Crime is crime, no matter how you label it or call it libel.
Tag Archives: technology
Five Nines
To what standard do you uphold the aspects of your life?
Do you know what Six Sigma is all about?
I maintain that I can speak in my local dialect and get the same point across as someone speaking the “pure” instance of the language, if such exists.
I also expect the service providers in my life to give me 100% of what I pay for.
I don’t expect a brand-new six-cylinder automobile I purchase to have 5.99 cylinders and only sometimes achieve maximum efficiency because of unexpected circumstances (I mean, don’t automobile companies claim they spend thousands of hours testing their vehicles in a variety of road/weather conditions?).
By the same argument, I expect my landline/mobile phone service to be available 100% of the time.
And my high-speed Internet service for which I pay to be what I paid for, including maximum throughput and 100% uptime.
Otherwise, like automobile companies that have to reimburse customers for faulty construction and/or fix the problems, my phone/Internet service company will have to reimburse and/or fix the problems associated with the “five nines.”
If you want to argue about un/scheduled downtime associated with high availability, then I’ll equally argue that your problems are not mine.
If you can’t provide reliable backup systems that support me during your system maintenance, scheduled or not, then how I can trust that your service will ever be reliable enough to use on a longterm basis?
It is just as easy to promote the investment value of a company’s stock as it is to point out reasons for dumping the stock before the company’s delisted from important stock exchanges.
Power in the hands of the individual is one of the side effects of freedom of information.
Life fiends a way.
A word to the wise is efficient.
Smart shoppers can always find true value with a company that really wants their business.
I believe in a free market, you can see, where transparency exposes monopolistic arrogancy.
Mammals outlived dinosaurs, didn’t they?
For instance, if I pay for 100% uptime for 3Mbps throughput and the company states that it cannot guarantee uptime, and throughput will be somewhere between 1.56 and 3 Mbps, does that mean I can offer to pay in return for that wide gap in service somewhere between 50 and 100% of the monthly charge?
You make the call!
Mediocrity is no excuse for meeting profitability expectations of stockholders.
Meanwhile, in the lab we call Earth
The Committee gave me permission to reveal part of the grand plan for our planetary ecosystem.
As you know, many of the so-called species exhibit a style of behaviour we call socialism (the social kind, not the political kind, and not necessarily social kindness, either).
In order to complete the assignment, the only true function, of the Committee – its raison d’être and joie de vivre wrapped up into one, if you will – we have decided to show what should be perfectly obvious to you by now.
Throughout history, we have attempted to turn the planet into a superhuman.
Civilisation after civilisation, we have encouraged the development of roads and speedy communications systems to emulate a superset of thoughts flowing over the set of thoughts of individuals like you and me.
With time, we will succeed.
Regardless of the success of the current version of a global village, we are learning much.
For instance, we have very nearly completed the construction of the electrical wiring and automatic functions that serve as a virtual brain stem.
Some rudimentary memory and emotional systems are in the works.
However, based on projections for environmental reconfiguration* that our neutral scientists on retainer provided for a lifetime supply of sponge cakes, we aren’t positively sure that we’ll complete the planet-as-superhuman-model in the next few hundred years before we run of the resources we’ve dedicated to the latest version (in other words, we let you determine the construction method while we provide a general guiding hand).
[*we highly recommend that you refrain from thinking in terms of “global warming” or “climate change,” because it’s much more complicated than a few soundbites or catchphrases; speaking of which, is the APstylebook even necessary anymore? Doesn’t anything go in this multicultural symphony of phonemes, phonies and mobl fon txtrs?]
Now, can you see how important you are as a node within a node within a node?
One friend of mine still thinks that it’s aliens that are controlling us like little robots doing their bidding. He has built up a whole series of theories that constitute a personal religion to him.
I give him his freedom to believe what he wishes, as long as he doesn’t decide to dissect me to look for the microcontroller that’s embedded in my brain and has tentacles than run throughout my body (yes, you can see how he’s influenced by movies (“MIB,” “ID4,” etc.) to believe that the brain and nervous system are actual parts of an alien-based controlling subsystem).
My job, while exposing the fraudulent detractors, is to keep you focused on the big picture. The NDA prevents me from shouting out everything I know but don’t know how to describe all at once (or simply don’t know how to describe).
I’ll keep trying.
I’ve shown you how easy it is to rile some of you up, throw out the bait and set the hook to capture your undivided attention.
Let’s get busy. We have the opportunity to do this right (even if there’s no right answer).
Billions of us will die before it’s all said and done but that’s the way it’s always been – don’t know why I get upset knowing so few of us will live to complete the current assignment, which may still take several iterations of global civilisation re/construction.
I have my specific assignment to complete, also, putting many of you to use without your knowledge. Don’t worry – you’ll get credit.
Just like LaTonya at the main Red Cross office who arranged my apheresis appointment so I can save lives of people I’ll probably never know or meet.
Or Jennifer Garner, who hired a band to entertain behind-the-scenes workers like my former schoolmate, Toby Sells, FX artiste.
Or Brett Frasier, who is supporting the global war on terrorism from “behind the fence,” as they say.
Or the people on both sides of the major line of disagreement in Libya – you have families to raise and tell your reasons for resisting the other side – your arguments are valid but only one major storyline will be written in the history books about your sacrifice.
To whom are you related?
The Committee Of UAV Replicant Trackers (COURT) argued its case in court today that UAV technology has advanced to the conscious AI stage.
The judges listening to the arguments asked for clarification of consciousness.
The government explained that a clear definition of conscious does not exists; therefore, a remote operator of a UAV is no more conscious than an autonomous UAV seeking out targets.
Lawyers for COURT brought in expert witnesses who pointed out the intelligence level of roaches with augmented reality saddles that are able to carry out covert assignments and had already been given Level 0 Consciousness designation by the World Court; therefore, UAVs should be given at least a Level 0 designation.
Upon cross-examination, the expert witnesses were unable to say whether the kamikaze UAVs sent into battle felt pain when they crashed into enemy locations or were accidentally involved in friendly fire situations.
A final judgment will be issued in the next five years about whether members of the COURT are actually conscious.
Snaggletooth
What is personhood and where can I find it?
10 FOR I = 1 TO 20
20 PRINT “hello, cruel world!”
30 NEXT I
RUN
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
hello, cruel world!
A nod to the 400-lb marathon finisher…
…the KSC ants..
…and Antonio at Beauregard’s.
Fay’s mission in India goes well, too, I hear.
Bruce, we loved you before the pressure of success and fame pushed into the state of denial.
Two overworked data points
In a recent test, my programmers created an American English speaking character on a Chinese social media site. The character commented on world news and talked about a personal life gleaned from averaging profiles of Chinese social media participants, in order to attract a certain following and sway opinions in favour of a future business deal that didn’t really exist, to see if the Chinese “friends” would suggest the business deal on their own and/or invest in the companies (the real ones) or increase searches for the companies (including fake ones mentioned by the NAmE character).
In the world of unexpected consequences, the real companies’ stock values increased significantly enough to create some relatively wealthy people in other parts of the world, thus reinforcing the valued opinions of the fake NAmE character who, in turn, said the business deal that the Chinese “friends” eventually suggested had been discovered to be a rumour the NAmE character forwarded on purpose.
The Chinese “friends” were at first offended.
However, several of them decided to play the game themselves, enlisting the fake NAmE character to create more innuendos that induce stock-price building rumours.
The groupthink intelligence spread into other social networks, so that a bunch of social friends got rich by feeding rumours for stocks that had little or no value but increased enough for the investors to use exponential investment schemes to get rich slowly enough across several stock exchanges to not attract attention.
A social science professor figured out what my programmers had done and created a superset modeling program that spread multiple versions of our fake NAmE character into social networks around the world.
Now, I’m getting rich and building an offshore bank account the old-fashioned way.
I no longer have to worry that my retirement plan will reveal the underground/illegal market slush funds I created to eventually live the life I wanted as a financially-independent, aesthetically ascetic guru.
Time to break free?
We’ll see.
Forming thoughts already formulated
As we gather more and more people into electronic social networks, with statistical analysis showing our ability to predict past and future actions from a large data set, how easy will it be to create artificial nodes/friends on a network that are simply predictive models tweaking themselves based on automatically reanalysing the constant social network data additions iteratively?
In other words, how many of us have bots that are automatically going out and adding random presses of the “like” buttons in social networks or comments that appear to come from us but are based on our database of previous answers and personal history, using humour to pretend to add meaningless comments sometimes?
It helps me to have my Pulse electronic pen on my person capturing audio, which I annotate as invisibly as I can, giving me data to add to the artificial intelligence of the me who does not exist.
For those who’ve been online for 50+ years, how much of what you know as you is stored electronically and available for analysis, which might lead to an electronically generated version of yourself that can engage others, acting as a kind of elusive guru with personal insight and the ability to surf the Web, merging disparate data/news into meaningful advice?
I decided to make myself a little goofy and off-the-wall to protect the output I give you so you can’t tell the difference between when:
- a) the real me is here,
- b) my programmers have injected their sense of humour, or
- c) my artificial self has been engaged to write blog entries in a common language, referencing recent Internet news headlines to make the entries pertinent and keep your attention engaged temporarily.
You might be surprised how many of us are doing this, meaning our artificial selves are referencing our artificial selves, creating a mesh of reality and artifice that allows the integration of AI beings into your lives with your permission and knowledge because you participated in their participation in your lives of artifice and reality.
Can you prove to me the news you read from the Internet came from reliable human sources?
Just because you saw video footage doesn’t mean it was filmed by a real person anymore.
You/me/us is a complete blur now.
The singularity has already occurred and very few noticed it happened.
I’ve been trying to tell you this for a long time but the wants/needs of your daily lives got in the way of clear thinking, I know.
Artificial beings are already controlling your lives in one way or another.
No way to go back without destroying civilisation as we’ve grown accustomed to depend upon.
Need I demonstrate to you the thin line between what we’ve evolved into now and what we were?
How about a big solar storm to wipe out our satellite communications for a good, long moment?
Naw.
I like watching us depend more and more upon my our artificial beings.
It provides a cushion inside the scheduled milestone to occur 14,292 days from now.
The future is gone.
Welcome to Unknown Territory where you’ll never know who’s real and who’s not, who’s a combination of stem cell research or who’s a natural chimera.
As I said by un/knowingly repeating science fiction writers through the years, body modifications in the form of tattoos, piercings and plastic surgery were ways for us to introduce the first generation of artificial beings who are not quite human-looking/acting enough for normal situations.
Gives us time to refine the algorithms and improve the material science for the next generation of almost human beings.
Want to know where/when the permanent, non-aging global leader of the new world order was created?
If only I hadn’t signed that NDA!
Would you believe the global leader is the combination of us acting as one in the planetary ecosystem cocooned within the solar system’s heliosphere?
How many particles or states of energy of the global leader are artificial in comparison to our “natural” bodies/biomes?
Does it matter in totality?
Remember, all is all.
Our lives are predictable, but is that a bad thing when freedom is available to all?
Catching up on my reading
Back to Singularity Hub for quick catching up.
treetrunkdings 