil bastards using Mafia-like methods but that doesn't change the fact that they have a right to the creation given to them by the creator. You don't and neither does the public.
(This one comes up very often although I don't really understand how it constitutes an argument)
Q: Nobody is unique and irreplaceable. If there wasn't a Madonna some other artist would have taken her place. As she is not unique, how can she be worth all that money?
A: She is worth exactly as much as others are willing to pay for her work. If you don't like her music, don't buy it. If you think it is too expensive, don't buy it. Do not however try to rationalize taking the music without permission and demanding that your action is considered moral.
Statement: For every greedy bastard that creates for money there are dozens that do at least as good work for free and for the fun of it.
Answer: Great if you really think so. Life then can be much cheaper and varied than for the rest of us who assign enough value to a lot of commercially produced stuff to pay for it. That position is in no way in conflict with what is moral. Use the free stuff if it is with the consent of the creator.
The US broadband situation is interesting a a contrast to the one we have here in Sweden. In all cities you can basically as a private person get a fiber connection up to 100 Mbit. Up north where very few people live, you can still get decent 10-20 Mbit ADSL connections. Here in Stockholm most ISPs are talking about upgrading to 1 Gbit/s late this year or early next year. I've had broadband since 1997 (10 Mbit back then). And it's cheap. I'm currently paying roughly $10/month for a 100 Mbit connection (although it's a special deal through the homeowner association my condo belongs to - the street price is somewhat higher)
So why to we have faster and cheaper connections?
* Smaller population (9 million). Although we are do not have a high population density (20/km compared to 31/km for the US), the problem does not scale in a linear fashion.
* Über-centralization. In the US you have states, counties etc, all that have some form of local identity, laws and business. Sweden only has the national level. There are no local ISPs.
* We've paid for it. While it might seem that we are paying less for faster connections, in fact we are not. We are and have been paying it through taxes. Sweden is a very socialist country. Although our ISPs are privately owned they are given enormous subsidies to make sure that every man, woman and reindeer gets a broadband connection no matter where they live. In essence, we in Stockholm are through taxes financing the building of broadbroadband connections up north where it is not economically feasible.
So all in all it's a combination of population, geography and politics.
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I'm not sure why there is this weird myth in the US about Sweden being "socialist". We've had a right wing government for the past 8 years. There has also been in the past two decades a sharp turn towards libertarian ideology in Sweden (our right is not socially conservative) and this is also true for the social democrats who have very little of socialism left in them.
Health care isn't free, nor are child care and social services. They are in some cases heavily subsidized, but definitely not free. It is accessible to everyone and it works very well for most people and their needs. It sort of sucks for more advanced medicine: If you are going to have a child for instance, it's superb while if you have say lung cancer, your chances are much better if you have the operation in the US.
The rather dysfunctional medical care system in the US is not a socialist/capitalist thing - it's just a system that doesn't work very well for a lot of people. The insurance model of financing healthcare is for instance very questionable etc.
As for other stuff such as taxes, I could mention stuff like that Sweden has no inheritance taxes, no real estate taxes or that the financial system is orders of magnitude less regulated than the US one etc Sweden is also somewhat of a corporate tax haven - with the right corporate structure you can get away with paying very little taxes. The bottom line is that from a Swedish perspective at least in in some respects the US is far more socialist than Sweden.
Ideologically you could say that the typical Swede is a pragmatic individualist who thinks that the role of the state is to protect, liberate and enable the individual. Unlike a 'pure' socialist system the role of the state is limited to problems it actually can solve. Unlike a 'pure' capitalist system the state has an enabling role as well (positive freedoms) rather than just a protective role (negative freedoms). If you things those concepts are muddled, you are quite right. Hence the pragmatism. And it sort of works. It's far from perfect. It's very disappointing to those that wish to classify it ideologically. There are many small issues and some huge ones (integration into society of immigrants is one example) but on the whole it is a decent society - and much better off than 30 years ago when it was much easier to classify ideologically.
I work for a company that develops neural network software which is used for face recognition on a number of airports. The problem we've had over and over again is that government officials and airport security personnel have great difficulty understanding some elementary statistics.
Let me give you an example. One version of the software offers 99.99% accuracy (symmetrical true positive and true negative), a number that always seems very impressive to various officials.
What they don't understand and what we have to remind them all the time is that they need to take into account the large number of faces that are scanned by the software and that a 0.01% false positive rate isn't something you can ignore.
For instance in a large airport that has say a million people getting scanned yearly it means that 100 people will be incorrectly flagged by the system. The prior probability that a traveler is a 'person of interest' is less than 1/100,000. Plugging the number into Bayes' theorem you get that when the system flags a passenger, the probability that the passenger was actually a person of interest is around 9%.
The officials typically only listen to the 99.99% figure and ignore the reality of the relatively large numbers of false positives when dealing with huge numbers of people. Subsequently they treat the people the systems flag much worse than they would if they realized that the probability of a 'catch' being correct was less than 10%. We've done our best to try to educate them but usually they don't want to listen as it's an uncomfortable truth and it's much more convenient to say that the system has an accuracy of 99.99%.
On the face of it this may be silly as EU law obviously doesn't apply to US companies. That however would be misreading the whole thing. The EU is controlled by two entities the European Parliament and the Commission. The latter writes the laws and proposals and the former votes for or against them.
Members of European Parliament (MEPs) are democratically elected. Their primary problem is that nobody in Europe cares what they do or what they say. The EU decisions are in practice always complex compromises. The UK may vote for privacy laws the Netherlands wants in exchange for increased fishing quotas and the Netherlands wants it because the Dutch government can use it as a political tool for some other purpose. In short political ideology does not exist in the EU. This is a big problem for MEPs as they can't get reelected unless they get enough publicity and look as if they are doing something the voters care about. The system works against them and so on occasion they make loud noises about any issue they think will be of interest to the voters. Given the complex nature of compromises in the EU they seldom have the opportunity to do this. In this case the opportunity they saw was in the word "twitter". They know that voters recognize it and have scrambled to make themselves look like they are doing something decisive in the public interest. It's not real, it's just collecting brownie points from the public and getting their name in the papers. So you can forget about it. It has nothing to do with EU privacy laws or the US or twitter - it's strictly a PR thing.
The other branch of the EU executive and legislative power is the Commission. It has two functions. One is to act in the interest of the entity that controls it - the EU's civil service and the other is to provide a mechanism for national level politicians to get unpopular decisions through. The EU is run and controlled by the EU bureaucracy - it's civil servants. The Commissioners represent primarily the interest of their departments. The interest of the civil service is entirely self serving. They are for sending SWIFT data to the US as it will mean many fact finding trips to the US and other countries for the people in the departments. They are strongly for the introduction of checks and balances for sending the data as it creates more work for the civil service and ultimately increases their budget. The politicians on the national level have no problem with this as their use of the Commission is to get through unpopular legislation. When something popular is introduced it's always handled at the national level and the local politicians take credit for it. When it's something unpopular they simply say "we hate it too, but it's EU legislation, we can't do anything about it".
That's how the system works and it's not easy for the MEPs as they are not civil servants, they are politicians and need publicity and votes while they are not really meant to have any significant political power. That's why there was such an outrage at the EP rejecting a gay bashing candidate for the post of the Commissioner for Justice a few years back. Things like that are not supposed to happen and as a rule they don't. So when you hear that the EP is making an inquiry or that MEPs are making noises about something, you can safely ignore it. It doesn't have to make sense as nothing will ever come of it - they are just trying to get themselves noticed in order to get reelected.
-The main charge was "aiding copyright violation". The decision of the court is mainly based on the fact that TPB did nothing to prevent it and that they in every way advertised that you could download copyrighted stuff on their site. The fact that this can be done with Google or any other search engine is beside the point according to the court. Google cooperates at least to a limited extent with copyright holders while TPB made a point of pissing them off.
- According to the court indifference to the possibility of the copyright violations occurring is not enough as an argument to let them off the hook. This is not so much a controversial point in the guilty verdict but a very controversial one when it comes to sentencing.
-According to Swedish law you can be found guilty of aiding even if the perpetrators of the main crime (i.e copyright violations) is unknown and the full extent of the crime is unknown as well.
-According to the court information provider neutrality as defined in among other things the EU's e-commerce law does not apply to TPB. Their main argument is that TPB was not a general service provider but a search service largely aimed at facilitating downloading copyrighted material.
-The most controversial point is the sentencing. The basic question is if the three specific persons could really be sentenced for crimes that they did not and could not have had information about (each individual download). The court's answer is yes and the reasoning behind it is fairly vague and general in nature. When it comes to the damages the reasoning is rather strange: Basically they say the following: The industry claims X million Euros in directly lost profits. This is clearly absurd as not all who download would have actually bought the product in question. So we'll split the difference and put the damages to X/2. X/2 turned out to be 46 million Swedish crowns. (€5 million)
Apart from the questionable reasoning one should put into context that a premeditated murder will in Sweden cost you on average 5 years in prison and 100,000 (~€10.7k) crowns in damages to the relatives. So although the guilty verdict of the court may be reasonable, the sentencing is very extreme by Swedish standards. As a rule damages are never in the millions and the idea is that the guilty party should have a chance to actually pay them. The sentence of 46 million crowns in damages is simply outside any Swedish legal practice.
2001: Geforce 3, 2.6 MFLOPs
2009: Geforce GX295: 1.78 GFLOPs
That's a factor of 680 in six years. Ok, the 295 is a dual GPU solution, but Nvidia is set to release the nv300 series this year that will have twice the number of cores. So he's actually predicting that the increase in computing power will be smaller than in the previous seven year period.
I'm not quite sure what it is, but it looks like that there is some government regulation in the US that makes the situation so bad. Compared to what we have in Sweden, the US mobile phone network is abysmal. In the US networks have poor coverage, high prices and long contracts that lock you in to one provider for a long time. If you thing it is geography, think again - Sweden has about the same population density as the US. We have some regions that are relatively densely populated but large parts of the country are not. Yet you can basically go to the point furtherest from civilization and you'll still have full 3G coverage.
Now to my point: Sweden has almost no regulations of the mobile phone market. Although we have a government that is rather regulation-happy, mobile networks and internet providers have been excepted. We have a large number of mobile providers (I would guess something like ten times more mobile providers per capita than the US) so you can pick and choose. Prices are low and coverage and speeds are good. All that is accomplished without any interference from the government (there has been some interference from the EU regarding roaming charges, but that's a different story).
Another example are mobile networks in Africa. Guess which country in Africa has the best and cheapest mobile networks? You probably guessed wrong: It's Somalia. Apparently mobile network companies thrive under anarchy.
So, as it seems to me, less government regulations of mobile networks seems to produce better results for the consumers. The question is what kind of government involvement is making problems in the US? Or is it something else?
Wow indeed. You have been watching too many Adam Curtis movies. Even taking that into account it is still remarkable how many errors you can put into a few sentences.
Neo-liberals (or libertarians as they are called in the US) are as a rule against laws banning drugs. Their main tenet is that individual liberties should be maximized and government influence minimized. So they are generally vehemently to government regulations - be it of drugs or of the market. Saying that neo-liberals see people as "entirely selfish entities, plotting and scheming against one-another" is a very slanted and twisted version of the of their core belief: that each individual is an end in himself/herself. Put in other words that your life belongs to you and that nobody has the right to enslave you, be it for the benefit for one other individual or a whole society.
As for raves going "against the principle that people are essentially selfish" - i think it's rather difficult to find a more selfish activity than getting stoned and listening to music that you like. It certainly isn't something that neo-liberals would find offending.
Note: For those of you who haven't seen any Adam Curtis documentaries: He's like Michael Moore, but without the humor and with less fact checking. The documentaries are similar in style and quality to "Moon Hoax" documentaries and have the same ratio of facts to speculation.
In the early 80's when VHS became popular there was a strong movement in Sweden for banning all video imports. The reason cited was that the children would become hooligans at best and mass murderers at worst if they were to exposed to so much violence. Until the early 90's, there were no private TV channels in Sweden. There were two state owned and controlled channels that were very proactive in censoring violence. Movies in theaters were heavily censored as well.
In a way the fear of video was more justified than the fear of video games - there was no prior data on how people react in general when exposed to displays of graphic violence on a regular basis. As it turns out, photorealistic video did not make mass murderers out of the population, so there is really no reason why we should expect the video game generation to be any more violent than the VHS generation.
The video ban in Sweden? It was never introduced, but not for a lack of trying. The reason why it was scrapped was because a ban would have violated some trade agreements. It is a rather remarkable human trait - the desire to stop *other* people from doing something they like. Note that it's always stopping others for their own good. You'll never find somebody saying: Please pass this ban so that I'll stop doing that thing that I know I shouldn't be doing.
Stockab has fibers connected to municipal housing. That's about 20% of all fiber, and they cost more as both ISP and stockab get paid. The reason why it's so cheap is because of fierce competition between the different broadband providers. There was zero regulation and great tax benefits during the IT-boom era which led to a large number of broadband providers. That made a huge difference.
I pay (in Stockholm) about $7/month for a 100 Mbit connection and that's through privately owned fiber, not the municipal one. It also varies from city to city. In the case of Västerås (another Swedish city) they did actually build a full municipal fiber network and through laws and regulations made it a monopoly (the fibers, not the service). Prices there are about $30-40/month for a 20 Mbit connection.
The summary implies that TradElect was responsible for the shutdown, but according to the stock exchange itself, it wasn't the case. They say instead it was a network problem.
While their research is certainly interesting it does suffer from them using PCA for creating the map. PCA is a linear transform that finds the axes of an ellipsoid that encompasses the data. This is an enormous simplification that seldom works well on real-world data. For an illustration of what PCA does and the problems with the simplification, see this. For the math, see this.
Now, the problem is that with such a simplification the resulting map is nearly meaningless. It only shows how things would have been distributed had the genetic data and the geographic data been neatly ordered in a form that could be described with a second degree n-dimensional body (i.e. an ellipsoid). There are much better non-linear methods, such as kernel PCA that most likely would have produced a much more accurate picture. PCA does have its uses and can indeed be used for mapping geo-genetic information, but the data needs to be statistically separated to a very large degree. This is an impossibility for Europe that has a limited genetic diversity and where the overlap between different groups is large.
I'd love to see their data analyzed with a bit more powerful algorithms.
I spent some time in Ghana last year and the computer situation there is rather interesting. In all internet cafes the computers are ancient (we're talking 486 and first generation Pentium boxes). The monitors are on the other hand excellent. After we in the west switched to TFTs, they got our CRTs and kept the good ones. They are however of limited use due to the weakness of the computer hardware. It's really atrocious to see Windows 95 in 640x480 on a 21" monitor.
Now as for the computers that don't work, while it is certainly not nice with the child labour and the pollution, if you ask the Ghanaians they would tell you that they would rather get our computer junk than not. The junk does have value and can provide them with an income that they would not have otherwise.
Speaking of pollution, the really damaging thing we are exporting are our old cars from the 80's. They don't have cat-cons and from most cars you can see a black cloud of exhaust gases. Again however, they are happier with the cars than without them.
The junk that we dump on them does nowhere near the damage that our blind and misdirected aid programs do. They result in two things: 1)financing of corrupt government officials 2)increasing the population beyond sustainable levels.
Ultimately however they need to get their shit together. Ghana is one of the more developed west African countries, but the situation is quite bad. The politicians are corrupt beyond belief and the only type of business that thrives is one that colludes with the politicians. In short their local industry doesn't actually do anything. Every engineering project of value has been done by westerners. The talented and able leave the country as soon as they can. There was also from what I could see a complete lack of entrepreneurial spirit. All the smaller businesses are run by foreigners (westerners, lebanese, chinese..).
When you drive down any of the main roads every 500m you have somebody with a small stand selling pineapples. That is as far as the local entrepreneurial spirit extends: street vendors. They sell exactly the same thing and nobody gets the idea of joining up with other vendors, expanding and centralizing etc.. in short running a business.
My conclusion from my stay was that it is a very difficult problem. I'm not sure that it is solvable - they are currently in so deep shit that it's difficult to see a way out. And we can't really help them either in a meaningful way. Investments are impossible as they have a history of nationalizing any successful industry and running it in the ground. In addition you could not make any investments without upholding the corrupt political system. You can't do anything on a larger scale without having resort to massive bribes.
It's however more than that - they not only have to fix their system, but they first have to want to fix their system. Yes, the people are complaining about the politicians, but the first chance they get they elect the rawest populist they can find. And when the government nationalizes foreign industries and seize the property of industrialists (that haven't greased the machinery enough), the people cheer. I know this is not a popular thing to say but to a large degree it's their own fault. Unlike pineapples, industry does not grow on trees (well, actually neither do pineapples as they grow in bushes, but you get the point) and they have to choose between their current style of political and economic management and having a working economy.
Forgot to post a link to the proposed law, so here it is. And yes, it's for real.
A quote from the MEP that was responsible for the proposal:
I may have to flee to China to keep some of my individual rights. Lovely.
You making up that I claim something doesn't make it my claim. Patents do not prevent you from discussing an idea that somebody else came up with - it only gives the inventor the exclusive right to make money from his idea. Normally this is handled simply trough trade secrets but in some cases this is not possible. In those situations your right is protected by patents which are a temporary protection from others cashing in from your work at your expense. They are reasonably time limited and are granted with caution (well, they should be anyway) in order not to prevent others to independently come to the same idea and use it for a financial gain. Copyrights on the other hand are a much more simple thing - it is plainly that you are the owner of the product of your work. To put it in a way a typically slashdotter would understand: If you take a picture and post it on your blog it doesn't give a company taking stock photos the right to take your picture, without your consent and sell it. Or if you wish a different example: If you write a brilliant piece of code it does not give Microsoft the right to take your code, incorporate it in its product and sell it. That is incredibly naive. If you think that individual rights are never in conflict you are sadly mistaken. Let me give you another example: contractual rights vs free speech. If you work for a company and sign a non-confidentiality agreement that agreement supersedes your right to free speech. In the age of information technology it is inevitable that free speech and property rights on occasion come in conflict. The resolution is obvious: property rights supersede free speech. The reason for that is obvious: without property rights you can't have any other rights. If you don't have the right to your own food no other right will be of any use to you.
Let me see if I get this right - you are saying that a better plow blade shape has no market by the virtue of being a better plow shape but that the market value comes from the exclusivity of the information? Boy, is that some twisted logic. The market value of a better plow blade comes from it being a better plow blade - that people are willing to pay for it more than for an inferior plow blade. The rest is just maneuvering in order to make sure that the primary profits go to the person or company that created that additional market value.
Ridiculous? Well, perhaps if you are of the communist persuasion and think that an in individual lives for the sake of society. For obvious reasons that kind of society wipes itself out pretty soon. Sure you can convince people for a while that the interest of others should have a higher priority. As has been historically demonstrated it is not an impossibility to get the consent of the victim - because that is what is required. As long as the producers bow to the parasites your system will indeed work. The key of course is not of you having "worked hard" but having created
The current US health care system is really fucked up, I don't deny that. The problem however is government intervention, not the free market. The system needs a reform, but not one using the defunct socialist model but the healthy capitalist one. You really don't want to go to where we in Europe are now. Incidentally in a number of European countries there is a process of de-socializing health care as people have begun to realize the disastrous consequences that it has had.
That "temporary protection" is a fundamental individual right. That it is temporary in the form that the government dictates how long you are the owner of your the product of your work is obscene. Of course, the issue is more complicated as the basic idea is that your intellectual property should be protected from blatant reproduction but not to prevent others independently coming up with a similar idea. That is the only justification to it being temporary.
As for the "to promote the useful arts", that the US constitution uses for justification is the same statement that the previous poster stated. It says that the result of your work does not belong to you but that you are working for the public good. Your existence is justified by serfdom to society. To sweeten the deal they grant you a bit of temporary exclusivity on your own work.
Yes, there is definitely something feudal about the current system, but not in the way you imply. The fact that it's the banks/publishers/record companies that make all the money and not the investors/writers/artists is often criticised but in fact it should be celebrated as a great victory for individual rights. You see, it is based on the voluntary cooperation of traders. Using reason (instead of guns) the trade is done with people and companies with equal rights. The artist doesn't have to get financing from a record company and the record company is not forced to provide financing. A deal will be made if both are happy. If the deal is that the record company takes 99.9% of the profits it is not an issue as long a both sides have agreed on it. Typically the artist understands the need for financing and that without a deal with a record company there won't be anything produced. 0.1% of a huge sum of money is far better than 100% of zero.Voluntary trade is the moral way of doing business. The only other option is by the use of force (this is where the government comes in).
Is because I am an unapologetic defender of individual rights or because I advocate the use of reason instead the use of force? I'm really curious as you probably represent a larger group here on slashdot. My original post was modded down to -1p (Flamebait) from its 2p starting position, so I'm guessing you are not alone and it tends to happen every time I speak my political views here. The only time I've been modded down more when I let slip that I thought the iPhone was 'a bit gay' and got charged by a horde of Apple fanboys.So, is it the defense individual rights that offends you or the defense of voluntary trade?
What you are saying is that you are only granted a limited right to your own work and ideas in order to work for the interest of others. In short you are advocating something that can only be categorized as slavery. No, it is not whites forcing blacks to work doing manual labor for them. As repulsive as that was, this is even worse. What you are suggesting is the talentless and the incompetent making slaves out of the able and intelligent. While being condemned to be a slave because of your skin color is bad indeed being condemned to be a slave because of your virtues and your ability is much worse.
Copyrights and patents are defenders of individual rights - they embody your right to your own work and ideas and prevents others from expropriating them without your consent. If you don't like the conditions under which a product is sold, the solution is simple: don't buy it. It is not yours and you do not have an automatic right to it or a right to dictate under which terms it should be sold.
The argument that since science can't explain X, religion must provide the explanation is a false dichotomy. If religion wants to make a case for a claim it must do so by providing evidence - something that it doesn't.
Folk 'wisdom' and folk science - or as you put it the "collective intuition of A developed by hundreds of generations of many million people" - tends to be completely wrong. We live on a sphere, not on a plane, we are not at the centre of the universe and force is proportional to acceleration, not to velocity - just to take a few examples of incorrect intuition. If our 'collective intuition' failed us in these rather elementary cases, what makes you think that it is correct on the much more complex question of how the brain and consciousness works?
It's the same old problem of infinite regress when you try to state that a complex thing has to have a more complex designer. An über-powerful deity has to be much more complex than a human (or alien) and you end up with a bigger problem than the one you started with and you have explained exactly zero. And that's without even mentioning that there is no evidence of any form of supernatural creation of living beings (or anything else for that matter).
The comedian Emo Philips once remarked that "I used to think my brain was the most important organ in my body until I realized what was telling me this."
We have tendency to use human intelligence as a benchmark and as the ultimate example of intelligence. There is a mystery surrounding consciousness and many people, including prominent philosophers such as Roger Penrose, ardently try to keep it that way.
Given however what we through biological research actually know about the brain and the evolution of it there is essentially no justification for attributing mystical properties to our data processing wetware. Steadily with increased capabilities of brain scanning we have been developing functional models for describing many parts of the brain. For other parts that need still more investigation we do have a picture, even if rough.
The sacred consciousness has not been untouched by this research. Although far from a final understanding we have a fairly good idea, backed by solid empirical evidence that consciousness is a post-processing effect rather than being the first cause of decision. The quantity of desperation can be seen in attempts to explain away the delay between conscious response and the activations of other parts of the brain. Penrose for instance suggests that yes, there is an average 500 ms delay, but that is compensated by quantum effects that are time symmetric - that the brain actually sees into the future, which then is delayed to create a real-time decision process. While this is rejected as absurd by a majority of neuroscientists and physicists, it is a good example of how passionately some people feel about the role of the brain. It is however painstakingly clear that just like we were forced to abandon an Earth-centered universe we do need to abandon the myth of the special place of human consciousness. The important point here is that once we rid ourselves of the self-imposed veil of mystery of human intelligence we can have a sober view on what artificial intelligence could be. The brain has developed through an evolutionary optimization process and while getting a lot of benefits it has taken the full blow of the limitations and problems with this process and also its context.
Evolution through natural selection is far from the best optimizing method imaginable. One major problem with it is that it is a so called "greedy" algorithm - it does not have any look ahead or planning capabilities. Every improvement, every payoff needs to be immediate. This creates systems that carry a lot of historical baggage - an improvement isn't made as a stand-alone feature but as a continuation of the previous state. It is not a coincidence that a brain cell is a cell like any other - nucleus and all. Nor is it a cell because it is the optimal structure for information processing. It was what could be done by modifying the existing wetware. It is not hard to imagine how that structure could be improved upon if not limited by the biological building blocks that were available to the genetic machinery.
Another point worth making is that our brains are optimized not for the modern type of information processing that humans engage in - such as writing software for instance. Humans have changed little in the last 50,000 years in terms of intellectual capacity but our societies have changed greatly. Our technological progress is a side effect of the capabilities we evolved that increased survivability when we roamed the plains of Africa in small family hunter-gatherer groups. To assume the resulting information processing system (the brain) would the ultimately optimal solution for anything else is not justifiable.
There has been since the 1950's ongoing research to create biologically inspired computer algorithms and methods. Some of the research has been very successful with simplified models that actually did do something useful (artificial neural networks for instance). Progress has however been agonizi
It might seem like the lack of AI development is a temporary problem and altogether a peripheral issue. It is however neither - it is a fundamental problem and it affects all software development.
Early in the history of computing, software and hardware development progressed at a similar pace. Today there is a giant and growing gap between the rate of hardware improvements and software improvements. As most people involved in the study of the field of software engineering are aware of, software development is in a deep crisis.
The problem can be summarized in one word: complexity. The approach to building software has largely been based on traditional engineering principles and approaches. Traditional engineering projects never reached the level of complexity that software projects have. As it turns out humans are not very good at handling and predicting complex system.
A good example of the problems facing software developers is Microsoft's new operating system Windows Vista. It took half a decade to build and cost nearly 10 billion dollars. At two orders of magnitude higher costs than the previous incarnation it featured relatively minor improvements - almost every single new radical feature (such as a new file system) that was originally planned was abandoned. The reason for this is that the complexity of the code base had become unmanageable. Adequate testing and quality assurance proved to be impossible and the development cycle became painfully slow. Not even Microsoft with its virtually unlimited resources could handle it.
At this point, it is important to note that this remains an unsolved problem. It would have not been solved by a better structured development process or directly by better computer hardware. The number of free variables in such a system are simply too great to be handled manually. A structured process and standardized information transfer protocols won't do much good either. Complexity is not just a quantitative problem but at a certain level you'll get emergent phenomena in the system.
Sadly artificial intelligence research which is supposed to be the vanguard of software development is facing the same problems. Although complexity is not (yet) the primary problem there manual design has proved very inefficient. While there are clever ideas that move the field forward on occasion there is nothing to match the relentless progress of computer hardware. There exists no systematic recipe for progress.
Software engineering is intelligent design and AI is no exception. The fundamental idea persists that it takes a clever mind to produce a good design. The view, that it takes a very intelligent thing to design a less intelligent thing is deeply entrenched on every level. This clearly pre-Darwinian view of design isn't based on some form of dogma, but a pragmatism and common sense that aren't challenged where they should be. While intelligent design was a good approach while software was trivial enough to be manageable, it should have become blindingly obvious that it was an untenable approach in the long run. There are approaches that take the meta level - neural networks, genetic algorithms etc, but it is thoroughly insufficient. All these algorithms are still results of intelligent design.
So what Darwinian lessons should we have learned?
We have learned that a simple, dumb optimization algorithm can produce very clever designs. The important insight is that intelligence can be traded for time. In a short in
As I've repeated this often enough here on Slashdot, I know what will happen - I'll get modded down and get a few standard counter arguments, so I'll cover them briefly here:
Q: Yes, but what about his grand-children who have not done anything to earn the rights to that work?
A: The creator has the right to do whatever he wishes with his work - including giving it to his undeserving children. The children will then be the legitimate owners and may pass it on further down the generations. If they don't deserve it, don't be jealous - you don't either nor does the 'public'. Having a million parasites is hardly an improvement over having one.
Q: Yes, but it isn't the creator that actually owns the copyright, it's evil record companies and they are represented by the RIAA and other bastards. Why should they have the right to it?
A: The record companies provided the needed cash for the creator and he agreed to let them have the copyright. Again, they may be evil bastards using Mafia-like methods but that doesn't change the fact that they have a right to the creation given to them by the creator. You don't and neither does the public.
(This one comes up very often although I don't really understand how it constitutes an argument)
Q: Nobody is unique and irreplaceable. If there wasn't a Madonna some other artist would have taken her place. As she is not unique, how can she be worth all that money?
A: She is worth exactly as much as others are willing to pay for her work. If you don't like her music, don't buy it. If you think it is too expensive, don't buy it. Do not however try to rationalize taking the music without permission and demanding that your action is considered moral.
Statement: For every greedy bastard that creates for money there are dozens that do at least as good work for free and for the fun of it.
Answer: Great if you really think so. Life then can be much cheaper and varied than for the rest of us who assign enough value to a lot of commercially produced stuff to pay for it. That position is in no way in conflict with what is moral. Use the free stuff if it is with the consent of the creator.
So why to we have faster and cheaper connections?
* Smaller population (9 million). Although we are do not have a high population density (20/km compared to 31/km for the US), the problem does not scale in a linear fashion.
* Über-centralization. In the US you have states, counties etc, all that have some form of local identity, laws and business. Sweden only has the national level. There are no local ISPs.
* We've paid for it. While it might seem that we are paying less for faster connections, in fact we are not. We are and have been paying it through taxes. Sweden is a very socialist country. Although our ISPs are privately owned they are given enormous subsidies to make sure that every man, woman and reindeer gets a broadband connection no matter where they live. In essence, we in Stockholm are through taxes financing the building of broadbroadband connections up north where it is not economically feasible.
So all in all it's a combination of population, geography and politics.