We're making a beautiful, high-end frame to order and delivering it within a week. Of course there are cheaper alternatives/materials, but you can easily tell the difference and oftentimes cheap frames will literally fall apart within a few years.
After having a little patience to digest the stuffy academic language I realized something:
This is one of the craziest articles I have ever read.
It is like the premise of a sci-fi novel where future states slowly creep along by dredging and filling in land. But it's actually really happening at a scale beyond novelties like Dubai and non-contentious (at least internationally) expansions like Battery Park City.
In my mind, the next big step will be the machine perception, specifically full scene understanding in vision.
Computer vision has advanced very rapidly recently in sub-tasks like object recognition, scene segmentation, 3d-modeling from videos, and others.
Now people are trying to put these elements together, along with text-based metadata and logic for physical interpretation of images (e.g. the coffee cup is on the table which is on the ground and abuts the wall; physical interpretations of spatial information).
Soon enough we'll be to the point where a drone can identify and track most objects in its line of sight and know their physical relationships to each other. This opens up tremendous possibilities in robotics.
Don't be so pessimistic. Drones have been used for search & rescue, storm chasing, and even precision farming (precision in the application of pesticides, etc.)
Unless we establish some artificial restrictions, that'll be inevitable.
The majority of People will want to defend themselves from threats --but people are also less willing than before to expend lives. Anti-war protesters against Iraqi and Afghan wars didn't assail their own soldiers any more --as in Vietnam, but rather couched it as 'we don't want American soldiers' lives put in harm's way' We are for the lives of soldiers so we are against war.... so with that the armed forces used more drones to make it more pallatable (fewer of our own lose lives). So, yes, I don't see why the Army etc, would not go in that direction, eventually.
Of course, antiwar protesters will have to find a new antiwar narrative --which may necessarily have some anti-self (anti-American) component which I think they have trying to avoid since it's a harder 'sell'.
Given that we will have foes, for whatever reason, and that some of those will irrationally engage with us, I would certainly prefer we use drones to people to fight those enemies. On ht other hand, since it will not incur the same amount of moral penalty from our side, we should reconsider when and how we'd said robotic fighters --in other words to try to ensure we don't run roughshod over perceived enemies rather than actual enemies who would bring destruction to us.
Even if his criticisms of coveillance are correct, I still think the world is headed that way.
Simply put, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. We passed a similar threshold with industrialization, and the consequent removal of autonomy for workers on several levels (is the 1800's factory of exacting time cards and constant repetitive movements that far behind the warehouse the author describes?). It was a tumultuous transition (strikes, revolution, communism, etc.) but we made it through. The transformation in state and corporate power that tools like surveillance bring will be similar, but just like in the industrial revolution we can't turn back the clock and have to instead ride out whatever happens.
> "Simply put, you can't put the genie back in the bottle."
I dislike quoting films to make a point, but "the future is not set".
Instead of thinking about reversing change, think about creating an alternate path, a 'fork' in version control terms. Think about what we'd want to inherit in this fork, and what we'd like to replace.
The easier you make the choice to switch to something better, the more people will do it. There are certain parts of our current society that we do not want to live without, any compelling alternative will need to provide them.
I see the greatest hope for a viable alternative in the world of self-sufficiency, but it has to be a more complete form of self-sufficiency than we currently have access to. Healthcare is a great example, what tools would we need to have in our homes to ensure we could treat illnesses without relying on the current healthcare industry? These are the sorts of questions to ask.
For what it's worth, I've already started making steps towards the foundations of a new society. I know it can be done. So that you can understand these ideas better, can you describe to me what holds humans back from making better choices?
Serious question: where do we start when we want to fight this? We made it through the industrial revolution because people stood up for their rights. I'm at a total loss for where to start. (Edit: grammar)
Like with many other causes, you start with yourself -- and that might be enough.
These days, not participating in the latest electronics and social sites and whatnot is enough to make people ask you questions. If you think carefully enough about why you're making the choices you make, then you can give pretty reasonable answers.
I don't own a smart phone, or have a Facebook or LinkedIn account. I still buy paper books. I don't blog (much). And I don't really evangelize these choices; I don't do any of this for attention or to try to change other people's minds. But, when someone notices their tech guy is carrying an old-school flip phone, they ask questions.
Usually the first thing I say is, "they're really convenient, really good tools," immediately followed by, "but, I've noticed that people seem to have a lot of trouble ignoring them, and I don't need another distraction in my life. I don't really want an internet connection to follow me everywhere."
As far as I know, I haven't made anyone else give up their smart phone or Facebook account or whatever. But a surprising number of people take a moment to think about that. They often kinda look at their phone and go, "...huh, I wonder what that would be like..."
And, y'know, just the fact that I get by and live pretty well without these things I think speaks more about how valuable they really are than any sermon I could think of.
Eh, by that reasoning, you could equally live without electricity or running water.
Technology is leveraged, not because it's strictly necessary, but because it's useful. After all, the very website we're having this conversation on isn't necessary. You could get by just fine without it.
But it's useful, isn't it?
Frankly, I don't think quietly opting out solves anything. Would it have helped if some folks opted out of the industrial revolution, content to sit on their farms eking out a living? No. It was those folks participating in the system, but determined to change it, who ultimately lead the charge and catalyzed change.
This technology is here, and it's enormously powerful and useful. But that necessarily means it's also enormously dangerous. The solution isn't to attempt to convince people to abandon that technology and somehow roll back the clock. The solution is for folks to understand the good and the evil these technologies can enable so that we can have intelligent conversations about their use and abuse; conversations that can ultimately inform a new generation of law makers, business owners, and citizens, so that we can realize the advantages of these technologies while minimizing the downsides.
Fortunately, things like the NSA leaks may be just the thing necessary to start those conversations.
I disagree that living with a flip phone instead of a smart phone is in any way equivalent to living without electricity or running water.
You're more than welcome to fight the good fight -- good luck to you -- but I'm not convinced that I'm so right that it should be my mission to change others' minds, and regardless the advice I gave is a good first step for anyone that is interested in changing others' minds.
I don't think the parent comment wants you to get people to downgrade. I think the intent is to get people to demand better protections from abuses of technology.
I think it's a poor comparison. You need water to stay alive and to not stink. Electricity is easier to avoid, but why do that? Electricity and running water don't disturb me with notifications, are not as addictive as social networks, don't make me waste time, don't track me (as much as a smartphone).
I find that having no TV, no smart phone and no facebook reduces the noise. I don't miss them.
There are always trade offs. Sure, you can live without electricity or running water and I'm certain some people argue that this has many benefits. For the average person however, the downsides outweigh the benefits by a huge margin.
Not owning a smart phone also has downsides and benefits. Many people however aren't really aware that downsides exist, so the benefits, however small they may be seem like a justification to buy one. I think it makes sense to be critical of the things you use and spend some time thinking about whether you really think that they benefits are worth the costs.
personally i like the amish approach, before you make decisions on some technology, watch how others use it and take time to understand it before adopting it yourself.
I was asking because that's exactly what I did last year on January 1st. I quit Facebook (500+ "friends"), Twitter (3Ksomething followers) & all social networks cold-turkey. Deleted my accounts, no recovery possible. My motivation was personal & not political/ideological (social media burnout) ... All it did for me was:
* give me more time for side-projects & a clearer frame of mind (good)
* actually made me think & write MORE. not everything you think should be thrown on social media immediately. I appreciate having learned to shut up when you don't have anything to say (good)
* made a bunch of people angry at first (good I guess if you want to provoke a mind-change) ... but that seemed to last only until the next cute cat picture came along.
* I'm sure I made no one reconsider. Zero effect. So that's why I was asking.
"Changing the world by beginning with yourself" is not a valid strategy here. So what do we do instead?
A flip phone doesn't really stop surveillance. They still track where you are, who you call. Sure, maybe no app data, but since you don't use Facebook and such that data wouldn't be there anyway.
While I am doing some of these things, the Luddites didn't have much of an influence over the industrial revolution, they were discarded in the dustbin of history along with anyone who stood in the way of increased profits and globalization.
What I often see is that most individuals see that the benefits outweigh the negatives (all the people that say "I have nothing to hide." over and over) of safety over privacy, and specters can be brought up to increase this fear of the unknown until you are going to have to fight against your friends and neighbors instead of the government to get any change in place.
I find people that say "I have nothing to hide" often haven't thought it through. Easiest example is porn habits, it's not necessarily something people keep private, but many people want to, yet it can skip their mind when they say "I have nothing to hide". IIRC the Snowden leaks included stories of political dissidents being kept in their place by threatening to expose their porn habits (not necessarily anything illegal, just potentially embarrassing).
When someone says they have nothing to hide, I've found there's usually an implied "from the specific person or group that I'm thinking about right now." It's not that I have nothing, but the set information that'd I don't want the cops to know about is different from the set that I don't want my spouse to know about, which is further different from the set I don't want Google or Facebook to know about.
The cops won't care about my porn browsing, but I might not want my spouse to know about all of it. I wouldn't want the cops knowing if I was buying drugs, but I trust that my spouse wouldn't go walking down to the station to turn me in. Similarly, I trust that Facebook wouldn't hand over my info to the feds without a court order, but I don't trust them to hand all of my info over to marketing firm without my permission for a small fee.
As a side note, the leak you're referring to stated that several jihadis' devotion to their cause would be called into question and their authority undermined if it was shown that their public and private lives were inconsistent, with several examples[1]. There were no indications that any threats were made, and, in fact, Greenwald later stated in an interview[2] that he had no evidence that there was any intention to threaten them. I like to point out whenever that article comes up that one of the sources for that article later complained that Greenwald selectively quoted him so as not to undermine the article's core argument[3] and that Greenwald had himself written a book back in 2008 which tried to discredit Republicans by publishing information about their private lives[4]. Sorry, I just can't stand Greenwald...
Web instead of cable channels
Git instead of subversion
Bitcoin decentralizes money
Social networking will be next to decentralize
Energy production - decentralized
Cellphone mesh networks
Open source government programs to run cities
Etc
The big question one has to ask is what do you do in a world where you are more and more living in a zoo with robots making sure you do the right thing to more and more exacting standards?
I think the answer is that expectations will get so high that robots will do everything. And humans will be free to do anything, as long as they don't involve anyone else.
Want to ask a question to your dad? Why bother, google will answer better and your dad won't be pissed at you for asking while he's glued to his facebook
> We made it through the industrial revolution because people stood up for their rights.
I wouldn't say we made it through. We are living it now. We are just getting automated away from it gradually over last hundred years despite all the kicking and screaming and few revolutions (the other, bloody kind). What we sort of succeeded at is getting decent share of the profits.
> Serious question: where do we start when we want to fight this?
I think you can't fight the process. You can just demand your share.
You need to fight for your right to information. Right to surveil others. Privacy will die, you just need to ensure everybody gets a piece of its corpse and all that grows on it.
Demand right to acquire and publicize surveillance footage no matter who acquired it. No matter who was surveiled. Demand transparency from your government to the point mandatory of livefeeding of all public officers.
Don't just accept that some things should be secret. Make all the people, who claim that, prove why. Enforce transparency as default and secrecy an incredibly well argued exception.
I don't think we should want to fight this. The way I see it, things increasingly tend to look like "privacy or the progress of mankind, pick one". There are tons and tons of potential benefits to society stemming from all that data being available for constant real-time processing, and I haven't seen any kind of analysis that would properly weight the costs and benefits. What we get is constant surveillence state fear mongering.
This is a good, but probably unpopular, point. Even Stallman's info leaks everywhere. If his great lengths aren't enough where does that leave typical people? The article states satellites can recognize your face. At some point you throw up your hands and say I give up. On Star Trek no one seems to care that the Federation always knows where they are because they trust that their rights are respected uniformly. Attacking the problem from the standpoint of hiding all info about your doings is a castle made of sand.
Yes. I won't pretend I'm not scared of the bad consequences of the tech we have, be it oppressive governments or evil private companies. Though to be honest, it's something we had to deal with since the dawn of mankind, I don't think surveillance tech is anywhere close to the root of the problem.
Since you mentioned it, I grew up watching Star Trek and I guess it might have formed some of my views on society and technology. The technology present in that universe can - and sometimes is - abused, but like you said, they generally trust each other a lot, both on personal and on societal level. It's a way of life I try to follow and a future I hope we'll one day reach.
Pretty much everything again hinges not on the technology itself, but on how it can be used. There's a lot of good we can leverage even current level of "antiprivacy" technologies - optimizing agriculture, traffic and public health, learning more about ourselves and how societies evolve, improving the general well-being of everyone.
The last two or three generations seem to have grown up with irrational hate of centralized systems. Yes, distributed and democratized is great, but those systems also have their failure modes - many of which we see every day not only in technology, but in economy, politics. There are some things that are better done centralized, like any kind of optimizations. With the levels of computing power we have nowdays, I think we should embrace centralization some more.
Another thing - that I do need to check up with history books, but I feel that the current notion of "privacy" is an artificial construct, an artefact of growing urbanization. I can't imagine villages having any level of privacy similar to what people in cities nowdays consider a minimum standard.
Sure you can "put the genie back in the bottle." There are plenty of social norms that inhibit possible but obnoxious behavior. Some even have laws that reënforce the social norms.
I use and enjoy the services that uber offers. That said, it uses dubious loopholes to evade the (misguided, anti-competitive) regulations taxi companies operate under.
Letting uber evade the bad regulations instead of fixing them is a poor solution (same with tesla and dealerships).
Whenever a market gets too distorted or even shut down, shady things (either illegal or in legal gray areas) start popping up that allow people to evade the distorted market. Alcohol prohibition, printer cartridges, keurig and nespresso capsules, taxis, even the war on drugs, you can all boil it down to this simple principle. At the end this is how change happens when at some point the attempts to crack down on it are either given up or it leads to such a severe police state that at some point a revolution happens. So I'd say don't blame the player, blame the game - but still hold up the player to the moral standards you'd like to see yourself (e.g. try to give your money to a better organization than Uber).
When it comes down to these things I like to go back to Immanuel Kant: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction.". I care much more about this than about the law, especially laws that clearly don't have an actual democratic process at their basis. Laws that come into place because of lobbies pressuring or influencing politicians through money or other means, where there is no real possibility for the people to overturn it, are in my opinion not morally just. Unfortunately this means that there are almost no laws I find just, other than those in my home country, Switzerland.
Well said. I find it absurd how much local governments interfere with local markets, like with taxis. I see no good reason (that will survive scrutiny with Kant's Categorical Imperative) to legislate the number of taxis in a certain area, like with medallions, or charge a high price for them. It's effectively corruption and regulatory capture. It's anti-competitive and has, by my analysis, no redeeming qualities that could not be accomplished better another way.
I don't see a reasonable avenue for a company like Uber to change the laws ahead of time. They only have the traction and resources that they do because of their bias for action. A no-name startup petitioning the city to drop their taxi legislation because the model is "wrong" will get nowhere. I don't see how Uber could ever have come about with that approach.
Additionally, I am also not convinced that Uber's model falls under taxi legislation by writing or intent. I do not believe that taxi legislation is attempting to control for the same problems. Taxis pick up random people on the streets, with effectively zero relationship ahead of time, and lots of opportunity for individual consumer ripoff. People who use Uber have established a relationship with the company ahead of time, before they need a ride. They have chosen to use Uber specifically. The same choice and discrimination is not part of hailing a cab on the street. Uber offers a consistent price to people in an area, and its well-known brand has a reputation to which people can associate bad or good experiences: for the company as a whole, through their speech, and for specific drivers, with the ratings system.
That said, I do also have concerns about Uber's attitude and their intimidating and disruptive tactics toward the press, competitors, etc. They have not comported themselves well enough to deserve the moral high ground, though I will tend to side with them anyway on these legislative issues because taxis are so dysfunctional.
That's a good point - if Uber should fall under Taxi law, so should SuperShuttle and various other airport shuttle services. Once there is already a consumer relationship in place, there is no need to protect consumers more than with the normal anti fraud protection.
I feel like I get this advice all the time. "Invest in Indexes" is ridiculously popular advice. I've also been exposed to portfolio theory in lots of academic literature.
Good luck boring subways, tunnels, and right-of-ways through mountains, sand dunes, and silt! Buses are the only reasonable answer and much more modular to adjust to changing demands as years go by.
A traffic system that programmatically prioritizes for public transportation, along with traffic citations issued by camera and automation (sorry) is what we need.
BART is already built through the very same ground. MUNI already has multiple tunnels through the "mountains" in the middle of SF. BART even runs directly through artificial landfill without issue.
The seismic activity of California certainly exposes more challenges, but there's no good reason why underground transport is impossible in SF.
Bus Rapid Transit is a cheap way to look like you're doing something about transit in a growing city when in reality you're just kicking the problem down the line.
> Buses are the only reasonable answer and much more modular to adjust to changing demands as years go by
The problem with buses is bus routes are too easy to change or eliminate.
To get me to give up my car, a public transportation system needs to have good coverage of where I need to go, when I need to go, and there has to be good reason for me to believe that it will stay this way.
Buses can provide the good coverage, but it is almost impossible to provide the assurance that this will continue. If some route I depended on when I picked where to live has a ridership decline, some bean counter can cut that route, or move it a few blocks over to try to get more riders. I can't easily move my house a few blocks over to match the new route.
For buses to really work, there has to a strong commitment to stability of routes and schedules, so that people can base long term plans on them. I don't think most US cities have the political and financial stability to make that commitment.
If I ever frame anything again, I will look into Level Frame.