"This new technology of the Internet is promising, but we're worried that some aspects of it are going to cause problems. Let's get Congress to impose taxes and regulations to bludgeon the new industry into the shape we think it should take, then let lobbyists and the English majors in Congress be the ones to decide what direction the technology takes."
He has no legal authority under the Constitution to dictate what energy the country will use in the first place. It'd be nice if he and Congress would get out of the way, eliminate energy taxes and subsidies, and let the price determine what solution prevails. Or if he really believes we need federal CO2 taxes, push for a Constitutional amendment to grant government the power to impose them.
Sure. But at present, efficiency ratings for solar panels, plus the cost of manufacturing them, plus the transmission loss from getting energy where it's needed, plus the legal hassle of convincing environmentalists that you're not going to kill an endangered insect on the precious desert landscape, combine to make solar an impractical option. For now. Unfortunately, what we're most likely to do first is heavily tax fossil fuels and heavily subsidize renewables, thus distorting the actual production cost to the point where we're really using $1.01+ of effort to produce $1.00 of energy.
I'll ignore the insults, AC, other than to note that the state bar association would disagree with them.
The mistake above is that "right" is being used to mean both "fundamental right existing for philosophical reasons" and "government-granted privilege granted for society's benefit". "Right" was used ambiguously in this way even in the Constitution.
One thing that came up in my classes was data showing that most copyrights are nearly worthless within a few years. For instance, right now there's probably a sudden rush of books about Michael Jackson, but in ten years those new books will probably be forgotten. Why bother protecting them for 60+ years beyond that?
Well... Yes, patent is much more limited in that there's a far shorter time limit and far stricter requirements. This very comment is automatically copyrighted under US law until at least 2079, hopefully much longer -- which is absurd. (A cure for cancer would be protected for a lot less than life + 70 years, despite being infinitely more useful than this comment!) What I was getting at, though, is that both patent and copyright have that underlying question -- whether we're issuing this protection because we think there's a moral right to it, or just because it's supposedly good for society.
Congress has no general legislative powers, according to the Constitution. That is, if a Constitutional amendment struck the clause in Art. 1 Sec. 8 granting the explicit authority "to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts" by granting patents and copyrights, Congress would have no authority, period, to do it. Yes, some people would say otherwise, but those arguments are based on a severe, deadly misreading of the Constitution as judged from its text, the 10th Amendment, the Federalist Papers, the state ratifying documents, the ratifying debates, and the whole point of the Constitution as establishing a limited, federated government.
I've studied patent and copyright law professionally, and still haven't seen a clear and compelling argument for how it ought to work. As the articles note, one of the main questions is, "Do/should we recognize a creator as having a property right to his creations because there's a moral right to control them, or only because we think it's convenient for society? Ie., is this a 'fundamental right' or a government-granted privilege?" We've largely abandoned the notion of fundamental rights in the US, to our great peril. Because of that abandonment it's harder to think clearly about the question.
The Constitution's wording is ambiguous on this point, but seems to treat "intellectual property" as a privilege rather than a fundamental right. The theory echoes Jefferson's argument that ideas are like a candle-flame, such that "he that lights his taper from mine" doesn't diminish my supply of light. That's roughly what one of the articles was saying about the new tech of player pianos doing no harm to the existing rights of composers to sell sheet music. We've lately been treating IP as more like a right, one of many government-granted 'rights' to forcibly control people.
There was a comic called "Licenseable Bear (tm)", that brought up real arguments amid some silliness. What do you think of its argument that a physical object is ultimately made from resources acquired by right of conquest, while a song or story is created from a person's mind and so is at least as legitimately the creator's own property?
I'm interested in this topic partly because of its connection to "seasteading" or sea-surface colonization.
As with other forms of "alternative" energy, though, the problem is cost. Generating energy from renewable sources certainly sounds nifty. But does it make sense for the kind of low-budget settlement that could plausibly exist anytime soon, or even for conventional markets on land? The article summary is about making an energy generator that will work, period, not making something that can compete with existing energy sources. Right now, alt-energy proposals all seem to rely on governments heavily taxing fossil fuels and heavily subsidizing the new sources, creating a very unfree market. I've even heard the claim (though I've not looked into the numbers) that some of these systems cost more to build and maintain than the lifetime expected value of the energy they harvest.
Rather than a big, durable system, why not some kind of cheap low-energy system? I've heard of some tiny wind (?) energy generator developed for use in the Third World that costs next to nothing and produces a tiny but useful trickle of electricity. If you've got a bunch of those, it doesn't much matter if some break in a big storm.
"Bolting a nut in 0g" doesn't much interest me either! But I'd be a lot more excited by humans setting foot on Mars and puttering about with a greenhouse, than I would with some little robots that spend months poking rocks. Which is the better headline: "Man Walks On Mars" or "NASA Engineers Try To Coax Robot To Pour Rock Dust Into Sample Chamber"?
As I understand it, the two environments are substantially different. Mars has higher air pressure, double gravity, less temperature variation (deadly cold to just really cold, instead of deadly cold to deadly hot), and a different and lighter required suit design. The main similarities are that they're far away, hard to reach, require spacesuits, and have that problem with ultra-fine dust. A lot of that scenario can be practiced in Antarctica, and is actually being done. So, I don't think that going to the Moon specifically for practice would be all that useful.
Would you rather see Mars as an eternally dead rustball, or a thriving new home for humanity, full of farms, factories and cities? And if millions of people are ever going to participate in exploration and colonization, how exactly are they going to get food (or even air!) from the new and hostile environment other than by "exploiting" it? And should we expect them to live non-commercially and work together out of selfless collectivism, as on Star Trek? They tried that method in Jamestown and Plymouth for a while -- and the death rate was incredible.
Also, I don't see how the concept of "enslavement" can be applied to an inanimate object.
"And so it is essentially Mousavi's supporters who are a smaller faction trying to undermine democracy with violence."
Which reminds me again of just how big a difference there is between "democracy" and "freedom". Not that having a council of imams screening your candidates by law makes for much of a true democracy anyway, but the point is that it's quite possible to oppose "the will of the people" in the name of human rights and preventing nuclear war.
I'm interested in the work of Robert Bussard's research team, which continued after his death. Last I heard was sometime late last year, when the US military announced a continued grant to that team for their "Polywell" system. The grant suggests that the military saw something it liked in the interesting, but questionable data from Bussard's last experiments. Is there any new info on this?
Re: fusion research in general, how much of a priority do you think it should be? Is the best way to think of it, "It'll be nice if it ever works, but don't plan on it ever being closer than "40 years away"? (Or 100, now?) There is that one experiment that's been reported on lately with breathless claims that it'll achieve better than break-even energy within "a few years," right? One story from May says that the new California facility will be the one to achieve net energy gain, but suggests that it might take till 2040.
When I asked about the Wii version of "Okami," a game that uses drawing as a magic system, a store clerk claimed that it was flawed because the drawing didn't work well compared to the PS2 version! If the Wii controller is actually inferior for that purpose to a regular controller, it seems like it doesn't do what it was meant to do, and is basically just Power Glove II. Has anyone played both versions of the game for comparison?
Now, with a better sensor system, you have another problem - it's still just a game, the players don't really know how to sword-fight.
I thought that increased realism was part of the point, though. I'd be interested in a swordfighting game that required learning something resembling a real-world skill, so that I'm prepared to... uh, battle skeleton warriors. More seriously, it seems like there's new gameplay to be found if I have to actually try different parries and attacks instead of just hitting Attack, or even High/Low Attack like in a Street Fighter game. If people don't really want anything resembling a realistic experience, why bother with a Wiimote-style controller at all instead of an old-fashioned controller? I guess the test of this reasoning is, would there be a market for a Guitar Hero imitator where the skills carry over somewhat to actual guitar, instead of being basically Simon with music?
Those suggestions are pretty much in line with the discussion of the bulbs themselves: "I don't like how things are, so I think the government should force everyone to meet my standards." The ban on incandescent bulbs, the idea of taxing coal to fund a better power grid, and the idea of taking the property of "the rich" because you don't like them having so much money, all rely on the assumption that government has no rightful limits.
A good poker AI might actually be more interesting than a Jeopardy AI, even if the game it played was online so as to eliminate the factor of reading body language. For Jeopardy questions that boil down to "What is the capital of X" or "In what year did X happen?", a winning AI could basically just be Google running on an internal database. In contrast, winning at poker would involve social reasoning about questions like "When this guy suddenly raises his bet, is he often bluffing, and how likely is it that he thinks I think he's bluffing?"
Build a great Jeopardy AI, and you have a slight upgrade to Google. Build a great poker AI, and you have something that can start to tackle other human social situations.
Reality check: how good are actual poker AIs? A quick search turns up claims that some are pretty good.
I'm on a mailing list with some participants in the Loebner Prize Contest, a version of the Turing Test. ("Robitron," if you want to see the list.) We were talking about this Jeopardy AI project recently.
The most-discussed type of AI on that list is a "chatterbot" like ALICE or the classic ELIZA -- one that basically looks for key words and finds pre-written responses to them. That approach could probably tackle a variety of Jeopardy-type questions if someone took the trouble to feed the AI a bunch of suitably-formatted stimulus/response pairs. Still, I've argued that that type of AI is a dead end both for understanding the mind and for most practical purposes -- and the IBM approach sounds similar to it.
IBM is known for its chess computer, Deep Blue/Deep Thought, which used a brute-force method of searching a huge database of possible board positions. Since there are 400 possible board positions in chess after just one round, memorizing all possible layouts is absurdly data-intensive and almost certainly not how humans play chess or do most other things. (The poor progress of AI for the game of Go, in which there are many more possible layouts, also suggests that brute-force lookup isn't how we do things.) I'm more interested in the AI approach described by Douglas Hofstadter in "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies," which focuses on lots of semi-random "codelets" doing lots of processing on limited data. Using that style for a chess AI would involve having it make observations like "this is one of those knight-fork situations."
The upshot is that while IBM might be able to play a passable game of Jeopardy if treated as deaf and mute (given written I/O), that project won't get us much closer to human-like AI.
Or militants who have been bombing hospitals, police stations and historic Muslim mosques. Also, the US already does share quite a bit of its wealth with foreign nations in the form of food aid and other assistance, even ignoring other benefits such as piggybacking on our research.
And those of us who are real men will stop hiding behind guns, and rely exclusively on wrestling. If we really believed in our cause we'd go out of our way to fight as ineffectively as possible and at maximum risk to ourselves!
Slashdot Mirror
"This new technology of the Internet is promising, but we're worried that some aspects of it are going to cause problems. Let's get Congress to impose taxes and regulations to bludgeon the new industry into the shape we think it should take, then let lobbyists and the English majors in Congress be the ones to decide what direction the technology takes."
He has no legal authority under the Constitution to dictate what energy the country will use in the first place. It'd be nice if he and Congress would get out of the way, eliminate energy taxes and subsidies, and let the price determine what solution prevails. Or if he really believes we need federal CO2 taxes, push for a Constitutional amendment to grant government the power to impose them.
Sure. But at present, efficiency ratings for solar panels, plus the cost of manufacturing them, plus the transmission loss from getting energy where it's needed, plus the legal hassle of convincing environmentalists that you're not going to kill an endangered insect on the precious desert landscape, combine to make solar an impractical option. For now. Unfortunately, what we're most likely to do first is heavily tax fossil fuels and heavily subsidize renewables, thus distorting the actual production cost to the point where we're really using $1.01+ of effort to produce $1.00 of energy.
I'll ignore the insults, AC, other than to note that the state bar association would disagree with them.
The mistake above is that "right" is being used to mean both "fundamental right existing for philosophical reasons" and "government-granted privilege granted for society's benefit". "Right" was used ambiguously in this way even in the Constitution.
One thing that came up in my classes was data showing that most copyrights are nearly worthless within a few years. For instance, right now there's probably a sudden rush of books about Michael Jackson, but in ten years those new books will probably be forgotten. Why bother protecting them for 60+ years beyond that?
Well... Yes, patent is much more limited in that there's a far shorter time limit and far stricter requirements. This very comment is automatically copyrighted under US law until at least 2079, hopefully much longer -- which is absurd. (A cure for cancer would be protected for a lot less than life + 70 years, despite being infinitely more useful than this comment!) What I was getting at, though, is that both patent and copyright have that underlying question -- whether we're issuing this protection because we think there's a moral right to it, or just because it's supposedly good for society.
Congress has no general legislative powers, according to the Constitution. That is, if a Constitutional amendment struck the clause in Art. 1 Sec. 8 granting the explicit authority "to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts" by granting patents and copyrights, Congress would have no authority, period, to do it. Yes, some people would say otherwise, but those arguments are based on a severe, deadly misreading of the Constitution as judged from its text, the 10th Amendment, the Federalist Papers, the state ratifying documents, the ratifying debates, and the whole point of the Constitution as establishing a limited, federated government.
Your sig is the start of a solution.
I've studied patent and copyright law professionally, and still haven't seen a clear and compelling argument for how it ought to work. As the articles note, one of the main questions is, "Do/should we recognize a creator as having a property right to his creations because there's a moral right to control them, or only because we think it's convenient for society? Ie., is this a 'fundamental right' or a government-granted privilege?" We've largely abandoned the notion of fundamental rights in the US, to our great peril. Because of that abandonment it's harder to think clearly about the question.
The Constitution's wording is ambiguous on this point, but seems to treat "intellectual property" as a privilege rather than a fundamental right. The theory echoes Jefferson's argument that ideas are like a candle-flame, such that "he that lights his taper from mine" doesn't diminish my supply of light. That's roughly what one of the articles was saying about the new tech of player pianos doing no harm to the existing rights of composers to sell sheet music. We've lately been treating IP as more like a right, one of many government-granted 'rights' to forcibly control people.
There was a comic called "Licenseable Bear (tm)", that brought up real arguments amid some silliness. What do you think of its argument that a physical object is ultimately made from resources acquired by right of conquest, while a song or story is created from a person's mind and so is at least as legitimately the creator's own property?
I'm interested in this topic partly because of its connection to "seasteading" or sea-surface colonization.
As with other forms of "alternative" energy, though, the problem is cost. Generating energy from renewable sources certainly sounds nifty. But does it make sense for the kind of low-budget settlement that could plausibly exist anytime soon, or even for conventional markets on land? The article summary is about making an energy generator that will work, period, not making something that can compete with existing energy sources. Right now, alt-energy proposals all seem to rely on governments heavily taxing fossil fuels and heavily subsidizing the new sources, creating a very unfree market. I've even heard the claim (though I've not looked into the numbers) that some of these systems cost more to build and maintain than the lifetime expected value of the energy they harvest.
Rather than a big, durable system, why not some kind of cheap low-energy system? I've heard of some tiny wind (?) energy generator developed for use in the Third World that costs next to nothing and produces a tiny but useful trickle of electricity. If you've got a bunch of those, it doesn't much matter if some break in a big storm.
"Bolting a nut in 0g" doesn't much interest me either! But I'd be a lot more excited by humans setting foot on Mars and puttering about with a greenhouse, than I would with some little robots that spend months poking rocks. Which is the better headline: "Man Walks On Mars" or "NASA Engineers Try To Coax Robot To Pour Rock Dust Into Sample Chamber"?
As I understand it, the two environments are substantially different. Mars has higher air pressure, double gravity, less temperature variation (deadly cold to just really cold, instead of deadly cold to deadly hot), and a different and lighter required suit design. The main similarities are that they're far away, hard to reach, require spacesuits, and have that problem with ultra-fine dust. A lot of that scenario can be practiced in Antarctica, and is actually being done. So, I don't think that going to the Moon specifically for practice would be all that useful.
Would you rather see Mars as an eternally dead rustball, or a thriving new home for humanity, full of farms, factories and cities? And if millions of people are ever going to participate in exploration and colonization, how exactly are they going to get food (or even air!) from the new and hostile environment other than by "exploiting" it? And should we expect them to live non-commercially and work together out of selfless collectivism, as on Star Trek? They tried that method in Jamestown and Plymouth for a while -- and the death rate was incredible.
Also, I don't see how the concept of "enslavement" can be applied to an inanimate object.
Did it retire?
Interesting decision to use a phrase that usually refers to "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled," and to replace "the devil" with "Israel".
"And so it is essentially Mousavi's supporters who are a smaller faction trying to undermine democracy with violence."
Which reminds me again of just how big a difference there is between "democracy" and "freedom". Not that having a council of imams screening your candidates by law makes for much of a true democracy anyway, but the point is that it's quite possible to oppose "the will of the people" in the name of human rights and preventing nuclear war.
I'm interested in the work of Robert Bussard's research team, which continued after his death. Last I heard was sometime late last year, when the US military announced a continued grant to that team for their "Polywell" system. The grant suggests that the military saw something it liked in the interesting, but questionable data from Bussard's last experiments. Is there any new info on this?
Re: fusion research in general, how much of a priority do you think it should be? Is the best way to think of it, "It'll be nice if it ever works, but don't plan on it ever being closer than "40 years away"? (Or 100, now?) There is that one experiment that's been reported on lately with breathless claims that it'll achieve better than break-even energy within "a few years," right? One story from May says that the new California facility will be the one to achieve net energy gain, but suggests that it might take till 2040.
When I asked about the Wii version of "Okami," a game that uses drawing as a magic system, a store clerk claimed that it was flawed because the drawing didn't work well compared to the PS2 version! If the Wii controller is actually inferior for that purpose to a regular controller, it seems like it doesn't do what it was meant to do, and is basically just Power Glove II. Has anyone played both versions of the game for comparison?
Now, with a better sensor system, you have another problem - it's still just a game, the players don't really know how to sword-fight.
I thought that increased realism was part of the point, though. I'd be interested in a swordfighting game that required learning something resembling a real-world skill, so that I'm prepared to... uh, battle skeleton warriors. More seriously, it seems like there's new gameplay to be found if I have to actually try different parries and attacks instead of just hitting Attack, or even High/Low Attack like in a Street Fighter game. If people don't really want anything resembling a realistic experience, why bother with a Wiimote-style controller at all instead of an old-fashioned controller? I guess the test of this reasoning is, would there be a market for a Guitar Hero imitator where the skills carry over somewhat to actual guitar, instead of being basically Simon with music?
Those suggestions are pretty much in line with the discussion of the bulbs themselves: "I don't like how things are, so I think the government should force everyone to meet my standards." The ban on incandescent bulbs, the idea of taxing coal to fund a better power grid, and the idea of taking the property of "the rich" because you don't like them having so much money, all rely on the assumption that government has no rightful limits.
A good poker AI might actually be more interesting than a Jeopardy AI, even if the game it played was online so as to eliminate the factor of reading body language. For Jeopardy questions that boil down to "What is the capital of X" or "In what year did X happen?", a winning AI could basically just be Google running on an internal database. In contrast, winning at poker would involve social reasoning about questions like "When this guy suddenly raises his bet, is he often bluffing, and how likely is it that he thinks I think he's bluffing?"
Build a great Jeopardy AI, and you have a slight upgrade to Google. Build a great poker AI, and you have something that can start to tackle other human social situations.
Reality check: how good are actual poker AIs? A quick search turns up claims that some are pretty good.
I'm on a mailing list with some participants in the Loebner Prize Contest, a version of the Turing Test. ("Robitron," if you want to see the list.) We were talking about this Jeopardy AI project recently.
The most-discussed type of AI on that list is a "chatterbot" like ALICE or the classic ELIZA -- one that basically looks for key words and finds pre-written responses to them. That approach could probably tackle a variety of Jeopardy-type questions if someone took the trouble to feed the AI a bunch of suitably-formatted stimulus/response pairs. Still, I've argued that that type of AI is a dead end both for understanding the mind and for most practical purposes -- and the IBM approach sounds similar to it.
IBM is known for its chess computer, Deep Blue/Deep Thought, which used a brute-force method of searching a huge database of possible board positions. Since there are 400 possible board positions in chess after just one round, memorizing all possible layouts is absurdly data-intensive and almost certainly not how humans play chess or do most other things. (The poor progress of AI for the game of Go, in which there are many more possible layouts, also suggests that brute-force lookup isn't how we do things.) I'm more interested in the AI approach described by Douglas Hofstadter in "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies," which focuses on lots of semi-random "codelets" doing lots of processing on limited data. Using that style for a chess AI would involve having it make observations like "this is one of those knight-fork situations."
The upshot is that while IBM might be able to play a passable game of Jeopardy if treated as deaf and mute (given written I/O), that project won't get us much closer to human-like AI.
"just make sure he knows your intended goal every time you go out, be sure to have adventures, and be sure to talk about them non-stop around him.
Should you include info on how many experience points you got?
Or militants who have been bombing hospitals, police stations and historic Muslim mosques. Also, the US already does share quite a bit of its wealth with foreign nations in the form of food aid and other assistance, even ignoring other benefits such as piggybacking on our research.
And those of us who are real men will stop hiding behind guns, and rely exclusively on wrestling. If we really believed in our cause we'd go out of our way to fight as ineffectively as possible and at maximum risk to ourselves!