Disqus - Latest Comments for benshoemate

Re: The difference between a value and a principle

benshoemate — Sun, 01 May 2016 23:53:31 -0000

It's funny - The exact opposite definition of value and principle was given by the New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/1984...

He states there (in 1984) that values - as used by politicians, are those things that change and principles are the foundation of truth that do not. I think in your example you are thinking of the phrase "as a general principle" which some people use to say "normally" as in: "as a general principle (normally) we don't do that, but we can make any exception"

The number 1 definition of "principle" is "fundamental truth". Where as a value is a personal opinion that something is important.

Re: You are a global thermonuclear war – waiting to happen

benshoemate — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 12:51:48 -0000

But unless you are made up of plutonium, it would require much greater energy input to extract that energy. In other words - while the energy of 30 H-bombs is present, it is locked away in a very, very, very stable configuration.

Re: Plagiarism Is Theft – But Of What?

benshoemate — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 02:55:00 -0000

Ironically the next article in my feed after this one was also about plagiarism

Re: Plagiarism Is Theft – But Of What?

benshoemate — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 02:49:23 -0000

It's not stealing. It's simply dishonest. The reason it's so despised is that when you are in the business of pursuing truth- as every scientist, journalist, and poet is - dishonesty is anathema to that pursuit. It's is the deliberate sabatoge of the truth - and the truth is an object the community values higher than all others. It is the equivalent of falsifying data or bearing false witness. The dishonesty of plagiarism, once uncovered, castes a shadow of doubt over the work itself, the authors previous works, the publisher and everyone involved. It taxes the community with the expensive burden of sorting out fact from fiction in the melting pot of our mind. If they lied about this- what else?

Re: Plagiarism Is Theft – But Of What?

benshoemate — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 02:36:54 -0000

Paint me the same scene is fine. Print or photocopy it and the value is less. Picasso drew hundreds of dove scratches, valuable cause they were made by his hand.

If you happen to retype you same words, letter for letter, it means more than an blind copy paste of a previous work because your effort recertifies the thought that you believe the words apply. Intentional vs unintentional plagiarism.

Re: Plagiarism Is Theft – But Of What?

benshoemate — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 02:31:08 -0000

Only immoral if you were asked for something orginal and new and gave something old. In which case the crime is not plagiarism but lying.

Imagine the case of the absent minded professor who assigns students the same book report twice. The students are trilled, they dust off their old work and turn it again. One however turns his already graded paper. The teacher sees it and says "what? Have I already assigned this? My bad" And gives an "A+" to the student who turned in his graded paper and an "F" to the rest of you dishonest children that tried to trick me.

Re: Plagiarism Is Theft – But Of What?

benshoemate — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 02:20:05 -0000

As he said, it's not the thoughts that are valueable but the opportunity to formulate them and apply them in this manner and at this moment that is valuable. Ultimately, what needs to get said will get said, problems that need solving wil be solved. But the opportunity to play the part is something actors value enough to compete for and audition for - even though the script is set.

As Thomas Jefferson said, "that which is logical is inevitalable" (which makes me wonder the authors thought on misattributed quotes).

If someone else had replied to you here with more or less the same thought, I lose the opportunity. That would be ok. no problem, first come first served - or rather to the victors go the spoils, whatever they are of commenting on a blog post. But if we find out later that the comment was a spambot that simply cut and paste a paragraph of the authors text that resembles a comment...well...if it's insightful...even by mistake...the audience won't care but I will have been cheated. My part to play stolen by a hack hamlet.

Re: Send Email in Sharepoint 2013 using Javascript - Knowledge Wiki - Base22 Wiki

benshoemate — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 02:36:43 -0000

I had no idea this was even possible. Thanks for sharing!

Re: How to shake hands

benshoemate — Sun, 13 Jul 2014 16:40:19 -0000

I think the "bonus touch" is only appropriate if you are shaking hands with someone beneath you in rank or station. For example, the pope can do that with a catholic priest. Or a politition running for office can do it to a sick war vet. Or a grandfather can do that to the boyfriend of his granddaughter. But if your going into an interview, don't try that two handed grasp thing.

Re: Phil Karlton on two hard problems in Computer Science

benshoemate — Fri, 30 May 2014 17:32:56 -0000

I've heard (and said) this quote myself many times. It always makes me smile. The other is:

"Have a problem and you think regex is the solution? Now you have 2 problems." (also applies to any language so complex that no matter how many times you've done it in the past, the first thing you do is start looking for examples)

Re: GoWorkout TV - This is called a suicide drill. Each sprint gets...

benshoemate — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 21:02:46 -0000

Thanks for posting this.

Re: Is Our Robot Future Really All That Speculative Anymore?

benshoemate — Sun, 26 Jan 2014 15:24:01 -0000

There was a book I read once called "beyond civilization". The most interesting thing for me was the definition of civilization. He said if you go somewhere and the food is guarded or under lock and key - that's civilization. If you go somewhere and the food is free for the taking - that's outside of civilization. For most of human history more places were uncivilized and it was true to tell someone - "if you don't like it, you can leave" and they could walk off into the woods.

Every year it gets harder to just walk off. A few of us could - into the wilds of Alaska or something - but not all of us. Not anymore.

The solution: I imagine returning to small tribes of professionals. Capatist ventures of pooled resources and labor. Not making any one person rich but the tribe itself lives comfortably. I like the way the software company Valve is orgainzed for example. Google for the Valve employee handbook for an glimpse of the future.

Re: Microsoft Research built a smart elevator that uses AI to figure out what floor you’re going to

benshoemate — Sat, 25 Jan 2014 14:45:35 -0000

I've seen similar elevators that can figure out what floor you need with the press of a single button!

Re: Is Our Robot Future Really All That Speculative Anymore?

benshoemate — Sat, 25 Jan 2014 14:31:02 -0000

I guess some people are not ready to give up their lives as wage slaves in exchange for a life as well fed, highly educated pet of a space faring robot race. If they are not serving human masters by doing "jobs" - some people can't imagine why anyone would keep them around. I plan on being a good companion to our robot overlords.

Re: Is Our Robot Future Really All That Speculative Anymore?

benshoemate — Sat, 25 Jan 2014 14:06:54 -0000

If you have ever read through the stack trace of a java error message you can see a glimmer of an machine experiencing the emotion of frustration. "Things are not happening the way I expect and I don't know why!!"

Programming a robot like the Mars rover to assess risk (is that a shadow or a pit?) and respond with an appropriate amount of trepidation that we might describe as fear, anxiety, caution and then relief and confidence will be an obvious benefit to its ability to navigate. Self driving cars also need the fuzzy logic of confidence levels. If you ask the car - "why did you slow down?" It might respond: "I thought I saw something in the road but it was just a wet spot"

If a horse did the same thing and jumped in "fear" at a piece of rope it thought was a snake we have no trouble describing that fear as an emotion. Even after it sees it as rope the body is flooded with adrenaline and takes a while to "calm down". A robot that charged a capacitor to respond to a perceived threat my take a similar amount of time to "calm down". Emotions are just short hand for complex biochemical reactions that serve the same purpose in animals they will in robots. Animals are programmed with complex reaction instincts - we choose to call them emotions but that is just a label - robots will (and do) have similar complex methods that we may choose to label emotions.

In the end it's just code. Either lines of Java or DNA.

Re: Is Our Robot Future Really All That Speculative Anymore?

benshoemate — Sat, 25 Jan 2014 11:39:32 -0000

Scripted emotions are not impossible. It's fuzzy logic. Emotions are simply thoughts you can't express - so you "feel" them - but if you take your time, like a poet or an economist - you can figure out why your afraid, in love, or angry.

Re: Is Our Robot Future Really All That Speculative Anymore?

benshoemate — Sat, 25 Jan 2014 11:27:16 -0000

The definition of what humans are "for" and why societies exist has to change (or be defined).

Everyone in this thread (I have not read them all but I have read a lot) believes that humans must be employed by some master to "earn" a living. The only society we seem to be able to imagine is one where "someone" "gives" the mass majority of people something productive to do. I'm not sure I buy into that concept completely. There must be more to being human than being a wage slave forever. If we can not even imagine a world without an entire segment of the population living paycheck to paycheck - we better get started.

Re: What Jobs Will the Robots Take?

benshoemate — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 19:36:22 -0000

Robots can all ready pick cotton, dig ditches, and saw wood much cheaper than 5 cents an hour. It lowers the cost of products made with these materials - raising the standard of living. I think that eventually human society will get to the point where somethings - food, health care, education, wifi - are free to all (we are already there given the social safety nets). this will be done because we have the wealth and power to imagine the world we want and then create it. I don't want a world that is full of desperate starving people and if I can assign a few members of my robot army to care for them - so be it.

What those well fed and suddenly healthy, well educated and free people decide to do with their free time is up to them. Already we have transitioned from a world where 99% of the population was once required to create food to one where on 1% is required. Now that we are not all farmers, what do we do with our free time? Oh yeah - we built the pyramids, invented the internet, and walked on the moon. There is INFINITE work to be done exploring and organizing the universe, educating and entertaining the human mind and feeding our appetites for variety. Don't worry about the transition - the robots will sweep up after the party.

Re: Don't Worry About Robots. Worry About Washington.

benshoemate — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 19:17:51 -0000

I really love these conversations. This is the same old "lump of labor" fallacy that has been the response to every innovation. This fallacy says - that there is only a finite amount of "work" to be done in the world and if you improve a process so that the same "work" that took 2 people now only requires 1 - than that person is out of a job. The truth is that there is an INFINITE amount of work to be done. When the Luddite's attacked machines in 1811 there were only 1 billion people on the planet. The productivity per person has risen many fold since then and so has the population - we never ran out of work to do and never will. Like knowledge, work is an expanding bubble - the more there is, the more remains to be done. If you had told someone 100 years ago that you could make a living doing 90% of today's highest paying jobs they would have laughed! Airplane pilot? Computer scientist? Web designer? Professional video gamer?

Let's take farming for example - it once occupied 90% of humanity's time and energy and now it is only about 1%. Let's say that those jobs completely disappeared and only machines and their masters roamed the fields. So what? The are infinite jobs combining, recombining, and artistically preparing those foods. Even if food was free - there would be excellent markup in the restaurant business. Because the human appetite for innovation is infinite!

If robots delivered your daily caloric intake requirements of soy-lent green every day, for free and it tasted like the equivalent of the best truffle encrusted filet mignon you ever tasted - humans would demand MORE, BETTER, DIFFERENT! Anyone with a single dollar would spend it on anything authentic and real and not "yet another truffle filet" and anyone could make a buck giving it to them. I also think people under-estimate the consumer demand for quality entertainment. The appetite is infinite. If you want to see the future of work - open your mind. Go to sites like Etsy.com and see the infinite variety that humans demand as the spice of life.

Re: What Jobs Will the Robots Take?

benshoemate — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 18:30:01 -0000

That's my point as well. A HUGE drop in jobs all at once would be a disaster. But its more likely to be at the same pace we have seen the last 20 years. Yes it makes people scared - so has the rest of the industrial revolution - but if the market collapses (even slightly) so does the need for robots. As the price of labor falls so does the incentive to automate.

Re: What Jobs Will the Robots Take?

benshoemate — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 15:47:25 -0000

ditch digging for one - ever seen those trenchers that look like a giant chain saw for laying pipe

Re: What Jobs Will the Robots Take?

benshoemate — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 15:44:15 -0000

I think the printing press and the internet where pretty big upgrades to the human mind.

Re: What Jobs Will the Robots Take?

benshoemate — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 15:41:38 -0000

This problem corrects itself - if jobs go away, the spending power follows, the economy collapses, the robots stop working, the humans rebuild. It happens on scales both big and small. No one is going to buy robots that replace basic services like cooking and cleaning if they can not afford them. If no one can afford them, they wont be made - not in mass. If they are not made in mass, they wont be a threat. As long as money comes from labor and value and not government fiat - then its not possible for you to work yourself out of a job.

Re: What Jobs Will the Robots Take?

benshoemate — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 15:36:14 -0000

technological change IS human change. When you invent something to protect you from the cold - you - the human is changing. If tech is evolving exponentially than so are we. All of you pessimists need to read http://annualletter.gatesfo...

Re: Cody Burleson - IBM Champions for Collaboration Solutions

benshoemate — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 13:46:09 -0000

Congrulations Cody!