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From Slashdot Hardware Story | Robotics Prof Fears Rise of Military Robots

Re:”Friendly AI” (Score:5, Insightful)

by jollyreaper (513215) on Thursday January 14, @11:56PM (#30775422)

This is one of the things that makes me think the concern about “friendly AI” is blown out of proportion. The problem isn’t making sure teh AI’s are “friendly” — its making sure the NI (natural intelligence) owners of the AI’s are “friendly”.
If half the effort spent on “friendly AI” were spent on examining the ownership of AI’s, there might be some hope.

That’s just it — human nature never changes. The general can order genocide but it’s up to the soldiers to carry it out. The My Lai Massacre was stopped by a helicopter pilot who put his bird between the civilians and “told his crew that if the U.S. soldiers shot at the Vietnamese while he was trying to get them out of the bunker that they were to open fire at these soldiers.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre [wikipedia.org]

Robots aren’t really the issue — distancing humans from killing is the problem. Not many of us could kill another human being with our bare hands. A knife might make the task easier in the doing but does nothing to ease the psychological horror of it. Guns let you do it at a distance. You don’t even have to touch the guy. And buttons make it easier still. It’s like you’re not even responsible. You could convince young men to fly bombers over enemy cities and rain down incendiaries but I don’t think you could convince many of them to kill even one of those civilians with a gun, let alone a knife.

This is the strange distinction we make where we find one form of killing a horrible thing, a war crime, terrorism, and another form of killing is a regrettable accident but there’s really no blame to be assigned. A suicide bomber walks into a pizzeria and blows himself up, we lose our minds. An Air Force bomber drops an LGB in a bunker filled with civilians instead of top brass, shit happens. We honestly believe there’s a distinction between the two. “Americans didn’t set out to kill civilians” war hawks will huff. Yes, but they’re still dead, aren’t they?

Combat robots are simply continuing this process. Right now there is still a man in the loop to order the attack. Hamas kills Israeli targets with suicide bombs, Israelis deliver high explosives via missile into apartment blocks filled with civilians. They’re using American-manufactured anti-tank missiles. I think they’re still using TOW. Predator drones use hellfires and their operators are sitting in the continental US while Israeli pilots are a few miles away from the target inside their choppers but really, what’s the difference? And what happens when drones are given the authority to engage targets on their own? A soldier with a gun can at least see what he’s shooting at. Those in the artillery corps are firing their shells off into the unseen distance and have no idea who they’re killing. Not that much different from laying land mines, indiscriminate killing. Psychologically no different from what it would be to set a robot on patrol mode, fire-at-will.

If one extrapolates a little further, the problem of the droid army is similar to that of the tradition of unpopular leaders using corps of foreign mercenaries to protect them from the wrath of the people. The mercenaries did not speak the language, did not know the customs, and were counted as immune to palace intrigues. They could be used against the people for they would not the sympathy for fellow countrymen that a native force might feel. What are droids being used for? Only the people operating them could say for sure. Welcome to the age of the push-button assassination.

From Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | 2-D Avatar To Be Pulled From Theaters In China

Re:That’s about right if your name is Fidel Castro (Score:5, Insightful)

by Grishnakh (216268) on Tuesday January 19, @08:46PM (#30827384)

A lot of things ARE America’s fault. Cuba is a case of both sides being wrong.

When your government is some crazy military who has remained in power by force for 50 years and has isolated the country from the rest of the world

In case you forgot, America has had an embargo on Cuba for decades, which has only recently been relaxed. Cuba never isolated itself from the world; America imposed that isolation because it didn’t want a communist country sitting off its coast.

Communism is certainly a crappy form of government, but that doesn’t give America the right to try to force its preferred form of government on foreign, sovereign countries. If the Cuban people want to try communism, that’s their right.

The other big reason America was so oppressive towards Cuba is because American corporations owned a lot of land in Cuba and used it for sugarcane farming. When Castro took power, he seized all this property and nationalized it (just like Venezuela nationalized their oil industry under Chavez). American corporations whined and the American government acted as their enforcement arm, and tried to oust Castro.

From an objective, moral viewpoint, America is completely in the wrong. That land belonged to the Cubans, not American corporations who had somehow bought it up, and it was the Cubans’ right to take it back. There’s a simple lesson here: if you’re not a citizen of a foreign country, then you don’t have any rights there, especially when a new regime takes over. Stay in your own country. If you want the same rights and privileges as citizens of another country, then emigrate there and apply for Citizenship. Otherwise, don’t act surprised when they change their minds one day and kick you out.

Cuba is just another example of America’s imperialism throughout the 20th century. If we really believed in freedom, we would leave other sovereign nations alone to do what they want, and stop trying to control them with military power, bribes, etc.

If America had had a “hands-off” policy towards Cuba under Castro (i.e., no embargo, no assassination attempts, no invasions, etc.), and people were still trying to escape by homemade raft, then you could rightfully criticize that nation for not working very well. But you can’t screw around with another country and then criticize them too. It’s like tying one of a boxer’s hands behind his back and then making fun of him for boxing poorly.

America is the main reason crazy leftist leaders like Castro and Chavez have been able to come to power and stay in power in Latin America. When the locals of these smaller countries are faced with a choice between exploitation by American corporations, or leadership by a nutcase who’ll at least provide for them better than what they were getting, they’ll choose the latter. It’s not too different from Germany in the 30s: they were being oppressed by the Allied powers under the crappy treaty terms set down at the end of WWI, so in comes Hitler who turned them back into a major power, though he was a nut. If countries would stop screwing with each other so much, and mind their own business, we wouldn’t have all these problems.

From Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | USPTO Grants Google a Patent On MapReduce

Re:Defensive patent (Score:5, Insightful)

by Target Practice (79470) on Tuesday January 19, @02:48PM (#30823492)

“A technique that is well known, such as MapReduce, is the property of the general public and is unpatentable.”

Someone should really let the patent clerks in on that secret…

Re:Defensive patent (Score:3, Informative)

by Dachannien (617929) on Tuesday January 19, @08:43PM (#30827368)

We’re called examiners, rather than clerks, and the issue with the vast majority of patents reported on Slashdot isn’t that the examiners are clueless concerning the prior art, but that Slashdotters are ignorant of how patent law and patent examining actually works.

For example, in this case, the claims are extremely long – so long, in fact, that the patent is probably worthless for its offensive capacity. The more limitations that a claim has, the narrower the invention has.

In order to anticipate the claim – and thereby reject it under 35 USC 102 – a single prior art reference has to disclose every single limitation of the claim. The longer the claim is, the more likely it is that there’s something in there that the prior art doesn’t disclose.

In order to render the claim obvious under 35 USC 103, a combination of prior art references has to teach every single limitation of the claim. No single reference has to teach any particular limitation; instead, it can arise through a combination of the references. But it has to be there. What’s more, there has to be a proper rationale for combining the references. That is, a “person having ordinary skill in the art” has to have some reason why they would modify what one reference teaches by incorporating the teachings of a second reference. This can be anything from one of the references providing a motivating reason why the teachings of the second reference would be advantageous to include, to a simple finding that one could perform a simple substitution of the secondary reference for a part of the primary reference with predictable results. (See the Supreme Court’s KSR Int’l v. Teleflex for a fuller discussion of obviousness.)

Finally, a determination that a patent should be issued is not a 100% guarantee that there is no prior art anywhere that could render a claim anticipated or obvious. Examiners only have a certain amount of time to get the job done, and eventually they have to make a judgment call that a claim properly represents the scope to which the applicant is entitled. The point is to help reduce the number of unnecessary lawsuits resulting from patents whose claims are too broad.

It’s not perfect, but we do what we can. And if you don’t think that’s good enough and you’re a US citizen, then eventually, when we start hiring again, you might consider joining the ranks and improving things yourself, within the bounds of the law, one application at a time.

From Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | Fixing Security Issue Isn’t Always the Right Answer

Re:Overreaction (Score:5, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05, @03:12PM (#30659716)

I don’t know what the answer is, but “terrorists” could have a field day with this. Imagine a group of a guys going through security the wrong way at a dozen major airports nationwide. The resulting delay due to evacuating everybody, screening the facility, and then rescreening everybody would result in millions if not billions of dollars worth of time and money lost. It is basically impossible to prevent this, the risks are low (this particular guy didn’t get caught, and even if you do get caught you’ll be out of jail in a short while), and the impact is potentially huge – majorly inconveniencing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people for half a day or more (not to mention all the lost time and money I spoke of earlier). I think this would be much more effective than any previous terrorist incidents, particularly if they did it regularly every couple of months or so.

I wish you weren’t an AC (Score:4, Insightful)

by Firethorn (177587) on Tuesday January 05, @03:59PM (#30660494)
Homepage Journal

Good thing you got modded up – I wish you’d posted this logged in, because it’s a good point.

We’ve gone so far overboard on security that our own security responses often exceed the costs that an actual attack would impose.

One dude, maybe a thousand dollar fine/couple days in the clink, can shut an airport down for much of a day, costing millions. Classic asymetrical warfare.

Heck, the terrorists have already switched from attacking the secure areas to attacking the approach to the secure area. Ever seen the queue to get into the secure airport area? I have a nasty imagination. Just take a suicide bomber, no need for a plane ticket, and have him approach the security area like he’s got a ticket and is going to board. Then detonate when in a particularly crowded spot. Heck, he could even have a fairly massive ‘carry-on’ filled with explosives.

Then again – if I was a terrorist I wouldn’t be looking at transportation right now. That’s where we’re looking. I’d look elsewhere for my targets.

From Slashdot Ask Slashdot Story | Do IT Pros Abuse Their Power?

Re:New around here? (Score:5, Funny)

by noidentity (188756) on Sunday January 03, @02:34PM (#30633598)

A BOFH might find it more fun to manipulate data from certain websites, rather than block sites.

Oh, you mean something like blurring or mirroring images on websites [ex-parrot.com] viewed over an open WiFi access point?

From Slashdot Technology Story | Is Getting Acquired Good For FOSS Projects?

Re:please tell us your real agenda. (Score:5, Insightful)

by Angst Badger (8636) on Wednesday January 06, @11:53PM (#30679142)

one of the biggest fails of open source is it’s lack of reliable support or response to customer deamnds, if more big names jump on board an throw money at developers it’ll only help OSS.

Right, because big companies are famous for the reliable support they provide and their responsiveness to customer demands. Seriously, have you ever tried to get actual customer support from a large company? What’s the last large company that implemented a feature you wanted? Or merged a patch you wrote for the feature you wanted into the trunk?

This is like the old argument that private corporations are inherently more efficient than government, a point of view that must originate from people who have never in their lives been involved in a large private corporation. Both big business and government are grossly inefficient because they are large enough that individual initiative and responsibility disappear.

It’s not Stallman’s words that are being obeyed blindly here, it’s Eric S. Raymond’s words. For reasons known only to ESR and God, he decided that the metric of success for “Open Source” was corporate adoption and competing with corporate products. Stallman’s Free Software ideology, for all of its occasional hidebound rigidity, had user freedom and choice as its metric for success. Free Software is a huge success insofar as we, as users (and developers) have an embarrassment of riches as far as freedom and choice go. Open Source, on the other hand, is pretty consistently seeing its big successes increasingly menaced by the corporate players its advocates went out of their way to provoke. And in that arena, it’s not choice, freedom, or even product quality that counts, it’s money, and you can safely assume that even relatively minor transnational corporations have more money to throw around than any Open Source initiative ever will.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. The same applies to marketshare.

From Slashdot Poll | Best estimate of monthly spending on …

Re:Paid off the house (Score:5, Insightful)

by DaveAtFraud (460127) on Wednesday January 06, @09:54PM (#30678366)
Homepage Journal

…it’s time consuming to eat decently at home…

Learn to like leftovers and make things that make good leftovers. Slow cook dishes like pot roast, turkey, pork roast, etc. aren’t significantly degraded by being warmed over (I’d swear some of them taste better the second time since the juices soak into the meat). They take time the first time although that’s usually wall clock time; not actual “being at the stove” time. They’re also pretty easy to fix. Another way to go is to get a slow cooker/crock pot that you can load up and then head out to the kid’s soccer game or whatever and have dinner waiting for you when you get home.

Once you have something already made up, it’s easy to heat it up on the stove and it probably doesn’t take that much longer then stopping some place to order out.

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Paid off the house (Score:4, Insightful)

by TempeTerra (83076) on Thursday January 07, @05:02AM (#30680438)

Just an OT tip for people who want to change their cooking habits. Making something new, even something ‘ridiculously easy’ like a roast or a stew where you chop everything and throw it in a pot, or pancakes where you just mix it all together, is difficult and time consuming the first three times you do it. Don’t be discouraged, it’s just the price of doing new things. But you might want to make the same dish a few times to get over that initial hump instead of moving straight onto some other new, ‘easy’ dish which will take you ages again.

Re:Paid off the house (Score:3, Interesting)

by Abstrackt (609015) on Thursday January 07, @04:18PM (#30687660)

Solid advice. Taking it in the other direction though, I’ve recently come to love using a pressure cooker. Just the other night, my wife and I made stew from scratch in half an hour. 15 minutes was prep work and the other 15 was cook time. Everything gets cooked quickly and tastes great. Basically, the slow cooker is for when you plan ahead and the pressure cooker is for when you didn’t.

You should also look into once a month cooking (search for OAMC on the recipe sites). We’ve never cooked ahead for more than two weeks, but it saves time and money to have home-made prepackaged meals in the freezer. Even cook day goes pretty quickly if you plan properly (i.e. cook 5lb of ground beef and put it into six different recipes). If your kids are old enough, involve them in the cooking process. Not only do most kids really like helping out in the kitchen, but you teach them an important life skill.

One fast, healthy meal is any kind of pasta. While the noodles are cooking cut up some tomatoes and cook them in a pan on low-medium heat. Add some spices, leftover meat, leftover veggies, whatever you have really, and drop the pasta in once it’s done. Mix it all up and serve. If you need inspiration or don’t trust your cooking skills I recommend “How to Cook Everything” by Mark Bittman, it tells you how to prepare almost anything you might want to eat and the instructions are easy to follow.

Good luck.

the-market-is-not-always-right

From Slashdot News Story | Rudolph the Cadmium-Nosed Reindeer

Re:REGULATORS! (Score:5, Insightful)

by debrain (29228) on Monday January 11, @10:59PM (#30733102)
Journal

wtf has this got to do with “letting the market decide”? your talking about kids braclets, they are hardly in a position to decide anything. I would suggest once the market knows these bracklets are made with a dangerous heavy metal, it will decide. fail.

Sir —

The market’s invisible hand rewards those selling cadmium bracelets because they are cheaper than other kinds; people buy them in the belief that they are essentially equivalent in every way but price (and, interestingly, looks). However, as per the article, these bracelets are not equivalent in their health effects – the cadmium bracelets present an enormous health hazard. I agree that if people knew the presence of cadmium and its effects, they would not buy cadmium laden bracelets. However people do not know, they have any way of knowing such a thing, and as most people would presume that such a toxin would never be in children’s bracelets there is unlikely to be inquiry by most purchasers (many are also likely aware that the salesperson knows as much about the heavy metal content of the bracelet as they would know about … virtually anything, hence there is no source of information that can be accessed with reasonable levels of effort).

With enough money one can ensure the market never “knows”. A well funded company that has purchased all its competitors and has inroads into multiple marketing vectors can present whatever image they feel appropriate. Your rebuttal would seem to be premised on a society made up predominantly of informed, conscientious consumers. That is not the society we now live in. Consumers today are at best uninformed, indifferent, and short-sighted. On average they are self-indulgent, misinformed, and impulsive.

For example, look at the food production and distribution system in the United States. People who eat meat at fast food joints are consuming (albeit in small portions) sterilized faeces and ground up other humans. Heck, Monsanto’s still around, and doing rather well [google.ca], in spite of well known criticism [wikipedia.org].

Alas, I would disagree with the assertion that the market can self-correct in all cases (the formula is rather simple – if the profit minus the cost of mitigation is greater than the cost of continuing to sell a bad product – continue to sell). Perhaps if the culture changes and people become conscious of their consumables we will see a change in the type of market. But for now, if the market were left to decide, and the avenues of information were paid to ameliorate criticism, there could continue to be a healthy market for cadmium laden bracelets that are cheaper than alternatives and purchased in the absence of education, awareness and forethought.

From Slashdot Poll | Sum of my now-open windows, desktops, …

Re:Over 30! (Score:5, Interesting)

by nmb3000 (741169) <nmb3000@that-google-mail-site.com> on Monday January 04, @06:21PM (#30648062)
Homepage Journal

Well, XP pro (at least the instance I am running) is limited to 50 open windows at any one time.

False.

What you are probably seeing is either the GDI Object [microsoft.com] limit or the User Object [microsoft.com] (handle) limit. And yes, when you run out of one of these resources Bad Things tend to start happening.

My system is moderately loaded right now and I just opened about 75 instances of Notepad (each using 35 GDI Objects) with no trouble. However, certain applications do chew up a lot of GDI and User resources, for example Firefox is currently using over 1,500 GDI Objects. I believe the default limit on XP and Vista is 10,000 of each per user session (maximum of 65,535 globally). Of course some applications leak these objects which leads to inevitable system instability (until the offending application is terminated).

You can see how many objects each process is using in Task Manager if you add the User Objects and GDI Objects columns (View > Select Columns).

Awesome bike video…

Inspired. Danny MacAskill from dave on Vimeo.