Do you live here? Have you? Or are you just voicing your prejudiced notions? When I hear this kind of statement, I'm always very curious to hear where the person making it lives...
I'm sure ArmoredDragon (3450605) is secretly Sandra Bullock from Crash.
Even in the best scenario, the zeroeth law of robotics applies. Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, for example, both recognized how humans as a whole make terrible decisions for themselves and their society. A benevolent AI could take us a long way toward being a better world and still take away a lot of our freedom.
I had Comcast for residential service for two years not long ago (2010-2012), and they gave me no problem with using my own modem. (They did try to charge me for not returning it when I disconnected service, but corrected their error without a hassle.)
They also still list acceptable personal modems on their website:
In the US, the powerful can be the most evil scum and commit the most heinous crimes against humanity and will have nothing to fear from "the law" at all.
To be clear, torture is a human rights violation against customary international law and treaty; it is not a crime against humanity unless it is part of widespread or systemic practice.
It is, however, widely practiced as a practical matter. Sometimes even by heads of state. This guy has personally tortured people, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Actually, there' something called "moral rights" in copyright law that allows the copyright holder to prevent you from, for example, buying an art book with a bunch of nice pictures in it, cutting out and framing all the pictures, and reselling the framed pictures.
I doubt that very much. Show me a case which broadly prohibits that - not some narrower interpretation tenuously connected. I don't care if the book publisher gets in trouble if I cut up the book, I signed no such agreement when I bought it off the discount rack at B&N.
No, you probably didn't, but it's a copyright law, not a contract. You are obligated to obey the law even if you didn't agree to it.
As to show you a case, the Ninth Circuit has held for Parent in a related fact-pattern, while the seventh circuit has sided more with you, so it depends where in the United States you are. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
In addition, the parent was talking about moral rights, which are more of a European thing. So you'd have to check their law.
consider that for a moment...only 90 years ago, the son of perhaps the most powerful and well connected man on the earth died from a blister. playing tennis.
No -- consider for a moment that we could be there again 90 years from now. Science fiction looks toward the future, and the current trend is that antibiotics are becoming useless.
Is it actually being attacked by north korea? If i were to do this, i'd compromise somebody else's computer and attack from there. Jumping to conclusions is much more fun though.
True; all signs point to North Korea but it could be a false flag operation, or just someone they trained, for example. However, motive, opportunity, and skill fingerprint are pointing to them. While we are engineers trained to think in counterexamples and recognize the possibility that it was someone else, it seems highly unlikely.
That being said, I do think the "wait and see" from the UN Mission Rep from North Korea, despite seeming to implicate them, was more of an "I have no clue whether we did it or not."
Yes, because corporate-funded (cyber-)terrorism against a soveriegn nation has *no* potential down sides, right? (
It absolutely has downsides; the problem is a game-theory one, not a turn-the-other-cheek one. Mutual phased reduction in hostilities is the goal. The net benefit of escalation for the aggressor at any time must be outweighed by the net cost, so a threat is necessary.
I would be seriously tempted to both lobby for and bankroll offensive cyber-operations against North Korea. (Lobby for ones on the public dime from every country where SONY has a sizeable presence; bankroll one from some country where it's legal.)
Whether through cyberoperations or plain old believable threats, SONY has to come up with a way to show North Korea (or perhaps independent actors in North Korea) that there's a penalty for this kind of behavior. So does the developed world generally--attacks like this cost a fortune in productivity and potentially lost jobs, and reputation. SONY is in a better position to recover than many businesses (notably in the financial or legal sectors, where the loss of trust could be fatal), but even so.
I mean it seems likely they got everything. Even the model numbers of the kitchen sinks.
I would expect they also got some fairly damning privileged information--emails exchanged with lawyers on everything from sexual harassment to copyright infringement suits. It's a BIG firm.
Plus Patents. Sony files THOUSANDS of patents a year. If that patent information (or research that could be patented) is published to the wild before SONY patents it, you have a LOT of new prior art and a fortune in IP at risk... SONY would have to patent everything within a year in the US; I am not sure that you even have that grace period everywhere else.
(a) NOVELTY; PRIOR ART.—A person shall be entitled to a patent unless— (1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention
(b) EXCEPTIONS.— (1) DISCLOSURES MADE 1 YEAR OR LESS BEFORE THE EFFECTIVE FILING DATE OF THE CLAIMED INVENTION.—A disclosure made 1 year or less before the effective filing date of a claimed invention shall not be prior art to the claimed invention under subsection (a)(1) if—
(A) the disclosure was made by the inventor or joint inventor or by another who obtained the subject matter disclosed directly or indirectly from the inventor or a joint inventor; or
(B) the subject matter disclosed had, before such disclosure, been publicly disclosed by the inventor or a joint inventor or another who obtained the subject matter disclosed directly or indirectly from the inventor or a joint inventor.
+1.
A kid raised solely on TV and the average preschool isn't getting the necessary stimulus for good brain or character development.
I'm all for removing artificial barriers, but once they are down we're gonna have to accept that maybe girls really do want to be princesses and maybe guys really do want to be monster trucks (not drive, be damnit, BE!)
Sure... once they're all down you will see differences. But they have never all been down.
Fundamentally, unless you have a significant community that actively tries to not focus on girl things with girls and guy things with guys, including training for parents who are dedicated to it, you're not going to escape your culture's gender norms. You can limit their influence, but they're still there. There are *trillions* of dollars of material and millenia of cultural inertia behind and imbued with those norms.
But there are traits that are admirable in the norms of both genders, and the trick is getting kids interested in those things. Experimenting, inventing, exploring, building things, designing things, social graces--there are lots of important traits, things it's good to bring out. Find a few parents who think the same way you do and try to set up activities around those things. Like lesson plans.
Also, look at parenting groups. Maybe even reach out through your college alumni networks to see what people from your school have done. I'm sure there are lots of parents around the country who wonder about this.
Let's look at the premise:
1. Students usually know WAY more about technology than their teachers.
This is becoming less and less true, as people who had computers growing up become teachers.
That being said, this is slashdot, so most of *us* knew WAY more about technology as kids than our teachers, or than teachers today.
We lost most of the great teachers in the United States when we embraced gender equality. It was definitely the right move, but it cost our country untold billions in terms of the price to education.
Not many decades ago, women could not go into most high-earning-potential fields. Teacher was one of the few fields of instruction open to them, and as a result, a LOT of the smartest women in the country went into teaching. And there are a *lot* of smart women in the country.
You still have smart women teaching, but not nearly as many.
You assume we will know how to program them. Not the first-generation AI traffic-monitor, but third or fourth generation, where you have general-purpose AIs that learn from doing things like watching traffic cams or reading the news. We haven't yet gotten to a point where we agree on how to teach human children; now imagine AI children far more adept and capable than the most skilled among us.
Like people, they can use that power for good or for evil. We will encourage them to use it for good--most of us--but we all have different ideas of good, and we're not very good at controlling how our children learn. If you take fifteen kids raised in the same family, you wind up with a lot of very different adults. Some are productive, some are a drag on society, some do good, some do M&A. In fifty or a hundred years, it will be AIs doing hostile takeovers of companies, or at least deciding when to do them. Some of that is probably already going on, but if it's not, it will be soon.
The other big target is the US elections. Heavy AI investing by major donors or the parties will, at some point in the next thirty years, be making a *lot* of decisions for the campaigns. They are already using good data-mining, and more data is available every year.
Perfection is acheived only on the point of collapse. - C. N. Parkinson
