Aside from the obvious example of Fox News, all other TV news outlets have a consistent negative slant on the efforts in Iraq.
Pardon my French, but these "efforts" are a fucked up mismanaged mess that have slanted all by themselves towards the negative - it's what happens when you roll into a country and toss the government that's been in charge for twenty years without any reasonable plan to end the power vacuum and restore order. What the anti-war crowd wants is for the Bush administration not to fuck this situation up, but it appears to be too late for that. The situation is a mess, it's been handled terribly from every point of view except the military one (I will give them credit - they've done an admirable job when they've had missions to accomplish, the only reason they didn't win the war yet is that the politicians forgot to pin down exactly what "win" would mean in this context, they just thought that things would magically heal themselves and it would be obvious). Yes, America has a badass army that can destroy whatever it wants with very little trouble; unfortunately it also has some mentally challenged leaders that forgot they would need to clean up the mess left by removing an active dictator from a country that's forgotten how to rule itself.
Iraq is no longer a war, after all. A war involves two organized armies having at it, as in with actual commanders and weapons; Iraq is just a bunch of idiots blowing crap up on the roads to scare the people trying to calm things down. We're now trying to quell an insurgency, which is exactly what the anti-war set warned would happen, and warned that we didn't have a plan to deal with. If I recall the response from the Bush administration was that the Iraqis would not do this because they would be so happy to be rid of Saddam. If that had been true, we would have stopped arguing this crap two years ago.
So we're screwed? Should we leave? Who knows...it doesn't appear that things are going very well, which I'm pretty sure even Bush admitted himself, and I really do feel for the Iraqis, so maybe it would be worth sticking it out a little longer to see if we can at least leave things slightly less dangerous than they are now. But as you get yourself all heated up about the anti-war leftist commie shitbag bastards with their patchouli douche and smokable underwear, don't forget this key fact - they were right. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. The entire justification for this war was mistaken, even if it was not an outright lie. Iraq was not even on the radar when it came to being a dire threat to the United States. I know the standard right-wing line from here: Saddam was a bad guy, are you saying it would be better if we left him in power? Well, no, I would never argue the world was better with him, yes, he was a real nasty leader. But there are a lot of bad guys out there. If we start wars with each of their countries just because they're bad guys...well, we just can't, for lack of resources, troops, and morale. There are too many places where we don't like the current leadership, and these kinds of missions do not tend to turn out well, either for our country or theirs. We don't have the energy as a nation to keep reliving the same military regime change nightmare over and over. And the fact is, without the WMD "proof" showing that Saddam was a clear, imminent threat, we would never have gone in because people wouldn't have supported it. Unlike politicians (real or armchair), most real people like to be extremely careful about sending their children off to war, so don't underestimate how totally messed up it is that thousands of our people have now died and killed because of a war that probably shouldn't have started at all.
So whatever...the point of this rant is that the Republicans in control of this war are the ones that messed up - it's ridiculous to point a finger at the media and scream "BIAS!" for reporting on it. You can try to spin this a
You're right, of course - I think we're actually in more or less perfect agreement, but in the above post I got too casual in my use of the word "theft." My point was just that the act is "stealing" in the looser (i.e. incorrect) sense of not paying for something that you're legally required to pay for. Incidentally, I suspect this is exactly the type of ambiguity that the RIAA is leaning on when they try to relabel infringement as theft, as well. This casual meaning is different from the dictionary definition of "theft" (from dictionary.net), with the important bit highlighted:
Theft \Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.]
1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief. See Larceny, and the Note under Robbery.
And copyright infringement not equalling theft is, in fact, crucial to my original post's point - the people should probably not be allowed to authorize massive theft of private property, regardless of how much they want to (though some might argue that this is exactly what taxes are, but controlled taxes are a different thing completely than unrestrained and unregulated pillaging would be). But since copying something does not deprive the original owner of anything, it's not clear in any freedom sense the owner needs to be protected from this, or has some fundamental right to control what is done with information that he has created.
All you whiners who hate on "Old Media" and want everything completely free should hang out on YouTube and exclusively watch all the video blogs and clips of people running into each other with shopping carts. Because if you're successful in killing Old Media, that's all you'll have! Sorry guys. It may not require tens of millions of dollars to produce gobs and gobs of high quality video entertainment with mass appeal, but it does take more then a couple dudes with a camcorder and six bucks.
Whether or not the ultimate quality of media in the country would decline, the point is that killing Old Media is, or at least should be, perfectly within the rights of the people - if people do not think they should have to pay for a product (especially a non-physical product the copying of which does not directly cost the company any goods or money), for whatever reason, then it is the peoples' right to revoke the protections offered to that product, i.e. copyright. It is not a priori obvious that an idea or a work of art should be illegal to copy, in fact it would seem a bit counterintuitive except for the fact that we've grown up used to the idea. Though I definitely agree with you that currently, the people have not revoked this right explicitly (even if their actions indicate strong desire to do so), and if you believe in the rule of law then there is no justification for sharing this stuff; if you don't believe in following laws that you disagree with, so be it, that's your right, just don't get caught. There certainly is some rationale for ignoring unjust laws, but those who do so should at least admit that that's what they're doing - it IS stealing as our current law defines it, even if the current laws don't seem reasonable.
I'm not with you, though, that we'd only be left with guys running shopping carts into each other if Old Media fizzled and popped. Traditional television runs on an advertising model, and this translates to the web quite well; frankly I'd love to see the means of TV distribution become much more decentralized. And good music is going to come out whether or not it's sold by the millions for $20 a pop or through donations that just barely pay the rent for a band, because there really are that many people who love to make it. I know plenty of extremely talented musicians who have never seen a dime due to any copyright ownership, but make very happy livings playing gigs and selling CDs, mostly to people who could just copy their stuff anyways but don't because they prefer to support the artist. You might not have the megastars like Britney Spears, but trust me, people were creating and enjoying great music WAY before it ever became big business. Movies, I suppose, are the rub - these really do cost a tremendous amount of money to create, and should we decide to kill off that industry we probably won't see the gap filled for quite a while, at least if what you're interested in seeing is huge budget Spiderman type stuff (the indie scene will continue with business as usual, though, and would probably even thrive off of the market hole left behind). Personally I would not mourn any of these changes, as it seems like a little bit of a money drought in the entertainment business would lead to a fruitful starved-beast period, hopefully resulting in a more stable industry that relies on providing something of value to the consumer rather than threatening him with its lawyers.
Pretty much everything about the internet is devoted to the idea that attention == money. So I'm sorry, I have to dismiss the claim that nobody will put money behind something good if they can't sell it. We live in an age where companies with zero profits, large amounts of debt, and extremely precarious legal situations are sold for hundreds of millions of dollars just because a lot of people go to their website; it's no longer possible to seriously claim that the only motivation for creation is the opportunity to sell your IP in such an environment.
Um, the wiimote does have gyro's in it. The sensor bar is only used when you need to point at something on screen. Sword fighting games will work very well with the wiimote.
Nope, no gyros, unless they are hidden deep inside and haven't been used in anything yet. I've spent a lot of time playing with this thing (do a Google search for DarwiinRemote - might be Mac only? - you can read the Wiimote output through a Bluetooth connection). What it has is merely some force sensors that detect x, y, and z acceleration. If the Wiimote is not actually being accelerated, then you can use this to locate the gravity vector in remote space; if it is being accelerated, then you need to be a little more clever to figure out what's going on (and there are some ambiguities - basically you have to determine what direction gravity is in so you can separate the gravity component from the acceleration, and this requires some educated guessing as it's a mathematically underspecified problem). But in essence, the accelerometers are little more than weights on linear springs - each one reads acceleration in a single direction. This is why rotation about the direction of gravity is not detectable, there is just no difference in the accelerometer readings all around that axis.
By the way, it IS true that the accelerometers provide three degrees of freedom, exactly the number you need for full rotational specification; unfortunately only two of them are actually rotational, the third is actually a translational DOF (more or less). And you can't even really use the spatial location very well because the accelerometers only provide 8-bit acceleration data, so it's hard to use this to integrate up from acceleration to position data. All of this explains why a lot of the stuff people had expected to see so soon are still not happening - the thing doesn't quite give you true locatability, it stabs at it and leaves it up to the game developers to figure out ways around the limitations. You might be right that they will eventually figure out some way to make swordfighting games, but the point is, they won't give you quite the amount of control that you have with a real sword.
Don't get me wrong, it's a very interesting controller nonetheless, I'm just sour because I had hoped for a perfect one with true 6 DOF locatability; I guess I'll have to wait for the next generation for that one...
One problem with tweaking the controls for stuff like tennis is that the Wiimote is unable to get at the rotational degree of freedom around the vertical axis unless the sensor bar is within viewing range (and even if the bar is within range, we're talking hack city) - for tennis, this will not be the case, as during a swing the front of the remote would be pointed away from the TV. Similarly, sword-fighting is never going to be quite possible with the remote as it is.
It's too bad they didn't add something that could pick this DOF up; I must assume they considered it and determined that it would be prohibitively expensive (the most efficient way would probably either be a gyroscope or several distance sensors in the remote - 3 should be enough, I think - but I suppose both of these methods must have been found lacking for one reason or another, either moving parts or cost).
That said, I love the system and have had lots of fun with it. I look forward to more games coming out.
All information can be codified as a number. As much as I disklike copyrights themselves,saying it's just a number doesn't change the issue one bit.
However, what might change the issue is the fact that this is not a creative work, or anything even remotely resembling one. Rather, it is a purely functional number, essentially the equivalent of a password (which are not copyrightable). You are correct, people skew the issue by focusing on the fact that it is a hexadecimal number; the real issue is that it contains no expression of anything, it is merely a key to a digital lock somewhere, likely spat out by a random number generator. The distribution of such a key might be illegal as well (trade secret perhaps?), but I see absolutely no reason it should be prohibited based on copyright.
From what I can tell, the AACS are not actually claiming copyright protection for the key, though, they are instead invoking part of the DMCA, claiming that the key's distribution violates the prohibition on releasing software to circumvent copyright protections. This is a separate issue, and one that is not easily resolved. To be honest, in spirit, they are probably right - people who distribute this key are doing so to stick it to the industry, and by the spirit of the law (whether you agree with it or not - I do not), should probably be considered to be doing something illegal. But I don't really think the key itself could reasonably qualify as software, and I think the DMCA is very specific about banning software that undoes copy protection, and never mentions a password that could be USED in software to undo copy protection, so everyone might be on fairly good legal ground, technically at least. Then again, I'm no lawyer, so who knows...I imagine judges get annoyed at people for this stuff since at root, people disagree with the laws in place and are pushing the boundaries of those laws just to piss on them, so I wouldn't want to be the guinea pig that tests out this stuff in court...
People tend to be more aggressive right after watching sports too. We've known this for years.
Not to mention those who play sports! Quick, compare how many times in high school you were physically threatened or hurt by a jock versus a video game nut. Can anyone honestly say that the videogame kids are more dangerous overall? The football players I knew were (and to my knowledge, have been as long as the damn sport has been around!) always the most obnoxious, arrogant, and physically abusive people around. Yet you never hear people trying to get football banned from our schools, though the ultimate price that everyone pays is likely much larger than that from video games.
The biggest problem with what you are saying, regardless of which one of us is right about the economics, and how much is produced, is that you refuse to believe that if someone makes something (a song, algorithm, book, etc.) they don't have the right to make money off of that. It is not about the 'recognized right,' the point is that it is only fair to them that we let them make money for the products of their mind, and the way to do that is patents. Meanwhile, the widget company is going to go out of business very rapidly because their costs are going to far outstrip their revenues.
It seems that you are being deliberately dense about this - being granted a patent is NOT equivalent to being allowed to make money off of something. It is specifically about denying anyone else the opportunity to make money off of the invention, even if they independently stumble upon your innovation themselves. You are right - it is only fair to let people make money off of their inventions, but patents have nothing to do with it. Patents grant the exclusive right to make money off of an idea. Which leads right in to your next statement...
In the real world there is no widget factory per se, instead there are several companies each competing for your 'labor'. The result? Fair market value.
Fair market value is exactly what a patent avoids; it is the entire reason people want patents, since without competition you can jack your prices and be the exclusive supplier.
Not that patents are always evil, though. I do tend to have some sympathy for the pharms because the amount of R&D required to come up with their drugs honestly would not (and could not) happen without the financial incentive of a temporary monopoly on the results. But one-click shopping? Marching cubes? These things are just ridiculous, and it really does seem like software patents are way off-base lately.
People used to think that. Over the last several decades, they came to realize that you simply cannot "write" AI programs, you have to learn them.
So, the "language of real AI" exists: it's learning algorithms.
I think you misinterpret the strength of my claim - it's a lot stronger than just that classical AI is not going to happen. I don't think our languages are properly set up to write the learning algorithms, let alone AI, and I agree that to "write" AI programs is a futile mission. The fact is, to set up a good learning algorithm you essentially have to craft your own interpreted language to let it use, which is a good sign that none of the available languages are doing the trick.
Yeah, I tend to agree. In my AI class at college we learned things like the "Customers who bought this also liked" algorithm, as well as the search tree stuff I mentioned. Like you, I don't think that stuff is a likely candidate for the problem of synthesizing an intelligent mind.
Yup, that sounds about right. I was a math major in college, but I was very interested in AI, so I sat in for the first lecture (my school had a shopping period where you "sample" your classes before registering), and I ultimately decided that the state of the art was really not that advanced in AI and I didn't want to waste a slot on the class; nothing that we were to cover seemed very forward looking, and the syllabus just read like a hit list of fairly difficult classical problems to solve.
IMO, the problems with real AI actually are not necessarily rooted in the algorithms as much as the languages used to write them - to me it seems that we don't currently have a syntax that would let us write the kinds of algorithms strong AI would require. The crux of this problem is that we need a language that is flexible, error-tolerant, can manipulate procedural information (code is equivalent to data), is mostly syntax-free, and is transparent to code in. LISP comes close, but it's not error tolerant (some would argue that it's not transparent, either, though I'm not going to bite on that one) and this means that it's very difficult to set up evolutionary algorithms that can turn one useful behavior incrementally into another without passing through a region of parameter space where your code doesn't run at all. Neural nets, on the other hand, (which to some extent are full fledged interpreted programming languages, at least the time-dependent ones) have everything but transparency, so you can set them up, but they are difficult to train because we can't add by hand useful routines that we know beforehand the computer will need to solve the problem we want it to solve, nor can we pick out useful pieces of functionality and reuse them elsewhere, at least without extreme difficulty.
So I think that at least until a better programming language comes along, things are going to stagnate a bit on the hard-AI front. Not that I have a solution...if I did, I'd be coding it, not complaining about the current state of affairs!
The term "Artificial Intelligence" also includes algorithms that solve problems that are merely difficult - things like combinatorial searches (A* and min/max searches, in particular) - and the general approach of attempting to model an AI character's actions based on their state and their goals, rather than going just for the desired effect of making them reasonably tough game opponents.
To call A* and finite state machines artificial intelligence is, in my opinion, an extreme twisting of the term; these things only fall under that label because early researchers were still under the delusion that they could hand-code an enormous tree of if statements and if they gave it enough feature-bloat it would seem intelligent. In my opinion, the simple algorithms used in today's "AI" engines should more be labelled pre-AI, as in useful procedures that incoming data might be preprocessed through before it's sent to something that actually does something smart with it.
In my opinion games are never going to push the bleeding edge of true AI, simply because to even model the inputs that (for instance) a group of five or six enemies should be taking in starts to tax the processor - to do it right one would need a separate render pass for each NPC, not to mention enough computational mayhem happening behind the scenes to figure out what to do with the data (yes, I'm aware that the second bit of this problem is entirely unsolved). And I somewhat doubt that even with infinite programming resources most companies would be willing to give up much if any precious processor time for something that doesn't have an immediate visual impact. Why waste time on a few thousand multiplications per frame per NPC so that you can have a decent neural network when you could use that time to push a thousand extra particles through the renderer, have even more realistic explosions, and hack together the AI just well enough using a finite state machine and some pathfinding to satisfy the average gamer? Not that I would even call a neural net AI - again, preprocessing! [Though this is less cut and dry than the simpler algorithms - the real issue here is that just about every application of neural networks involves feed-forward nets of some form, which aren't capable even in principle of learning on the fly. If someone figured out a way to train and use recurrent nets effectively, I might be persuaded to reexamine the issue, but to date I've never seen a practical architecture that even has the theoretical possibility of active learning.]
Which is great until a future employer searches for his Myspace profile and comes up with a number of ones detailing his drug habits and penchant for women's clothing.
Any employer too mentally challenged to know that a principal is a prime target for pranking is an idiot. And any employer that would not hire you because they found out you went on drinking binges in college or even have a penchant for women's clothing is an asshole, as long as these things aren't affecting your work. And yes, there is a huge difference between a kid pranking a principal and a kid ragging on another kid, and it should be reflected in the retaliatory behavior; a kid can beat the crap out of the other kid, whereas the principal needs to prove, punish, and STFU. If your feelings get hurt when kids make fun of you and you start off on a crusade to crush the medium that they used to criticize you, let me give you a hint - you're in the wrong line of work as an educator, especially a principal. Kids are mean little bastards, and if you can't handle a bit of venom coming your way once in a while without throwing a hissy fit then you really shouldn't be in the education business.
What if the students posted a fake Myspace profile for your child mentioning that he is homosexual and wants to become transgendered, enjoys copious amounts of Heroin and Steroids and frequently has sex with strangers. Is that such a minor act?
Your question is ultimately irrelevant - as if you could imagine the child of a Slashdot reader having frequent sex with anyone!
The Wii, and less than half the price, has only sold about twice as many units as PS3s? Sony's doing better than I thought actually...(snip)...Glad everyone can do math around here when the Playstation Sux0rz articles come up.
Yet from the other side of this issue, one might notice that the PS3 has only sold half as many units as the Wii, and the Wii is still flying off the shelves within minutes of arriving, whereas PS3s are just sitting there in many locations. Even factoring in the price difference (which is far less relevant for future game development effort than number of consoles out there), this still means that there is more demand in dollar value for the Wii. I don't know how the PS3 is going to compare to the 360, but by just about any metric that you look at it is losing out to the Wii.
Don't get me wrong, I do think that Sony can build a great system. The PS2 was a stunning success, and it rightly destroyed the competition in the last round. And I'm sure the PS3 is a marvelous piece of equipment. I don't really know, because I can't afford one at the moment. But as all the console companies should realize (Nintendo learned this the hard way), past industry dominance does not insulate you from being unseated in the future, and I think Sony was really banking on the fact that they could ride the PS2's success when they set their price point - a mistake largely caused by their desire to win the much more lucrative format war over HD discs. $600 is just too much for a toy, plain and simple, no matter how many bells, whistles, and PPUs it has.
Sure, but at the same time, if the RIAA is intentionally and willfully releasing their content via the same P2P distribution channel as where they are actively suing users, it does present a bit of a legal problem. "I got it from the RIAA" would be a valid defense.
Nope - IANAL, but I do know that if you recieve a copyrighted work from a source that is allowed to distribute it, that does not give you the legal right to redistribute it, whether or not it is over the same network. This permission must be explicitly granted to you by the copyright owner. In this case, the RIAA would not even have the power to explicitly grant you distribution rights if they wanted to, as they are already a step removed from the actual owners of the copyrighted material, who have likely licensed the RIAA to distribute their materials only in the service of enforcing copyright claims on them.
Of course, that's when it'll be time to hack into their wireless networks and turn the law against them, personally, but I'm getting ahead of myself...
You're absolutely correct that we need to turn the law against them, but the solution is not to hack their wireless networks. It's rather a change in the way our P2P programs work (or perhaps in the way infringing files are bundled), what one might call a "pirate handshake."
Here's the way it would work. The RIAA has to catch people red handed in order to make any sort of a case against them, which is easy to do because all they need to do is join the swarm and grab the infringing file from the unsuspecting mark (using BT as the example here because that's usually the way it goes down). Some people have often had the idea that there's something slightly shady about this because it means that in the process of downloading the file, the RIAA must also be uploading it to others, thereby becoming complicit in the distribution. Alas, there is no legal problem here, because one assumes the RIAA has been authorized by its members to distribute their materials in order to bust others. So you can't get them that way.
There is, however, a speck of useful logic there. The RIAA may be authorized to distribute its own crap over P2P networks, but it's certainly not authorized to distribute my crap. If it came to light that they had done so, assuming that I had a registered copyright on whatever it is that they distributed, I could file for damages against them. So one might have the idea to zip together every piece of infringing material with another piece of infringing material, where the second one is owned by someone that has no intention of suing the average user, but will drag the RIAA through the mud if it ever comes out that they passed the file around. We might call this a weak form of pirate handshake.
Weak, of course, because there are ways around it. The RIAA might just make sure to leech the whole file, thus avoiding any sort of redistribution, or perhaps they could figure out how to only distribute the pieces of the file that they have the rights to (not sure what this would mean in the case of a zip file - I think they're just encoded in a pretty simple way, so you may be able to localize one piece).
The strong form would be to build the handshake into the P2P client. I absolutely refuse to send any sort of data to you, other than the handshake request (which would probably be the very same file as the response), until you send me the copyrighted (but perfectly safe for anyone but the *AAs and their agents) file. Only once I recieve that file and check its contents to make sure that you have now infringed against this benevolent third party do I agree to send you even a single bit of whatever it is you wanted to download from me.
It is crucial that this copyrighted file be a third party's, offered without an explicit license to redistribute, by the way, and it must have some artistic value (to qualify for any copyright protection at all); if it was my own file or if the entire reason for its existence was to act as insurance against being taken to court for copyright violations, the courts might not decide to grant it copyright protection on the grounds that it's clear it's only out there to mess with their rules. I don't know if there's any legal precedent for doing this, but it seems like the type of thing that might offend a judge, and at some level, if you piss off a judge, you're screwed. Likewise if the file was offered with a license that granted, for instance, the right to redistribute as long as you are not using it to enforce copyright laws, the courts might take offense. The key would be to find an independent band or author that was sympathetic to the cause and get them to make a gentleman's agreement to:
Not sue anyone that wasn't distributing the file to catch copyright violators
Everything is regulated by SEC, and every time a large company goes out of business, someone decides There Ought To Be A Law to be sure it doesn't happen again. So they pile on more regulations that act as a barrier to new entrants, stifling competition.
Umm...first of all, the last "There Ought To Be A Law" moments that I remember involved a bunch of weasely executives falsifying all sorts of numbers so that they could cheat their investors and employees out of millions and millions of dollars. You can't seriously mean that the crap that Enron pulled should be legal, can you? You think it's perfectly cool to mislead the public into thinking that your company is doing great, then sell of all your stake in it just in time for the truth to come out? Because a stock market without the SEC would see this type of stuff all the time. Trading would become a game that you'd need to be a fool to play unless you were one of the slimy bastards on the inside. Certainly you can imagine what this would do to the market, if everyone but the insiders was afraid to play...our economy would literally implode as everyone ran for the exits.
The apologists for the Nanny State routinely trot out antitrust as an example of where the free market doesn't work, but in reality it's the industries with the most regulation by government that are the most monopolized. Take telecommunications. For most of the history of telephones, it was illegal to compete for customers. That monopoly was enforced by local governments. But I guess as long as you control the government schools that teach the history of 'Robber Barons', people will believe the propaganda.
I think you have your history backwards - perhaps whichever non-government school that left out the part about the "Robber Barons" when teaching you history also forgot to mention that bit about how the telephone industry only became so highly regulated because it was already actively abusing its monopoly status. To my knowledge all the stuff about not competing for customers was merely a restriction on Ma Bell to keep them at less than 85% market dominance, as per the anti-trust settlements at the time. Even the most hardcore of free-market types realize that leaving monopolies alone is downright stupid - no theory of economics can reasonably make the claim that a monopoly is good for anyone but the monopolist.
In fact, the subject of this article is most dangerous in the context of monopolies and near-monopolies. I remember when I was little getting a few bucks in the mail from Nintendo because it had come out that they were pulling this kind of price fixing crap with all the retailers, and they got caught. So don't pretend that this is just paranoia - if this becomes legal, companies will use it to screw over customers, especially in situations where the item in question is not a commodity but rather a highly branded item in an industry with very little substantial competition like a Nintendo (back when there was no real competition, that is - now the field is too crowded to mess around too much with the customer) or an iPod (since the Zune sucks, Apple can do just about whatever it wants).
Beer and (another addictive, carcinogenic plant:) tobacco are not safer. They should be restricted More, and that's gradually happening to smokers, worldwide.
Just what are you suggesting we do about the problem with drug abuse and addiction?
Absolutely nothing, at least legally. The fact is, despite what the hacks at DARE tell all the kids, there is a huge difference between use and abuse. Use is having a glass of wine at dinner; abuse is sharing a handle of vodka with yourself alone in your bedroom at 2 AM. There is a difference between various drugs, and some are much more dangerous than others. You are much better off having a beer than a bump of coke, no questions asked. Anyone that would claim otherwise is seriously effed up in the head.
But apart from all that, there is a serious problem with treating these issues as solvable through prohibitions. People want drugs, plain and simple. Therefore people will find them, whether or not other people want to protect them from themselves. By forcing them to go through back channels to do so, all you do is create a fantastic money-making machine for the criminal element to exploit, and make criminals out of a whole bunch of people who otherwise contribute perfectly well to society.
A better solution is to treat these things like we currently treat alcoholism. Some people can handle their stuff, some people can't; do everything in your power to help out those that can't deal with their drug of choice, give them support, try to find ways to get them off the stuff, etc., but leave everyone else alone. Same thing is happening with smoking these days - for those that want to quit, there is help. For those that don't, they can't smoke in enclosed places anymore, so it doesn't negatively impact others, but otherwise they are left alone. As far as pot, the stuff doesn't even physically addict you, so I have trouble seeing how it could be much of an actual problem for anyone (everyone I know that has wanted to quit just did it, no problem, no struggle). I know a lot of people say that it is used as an escape from reality and so on, but that in itself is no reason to make it illegal.
Here's one of my favorite quotes from one of the news articles on this topic:
But when Van Valkenburg spoke before the oversight committee Friday, he expanded on his position, explaining that it's his duty to represent all of Missoula County, lest he succumb to "the tyranny of the majority."
"Just because you have a majority doesn't mean you walk all over the minority," he said.
Yeah, how dare we infringe upon the right of the minority to force their ideals upon the majority, right? This is one of the most blatant inversions of the principle of protection from mob rule that I've ever seen...
I take your point - many of the commonly accepted green ideas are currently not at the point of viability, especially once you consider the costs, both environmental and economic, that go into creating these "solutions." However, they tend to lie very close to the point where the costs are cancelled out by the benefits, and are extremely young technologies which by their nature are far less efficient and far more costly than they would be if they left the single digit percentages of adoption. Conventional means of energy production are extremely mature, and hence optimized to the point where further gains are almost impossible to envision.
I think of course it's a personal opinion... but I'm sure more of the mac users will have their apps not in full screen while Windows users prolly have like basically every window maximized.
I'm sure that's true. But then again, does that surprise you, given that Mac OSX doesn't even let you properly maximize a window and you end up having to drag that tiny little corner handle any time you want to make it big? I'm a 15 year PC user who recently acquired a Mac, and I love it (as a once-content PC user, I can scarcely believe that I just typed those words into the computer...), but for a lot of applications (graphics editing, programming, spreadsheets, etc.) I find it useful to see as much on one screen as possible. I don't really see how this is unreasonable. Don't even get me started, though, on the fact that there is a faux-maximize button, but with most applications it just resizes your window to an unpredictable size. I'm sure there is some logic behind it, but it is so idiosyncratic that I end up just ignoring the damn button altogether rather than figuring it out.
Call me crazy, but I prefer that an OS gives you at least the option to change things so they work the way you want them; default behaviour should be chosen wisely, as well, but should not be the only choice. Or maybe I'm just spoiled by KDE, I don't know...
If the people in a democratic society have no desire to provide and have enforced artificial protection for intangible assets, then intangible assets will not be protected. There is no right or wrong about it - intellectual property is not a thing, and the fact that we protect it in our society as if it is one is actually somewhat strange.
In a democracy, the only things that are not subject to the whims of the crowd are those things that are considered inalienable rights. In the US, this more or less comes down to the Bill of Rights. So I absolutely disagree with you - if the people don't want copyright protections to be enforced upon them, then the people should be able to make it so.
And anyhow, these content providers are to blame for their own problems - if they would just figure out a freaking way to distribute their videos with their advertisements attached, this whole problem would go away. I mean, it's not like Joe Consumer ever actually pays Viacom a penny for watching their garbage...
I don't think that anybody's religion is absurd; I think that absurdities are introduced into religion by those who wish to pervert religion for their own ends.
So I assume that if you had a daughter and she came to you several months pregnant claiming that "God did it," you'd find nothing absurd about the idea? Parting of the sea is likewise an everyday occurrence, I guess, as is resurrection, water into wine, and rivers turning into blood. Don't even get me started on the Old Testament! Perhaps your definition of "absurd" does not quite match mine, eh?
Let's be honest - every religion makes some extreme claims, otherwise they would all be boring. Most of these extraordinary claims are quite absurd to me, and to believe them at face value seems absurd. I understand that the "point" of most religion is not mere belief in these ridiculous physical events, but they are lumped in there (and are quite frequently the most heated points of contention between believers and nonbelievers) and are certainly not trivial.
I must note, however, that the strict scientifically inclined non-believers (I gather there are quite a few around these parts!) make a mistake almost as egregious as the most fundamentalist of believers. There is no explanation for existence of the system that we find ourselves taking part in unless you look outside the system; no set of axioms can establish itself as true, to put it another way. You always need meta-axioms that establish the truth of the axioms, meta-meta axioms that establish the truth of the meta-axioms, and so on. And don't even start trying to think that you can bootstrap the infinite regress away with self sustaining axioms like "This axiom is true, along with all these other ones" because that axiom itself could be false (its truth is self consistent but not self evident). Similarly, our world's existence must be established by something, and that something's existence must be established by something else, etc. This means that at a fundamental level, there is a point at which reductionism must fail, and science can no longer point the way forward. Religion actually fails at addressing this point, as well, because it tries to get away with the self sustaining axiom that God exists more or less because He wills it (or some variation on that - every theologian seems to have his own pet way of boiling the tower of necessary axioms down to one). Which is all well and good, except that it's perfectly consistent to assume that He doesn't exist at all.
Still, the fact that science cannot explain everything doesn't mean that it is flawed, or that the current religions somehow do any better. I think the true fact of the matter is that from within a closed (or mostly closed) system, it is impossible to completely investigate that which lies outside the system. For instance, suppose for a minute that our universe is really just a highly complex computer simulation running on a powerful but non-networked computer in some kid's basement in the "real" meta-universe. It would be fundamentally impossible for us to determine anything about the meta-universe in such a situation; this is not a failing of our science, it is a mere fact of the crappy situation we're in. There is always some uncertainty left after we've discovered everything that is possible to know. Always. Both the religious and the skeptical would be well advised to remember this more often than they do.
I am not hardwired to believe anything. My beliefs are shaped by my experiences, and observations. I gather evidence, and attempt to be rational when knowledge allows. Through observations of the world around me I have come to the conclusion that mankind is not a creation of god, but god is a creation of mankind. I DO NOT believe your fairy tales. I DO NOT fear your hell. I WILL NOT suffer your god's wrath. I WILL NOT fall prey to ignorance.
I don't know whether or not you are hard-wired to believe in God or not, but to claim that you're not hard-wired to believe in anything is just plain wrong. You're telling me that babies decide through observation and evidence that a mother's nipple would probably make a good source of food? Most animals come preprogrammed with many types of "knowledge," and they also come predisposed to the acquisition of certain other types of knowledge. There are literally structures in our brain that mirror the 3-dimensional (effective) geometry of our world; we also have a fair amount of physical knowledge, or at least a strong propensity to acquire that knowledge, in us from birth. Otherwise, given the number of idiots in our world, we'd have people falling all over their feet and running into walls everywhere. I don't know if religion is actually programmed into us, but there does certainly seem to be a lot more religious people in the world than one might a priori expect, so this is definitely suggestive of a psychological imperative towards it.
Not that that makes it true, of course - that's another conversation for another day (though if I know Slashdot well, it's probably happening in a quite heated manner on the next thread over...).
Right, and what is the fundamental issue here is the word SIMULATE. The question whether simulation of intelligence is sufficient for the presence of intelligence. (Hence Searle's admittedly peculiar citation of simulating lactation.) Is simulation of intelligence sufficient for the PRESENCE of intelligence? (In that case, intelligence is rather unlike orgasms. . ..)
Okay, I see - we're arguing the same issue from different perspectives. My opinion on this matter is to treat AI as an (extraordinarily difficult) engineering task. For example, I would be satisfied to call something true strong AI as long as it behaved like it; to me, the day a computer passes the Turing test, we've cracked the nut. I do not care whether real intelligence exists under the hood. I suspect this is the attitude taken by most AI researchers, as well, which is likely why they clash with the philosophers so much. In my opinion, the "mere" simulation of intelligence is quite lofty enough a goal to be worthwhile pursuing.
OTOH, I suspect that philosophers are mostly interested in the question of whether the intelligence is "true" or not. This is something that I have no stake in, and frankly, I don't think the question is very well posed. The very asking presumes some form of dualism, i.e. that whether or not you go as far as belief in a soul, you hold that perception is fundamentally different from simulation. This is a philosophical stance with no observable consequences, so it lies outside the realm of science (which, based on the relative successes of various intellectual fields, tends to suggest to me that it lies outside the realm of subjects worthy of investigation).
Yes, Searle thinks that our minds aren't like SOME computers (e.g. digital computers running formal programs) and yes, he thinks that computing machines could think---IF they have the same causal powers as brains. That is, perhaps minds have to be made up of grey goo; perhaps they have to be analog rather than digital; perhaps they have to be evolved; I don't know (he's cagey about this, which is why maybe we need to be suspicious of his views about constitutions of mind). But the target is: GOFAI and the idea that you can capture semantics in syntax. THAT is the target of the Chinese room; what the guy in the room has is the syntax for manipulating Chinese symbols without their semantic content.
I think again we are running into the a priori assumption of dualism here. I now realize that by formal programs you mean something other than merely some Turing complete language, so I'm willing to back off a bit. However, I still take severe issue with Searle's view, because I don't think he's ever made a very persuasive argument that my brain and my PC have any fundamental difference that couldn't be overcome with a good deal more power added on to my PC. But yes, I would agree with anyone that says that GOFAI is likely nothing worth looking into; forgive me, I'm young enough so that the idea was declared DOA before I was even born, so I often forget that people used to actually see some promise in it.
So what Dreyfus is going on about is that (i) some aspects of experience aren't capturable by propositional claims, and, moreover, (ii) even if they COULD, that isn't how actual minds do those activities. This again calls into question whether the goal of AI is simulations that pass the Turing Test---or something that passes because it has a mind. (Of course, maybe all there is to intelligence is simulation, but that is a distinct and significant thesis.)
Again, the same question: is there more to intelligence than a mapping from input to output? I suppose I would make your parenthetical argument, though I would say that a priori we should accept it rather than its converse based on Occam's razor. But either way, I would argue that literally by definition the goal of AI is to merely pass the Turing test. After all, the whol
Re:WHAT COMPUTERS STILL CAN'T DO
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Marvin Minsky On AI
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You know, I always get confused when people claim that it's perfectly reasonable to say that something "can't be formalized." Some of them seem to mean this in more particular ways than others, for instance, meaning that any algorithmic representation will not be hard coded; but others tend to mean it in the sense that "you can never, even in theory, write a program that will capture this behaviour," which is trivially asinine because the universe runs such software (not that we could program a simulation on that scale; still, ask any physicist whether they could throw together a reasonable enough approximation of the real world to get chemistry and biology given near infinite computing resources - the physics underlying it is not that tricky, just the scale). The real question of import to strong AI research is the following: is Turing completeness enough to simulate intelligence, or is a Turing complete machine still somehow crippled? The answer, at least to me, is damn straight it's enough, since anything that shows up in nature appears to be computable in that framework. [note: yes, I know all about Godel's results and all that, but I'm glossing them over because there's no indication that anything in nature has the answers to undecidable propositions, either]
But since you opened the "Searle" bag, let's have a recent quote from him:
'Could a machine think?' My own view is that only a machine could think, and indeed only very special kinds of machines, namely brains and machines that had the same causal powers as brains. And that is the main reason strong AI has had little to tell us about thinking, since it has nothing to tell us about machines. By its own definition, it is about programs, and programs are not machines. Whatever else intentionality is, it is a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation, photosynthesis, or any other biological phenomena. No one would suppose that we could produce milk and sugar by running a computer simulation of the formal sequences in lactation and photosynthesis, but where the mind is concerned many people are willing to believe in such a miracle because of a deep and abiding dualism: the mind they suppose is a matter of formal processes and is independent of quite specific material causes in the way that milk and sugar are not.
I might note that the worst part of this quote is that it's a severe misunderstanding of the strong AI quest to say that we're hoping to produce milk and sugar (i.e. a physical product) from a simulation. Personally, I don't care how the thing happens as long as it passes the Turing test - I don't know what exactly Searle wants to see, but it's clearly not what I expect. Now from the parent:
I'm afraid you've misunderstood Dreyfus's work. His work, like Searle's, does not deny that our minds are *like* (to use your locution) computers. What he denies is that our minds engage the world in a way that is (totally) capturable in propositional form and so are formal programs of the sort
You're kidding, right? To be fair, I know very little of Dreyfus' work, but Searle's work most definitely does deny that our minds are like computers. That is literally the point of the severely flawed Chinese room thought experiment. I will grant you that his above quote makes it sound like he's now fallen back to arguing that a program needs a physical instantiation to be intelligent, but think back - whether he's backtracked on this position or not, I don't know, but this guy was absolutely claiming that even in theory, any sort of algorithmic understanding was impossible or inferior to the "real stuff" that happens in our brain.
As to whether our minds can be captured with formal logic, I'll ask again, what else is there? Informal logic? I.e. of the kind that we can simulate quite nicely by mixing formal logic with pseudorandom number generation? Maybe this is a term
I just love to hear all the childless slashdotters speculate wildly about parenting. It's a good reminder of how easy it is to imagine solutions to problems you've never addressed yourselves. Hint: not even the best parents can make kids start out with good judgement. The age at which a kid is ready for Mario Kart is not the same age at which he is ready to avoid goatse.
You are presuming that being a parent somehow imbues one with more knowledge about how best to be a parent than a person possesses naturally on the basis of having been parented. Personally I think this is untrue - parents tend to be tired, bitchy, and irrational because of the fact that their kids (rightfully, I might add) don't succumb to parental desires to rear tiny carbon copies of what they wish they were like at that age, in hindsight. I would venture to guess that you'd get much better parenting advice from those that have never had to fight through the emotionally draining process.
On that note - there is very little that you can do to positively influence your children that they don't already do for themselves. You can certainly screw them up by being abusive, or spoiling them, but honestly, kids don't need to be sheltered from the real world. For the most part they are uninterested in it, and if they are not, they'll find a way to find the information anyhow.
And as disturbing as goatse may be (though to be honest, I am lucky enough to have been spared the sight), how many people can you count in your life that have been subject to negative consequences as adults as a result of having viewed a twisted sexual picture as a child? How many people have grown up messed up in the head because they snuck a peek at daddy's Playboy when they were eight years old? I can't think of a single one; frankly, I don't think our children need nearly as much protection as we delude ourselves as a culture into thinking. Kids are resilient, and it takes quite a bit to screw them up - a few pictures viewed by choice on the internet do not a deviant make. I would be very curious to hear what the supposed "damage" that this stuff does to a child is, and why it's taken so seriously, especially since I've never seen an example that proves its reality...
Slashdot Mirror
Pardon my French, but these "efforts" are a fucked up mismanaged mess that have slanted all by themselves towards the negative - it's what happens when you roll into a country and toss the government that's been in charge for twenty years without any reasonable plan to end the power vacuum and restore order. What the anti-war crowd wants is for the Bush administration not to fuck this situation up, but it appears to be too late for that. The situation is a mess, it's been handled terribly from every point of view except the military one (I will give them credit - they've done an admirable job when they've had missions to accomplish, the only reason they didn't win the war yet is that the politicians forgot to pin down exactly what "win" would mean in this context, they just thought that things would magically heal themselves and it would be obvious). Yes, America has a badass army that can destroy whatever it wants with very little trouble; unfortunately it also has some mentally challenged leaders that forgot they would need to clean up the mess left by removing an active dictator from a country that's forgotten how to rule itself.
Iraq is no longer a war, after all. A war involves two organized armies having at it, as in with actual commanders and weapons; Iraq is just a bunch of idiots blowing crap up on the roads to scare the people trying to calm things down. We're now trying to quell an insurgency, which is exactly what the anti-war set warned would happen, and warned that we didn't have a plan to deal with. If I recall the response from the Bush administration was that the Iraqis would not do this because they would be so happy to be rid of Saddam. If that had been true, we would have stopped arguing this crap two years ago.
So we're screwed? Should we leave? Who knows...it doesn't appear that things are going very well, which I'm pretty sure even Bush admitted himself, and I really do feel for the Iraqis, so maybe it would be worth sticking it out a little longer to see if we can at least leave things slightly less dangerous than they are now. But as you get yourself all heated up about the anti-war leftist commie shitbag bastards with their patchouli douche and smokable underwear, don't forget this key fact - they were right. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. The entire justification for this war was mistaken, even if it was not an outright lie. Iraq was not even on the radar when it came to being a dire threat to the United States. I know the standard right-wing line from here: Saddam was a bad guy, are you saying it would be better if we left him in power? Well, no, I would never argue the world was better with him, yes, he was a real nasty leader. But there are a lot of bad guys out there. If we start wars with each of their countries just because they're bad guys...well, we just can't, for lack of resources, troops, and morale. There are too many places where we don't like the current leadership, and these kinds of missions do not tend to turn out well, either for our country or theirs. We don't have the energy as a nation to keep reliving the same military regime change nightmare over and over. And the fact is, without the WMD "proof" showing that Saddam was a clear, imminent threat, we would never have gone in because people wouldn't have supported it. Unlike politicians (real or armchair), most real people like to be extremely careful about sending their children off to war, so don't underestimate how totally messed up it is that thousands of our people have now died and killed because of a war that probably shouldn't have started at all.
So whatever...the point of this rant is that the Republicans in control of this war are the ones that messed up - it's ridiculous to point a finger at the media and scream "BIAS!" for reporting on it. You can try to spin this a
I'm not with you, though, that we'd only be left with guys running shopping carts into each other if Old Media fizzled and popped. Traditional television runs on an advertising model, and this translates to the web quite well; frankly I'd love to see the means of TV distribution become much more decentralized. And good music is going to come out whether or not it's sold by the millions for $20 a pop or through donations that just barely pay the rent for a band, because there really are that many people who love to make it. I know plenty of extremely talented musicians who have never seen a dime due to any copyright ownership, but make very happy livings playing gigs and selling CDs, mostly to people who could just copy their stuff anyways but don't because they prefer to support the artist. You might not have the megastars like Britney Spears, but trust me, people were creating and enjoying great music WAY before it ever became big business. Movies, I suppose, are the rub - these really do cost a tremendous amount of money to create, and should we decide to kill off that industry we probably won't see the gap filled for quite a while, at least if what you're interested in seeing is huge budget Spiderman type stuff (the indie scene will continue with business as usual, though, and would probably even thrive off of the market hole left behind). Personally I would not mourn any of these changes, as it seems like a little bit of a money drought in the entertainment business would lead to a fruitful starved-beast period, hopefully resulting in a more stable industry that relies on providing something of value to the consumer rather than threatening him with its lawyers.
Pretty much everything about the internet is devoted to the idea that attention == money. So I'm sorry, I have to dismiss the claim that nobody will put money behind something good if they can't sell it. We live in an age where companies with zero profits, large amounts of debt, and extremely precarious legal situations are sold for hundreds of millions of dollars just because a lot of people go to their website; it's no longer possible to seriously claim that the only motivation for creation is the opportunity to sell your IP in such an environment.
By the way, it IS true that the accelerometers provide three degrees of freedom, exactly the number you need for full rotational specification; unfortunately only two of them are actually rotational, the third is actually a translational DOF (more or less). And you can't even really use the spatial location very well because the accelerometers only provide 8-bit acceleration data, so it's hard to use this to integrate up from acceleration to position data. All of this explains why a lot of the stuff people had expected to see so soon are still not happening - the thing doesn't quite give you true locatability, it stabs at it and leaves it up to the game developers to figure out ways around the limitations. You might be right that they will eventually figure out some way to make swordfighting games, but the point is, they won't give you quite the amount of control that you have with a real sword.
Don't get me wrong, it's a very interesting controller nonetheless, I'm just sour because I had hoped for a perfect one with true 6 DOF locatability; I guess I'll have to wait for the next generation for that one...
One problem with tweaking the controls for stuff like tennis is that the Wiimote is unable to get at the rotational degree of freedom around the vertical axis unless the sensor bar is within viewing range (and even if the bar is within range, we're talking hack city) - for tennis, this will not be the case, as during a swing the front of the remote would be pointed away from the TV. Similarly, sword-fighting is never going to be quite possible with the remote as it is.
It's too bad they didn't add something that could pick this DOF up; I must assume they considered it and determined that it would be prohibitively expensive (the most efficient way would probably either be a gyroscope or several distance sensors in the remote - 3 should be enough, I think - but I suppose both of these methods must have been found lacking for one reason or another, either moving parts or cost).
That said, I love the system and have had lots of fun with it. I look forward to more games coming out.
From what I can tell, the AACS are not actually claiming copyright protection for the key, though, they are instead invoking part of the DMCA, claiming that the key's distribution violates the prohibition on releasing software to circumvent copyright protections. This is a separate issue, and one that is not easily resolved. To be honest, in spirit, they are probably right - people who distribute this key are doing so to stick it to the industry, and by the spirit of the law (whether you agree with it or not - I do not), should probably be considered to be doing something illegal. But I don't really think the key itself could reasonably qualify as software, and I think the DMCA is very specific about banning software that undoes copy protection, and never mentions a password that could be USED in software to undo copy protection, so everyone might be on fairly good legal ground, technically at least. Then again, I'm no lawyer, so who knows...I imagine judges get annoyed at people for this stuff since at root, people disagree with the laws in place and are pushing the boundaries of those laws just to piss on them, so I wouldn't want to be the guinea pig that tests out this stuff in court...
Not that patents are always evil, though. I do tend to have some sympathy for the pharms because the amount of R&D required to come up with their drugs honestly would not (and could not) happen without the financial incentive of a temporary monopoly on the results. But one-click shopping? Marching cubes? These things are just ridiculous, and it really does seem like software patents are way off-base lately.
Yup, that sounds about right. I was a math major in college, but I was very interested in AI, so I sat in for the first lecture (my school had a shopping period where you "sample" your classes before registering), and I ultimately decided that the state of the art was really not that advanced in AI and I didn't want to waste a slot on the class; nothing that we were to cover seemed very forward looking, and the syllabus just read like a hit list of fairly difficult classical problems to solve.
IMO, the problems with real AI actually are not necessarily rooted in the algorithms as much as the languages used to write them - to me it seems that we don't currently have a syntax that would let us write the kinds of algorithms strong AI would require. The crux of this problem is that we need a language that is flexible, error-tolerant, can manipulate procedural information (code is equivalent to data), is mostly syntax-free, and is transparent to code in. LISP comes close, but it's not error tolerant (some would argue that it's not transparent, either, though I'm not going to bite on that one) and this means that it's very difficult to set up evolutionary algorithms that can turn one useful behavior incrementally into another without passing through a region of parameter space where your code doesn't run at all. Neural nets, on the other hand, (which to some extent are full fledged interpreted programming languages, at least the time-dependent ones) have everything but transparency, so you can set them up, but they are difficult to train because we can't add by hand useful routines that we know beforehand the computer will need to solve the problem we want it to solve, nor can we pick out useful pieces of functionality and reuse them elsewhere, at least without extreme difficulty.
So I think that at least until a better programming language comes along, things are going to stagnate a bit on the hard-AI front. Not that I have a solution...if I did, I'd be coding it, not complaining about the current state of affairs!
To call A* and finite state machines artificial intelligence is, in my opinion, an extreme twisting of the term; these things only fall under that label because early researchers were still under the delusion that they could hand-code an enormous tree of if statements and if they gave it enough feature-bloat it would seem intelligent. In my opinion, the simple algorithms used in today's "AI" engines should more be labelled pre-AI, as in useful procedures that incoming data might be preprocessed through before it's sent to something that actually does something smart with it.
In my opinion games are never going to push the bleeding edge of true AI, simply because to even model the inputs that (for instance) a group of five or six enemies should be taking in starts to tax the processor - to do it right one would need a separate render pass for each NPC, not to mention enough computational mayhem happening behind the scenes to figure out what to do with the data (yes, I'm aware that the second bit of this problem is entirely unsolved). And I somewhat doubt that even with infinite programming resources most companies would be willing to give up much if any precious processor time for something that doesn't have an immediate visual impact. Why waste time on a few thousand multiplications per frame per NPC so that you can have a decent neural network when you could use that time to push a thousand extra particles through the renderer, have even more realistic explosions, and hack together the AI just well enough using a finite state machine and some pathfinding to satisfy the average gamer? Not that I would even call a neural net AI - again, preprocessing! [Though this is less cut and dry than the simpler algorithms - the real issue here is that just about every application of neural networks involves feed-forward nets of some form, which aren't capable even in principle of learning on the fly. If someone figured out a way to train and use recurrent nets effectively, I might be persuaded to reexamine the issue, but to date I've never seen a practical architecture that even has the theoretical possibility of active learning.]
Don't get me wrong, I do think that Sony can build a great system. The PS2 was a stunning success, and it rightly destroyed the competition in the last round. And I'm sure the PS3 is a marvelous piece of equipment. I don't really know, because I can't afford one at the moment. But as all the console companies should realize (Nintendo learned this the hard way), past industry dominance does not insulate you from being unseated in the future, and I think Sony was really banking on the fact that they could ride the PS2's success when they set their price point - a mistake largely caused by their desire to win the much more lucrative format war over HD discs. $600 is just too much for a toy, plain and simple, no matter how many bells, whistles, and PPUs it has.
You're absolutely correct that we need to turn the law against them, but the solution is not to hack their wireless networks. It's rather a change in the way our P2P programs work (or perhaps in the way infringing files are bundled), what one might call a "pirate handshake."
Here's the way it would work. The RIAA has to catch people red handed in order to make any sort of a case against them, which is easy to do because all they need to do is join the swarm and grab the infringing file from the unsuspecting mark (using BT as the example here because that's usually the way it goes down). Some people have often had the idea that there's something slightly shady about this because it means that in the process of downloading the file, the RIAA must also be uploading it to others, thereby becoming complicit in the distribution. Alas, there is no legal problem here, because one assumes the RIAA has been authorized by its members to distribute their materials in order to bust others. So you can't get them that way.
There is, however, a speck of useful logic there. The RIAA may be authorized to distribute its own crap over P2P networks, but it's certainly not authorized to distribute my crap. If it came to light that they had done so, assuming that I had a registered copyright on whatever it is that they distributed, I could file for damages against them. So one might have the idea to zip together every piece of infringing material with another piece of infringing material, where the second one is owned by someone that has no intention of suing the average user, but will drag the RIAA through the mud if it ever comes out that they passed the file around. We might call this a weak form of pirate handshake.
Weak, of course, because there are ways around it. The RIAA might just make sure to leech the whole file, thus avoiding any sort of redistribution, or perhaps they could figure out how to only distribute the pieces of the file that they have the rights to (not sure what this would mean in the case of a zip file - I think they're just encoded in a pretty simple way, so you may be able to localize one piece).
The strong form would be to build the handshake into the P2P client. I absolutely refuse to send any sort of data to you, other than the handshake request (which would probably be the very same file as the response), until you send me the copyrighted (but perfectly safe for anyone but the *AAs and their agents) file. Only once I recieve that file and check its contents to make sure that you have now infringed against this benevolent third party do I agree to send you even a single bit of whatever it is you wanted to download from me.
It is crucial that this copyrighted file be a third party's, offered without an explicit license to redistribute, by the way, and it must have some artistic value (to qualify for any copyright protection at all); if it was my own file or if the entire reason for its existence was to act as insurance against being taken to court for copyright violations, the courts might not decide to grant it copyright protection on the grounds that it's clear it's only out there to mess with their rules. I don't know if there's any legal precedent for doing this, but it seems like the type of thing that might offend a judge, and at some level, if you piss off a judge, you're screwed. Likewise if the file was offered with a license that granted, for instance, the right to redistribute as long as you are not using it to enforce copyright laws, the courts might take offense. The key would be to find an independent band or author that was sympathetic to the cause and get them to make a gentleman's agreement to:
I think you have your history backwards - perhaps whichever non-government school that left out the part about the "Robber Barons" when teaching you history also forgot to mention that bit about how the telephone industry only became so highly regulated because it was already actively abusing its monopoly status. To my knowledge all the stuff about not competing for customers was merely a restriction on Ma Bell to keep them at less than 85% market dominance, as per the anti-trust settlements at the time. Even the most hardcore of free-market types realize that leaving monopolies alone is downright stupid - no theory of economics can reasonably make the claim that a monopoly is good for anyone but the monopolist.
In fact, the subject of this article is most dangerous in the context of monopolies and near-monopolies. I remember when I was little getting a few bucks in the mail from Nintendo because it had come out that they were pulling this kind of price fixing crap with all the retailers, and they got caught. So don't pretend that this is just paranoia - if this becomes legal, companies will use it to screw over customers, especially in situations where the item in question is not a commodity but rather a highly branded item in an industry with very little substantial competition like a Nintendo (back when there was no real competition, that is - now the field is too crowded to mess around too much with the customer) or an iPod (since the Zune sucks, Apple can do just about whatever it wants).
But apart from all that, there is a serious problem with treating these issues as solvable through prohibitions. People want drugs, plain and simple. Therefore people will find them, whether or not other people want to protect them from themselves. By forcing them to go through back channels to do so, all you do is create a fantastic money-making machine for the criminal element to exploit, and make criminals out of a whole bunch of people who otherwise contribute perfectly well to society.
A better solution is to treat these things like we currently treat alcoholism. Some people can handle their stuff, some people can't; do everything in your power to help out those that can't deal with their drug of choice, give them support, try to find ways to get them off the stuff, etc., but leave everyone else alone. Same thing is happening with smoking these days - for those that want to quit, there is help. For those that don't, they can't smoke in enclosed places anymore, so it doesn't negatively impact others, but otherwise they are left alone. As far as pot, the stuff doesn't even physically addict you, so I have trouble seeing how it could be much of an actual problem for anyone (everyone I know that has wanted to quit just did it, no problem, no struggle). I know a lot of people say that it is used as an escape from reality and so on, but that in itself is no reason to make it illegal.
Here's one of my favorite quotes from one of the news articles on this topic:Yeah, how dare we infringe upon the right of the minority to force their ideals upon the majority, right? This is one of the most blatant inversions of the principle of protection from mob rule that I've ever seen...
I take your point - many of the commonly accepted green ideas are currently not at the point of viability, especially once you consider the costs, both environmental and economic, that go into creating these "solutions." However, they tend to lie very close to the point where the costs are cancelled out by the benefits, and are extremely young technologies which by their nature are far less efficient and far more costly than they would be if they left the single digit percentages of adoption. Conventional means of energy production are extremely mature, and hence optimized to the point where further gains are almost impossible to envision.
Call me crazy, but I prefer that an OS gives you at least the option to change things so they work the way you want them; default behaviour should be chosen wisely, as well, but should not be the only choice. Or maybe I'm just spoiled by KDE, I don't know...
If the people in a democratic society have no desire to provide and have enforced artificial protection for intangible assets, then intangible assets will not be protected. There is no right or wrong about it - intellectual property is not a thing, and the fact that we protect it in our society as if it is one is actually somewhat strange.
In a democracy, the only things that are not subject to the whims of the crowd are those things that are considered inalienable rights. In the US, this more or less comes down to the Bill of Rights. So I absolutely disagree with you - if the people don't want copyright protections to be enforced upon them, then the people should be able to make it so.
And anyhow, these content providers are to blame for their own problems - if they would just figure out a freaking way to distribute their videos with their advertisements attached, this whole problem would go away. I mean, it's not like Joe Consumer ever actually pays Viacom a penny for watching their garbage...
Let's be honest - every religion makes some extreme claims, otherwise they would all be boring. Most of these extraordinary claims are quite absurd to me, and to believe them at face value seems absurd. I understand that the "point" of most religion is not mere belief in these ridiculous physical events, but they are lumped in there (and are quite frequently the most heated points of contention between believers and nonbelievers) and are certainly not trivial.
I must note, however, that the strict scientifically inclined non-believers (I gather there are quite a few around these parts!) make a mistake almost as egregious as the most fundamentalist of believers. There is no explanation for existence of the system that we find ourselves taking part in unless you look outside the system; no set of axioms can establish itself as true, to put it another way. You always need meta-axioms that establish the truth of the axioms, meta-meta axioms that establish the truth of the meta-axioms, and so on. And don't even start trying to think that you can bootstrap the infinite regress away with self sustaining axioms like "This axiom is true, along with all these other ones" because that axiom itself could be false (its truth is self consistent but not self evident). Similarly, our world's existence must be established by something, and that something's existence must be established by something else, etc. This means that at a fundamental level, there is a point at which reductionism must fail, and science can no longer point the way forward. Religion actually fails at addressing this point, as well, because it tries to get away with the self sustaining axiom that God exists more or less because He wills it (or some variation on that - every theologian seems to have his own pet way of boiling the tower of necessary axioms down to one). Which is all well and good, except that it's perfectly consistent to assume that He doesn't exist at all.
Still, the fact that science cannot explain everything doesn't mean that it is flawed, or that the current religions somehow do any better. I think the true fact of the matter is that from within a closed (or mostly closed) system, it is impossible to completely investigate that which lies outside the system. For instance, suppose for a minute that our universe is really just a highly complex computer simulation running on a powerful but non-networked computer in some kid's basement in the "real" meta-universe. It would be fundamentally impossible for us to determine anything about the meta-universe in such a situation; this is not a failing of our science, it is a mere fact of the crappy situation we're in. There is always some uncertainty left after we've discovered everything that is possible to know. Always. Both the religious and the skeptical would be well advised to remember this more often than they do.
Not that that makes it true, of course - that's another conversation for another day (though if I know Slashdot well, it's probably happening in a quite heated manner on the next thread over...).
Okay, I see - we're arguing the same issue from different perspectives. My opinion on this matter is to treat AI as an (extraordinarily difficult) engineering task. For example, I would be satisfied to call something true strong AI as long as it behaved like it; to me, the day a computer passes the Turing test, we've cracked the nut. I do not care whether real intelligence exists under the hood. I suspect this is the attitude taken by most AI researchers, as well, which is likely why they clash with the philosophers so much. In my opinion, the "mere" simulation of intelligence is quite lofty enough a goal to be worthwhile pursuing.
OTOH, I suspect that philosophers are mostly interested in the question of whether the intelligence is "true" or not. This is something that I have no stake in, and frankly, I don't think the question is very well posed. The very asking presumes some form of dualism, i.e. that whether or not you go as far as belief in a soul, you hold that perception is fundamentally different from simulation. This is a philosophical stance with no observable consequences, so it lies outside the realm of science (which, based on the relative successes of various intellectual fields, tends to suggest to me that it lies outside the realm of subjects worthy of investigation).
I think again we are running into the a priori assumption of dualism here. I now realize that by formal programs you mean something other than merely some Turing complete language, so I'm willing to back off a bit. However, I still take severe issue with Searle's view, because I don't think he's ever made a very persuasive argument that my brain and my PC have any fundamental difference that couldn't be overcome with a good deal more power added on to my PC. But yes, I would agree with anyone that says that GOFAI is likely nothing worth looking into; forgive me, I'm young enough so that the idea was declared DOA before I was even born, so I often forget that people used to actually see some promise in it.
Again, the same question: is there more to intelligence than a mapping from input to output? I suppose I would make your parenthetical argument, though I would say that a priori we should accept it rather than its converse based on Occam's razor. But either way, I would argue that literally by definition the goal of AI is to merely pass the Turing test. After all, the whol
But since you opened the "Searle" bag, let's have a recent quote from him:
I might note that the worst part of this quote is that it's a severe misunderstanding of the strong AI quest to say that we're hoping to produce milk and sugar (i.e. a physical product) from a simulation. Personally, I don't care how the thing happens as long as it passes the Turing test - I don't know what exactly Searle wants to see, but it's clearly not what I expect. Now from the parent:
You're kidding, right? To be fair, I know very little of Dreyfus' work, but Searle's work most definitely does deny that our minds are like computers. That is literally the point of the severely flawed Chinese room thought experiment. I will grant you that his above quote makes it sound like he's now fallen back to arguing that a program needs a physical instantiation to be intelligent, but think back - whether he's backtracked on this position or not, I don't know, but this guy was absolutely claiming that even in theory, any sort of algorithmic understanding was impossible or inferior to the "real stuff" that happens in our brain.
As to whether our minds can be captured with formal logic, I'll ask again, what else is there? Informal logic? I.e. of the kind that we can simulate quite nicely by mixing formal logic with pseudorandom number generation? Maybe this is a term
You are presuming that being a parent somehow imbues one with more knowledge about how best to be a parent than a person possesses naturally on the basis of having been parented. Personally I think this is untrue - parents tend to be tired, bitchy, and irrational because of the fact that their kids (rightfully, I might add) don't succumb to parental desires to rear tiny carbon copies of what they wish they were like at that age, in hindsight. I would venture to guess that you'd get much better parenting advice from those that have never had to fight through the emotionally draining process.
On that note - there is very little that you can do to positively influence your children that they don't already do for themselves. You can certainly screw them up by being abusive, or spoiling them, but honestly, kids don't need to be sheltered from the real world. For the most part they are uninterested in it, and if they are not, they'll find a way to find the information anyhow.
And as disturbing as goatse may be (though to be honest, I am lucky enough to have been spared the sight), how many people can you count in your life that have been subject to negative consequences as adults as a result of having viewed a twisted sexual picture as a child? How many people have grown up messed up in the head because they snuck a peek at daddy's Playboy when they were eight years old? I can't think of a single one; frankly, I don't think our children need nearly as much protection as we delude ourselves as a culture into thinking. Kids are resilient, and it takes quite a bit to screw them up - a few pictures viewed by choice on the internet do not a deviant make. I would be very curious to hear what the supposed "damage" that this stuff does to a child is, and why it's taken so seriously, especially since I've never seen an example that proves its reality...