The fact that any game company would consider spending that much money on a game suggests that there's something seriously wrong with industry game design. How much did Id Software spend on, say, Doom II?
Well, yeah, but I think he's saying that if one of these interest groups wants to, they can make whatever changes they want to make to the basic software protocols, or even the hardware, and try to convince us through the free market to buy and use their equipment. It's countries like China that want to "improve" the Net in a way that will be forcibly imposed on people.
Is this a case for or against governments relying on un-biased automated systems? Or, should anyone be able to control who is recorded on camera and who is held accountable?"
It depends. Do you want a legal system in which the rules apply to everyone, or only to those too weak to cheat?
I don't think you're the first to be thinking along those lines. Corporations have been making attempts to restrict what types of media can play on a computer, under what terms, to the point of Sony's installing rootkits on its customers' computers. On the hardware side, the Trusted Computing concept helps limit users' anonymity. In politics, the free world is toying with laws requiring monitoring of innocent Net users to fight terrorism/porn/drugs, and countries like China are doing massive censorship. In looking at other hardware, we know that there's at least one US-government-mandated design feature -- the V-Chip for televisions -- and supposedly the Secret Service has subverted several brands of printer. Japan has even issued some draft guidelines for robot regulation.
What we're seeing is a convergence of trends towards locking down computers, making it illegal to build or sell a machine with the full power and freedom of a Turing Machine. Some argue (Okay, it's not a great source; just did a quick search) that restrictions like this are equivalent to Soviet Russian restrictions on the use of photocopiers.
The various restrictions being placed on computer users for various reasons threaten our use of an important tool, and are oppressive and insulting. Even if you personally are a savvy computer user, are you prepared (based on your proposal) to be charged a fee, photographed, fingerprinted, licensed, monitored, and otherwise treated like a criminal, because you weren't content with the toys your government allows lesser geeks to use?
How about the entire site of Homestar Runner? The various games and cartoons there are loaded with Easter Egg features, which get cataloged obsessively here.
You're absolutely right. We should abolish the Clean Air Act, then all the other environmental regulations and finally the EPA and then start arresting factory workers and operators for assault by poisoning.
Regardless of whether there's a need for any particular type of environmental law, isn't it a reasonable argument that the EPA's existence and powers are unconstitutional? If we need something like the EPA to exist, I would rather amend the Constitution to say "Congress may regulate X" than have Congress exceed its legal authority. Several recent Supreme Court cases have taken a similar stand, striking down laws that seem reasonable and useful (against carrying guns in school zones and committing violence against women), because Congress had no right to pass them.
The Court told the EPA that they had to DO THEIR DAMN JOBS, regulate greenhouse gasses, or provide a reasonable explanation why they won't. You see for years in the face of overwhelming evidence they have simply failed to act in accordance with the law.
The Clean Air Act, Sec. 108, calls for regulation of substances that "cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare." (Emphasis added.) Even accepting the idea of global warming at face value -- that it's real, human-caused, and dangerous -- is carbon dioxide really an "air pollutant" under that definition? Normally we think of pollution as something that poisons people in some way, not something that has long-term, cumulative effects on the weather. By the new definition that includes CO2, water is also an air pollutant, because it too (in vapor form) is a greenhouse gas. Arguably it's even the most important greenhouse gas. Why aren't people calling for mandatory regulation of water as a deadly air pollutant? Human emissions of it may be minor, but if it contributes to global warming, it's an "air pollutant" by the same logic the USSC uses and must have a national regulation plan.
This doesn't even get into the constitutional problem of regulating emissions of a substance produced by breathing, or the EPA's constitutional authority in general.
We don't have the ability to throw away any cycles of the game so the AI tends to be highly stripped down to the point it's just "oh I see a gun, I'm going to react to the gun, how should I react to the gun, I'll do that."
Interesting. Reminds me of some researcher's comment about human reaction times, something like: "There's all this cognition going on, when all we want him to do is push the stupid button!"
I think what we should be trying to do with game AI, for humanlike characters as opposed to random demons, is to broaden the horizons of what the characters "think" about. If all players do is run around shooting them, most of that thinking will be wasted, but it opens up a wider range of possible interaction. One compromise between advanced AI and fast AI would be to have a part of the game in which the characters have long-term goals, emotions, and relationships, which set a much narrower range of parameters for a simpler AI when it's time for combat, which feeds a small amount of data back into the big AI after battle.
I think the idea is that during the next serious war, much of the Web will become unusable because major Web sites and e-mail will be jammed, flooded, virused, or misdirected into oblivion. (And cell phones, and VOIP...) Meanwhile, each side will be trying to find secret military information from the others' computers and even interfere with military robotics. Though there's some skepticism such as this about the reality of "cyber war" exercises, it will probably become significant enough that the US government has good reason to care. Whether its efforts are legal, justified or effective is another issue.
Although I mostly agree, I do think it's worth an "Offtopic" mod for a post that basically says, "This situation would be much better if not for that damned Bush spending money on Iraq!" I've seen one or two posts like that on other articles (not this one) and think the moderation appropriate if there's not some effort to address the actual article topic.
I think the difference is that you're only likely to access the maliciously formed movie or similar files if you're going to a site that's already dangerous -- used for malware that is -- or doing something questionable like installing FREE SCREENSAVERS! The second type of problem is something that an ordinary user can't guard against simply by not doing anything stupid; it requires some kind of active defense. It's the difference between knowing you might be mugged if you walk down a dark alley, versus knowing you might be attacked by invisible ghosts while you sleep. The anxiety factor is a lot higher.
Although I don't know the name of it offhand, there's a textbook case illustrating the idea that even a small excerpt of a large work can be considered infringing, if it's a really important part. I think that this snippet of text is from a magazine article that scooped key details of an upcoming book of President Ford's memoirs. That is, the memoir book was about to come out, and (by questionable means) someone obtained the text and went to press with a few small quotes which were the part readers really wanted: the explanation of why Ford pardoned Nixon. The court found that despite the small size of the quoted portion relative to the book, this copying was infringement.
I was going to moderate this, maybe "Insightful," but then it descended into Trolldom. Making up gratuitous clever nicknames like "Foul Breathed Investigators" does nothing to bolster your argument; in fact it makes me (at least) focus on the name-calling rather than the argument. Attributing outright malevolence to Bush is also cliche by now.
You have a legitimate case to make about the abuses and expansion of government power.
Once our cars are on autopilot -- DARPA is working on it through its neat races -- do you suppose we'll have administrator access to them, or will someone else?
I'm not sure what you man by "firebombed," at least in the context of evolution. I think the idea being discussed here (without speaking to its merits) is, "Is global warming so overhyped that people are ignoring it out of annoyance?) I don't see widespread ignoring of evolution, though. As far as I can tell it remains dominant in schools, fortunately, with ongoing broadsides like those of Dawkins, the Discovery Institute, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
I second Startide Rising and add his Earth to some extent; flaky science in that one but with some interesting stuff about black holes and the environment. SR and the other Uplift novels (skip Sundiver) were what made me major in Biology for a while. A short story that's arguably completely hard SF, The Aficionado (aka. Life In the Extreme) is available free on Brin's Web site; it's a look at the origins of Uplift.
See also Kim Robinson's Red Mars and to a lesser extent the sequels. These involve Mars colonization without any nonsense about alien artifacts for once.
I'm tempted to suggest Stephenson's The Diamond Age because of the ideas about future societies and the "magic" book, but the last third or so of the book is unsuitable; I found it needlessly lurid and barely comprehensible. Maybe look at Stephenson's Baroque Cycle series? It's very long, but from what I've read of the first book it's got all sorts of apparently well-researched history-of-science material.
Ah! And if you're willing to include nonfiction that's a good read, look up Devil In the White City, re: one of the world's great feats of engineering and the individuals who made it work.
A point that isn't usually articulated: the reason that this "What do you have to hide?" argument doesn't hold water is that universal monitoring has two likely outcomes. One is that once we start watching everyone all the time, we realized that everybody is a criminal under the current profusion of laws, and we start scaling them back to focus on things that actually should be illegal. The other is that we abandon the idea of the "rule of law," by selectively enforcing our laws. Watch for this effect: Smiling officials say "Don't worry, we'll ignore minor infractions," rather than de-criminalizing those crimes. It sounds convenient, but it means the government will have dirt on everyone, ready to use whenever it's convenient.
I greatly admire The Something Must be Done philosophy. It suggests a degree of discipline that pushes society as a whole to improve itself...
Well, that's good as far as it goes, but here in the US we have a tendency to see that as "we need new laws." In some cases we write new laws to criminalize things that are already illegal, or that could be better handled by the free market or nonprofit groups.
That's not a fair comparison. The Jews weren't firebombing embassies, let alone hijacking anything. Hatred against them was based on centuries-old religious and other cultural divisions, the need for a scapegoat for unrelated national problems, and a dose of bad science. Although anti-Muslim prejudice does have deep roots, and while you can argue we're unfairly characterizing a whole group based on the actions of a few, I can't think of any 1930s Jewish equivalent to the headline-making activities of Muslim fanatics. In fact, modern Muslims in Germany are making headlines for charming activities such as murdering family members for being insufficiently devout. If we mistreat Muslims it will be because we're overreacting to actual provocation by some part of that group.
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And MIT would finish him off once and for all with your cannon. 8)
The fact that any game company would consider spending that much money on a game suggests that there's something seriously wrong with industry game design. How much did Id Software spend on, say, Doom II?
Well, yeah, but I think he's saying that if one of these interest groups wants to, they can make whatever changes they want to make to the basic software protocols, or even the hardware, and try to convince us through the free market to buy and use their equipment. It's countries like China that want to "improve" the Net in a way that will be forcibly imposed on people.
Is this a case for or against governments relying on un-biased automated systems? Or, should anyone be able to control who is recorded on camera and who is held accountable?"
It depends. Do you want a legal system in which the rules apply to everyone, or only to those too weak to cheat?
I don't think you're the first to be thinking along those lines. Corporations have been making attempts to restrict what types of media can play on a computer, under what terms, to the point of Sony's installing rootkits on its customers' computers. On the hardware side, the Trusted Computing concept helps limit users' anonymity. In politics, the free world is toying with laws requiring monitoring of innocent Net users to fight terrorism/porn/drugs, and countries like China are doing massive censorship. In looking at other hardware, we know that there's at least one US-government-mandated design feature -- the V-Chip for televisions -- and supposedly the Secret Service has subverted several brands of printer. Japan has even issued some draft guidelines for robot regulation.
What we're seeing is a convergence of trends towards locking down computers, making it illegal to build or sell a machine with the full power and freedom of a Turing Machine. Some argue (Okay, it's not a great source; just did a quick search) that restrictions like this are equivalent to Soviet Russian restrictions on the use of photocopiers.
The various restrictions being placed on computer users for various reasons threaten our use of an important tool, and are oppressive and insulting. Even if you personally are a savvy computer user, are you prepared (based on your proposal) to be charged a fee, photographed, fingerprinted, licensed, monitored, and otherwise treated like a criminal, because you weren't content with the toys your government allows lesser geeks to use?
How about the entire site of Homestar Runner? The various games and cartoons there are loaded with Easter Egg features, which get cataloged obsessively here.
You're absolutely right. We should abolish the Clean Air Act, then all the other environmental regulations and finally the EPA and then start arresting factory workers and operators for assault by poisoning.
Regardless of whether there's a need for any particular type of environmental law, isn't it a reasonable argument that the EPA's existence and powers are unconstitutional? If we need something like the EPA to exist, I would rather amend the Constitution to say "Congress may regulate X" than have Congress exceed its legal authority. Several recent Supreme Court cases have taken a similar stand, striking down laws that seem reasonable and useful (against carrying guns in school zones and committing violence against women), because Congress had no right to pass them.
The Court told the EPA that they had to DO THEIR DAMN JOBS, regulate greenhouse gasses, or provide a reasonable explanation why they won't. You see for years in the face of overwhelming evidence they have simply failed to act in accordance with the law.
The Clean Air Act, Sec. 108, calls for regulation of substances that "cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare." (Emphasis added.) Even accepting the idea of global warming at face value -- that it's real, human-caused, and dangerous -- is carbon dioxide really an "air pollutant" under that definition? Normally we think of pollution as something that poisons people in some way, not something that has long-term, cumulative effects on the weather. By the new definition that includes CO2, water is also an air pollutant, because it too (in vapor form) is a greenhouse gas. Arguably it's even the most important greenhouse gas. Why aren't people calling for mandatory regulation of water as a deadly air pollutant? Human emissions of it may be minor, but if it contributes to global warming, it's an "air pollutant" by the same logic the USSC uses and must have a national regulation plan.
This doesn't even get into the constitutional problem of regulating emissions of a substance produced by breathing, or the EPA's constitutional authority in general.
We don't have the ability to throw away any cycles of the game so the AI tends to be highly stripped down to the point it's just "oh I see a gun, I'm going to react to the gun, how should I react to the gun, I'll do that."
Interesting. Reminds me of some researcher's comment about human reaction times, something like: "There's all this cognition going on, when all we want him to do is push the stupid button!"
I think what we should be trying to do with game AI, for humanlike characters as opposed to random demons, is to broaden the horizons of what the characters "think" about. If all players do is run around shooting them, most of that thinking will be wasted, but it opens up a wider range of possible interaction. One compromise between advanced AI and fast AI would be to have a part of the game in which the characters have long-term goals, emotions, and relationships, which set a much narrower range of parameters for a simpler AI when it's time for combat, which feeds a small amount of data back into the big AI after battle.
Nice. And in response, a friend of mine offered to let me pirate a copy. I said no.
I think the idea is that during the next serious war, much of the Web will become unusable because major Web sites and e-mail will be jammed, flooded, virused, or misdirected into oblivion. (And cell phones, and VOIP...) Meanwhile, each side will be trying to find secret military information from the others' computers and even interfere with military robotics. Though there's some skepticism such as this about the reality of "cyber war" exercises, it will probably become significant enough that the US government has good reason to care. Whether its efforts are legal, justified or effective is another issue.
Although I mostly agree, I do think it's worth an "Offtopic" mod for a post that basically says, "This situation would be much better if not for that damned Bush spending money on Iraq!" I've seen one or two posts like that on other articles (not this one) and think the moderation appropriate if there's not some effort to address the actual article topic.
Can you explain who "the ruling class" are in this context, and how they profit from the listed abuses of power?
I think the difference is that you're only likely to access the maliciously formed movie or similar files if you're going to a site that's already dangerous -- used for malware that is -- or doing something questionable like installing FREE SCREENSAVERS! The second type of problem is something that an ordinary user can't guard against simply by not doing anything stupid; it requires some kind of active defense. It's the difference between knowing you might be mugged if you walk down a dark alley, versus knowing you might be attacked by invisible ghosts while you sleep. The anxiety factor is a lot higher.
Although I don't know the name of it offhand, there's a textbook case illustrating the idea that even a small excerpt of a large work can be considered infringing, if it's a really important part. I think that this snippet of text is from a magazine article that scooped key details of an upcoming book of President Ford's memoirs. That is, the memoir book was about to come out, and (by questionable means) someone obtained the text and went to press with a few small quotes which were the part readers really wanted: the explanation of why Ford pardoned Nixon. The court found that despite the small size of the quoted portion relative to the book, this copying was infringement.
I'm not saying I'm offended, but that your argument would be more effective if it weren't laden with that level of sarcasm.
I was going to moderate this, maybe "Insightful," but then it descended into Trolldom. Making up gratuitous clever nicknames like "Foul Breathed Investigators" does nothing to bolster your argument; in fact it makes me (at least) focus on the name-calling rather than the argument. Attributing outright malevolence to Bush is also cliche by now.
You have a legitimate case to make about the abuses and expansion of government power.
Once our cars are on autopilot -- DARPA is working on it through its neat races -- do you suppose we'll have administrator access to them, or will someone else?
I'm not sure what you man by "firebombed," at least in the context of evolution. I think the idea being discussed here (without speaking to its merits) is, "Is global warming so overhyped that people are ignoring it out of annoyance?) I don't see widespread ignoring of evolution, though. As far as I can tell it remains dominant in schools, fortunately, with ongoing broadsides like those of Dawkins, the Discovery Institute, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
I second Startide Rising and add his Earth to some extent; flaky science in that one but with some interesting stuff about black holes and the environment. SR and the other Uplift novels (skip Sundiver) were what made me major in Biology for a while. A short story that's arguably completely hard SF, The Aficionado (aka. Life In the Extreme) is available free on Brin's Web site; it's a look at the origins of Uplift.
See also Kim Robinson's Red Mars and to a lesser extent the sequels. These involve Mars colonization without any nonsense about alien artifacts for once.
I'm tempted to suggest Stephenson's The Diamond Age because of the ideas about future societies and the "magic" book, but the last third or so of the book is unsuitable; I found it needlessly lurid and barely comprehensible. Maybe look at Stephenson's Baroque Cycle series? It's very long, but from what I've read of the first book it's got all sorts of apparently well-researched history-of-science material.
Ah! And if you're willing to include nonfiction that's a good read, look up Devil In the White City, re: one of the world's great feats of engineering and the individuals who made it work.
This money would've been a nice down payment on a Mars expedition.
A point that isn't usually articulated: the reason that this "What do you have to hide?" argument doesn't hold water is that universal monitoring has two likely outcomes. One is that once we start watching everyone all the time, we realized that everybody is a criminal under the current profusion of laws, and we start scaling them back to focus on things that actually should be illegal. The other is that we abandon the idea of the "rule of law," by selectively enforcing our laws. Watch for this effect: Smiling officials say "Don't worry, we'll ignore minor infractions," rather than de-criminalizing those crimes. It sounds convenient, but it means the government will have dirt on everyone, ready to use whenever it's convenient.
Remember that the British are still technically subjects of a queen.
I greatly admire The Something Must be Done philosophy. It suggests a degree of discipline that pushes society as a whole to improve itself...
Well, that's good as far as it goes, but here in the US we have a tendency to see that as "we need new laws." In some cases we write new laws to criminalize things that are already illegal, or that could be better handled by the free market or nonprofit groups.
That's not a fair comparison. The Jews weren't firebombing embassies, let alone hijacking anything. Hatred against them was based on centuries-old religious and other cultural divisions, the need for a scapegoat for unrelated national problems, and a dose of bad science. Although anti-Muslim prejudice does have deep roots, and while you can argue we're unfairly characterizing a whole group based on the actions of a few, I can't think of any 1930s Jewish equivalent to the headline-making activities of Muslim fanatics. In fact, modern Muslims in Germany are making headlines for charming activities such as murdering family members for being insufficiently devout. If we mistreat Muslims it will be because we're overreacting to actual provocation by some part of that group.