12. April 2009 by admin.

I submitted t-shirt slogans at Threadless. If you like them, please vote for them.

Slogan 1 — Capitalism = privatize profit + socialize debt

Slogan 2 — I’m an unreliable witness to my own existenceIf you have any you’d like to submit, go to Threadless.com (which has great t-shirts) and register. You can submit your own slogans and if picked, you win $500.

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12. April 2009 by admin.

WallStreetWatch.org is a great site that is trying to inform you, the public, about what is going on in Washington in regard to Wall Street, and what is going on on Wall Street itself. 

WSW has issued a great report, "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America" that you can access here as 3MB .pdf file that goes into great detail about what politicians did to enable the current collapse to happen (including many of the things that Bill Clinton did–unfortunately, many Democrats seem to think that the problems didn’t start until W. came to power, but nothing could be further from the truth), what Wall Street did to make it happen, and, perhaps most interestingly of all, which FiServs, Banks, Insurance companies, etc. contributed how much to which politicians over the last 10 years.

I spent a fair bit of time looking at the contributions by these companies to Obama, and it’s not hard to understand why his team is going relatively easy on these guys (and if you think that the banks are getting rough treatment from the gov’t, just look at the UK, where things are being done much more sensibly) when you see how beholdened Obama et al. are to these institutions.

Definitely try to read this report and support WallStreetWatch.  It’s doing a great job in its efforts to keep the light focused on these nefarious financiers and it needs to continue doing so on our behalf.

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12. April 2009 by admin.

I alluded to the fictitious company, ‘Cyberdyne’, in my earlier post about the HAL bionic suit.  For those of you who are Sci-Fi geeks or who just like the ‘Terminator’ film franchise, this is prior knowledge, but for the rest of my vast audience ; ) allow me to explain:  Cyberdyne Systems is a company that comes up with an AI that can manage the U.S. defenses.  It becomes sentient (never explained how, since circuit complexity by itself can’t induce consciousness, but oh well) and decides to wipe out all the people.  Since it controls missile launching systems, it fires nuclear missiles and wipes out most of humanity.  For those it can’t otherwise kill, it starts building ‘Terminator’ cyborgs (which have flesh on the outside and hard metals and circuits on the inside) and using these and ‘Hunter-killer’ machines to wipe out the remaining survivors.

Sounds like a great premise for a science fiction film franchise, right? You got it, and there have been 3 previous Terminator films and a new one about to be released, starting Christian Bale–you know, the guy who played Batman recently. 

Okay, you say, but what’s your point?  Well, the Navy is concerned that its computer systems may go rogue and turn on their masters, unless they are taught a warrior code.

If the idea of amoral super-intelligent machines destroying you and your city without a second thought makes you nervous (and it should) then just hope Microsoft isn’t programming these robots.

I tried to access the report itself but the Cal Poly server isn’t letting me for some reason.

Here’s the article:

From The London Times online:

February 16, 2009

Military’s killer robots must learn warrior code

Automatons revolt to form a dictatorship over humans in Asimov’s I, Robot

Leo Lewis

Read the report in full

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.

The stark warning – which includes discussion of a Terminator-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters – is issued in a hefty report funded by and prepared for the US Navy’s high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research .

The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans. Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over Homo sapiens soldiers.

“There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do,” Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. “Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when . . . programs could be written and understood by a single person.” The reality, Dr Lin said, was that modern programs included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire program: accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programs would interact without extensive testing in the field – an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.

The solution, he suggests, is to mix rules-based programming with a period of “learning” the rights and wrongs of warfare.

A rich variety of scenarios outlining the ethical, legal, social and political issues posed as robot technology improves are covered in the report. How do we protect our robot armies against terrorist hackers or software malfunction? Who is to blame if a robot goes berserk in a crowd of civilians – the robot, its programmer or the US president? Should the robots have a “suicide switch” and should they be programmed to preserve their lives?

The report, compiled by the Ethics and Emerging Technology department of California State Polytechnic University and obtained by The Times, strongly warns the US military against complacency or shortcuts as military robot designers engage in the “rush to market” and the pace of advances in artificial intelligence is increased.

Any sense of haste among designers may have been heightened by a US congressional mandate that by 2010 a third of all operational “deep-strike” aircraft must be unmanned, and that by 2015 one third of all ground combat vehicles must be unmanned.

“A rush to market increases the risk for inadequate design or programming. Worse, without a sustained and significant effort to build in ethical controls in autonomous systems . . . there is little hope that the early generations of such systems and robots will be adequate, making mistakes that may cost human lives,” the report noted.

A simple ethical code along the lines of the “Three Laws of Robotics” postulated in 1950 by Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, will not be sufficient to ensure the ethical behaviour of autonomous military machines.

“We are going to need a code,” Dr Lin said. “These things are military, and they can’t be pacifists, so we have to think in terms of battlefield ethics. We are going to need a warrior code.”

Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics

1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm

2 A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law

3 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

Introduced in his 1942 short story Runaround

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12. April 2009 by admin.

While we hopefully won’t be hearing again about Sarah Palin, at least on the national stage, until 2012 (and hopefully not even then), she still continues to be governor of Alaska. and is featured in an article in this month’s Portfolio Magazine. As an aside, Conde Nast’s Portfolio Magazine is equivalent to the Vanity Fair of finance publications.  I enjoy reading it because, while it’s not as hard-core as The Economist or The Wall Street Journal it also is more entertaining.

The article focuses upon the natural gas pipelines, actually two of them, that are being built–one by the oil/gas companies themselves, the other by the pipeline builder but without cooperation from the actual suppliers of the gas–you know, the companies that would fill up the 2,000 mile long pipe with the actual revenue-generating substance.  Guess which one Palin backs? You got it, the one that Alaska has paid $500,000,000 to do a feasibility study for, but which lacks cooperation from any of the big 3 oil/gas companies.  Meanwhile, the big 3 oil companies are moving forward with plans for their own pipeline.

Palin claims that she has stared the oil companies down and is moving forward with the $40B (yes that’s $40 BILLION with a ‘B’) pipeline, yet the article indicates that she is living in a reality distortion field, because in interviews she claimed that the pipeline was underway, and yet it is not even close to being designed, much less built.

You can read the article at this URL.

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12. April 2009 by admin.

I think this video (which apparently was shot using a video camera looking through a broken Nikon digital still camera) does a good job of showing a photographer’s eye-view, so to speak. It was shot by Karen Abad.  Don’t know who she is other than via this video and some others she shot.  Her blog page is here.  Good work, Karen.

The Last Home Recording Upon Eager Eyes from Karen Abad loves Dinosaurs. on Vimeo.

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12. April 2009 by admin.

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism is a great book by an economist, Cambridge  Professor Ha-Joon Chang, who can actually write well…meaning that he combines substantive discussions of economic principles with comprehensible prose that, while not electrifying, is clear and to the point.

Why is the book great? Because he exposes myths about capitalist free market systems which are so ingrained (at least in the United States), that they aren’t even questioned.  He does this in a relatively objective and dispassionate way.  For instance, he discusses the myth that businesses which are run as private enterprises are inherently better than those which are State-Owned Enterprises.  I don’t know how many so-called "Free-market capitalists" will say, reflexively, that government is incapable of running anything effectively.  Chang makes a solid case as to why some types of businesses should only be run by the State.

Also, he discusses what actually happened in history with respect to ‘free trade’ vs. what we’re now told happened. For instance, in his discussion of ‘gunboat diplomacy’, he discusses how British businesses used to deal heroin to China, even though it was illegal in China and this was known to the British.  When the Chinese seized heroin shipments in protest, the British navy came in and made war with China, at the request of the affected British businesses.  In the resulting settlement, as reparation, China gave Britain Hong Kong. 

You can buy this book via the portal below.  If you buy it here, I get 4% of the purchase price, and it costs you nothing extra.

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12. April 2009 by admin.

To borrow from one of my favorite Simpsons characters, Dr. Nick–’Hello, everybody!’ It’s been a while since I last posted but I will try to be more regular, as they say.

It’s great that scientists, anticipating that we will all be too fat from…blogging…playing console games…watching TV…surfing the ‘Net…and not exercising, have come up with technology that will let us be morbidly obese AND accomplish daily household chores.

Behold, the bionic suit… for those of you who are not geeky enough to pick up the ‘Cyberdyne’ reference…’Cyberdyne’ was the name of the company that created the computer that became sentient, which subsequently created the Terminator cyborg line fashioned after our governator, Ahnold, and attempted to wipe out mankind. 

You can buy one for $4200.

Learn more here.

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