Brexit is bad for me personally, but I'm sure that respecting results of a political procedures (referenda, elections) is exactly what should be done in a democracy, because not sticking to rules of the game is a direct way to destroy trust, and incentive to vote. "Diminishing support" is what often happens to very freshly elected MPs, governments, or presidents, and it doesn't cancel electoral outcomes.
Btw, I don't think it only works with a small number of transmitters. In the UK they has been taxing TV watching, and managed to have a huge fleet of specially equipped vans cruising streets, identifying where are TV sets (and it's harder task then scanning for transmissions), and checking addresses against national registry. Nowadays, I suppose methods are different due to internet broadcasting, but it seems they are still capable of taking pennies for it quite successfully. FWIW, state officials love massive budget disbursements, creation, and expanding of departments, and they can use modern technologies for large-scale operations too.
To be sold in a particular country every model needs certification which obviously may be a very complicated thing if that country's authorities are not happy with counter-censorship capabilities. Moreover, in many countries (including AFAIK Russia, and Chine) every shop selling satcom needs a separate certification. I am not sure Samsung, or Apple will ever risk to invest in something which cannot be legally exported to a large number of countries.
Finally, you should not underestimate how far a state can go to keep the status quo. Did we hear already:
- What, they will check every phone?
- What, they will demand our passwords?
- What, they will slow down all out-of-country traffic?
- What, they will block millions if websites, and look into every network packet?
All of these were asked sarcastically, yet every point is happening now on a massive scale.
Actually, in late 90s there were a lot of talk about 'new era', because 'internet made censorship impossible'. Hold my beer! - said state bureaucracy everywhere.
Of course, technology can sometimes leapfrog gov't capabilities, but as a rule it's a very temporary thing. Censorship is a political, and cultural problem, and it needs political, and cultural pressure to be resolved.
They already do it: first of all, by controlling of import/sales of equipment, and by incentivizing citizens to tip police. Also, there are frequency control inspections which keep maps of radiotransmitting activity. It's easy to spot any new transmitter.
To be fair, there's a grain of truth in this downvoted comment. Western elites increasingly turning in favor of censorship using blurry definitions of "hate speech", "extremist materials", "terrorist propaganda", "fake news" to persuade societies to surrender free speech. It nevertheless doesn't make Chinese censorship less ugly.
In many countries sending something over a satellite requires registration (which can be used for control subsequently), or even a license. Unless it will be a type of technology which is very hard to block, and locate, I wouldn't expect it to beat censorship.
Yes, except practically nobody claims that it's black-and-what. This idea which is under attack (for which James Damore got fired, for example) is that measuring equality by setting 50/50 female-to-male ratio as an ideal doesn't reflect reality, because in general sex differences very likely exist beyond culture, and they logically should lead to different representation in various fields of occupation.
Sorry, I hear "when it's against my preferred candidate it's absolutely horrible". Transparency, and informed decisions are usually claimed to be good for democracy. Hacked emails may play for this, even if done for another reason. Democratic elections are always go with dirt-digging, and spills, and it is essential part of the process even if someone doesn't like it.
In real life, most of the corporate leaks are accidental. Disappearing messages, and sharing/printing restrictions can perfectly augment employee training, reminding them that some things require more careful touch, and reduce the chance of making thoughtless mistake. Sure, making email e2e-encrypted is a good thing, but completely different one.
It's not "pseudo", it is a tool to reduce risks of accidental leaks, and to enforce discipline. Used in a right context it increases security. However, I agree that it's proprietary, and it would be better to have such things in RFC.
Hacked emails is certainly a cybersec thing, but the fact that backstage politics secrets sometimes become public is nothing new, and not necessary bad for democracy.
External influences is nothing new, and is part of politics for as long as masses opinion matters. If democracy would not able to work with it, it wouldn't exist.
They've spent centuries arguing for a definition of free will that no one actually holds
This statement is incorrect, and actually prove the very thing you intended to deny. It's not like adherents of C. held a plebiscite, isn't it? (And if they would, I dare to say they would be in danger of huge disappointment.) They made a choice to call an action free when it's inescapable consequence of a butterfly flapping wings millenia ago on another continent, but not free if it's e.g. equally inescapable consequence of a another human doing something recently, and closely (even if this forcing person is equally inescapably forced by a butterfly wings before). It is not, however, some sort of obvious conclusion, accepted by everybody. It's something C. philosophers prefer to call a common sense, because... well because this way we can make sense of things we do. So it feels much better.
As a side-note, your explanation of 'correction' makes perfect sense if you took the C. pill already, but doesn't make any useful proof of C. One have to accept that the only available variant of future (if we are in a purely determinist universe) still presents a free choice between correct/incorrect. Which is a circular reference to basic presumption of C.
Anyway, thank you for taking time to write the long response!
Choice between Open, and FreeBSD is mostly a matter of personal preferences. In principle, O. invests more into security, while F. tries to be more inventive, but when used as a desktop you won't feel much practical difference. It's about small things like how uprgrades are done, what packages available etc. After using both in parallel I settled with FreeBSD mostly due to ZFS, and the fact that I prefer some of my software compiled with very specific settings (OpenBSD discourages compiling ports), but OpenBSD is fine too. I'd like to note that all of BSDs have less money, manpower, and visibility, and it means producers of software, and hardware care about them even less then about Linux. E.g. there's no official Electron for *BSD. I heard some people succeded in building it with some hacks on FreeBSD, but anyway nothing Electron-based is available for quick and easy installation.
holding a learning agent responsible is the moral feedback needed to correct that error in judgement.
That's exactly where the trouble is. In case of strict logical determinism we correct nothing because everything is predestined. However, choosing limited definitions, and restricting ourselves in comfortable contexts we can certainly avoid discomfort of the thought. Not that I have better idea, but I see clearly why non-compatibilists say "word juggling" towards compatibilists.
For starters, majority of philosophers never make a stable ground for absolutist statements ("turned out to be false“).
Compatibilism is a kind of comfortable opinion, because it simply avoids thorny questions regarding logic, and morality. E.g. C-sts belive that a criminal is guilty, when he allegedly acts in accordance with his will, because, as you noted, that's what people mean when they say "free will". However, it still may sound unconvincing when one believes that the criminal's mind contents was predetermined aeons before he was born.
Highly politicized voters tend to see things through a tribal lense: our tribe resists bad people with fists if necessary, their tribe does violence. Our leader has a freethinking stance to sex, their leader is sexual predator. There are of course a few of universally bad, and universally good things, but "hacker" certainly doesn't fall to these categories.
Your observations don't disprove anything in the article. The author doesn't say that brute force is the way to go, and one has to cease all tries to optimize just waiting for computing power to increase. He says that essentially all attempts to build AI by modeling human thinking lead to nowhere, because their are inherently too complex, with simpler statistical, or search-based methods constantly winning. What you wrote here is absolutely in line with his words. "Neural network" contrary to its name doesn't work by emulating human.