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The Center for American Progress reports
Before Stephen Paddock opened fire at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip last October, killing 58 and wounding hundreds, most Americans probably hadn't heard of bump-fire stocks--add-ons that lets a semiautomatic rifle fire as quickly as a machine gun. Until that mass shooting, they were a novelty known only among firing-range enthusiasts and Cool Gun YouTube.
Within months of Las Vegas, lawmakers introduced bipartisan legislation[1] to outlaw the devices, and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, or ATF, announced plans to ban them through regulation.[2]
But gun control advocates warn bump stocks are just one part of a much bigger problem. A flood of new gun technologies is pushing the envelope on what a civilian can legally own, skirting laws that have kept the most dangerous weapons off the street for decades.
[...] Weapons like machine guns, silencers, and short-barreled rifles and shotguns are regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934 and subsequent amendments. To own one of those weapons, a civilian has to go through a lengthy approval process and pay a special tax. The job of deciding whether a gun falls under NFA's restrictions falls to ATF.
Gun manufacturers have used the law's technicalities to create guns that are just as powerful, and deadly, as restricted weapons but without the added tax and strict regulations.
Take the SAINT, by Springfield Armory. It's an AR-15 with a 30-round magazine and a 7.5-inch barrel. That's shorter than the legal rifle length under federal law. But instead of a shoulder stock, the SAINT has a "stabilizing brace" or "forearm brace"--a device designed to attach to a shooter's forearm for one-handed firing rather than resting against their shoulder. By ATF's definition, the SAINT is a pistol, not a rifle, because it isn't meant to be fired from the shoulder. So anyone who can pass a federal background check can buy one online for $989.
[...] Stabilizing braces aren't the only new gun tech to skirt around the National Firearms Act. Franklin Armory's Binary Trigger System fires two rounds with every shot--one when the trigger is depressed and one when it's released, doubling the rate of fire. Like bump stocks and stabilizing braces, binary triggers aren't currently regulated under the National Firearms Act.
In one YouTube video, a man uses a binary trigger to fire a 30-round magazine in less than five seconds. In another, a binary trigger beats out a fully-automatic weapon.
[1] Bogus link in TFA. Fixed in TFS.
[2] Content is behind scripts.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday June 24 2018, @12:13PM (8 children)
Yet.
Wait a bit until I craft some initiative in that AI drone I'm working on [youtu.be] (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday June 24 2018, @02:46PM (7 children)
> Wait a bit until I craft some initiative in that AI drone I'm working on [youtu.be] (grin)
Still involves a human, in this case you, to bestow said initiative to the object in order for it to become a human killing machine. Another layer of indirection but still requires a human to make a decision that they want to kill.
(btw, that video is a known CGI setup. It was faked for some game release tie-up if I remember correctly).
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 25 2018, @01:16AM (6 children)
You still stick with 'algorithms don't kill people, people kill people's, right?
This path involves professional liability in the software engineering, a thing resisted by the industry so far, are you sure you want to go down on this path?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday June 27 2018, @08:56AM (5 children)
> You still stick with 'algorithms don't kill people, people kill people's, right?
Well yes. Until the day an algorithm makes a conscious decision to kill people of its own volition (in which case congrats, we have created hard AI, and it wants to kill all humans), there has to be intent on behalf of whoever is programming the device to kill. At the moment, no device will go of its own volition to kill (or do anything), we have to issue a string of commands to get it to do that.
> This path involves professional liability in the software engineering, a thing resisted by the industry so far, are you sure you want to go down on this path?
Why not? Every single other engineering profession has it, as well as certification. Only in software engineering can we get away with shipping buggy code and using the customer as a tester. Imagine if structural or aerospace engineers behaved like that, the world just would not function.
Due to lack of any personal responsibility (and here I use "personal" in both the context of the developer, or the company that sells the software), we can get away with buggy code being shipped and used all the time. Anyone who read "coding for dummies" and can string some lines of code together is a "Developer", and it shows in the poor quality of output overall in the industry.
It means wages are driven down by incompetent people, code quality deteriorates as bean counters switch out good devs for bad ones because they are cheaper, and more and more code is buggy or riddled with security holes and vulnerabilities.
Once upon a time when most software was limited in scope we could get away with this. Bit now we got full blown software in almost everything, IoT, smart_$device (of which there are many now, and growing every day), even cars are riddled with software, most of it crap, and unsupported after a few years.
I have worked in aerospace, as such I have had personal liability for my software (they insist on it, for aircraft certification reasons), you take out liability insurance, like every other engineer/company does, and then you make damn sure you do a good job, with full documentation and state diagrams showing all possible logic flows, with full unit testing. You don't ship out untested, hacked together buggy code and let the test flights debug it for you, that is a recipe for disaster.
Also, in the context of killing, there is a difference between a bug in a piece of software killing someone, and a piece of software specifically designed to kill someone. One is an accident, the other (which in the context of the kill-drone, is the one we are discussing here) requires a conscious decision by a human to kill, and programs the device accordingly.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday June 27 2018, @09:45AM (4 children)
Pedantic hat on
Oh, it will. Just not the world as we like it. Here's an example [theguardian.com], and I only picked it to raise a challenging (but not intentional polemic) question after.
----
Ok, before my question, the context:
By accident, you say. How much difference you reckon there is in the meaning you associate with 'accident' and the meaning the Pakistani attribute to 'fate'? Is there any difference in the nature or only in the level of due diligence applied (zero in the case of Pakistani drivers, some but clearly not enough to prevent the accident in the other case)?
Furthermore, where do you draw the line in which the negligence-caused-accidents become as criminal as the killing-by-design? Or will the two always be separated?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday June 28 2018, @07:37AM (3 children)
> By accident, you say. How much difference you reckon there is in the meaning you associate with 'accident' and the meaning the Pakistani attribute to 'fate'? Is there any difference in the nature or only in the level of due diligence applied (zero in the case of Pakistani drivers, some but clearly not enough to prevent the accident in the other case)?
The fatalistic mind set (which extends beyond Pakistan, it is a core component of Islam, so many Muslims are just as fatalistic, at least the ones I have met), stipulates that there is no free will, and that everything that happens is because of Allah/fate, etc....
In my mind it is just an abdication of responsibility. Rather than taking responsibility for your actions causing something to occur, you just say "it is like that because fate/Allah willed it", it is the ultimate cop out, and it isn't limited to death/killing, anything can (and is) attributed to that in such societies. I guess it is a way of coping with death and guilt, it makes people feel better that ultimately they were not the cause of the event, but a higher being, and they were just the vessel used in the event.
I don't support that notion, I see each human as having free will, and as such can make decisions, and can be held responsible for making those decisions (up to a point, sometimes other peoples decisions take you directions you don't want to go).
Of course, maybe I am wrong and fatalists are right. Maybe everything is fatalistic, and my free will is just an illusion (I think I made the decision, but in fact I was always feted to make that decision), however we basically go into philosophy at this point, and you can't prove anything concrete from such a debate.
> Furthermore, where do you draw the line in which the negligence-caused-accidents become as criminal as the killing-by-design? Or will the two always be separated?
In my mind they are separate and quite clear cut. Simply, it is about intent. Intent can be hard to prove in a court of law, of course, but it can be done, it is like the difference between manslaughter and murder, so we already have definitions for killing by design vs accidental deaths.
If you build a machine that hugs people. and it squeezes someone too hard and you kill them, that was an accident. Building a machine that is designed to crush people to death, that is not an accident, even if the end result is the same.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday June 28 2018, @08:04AM (2 children)
Ok, I got your mind on the 'fatalist' area.
However, there's yet something yet unanswered from my question: the difference between saying "it was an accident" and the "fate made it so".
Any difference in the nature between the two?
If there's no difference in the nature, then where does the difference reside?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Thursday June 28 2018, @11:07AM (1 child)
If you wanted to talk about fatalism, feel free to ask directly, it is an interesting philosophical subject after all :)
Yes, the difference is in the worldview of the person, and also in the reasoning as to why an event occurred.
In the case of an event occurring without the conscious intent of the main actor:
A fatalist would say "Fate ordained it", it was not only out of their hands, but fate/$deity specifically chose them to play their part in it. So it wasn't an accident, everything happened exactly according to a higher plan (even if the actors have no idea what the plan actually is). Indeed in a fatalists worldview there is no such thing as an "accident", everything happens for a reason and according to plan. (It must be a very comforting way of thinking, absolves the individual of all responsibility and everything, even death and/or painful tragedy in their life, is with purpose/for a reason)
A non-fatalist would say that it was an accident, a series of events that are a result of others making free-will decisions that led to circumstances that caused something beyond the non-fatalists control to occur.
The difference to a non-fatalist of an event being an accident or not is to do with intent of all the parties involved (hence why police do not refer to accidents as such, but refer to "incidents", and the incident can become an accident if all parties are shown in a court of law to be without intent to cause the event).
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday June 28 2018, @11:44AM
Ok, the terminology is clear in regards with the philosophical position.
Now, let's get to the context in which we started: the responsibility in engineering.
Why is it not enough to show in a court of law the lack of intent for an engineer to be exculpated of the responsibility of an accident (derived from the design/work of that engineer)? More precisely, what/who requires or imposes extra responsibility on engineering work?
(background: I graduated physics but switched to software industry quire early after graduation. Software engineering is self-taught discipline for me. That is to say: I'm oblivious to a formal framework of "proper engineering" - as opposed to "software engineering" - my questions do not carry any implication of a debate).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford