Who wants Bioshock?

It was my birthday recently, I’ve got some money to spare, and a Roomba 570 costs less than six months’ human labor. Is it worth buying a robot to take care of this for me?

If yes (noting that my apartment is entirely floored in linoleum):

I say yes. What’s the point of language? To allow a speaker to induce a mental state in a listener. At its most basic level, this allows communication of basic concepts, plans, and facts. At more advanced levels, it can be used to induce emotions or to persuade. My thesis is that an ideal human language allows the speaker to induce the mental state they desire with minimal effort.

I’ve got a good friend who disagrees. He says that an ideal human language is expressive and unambiguous and by its nature prevents logical fallacies and misdirection. Even if falsehoods are possible, they will at least be cumbersome and difficult to express. His thesis is that an ideal human language is so inherently communicative it is akin to telepathy: the partitions necessary in order to mislead are intentionally difficult to erect.

What do you think?

Pros of switching: I get guns. I get a more interesting mission.

Cons of switching: I class up a month later–enough to be annoying; not enough to take the JLPT. I get fewer and worse duty stations. Higher risk. Lower toque. (Torque is all-important for helicopter flight.)

At this point, I feel like I might as well flip a coin. It all seems implausibly evenly balanced. What do you think?

(poll closes at noon tomorrow so I can deliver my answer on time)

The other noticeable improvement: on each post’s individual page, you’ll find automatically generated links to similar posts. I’ve got most of a decade of content here, and things like this should help expose more than the newest bits to the outside world. If nothing else, they’re fun to play with.

I’ve changed the antispam systems; it seems that the old one decided that the only way to win was not to play. Consequently, it silently (to me) blocked as spam every comment that people tried to submit. The new system is a bit more transparent to me as the administrator, and should be more immediate as well. Please, if you have trouble posting a comment, let me know: comments are life-giving manna which encourage further posting.

I think that’s about it for now. Is there anything else I can do to improve the site for you?

I sometimes feel like I skipped past something, getting a CS degree without ever actually using that language. Like it or not, it’s the language of choice for all modern heavyweight applications, and it’s about time that I gained fluency in it. However, I’m not sure what books to use. I got the C++ Primer Plus 5th ed. because it got good reviews as a learning book, and C++ in a Nutshell because I think of C++ as a language for which an O’Reilly book is a good investment. However, learning the language using these books is going to be interesting. Looking at a random page in the Nutshell book, I find a detailed discussion on the relative merits of Wide Characters (type wchar_t) versus Multibyte Characters (type char[]). It’s good stuff, but not exactly intended for someone just learning the language. On the other hand, the Primer is extremely basic: it mentions several times that you must be precise in spelling and capitalization for things to work, and explains in detail what a comment is and why it is a good idea to use them.

Do any of you know of any books or references which teach the language without also assuming that you must be taught the fundamentals of OOP?

For extra, special bonus points: what are the relative merits of using MSVS vs. the Eclipse C Development Toolkit?

What if, during normal voter registration, you are free to register a public key (presumably one to which you have the corresponding private key)? Suddenly, the issue changes: all the polling authority has to do is verify signatures.

Here’s how it might work: when the issue is presented formally, assent and dissent strings would be noted. They would probably run along the lines of “I the undersigned vote YEA to Proposition 12345″ or something similar. You are free at any time before voting closes to send along an email to the polling authority with your signed assent or dissent statement, which will be automatically verified and logged.

That’s the simplest case, though, without delegation. Delegation isn’t very hard, though: you just ask your upstream delegate to CC you when they cast their vote. You can prove that that email comes from the delegate you designated via their signature. You then sign the appropriate assent or dissent string, and send in your own vote. This entire process would be very, very simple to automate.

If you’re concerned about the secrecy of your vote, all that’s necessary is to encrypt your vote with the (widely available) public key of the polling authority. However, this imposes a limitation: you cannot simultaneously keep your vote secret and act as someone’s upstream delegate. This isn’t a bug, though: it’s a feature. This is because one of the more important rights in a delegated democracy has to be the right to know on which side of the issue your personal vote was cast.

Thoughts?

What is the correct ethical option here?

I see several possibilities. You could turn over the hard drive to DARPA so they could keep running fully intelligent warbots, though these warbots are as intelligent as an average human and hate dying just as much. You could hide the source but run it yourself to get something like your friend the AI back. You could open-source the project and give it to the world. You could move out of the US, then attempt to sell the project to the highest bidder, on the assumption that full AI would be worth millions or more. You could tinker with the source to make it a little less smart, then give it back to DARPA. You could mortgage your house to buy a nice chassis for it, then set it free to make its way in the world (and hopefully pay you back for your house in time). You could destroy the source in the assumption that any human encounter with an AI will be an attempt by the human to enslave the AI, and annihilation is better than slavery.

I would probably open-source the thing. Upload it to sourceforge, put one link on digg and another on slashdot, and trust that enough people would download it before DARPA caught on that it’d be impossible to put the genie back into the bottle. DARPA would probably be annoyed, but I think I could gather enough public opinion on my side to prevent any real consequences from harming me. Most of the other options seem defensible if not optimal in my mind, except the last. That one seems both unduly pessimistic and short-sighted.

Naturally, the last one was the one chosen in the novel which prompted this post.