Latest Techdirt Comments http://www.techdirt.com/ Easily digestible tech news.... Re: Re: Re: Your fair share paying for a $100 million movie is $3 rental! http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/15445423110/framework-copyright-reform.shtml#c1648 Sat, 18 May 2013 13:59:53 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/15445423110/framework-copyright-reform.shtml#c1648 Re: Horses http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c487 Sat, 18 May 2013 13:50:36 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c487 http://www.amazon.com/Robots-Will-Steal-Thats-ebook/dp/B009R93JR6/ref=cm_cr_pr_sims_t]]> Re: Re: Re: Prenda Fall down http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/16365623113/court-dumps-prendas-subpoena.shtml#c319 Sat, 18 May 2013 13:40:57 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/16365623113/court-dumps-prendas-subpoena.shtml#c319 Re: Re: Privacy concerns legit; single sided critique via grandstanding http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/15583223111/congress-grandstanding-over-google-glass-privacy-concerns-next-up-privacy-concerns-over-your-eyes.shtml#c2249 Sat, 18 May 2013 13:01:58 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/15583223111/congress-grandstanding-over-google-glass-privacy-concerns-next-up-privacy-concerns-over-your-eyes.shtml#c2249 ______

I can't stress enough that complaining about government having access to info while encouraging private companies to have unlimited access to info is essentially the same thing.

If the data is being collected and saved by private companies, it is ultimately available to everyone. It's a fake barrier to suggest that info can be kept out of government hands while simultaneously being available to private companies and hackers/criminals/terrorists.

If you want private companies to be free to collect whatever they want to collect and to monitor whomever they want to monitor and to make their privacy opt-ins and opt-outs so vague that most people don't understand what they are sharing, then you have to recognize that government is part of that eco-system. It doesn't have to directly monitor people and collect data. It doesn't even have to order private companies to turn it over. It just has to set up the right commercial system to obtain the data in a way that these private companies approve and profit from.]]> Re: When everything we do is monitored http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/15583223111/congress-grandstanding-over-google-glass-privacy-concerns-next-up-privacy-concerns-over-your-eyes.shtml#c2231 Sat, 18 May 2013 12:59:32 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/15583223111/congress-grandstanding-over-google-glass-privacy-concerns-next-up-privacy-concerns-over-your-eyes.shtml#c2231
If the data is being collected and saved by private companies, it is ultimately available to everyone. It's a fake barrier to suggest that info can be kept out of government hands while simultaneously being available to private companies and hackers/criminals/terrorists.

If you want private companies to be free to collect whatever they want to collect and to monitor whomever they want to monitor and to make their privacy opt-ins and opt-outs so vague that most people don't understand what they are sharing, then you have to recognize that government is part of that eco-system. It doesn't have to directly monitor people and collect data. It doesn't even have to order private companies to turn it over. It just has to set up the right commercial system to obtain the data in a way that these private companies approve and profit from.]]> I've had this conversations before http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c468 Sat, 18 May 2013 12:58:43 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c468
A robot uprising comes in one of two forms:

~ A small bug, that is discovered and corrected before it becomes a problematically big bug, or

~ Willfully plated malicious code, in which case Ms. Scarlett killed Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory using the Robot.

These days, we still use slavery, we just keep our slaves in other nations where we don't have to look at how bad we treat them. But whenever we have an abolitionist movement to free a workforce from abuses, we always have a surge in industrial automation.

A robot is nothing more than a versatile cotton gin.]]> Fixed for you. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c459 Sat, 18 May 2013 12:52:40 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c459 My observation is that everything that we thought required "intelligence", e.g. chess, has turned out in practice to be susceptible to a brute force approach of one kind or another.

"My observation is that everything that we thought required intelligence, e.g. chess, has turned out in practice to be susceptible to a reductionist approach of one kind or another."

I think talking about real intelligence is like talking about true Scotsmen, since in robotics we are getting closer and closer to dissecting the individual components of human mental processing, and are well on our way towards empathetic robots.

The difference is, we can actually omit the programming in the maidbot to be annoyed at cleaning latrines.]]> Re: Re: My senator http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130426/15064322856/sen-dan-coats-boston-bombers-you-know-who-we-need-to-keep-eye-loners.shtml#c743 Sat, 18 May 2013 12:22:22 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130426/15064322856/sen-dan-coats-boston-bombers-you-know-who-we-need-to-keep-eye-loners.shtml#c743 Re: Re: My senator http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130426/15064322856/sen-dan-coats-boston-bombers-you-know-who-we-need-to-keep-eye-loners.shtml#c724 Sat, 18 May 2013 12:21:33 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130426/15064322856/sen-dan-coats-boston-bombers-you-know-who-we-need-to-keep-eye-loners.shtml#c724 Re: Template hit! Anomaly, lawsuit, won't ever affect anyone else. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/10535223120/indian-publishing-firm-cant-take-little-criticism-threatens-blogger-with-1-billion-lawsuit-criminal-charges.shtml#c150 Sat, 18 May 2013 12:01:37 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/10535223120/indian-publishing-firm-cant-take-little-criticism-threatens-blogger-with-1-billion-lawsuit-criminal-charges.shtml#c150 Horses http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c453 Sat, 18 May 2013 11:51:23 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c453 When the automobile was invented, it isn't as though the buggy whip makers simply died off in unemployed starvation.
Horses did.

Can machines make rugs? Yup, yet there's a huge market in hand-woven rugs out there.

And some people enjoy riding horses -- that doesn't mean demand for horses is anywhere close to what it was in 1910.

People aren't horses of course. As the economy changes, people can adapt to provide labor in a way horses can't. But people adapt slowly -- certainly not as quickly as automation replaces jobs. There's no Moore's Law for labor.

And service jobs aren't really an answer. Wages for service jobs are low because there's excess supply in the labor market there -- that excess supply is coming from all of the manufacturing workers that have, essentially, been replaced.

I don't think it's the end of the world, but it definitely deserves more of a response than simply dismissing the people raising those concerns as luddites.

A short read on this topic that's neither dismissive nor neo-luddite: http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI]]> Re: Re: Re: Re: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c439 Sat, 18 May 2013 11:50:07 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c439 its achievement is no greater than that of the chess playing computers

And IMHO, that's a pretty freakin' big achievement. There really aren't many jobs that are safe from machines that are smarter than their creators.]]> FTFY http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130518/00045923138/awesome-stuff-cool-product-designs.shtml#c10 Sat, 18 May 2013 11:41:03 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130518/00045923138/awesome-stuff-cool-product-designs.shtml#c10
FTFY.]]> Re: Re: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130510/13023123037/lots-people-dont-turn-off-their-devices-when-they-fly.shtml#c1322 Sat, 18 May 2013 11:23:01 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130510/13023123037/lots-people-dont-turn-off-their-devices-when-they-fly.shtml#c1322
Next, do you think the pilots turn their shit off? no they dont, I actually saw, in the cockpit of an Airbus A320, the pilot and co-pilot both, had their iphones velcro'd to empty spaces on the instrument panel.

And the story about a plane veering off course because of an iphone is complete and utter bullshit. The frequencies used by the iphone and GPS are too far apart in the spectrum to interfere with each other. Seriously, if that were the case iphones wouldnt have built-in GPS receivers as the device would be useless as a GPS because the iphone signal would constantly interfere with it.

And as for speculation that the iphone was interfering with the electronics of the GPS receiver on the aircraft not the signal itself is also absolute bullshit. If a $79 GPS device you can buy at walmart are built well enough to withstand intrinsic interference from other electronic devices, the $50k to $60k devices in commercial aircraft damn well better be capable of withstanding intrinsic interference.

I mean seriously, If the electronics on-board aircraft could be interfered with that easily, it would be a wonder that aircraft could even get off the ground. With the internal and complex electronics built in to aircraft, they would be their own worst enemy.]]> Re: Re: Re: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c437 Sat, 18 May 2013 11:14:11 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c437 RadioLab did a story about machines that learn. An example was that by watching a pendulum, it figured out f=ma. Elementary, sure, but it's something that took people a while to figure out.

However it was set up to figure out pendulum equations so its achievement is no greater than that of the chess playing computers.]]> Re: Re: Re: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c421 Sat, 18 May 2013 11:06:48 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c421 and people used to be getting no nearer to heavier-than-air flight until, suddenly, they were nearer.
You mean Stringfellow?]]> Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: WHOA! Stop at: "everyone just wants stuff for free". http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/15445423110/framework-copyright-reform.shtml#c1624 Sat, 18 May 2013 11:01:06 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/15445423110/framework-copyright-reform.shtml#c1624 Anyone else get the impression that this is exactly how average_joe would function in court? Neener neener neener and all that?

The main difference is that in court, unlike here, he can't just disappear once he's been caught in an obvious error.]]> Re: Re: Re: A sad misunderstanding http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/15445423110/framework-copyright-reform.shtml#c1601 Sat, 18 May 2013 10:54:02 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/15445423110/framework-copyright-reform.shtml#c1601 Do you think it is fair that an artist who paints a picture can sell the picture (or charge admission to see it, if they want), but a musician, computer programmer, movie actor, or writer should somehow be denied that right because their works are more easily put in a digital format?

Um, what? That makes zero sense.

It's just as easy for a painter to put their work into a digital format as a musician. And it's just as easy for a musician to charge admission or sell a song by not putting it out there in a digital format.

I'm all for the system you describe: if you want control over your work, you must control every copy personally, as property. But if you put your work into an infinitely copiable digital format and release it to the public, you shouldn't whine and complain when people help themselves to copies.]]> Re: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c415 Sat, 18 May 2013 10:53:39 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130517/06185923116/rice-university-professor-skynets-gonna-take-ur-jerbs.shtml#c415 Re: Re: Re: Re: A sad misunderstanding http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/15445423110/framework-copyright-reform.shtml#c1593 Sat, 18 May 2013 10:37:33 PDT http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/15445423110/framework-copyright-reform.shtml#c1593 That's kind of the problem.... the 'whatever that means' part.


Are you seriously saying that someone should declare what the best path is before exploring ALL the paths? That's just crazy.

If you seriously think that our current copyright system is the best way, then you have no reason to be afraid of exploring different means to achieve the same goals.]]>