Using arguments like that, you could argue that anything might be an IED. My bags, my cell phone, my laptop, etc. could all equally well be stuffed with C4. Shall we all abandon our bags at the front entrance and change into orange jumpsuits to make sure we don't have anything that could possibly be a bomb?
I think the guards should be trained to know what a bomb looks like. I also think that if they do make a mistake, as they did here, they should apologize and let the person go (possibly asking her to take the thing off and put it in her pocket) rather than arrest her, charge her with a crime, and brag about how they were about to kill her.
wearing a device that looks like an IED, that you designed specifically to look like an IED
The device did not look like an IED and it clearly was not designed to look like an IED. I doubt Star had ever imagined anyone would mistake it for an IED.
Therefore if their strategy is simply as a deterent, then we have one conclusion: the criminals in this area don't care if they're being watched, and you just wasted an obscene amount of money.
How do you come to that conclusion, exactly? The article only claims that the rate of solving crimes is no better with the cameras, probably due to all the reasons you cite. The article does not say anything about whether there is more or less crime with the cameras.
I'm not arguing for or against the cameras, but the argument in this article looks like a misuse of statistics to me.
Who do you propose should pay the costs of building a network which can offer three megabits sustained bandwidth to every user? What you are proposing would be extremely expensive. Meanwhile, most users simply have no need for it. Why should someone be required to pay for 3 megabits sustained when what they really want is 3 megabit bursts during the small fraction of time when they are actually using it?
I think it's wrong to simply cut off users who use too much bandwidth. But, I think traffic shaping is perfectly reasonable (as long as it does not discriminate based on the application). If you really need three megabits sustained, you need to pay for it.
You can identify an infinite loop in some cases, and so can a computer. You cannot identify an infinite loop in all cases. For example, if I gave you a program that loops through all integers looking for a counter-example to Beal's conjecture, you would not be able to tell me if it is an infinite loop. Indeed, if you could, you could claim Beal's $100,000 prize.
Writing an algorithm which identifies infinite loops is a conceptually simple application of a theorem prover. Theorem provers exist, and have proven things that humans could not. They can't always prove or disprove something, just like humans can't. This doesn't serve as any sort of evidence that computers can't match human intelligence.
We can build machines that are better than humans at a lot of tasks, but we'll need much better concepts of what intelligence really is before we can even start thinking about how to design a a general AI that is smarter than a human all around.
Have you researched this much? I find our concepts to be pretty advanced, and I think they will only advance faster as we approach the processing power necessary to implement them. This textbook is a pretty good starting point if you want to know details (and it's a lot of fun to read, too!).
All through recorded history we've had philosophers thinking about thinking, and we're not visibly closer to an answer to "what does it mean to say 'I think'" than the ancient Greeks were. It tends to make one pessimistic about the age of thinking machines being right around the corner...
I disagree. Logicians and mathematicians have come a long way in defining the rules of thought, and computer scientists much further than them, even.
The guy I was responding to was claiming that we can't design something smarter than ourselves. You're just saying that we have to understand how intelligence works first. That's an entirely different (and obvious) argument. Do you believe that it is impossible for us to ever understand how our brains work? Why would that be?
We actually do understand quite a bit about intelligence already, if you look at the research. We haven't quite tied it all together yet, but most of the pieces are there. One of the biggest obstacles is the fact that we just don't have the processing power to run any sort of general intelligence algorithm yet, but if hardware continues to advance at the rate it has for the last few decades, that should change soon enough. Once the hardware is available, there will be a lot more interest in actually trying to write a general intelligence on it. Right now, there's much more interest in using the pieces for more restricted purposes that are possible now, e.g. using planning algorithms to plan the construction of a 747.
If you want details, I highly recommend this textbook. It's actually a lot of fun to read.
Human mind can't design anything smarter than itself, that is, anything beyond it's comprehension.
Why? I've heard this claim made a lot, but there does not seem to be any logical argument to back it.
We already have computers that are smarter than us when performing specific tasks, such as playing Chess or planning out the steps needed to build a Boeing 747. There's no reason to believe we can't design computers which are smarter than us at performing arbitrary tasks.
As a programmer, I think engineers tend to like to look at government the same way as they look at engineering projects. In engineering, we like to use simple, clean solutions that are easily understood and verified. Software that contains lots of special-cases quickly becomes fragile, bloated, and generally bad.
Or, at least, engineers think it is bad. In practice, almost all the software we use regularly is big and bloated with lots of special-cases. But, engineers -- myself included -- still think of the simple, clean solutions as better.
When you extend that thinking to government, Libertarianism looks very attractive. It says that just a few simple rules -- basically, capitalism, enforcing contracts, and protecting property rights -- gives you a system which magically fixes everything. Libertarians provide all sorts of logical arguments that cover individual cases, e.g. "In the absence of the FDA, private drug certification companies will emerge.". It all sounds so simple.
Unfortunately, in the real world, it just doesn't work. Before the FDA, private drug certification companies did not provide adequate protection for consumers. That's the whole reason why the FDA was created. So why should we think that if we abolish the FDA things will work out this time? In general, most of our government institutions were created to address real problems that existed in the past. Those problems were not solved by Libertarianism at the time, and they won't magically be solved if we try it again.
The fact is, the real world is far too complicated to be governed by any simple set of rules. As nice as Libertarianism sounds, it just will not work in practice.
With that said, Libertarianism does have some good ideas. We should definitely be using competition to force government services to improve. But instead of just abolishing the services and letting the private sector have at it, we should set up rules on a case-by-case basis which create the right incentives, so that the private sector can compete with the government in a way that doesn't screw over the consumer. E.g., allow private drug certification companies to exist, but have the FDA audit their decisions, and apply harsh penalties if they get something wrong. This might allow efficient private companies to do most of the work while keeping government oversight intact.
Smaller-scale solutions like these are actively pursued by smart lawmakers from both main parties all the time, because they work well. Of course, you don't hear about them much because average people don't care about these things.
My guess is that Ron Paul won't enforce the tax code, and if Congress won't play ball, tell the US NOT to pay their income taxes. That'll put a reign in on spending IMMEDIATELY!
Hahahahahahahaha... You do realize that this is a crime, and Ron Paul would be impeached and possibly jailed for it, right?
The Supreme Court can undo its past decisions, but until it does, whatever it says is the law. The Supreme Court disagrees with your view of the constitution.
Regardless, though, telling people that their valued government services should be abolished simply because they are "unconstitutional" is not going to win much support for the Ron Paul cause. You should really be explaining to people why they will be better off without these services. Explain to them how they will be safer trusting a private corporation to insure that their food is not poisonous, or paying for a private security service to protect their homes. They'll probably think you're crazy -- as I do -- but maybe you will seed in them the idea that some government services could be improved if they were forced to compete, either with each other or with private companies. That would be a good thing.
There are multiple ways to interpret the constitution. The constitution itself says that the supreme court is the final authority on these questions. The supreme court has not ruled that labor laws are unconstitutional. Therefore, they are constitutional. No, you can't claim the supreme court is wrong. The supreme court is always right. The constitution says so.
On the other hand, if the supreme court changed its mind on this, we would simply have to pass an amendment to fix it. It would pass easily -- just about everyone agrees that labor laws make the United States a better place.
Strictly upholding a narrow interpretation of the constitution to the detriment of society is not what I would consider a desirable behavior in a president. The real world is complicated, and no one principle can answer all questions.
He's also opposed to network neutrality. And fixing climate change. And student loans. And the FDA. And, uh, income tax. And the federal reserve. Hell, he's basically against every singe government institution that we've created over the lifetime of this country, and if you ask him about the real problems those institutions solved, he pretends no such problems existed! Yes, let's all go back to no public education, hospitals requiring upfront payment, 16-hour work days, child labor, heavy pollution, and massive periodic economic depressions. That sounds great.
Yes, sure, but even if you did all those things, there would still be better things to spend money on than safer bridges. The fact is that our bridges are already quite safe, and the incident in Minneapolis is probably the result of a mistake made during the road work that was going on at the time more than it is the fault of the bridge's original design.
What funding do you propose we cut in order to find money to make bridges ever-so-slightly safer? Shall we cut funding for schools? Reduce the police force? Neglect other roads in need of repair?
Bridges in the western world already have an extremely low failure rate. Reducing it further would require an enormous investment for almost no gain. There are much better ways that we can spend that money.
True, last I checked, if you swap out your motherboard, the NT kernel will crash on boot. I always found that rather retarded, especially since Win9x seemed to be able to handle it.
I think his point was that there are a very large number of "unusual" configurations in which Linux is unhelpful; so many that most people will run into one of them at some point. I know I ran into many, many problems along these lines when I used Linux, though admittedly that was a long time ago, and of course I am not a "typical" user.
On the other hand, Windows would have auto-detected the hardware configuration change. The worst it might have done would be to drop him back to 256-color mode from which he might have had to reinstall his drivers (a simple task on Windows), but more likely it would do this automatically and simply require an extra reboot.
Google probably does more good than harm with this, but their mission statement is not about doing good. It is not about having a positive net impact. It is about doing no evil.
The motto is not "Do no evil". It's "Don't be evil".
My favorite Chavez-ism: He set price controls on various food items in order to stop inflation and "protect the poor". Naturally, as any economist could predict, this had no impact on inflation but did create food shortages. How did Chavez respond? He accused people of "hoarding" food and sent his police off to seize whatever food supplies they could find. source
If Venezuela weren't swimming in oil, its economy would already be in ruins. Unfortunately the oil money is just buying Chavez time to build up to an even more spectacular collapse.
Can you point to any evidence whatsoever that Google sells personal data? The article you link does not make this claim.
The argument that you seem to be making is "Google must sell personal data because they are evil, and they are evil because they sell personal data.", which is a circular argument.
I find it somewhat weird that people are happy to take the word of a company that's willing to sell your search history and personal details to the highest bidder.
Are you referring to Google? Because Google does not sell your search history nor your personal details. Privacy policies are legally-binding, and Google's privacy policy says this:
Information sharing
Google only shares personal information with other companies or individuals outside of Google in the following limited circumstances:
We have your consent. We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information.
We provide such information to our subsidiaries, affiliated companies or other trusted businesses or persons for the purpose of processing personal information on our behalf. We require that these parties agree to process such information based on our instructions and in compliance with this Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request, (b) enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, or (d) protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public as required or permitted by law.
If Google becomes involved in a merger, acquisition, or any form of sale of some or all of its assets, we will provide notice before personal information is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
We may share with third parties certain pieces of aggregated, non-personal information, such as the number of users who searched for a particular term, for example, or how many users clicked on a particular advertisement. Such information does not identify you individually.
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Using arguments like that, you could argue that anything might be an IED. My bags, my cell phone, my laptop, etc. could all equally well be stuffed with C4. Shall we all abandon our bags at the front entrance and change into orange jumpsuits to make sure we don't have anything that could possibly be a bomb?
I think the guards should be trained to know what a bomb looks like. I also think that if they do make a mistake, as they did here, they should apologize and let the person go (possibly asking her to take the thing off and put it in her pocket) rather than arrest her, charge her with a crime, and brag about how they were about to kill her.
wearing a device that looks like an IED, that you designed specifically to look like an IED
The device did not look like an IED and it clearly was not designed to look like an IED. I doubt Star had ever imagined anyone would mistake it for an IED.
http://images.salon.com/tech/machinist/blog/2007/09/21/star_simpson/story.jpg
The hole in the ozone layer hasn't eaten us because we fixed the problem by banning CFCs. Now we need to do something similar with CO2.
Therefore if their strategy is simply as a deterent, then we have one conclusion: the criminals in this area don't care if they're being watched, and you just wasted an obscene amount of money.
How do you come to that conclusion, exactly? The article only claims that the rate of solving crimes is no better with the cameras, probably due to all the reasons you cite. The article does not say anything about whether there is more or less crime with the cameras.
I'm not arguing for or against the cameras, but the argument in this article looks like a misuse of statistics to me.
Who do you propose should pay the costs of building a network which can offer three megabits sustained bandwidth to every user? What you are proposing would be extremely expensive. Meanwhile, most users simply have no need for it. Why should someone be required to pay for 3 megabits sustained when what they really want is 3 megabit bursts during the small fraction of time when they are actually using it?
I think it's wrong to simply cut off users who use too much bandwidth. But, I think traffic shaping is perfectly reasonable (as long as it does not discriminate based on the application). If you really need three megabits sustained, you need to pay for it.
You can identify an infinite loop in some cases, and so can a computer. You cannot identify an infinite loop in all cases. For example, if I gave you a program that loops through all integers looking for a counter-example to Beal's conjecture, you would not be able to tell me if it is an infinite loop. Indeed, if you could, you could claim Beal's $100,000 prize.
Writing an algorithm which identifies infinite loops is a conceptually simple application of a theorem prover. Theorem provers exist, and have proven things that humans could not. They can't always prove or disprove something, just like humans can't. This doesn't serve as any sort of evidence that computers can't match human intelligence.
Have you researched this much? I find our concepts to be pretty advanced, and I think they will only advance faster as we approach the processing power necessary to implement them. This textbook is a pretty good starting point if you want to know details (and it's a lot of fun to read, too!).
I disagree. Logicians and mathematicians have come a long way in defining the rules of thought, and computer scientists much further than them, even.
See my other reply.
The guy I was responding to was claiming that we can't design something smarter than ourselves. You're just saying that we have to understand how intelligence works first. That's an entirely different (and obvious) argument. Do you believe that it is impossible for us to ever understand how our brains work? Why would that be?
We actually do understand quite a bit about intelligence already, if you look at the research. We haven't quite tied it all together yet, but most of the pieces are there. One of the biggest obstacles is the fact that we just don't have the processing power to run any sort of general intelligence algorithm yet, but if hardware continues to advance at the rate it has for the last few decades, that should change soon enough. Once the hardware is available, there will be a lot more interest in actually trying to write a general intelligence on it. Right now, there's much more interest in using the pieces for more restricted purposes that are possible now, e.g. using planning algorithms to plan the construction of a 747.
If you want details, I highly recommend this textbook. It's actually a lot of fun to read.
The FDA is better than what existed before the FDA, yes.
Why? I've heard this claim made a lot, but there does not seem to be any logical argument to back it.
We already have computers that are smarter than us when performing specific tasks, such as playing Chess or planning out the steps needed to build a Boeing 747. There's no reason to believe we can't design computers which are smarter than us at performing arbitrary tasks.
As a programmer, I think engineers tend to like to look at government the same way as they look at engineering projects. In engineering, we like to use simple, clean solutions that are easily understood and verified. Software that contains lots of special-cases quickly becomes fragile, bloated, and generally bad.
Or, at least, engineers think it is bad. In practice, almost all the software we use regularly is big and bloated with lots of special-cases. But, engineers -- myself included -- still think of the simple, clean solutions as better.
When you extend that thinking to government, Libertarianism looks very attractive. It says that just a few simple rules -- basically, capitalism, enforcing contracts, and protecting property rights -- gives you a system which magically fixes everything. Libertarians provide all sorts of logical arguments that cover individual cases, e.g. "In the absence of the FDA, private drug certification companies will emerge.". It all sounds so simple.
Unfortunately, in the real world, it just doesn't work. Before the FDA, private drug certification companies did not provide adequate protection for consumers. That's the whole reason why the FDA was created. So why should we think that if we abolish the FDA things will work out this time? In general, most of our government institutions were created to address real problems that existed in the past. Those problems were not solved by Libertarianism at the time, and they won't magically be solved if we try it again.
The fact is, the real world is far too complicated to be governed by any simple set of rules. As nice as Libertarianism sounds, it just will not work in practice.
With that said, Libertarianism does have some good ideas. We should definitely be using competition to force government services to improve. But instead of just abolishing the services and letting the private sector have at it, we should set up rules on a case-by-case basis which create the right incentives, so that the private sector can compete with the government in a way that doesn't screw over the consumer. E.g., allow private drug certification companies to exist, but have the FDA audit their decisions, and apply harsh penalties if they get something wrong. This might allow efficient private companies to do most of the work while keeping government oversight intact.
Smaller-scale solutions like these are actively pursued by smart lawmakers from both main parties all the time, because they work well. Of course, you don't hear about them much because average people don't care about these things.
My guess is that Ron Paul won't enforce the tax code, and if Congress won't play ball, tell the US NOT to pay their income taxes. That'll put a reign in on spending IMMEDIATELY!
Hahahahahahahaha... You do realize that this is a crime, and Ron Paul would be impeached and possibly jailed for it, right?
The Supreme Court can undo its past decisions, but until it does, whatever it says is the law. The Supreme Court disagrees with your view of the constitution.
Regardless, though, telling people that their valued government services should be abolished simply because they are "unconstitutional" is not going to win much support for the Ron Paul cause. You should really be explaining to people why they will be better off without these services. Explain to them how they will be safer trusting a private corporation to insure that their food is not poisonous, or paying for a private security service to protect their homes. They'll probably think you're crazy -- as I do -- but maybe you will seed in them the idea that some government services could be improved if they were forced to compete, either with each other or with private companies. That would be a good thing.
There are multiple ways to interpret the constitution. The constitution itself says that the supreme court is the final authority on these questions. The supreme court has not ruled that labor laws are unconstitutional. Therefore, they are constitutional. No, you can't claim the supreme court is wrong. The supreme court is always right. The constitution says so.
On the other hand, if the supreme court changed its mind on this, we would simply have to pass an amendment to fix it. It would pass easily -- just about everyone agrees that labor laws make the United States a better place.
Strictly upholding a narrow interpretation of the constitution to the detriment of society is not what I would consider a desirable behavior in a president. The real world is complicated, and no one principle can answer all questions.
He's also opposed to network neutrality. And fixing climate change. And student loans. And the FDA. And, uh, income tax. And the federal reserve. Hell, he's basically against every singe government institution that we've created over the lifetime of this country, and if you ask him about the real problems those institutions solved, he pretends no such problems existed! Yes, let's all go back to no public education, hospitals requiring upfront payment, 16-hour work days, child labor, heavy pollution, and massive periodic economic depressions. That sounds great.
Yes, sure, but even if you did all those things, there would still be better things to spend money on than safer bridges. The fact is that our bridges are already quite safe, and the incident in Minneapolis is probably the result of a mistake made during the road work that was going on at the time more than it is the fault of the bridge's original design.
What funding do you propose we cut in order to find money to make bridges ever-so-slightly safer? Shall we cut funding for schools? Reduce the police force? Neglect other roads in need of repair?
Bridges in the western world already have an extremely low failure rate. Reducing it further would require an enormous investment for almost no gain. There are much better ways that we can spend that money.
True, last I checked, if you swap out your motherboard, the NT kernel will crash on boot. I always found that rather retarded, especially since Win9x seemed to be able to handle it.
I think his point was that there are a very large number of "unusual" configurations in which Linux is unhelpful; so many that most people will run into one of them at some point. I know I ran into many, many problems along these lines when I used Linux, though admittedly that was a long time ago, and of course I am not a "typical" user.
On the other hand, Windows would have auto-detected the hardware configuration change. The worst it might have done would be to drop him back to 256-color mode from which he might have had to reinstall his drivers (a simple task on Windows), but more likely it would do this automatically and simply require an extra reboot.
There are plenty of ways to tell Google not to index your site. robots.txt, meta noindex, etc.
The motto is not "Do no evil". It's "Don't be evil".
My favorite Chavez-ism: He set price controls on various food items in order to stop inflation and "protect the poor". Naturally, as any economist could predict, this had no impact on inflation but did create food shortages. How did Chavez respond? He accused people of "hoarding" food and sent his police off to seize whatever food supplies they could find. source
If Venezuela weren't swimming in oil, its economy would already be in ruins. Unfortunately the oil money is just buying Chavez time to build up to an even more spectacular collapse.
Can you point to any evidence whatsoever that Google sells personal data? The article you link does not make this claim.
The argument that you seem to be making is "Google must sell personal data because they are evil, and they are evil because they sell personal data.", which is a circular argument.
Are you referring to Google? Because Google does not sell your search history nor your personal details. Privacy policies are legally-binding, and Google's privacy policy says this: