Slashdot Mirror

1) It's not unsupported; there's plenty of high-quality work showing personality differences between men and women (on average!) that are consistent across many diverse cultures,

Like how in that bastion of gender equality known as Iran, women are 70% of STEM university graduates?

Or that given two juxtaposed tribes, one patrilineal and one matrilineal, women in the matrilineal tribe have equivalent spacial reasoning skills as the men?

2) programming was a completely different job at that point,

Yeah, all the tools and high-level languages we have now mean its not as hard as it once was when real women programmed on bare iron.

3) saying that men and women may be attracted to different things, and that this partially explains the gender gap in CS does not preclude bias as a contributor.

Which is utterly irrelevant to any argument focusing on biology being the problem which is what Damore did.

There is something sad about a PHD in biology getting fired for stating a biological opinion supported by other PHDs in biology because some MBA's disagree.

They could fire him for resume fraud, considering he doesn't appear to have actually obtained the pHD that you're touting .

Does that make it less sad, now?

The dude has a PHD relevant to the topic he was discussing, and was well sourced.

Oh really? Harvard doesn't think that he has a pHD. Care to provide a link to his doctoral thesis?

No, it isn't. You are flat out lying.

Here is an earlier article from the EFF that was carried on Slashdot titled More Than 40 ISPs Across the Country Tell Chairman Pai to NOT Repeal Network Neutrality

Here's one showing who is really supporting the repeal of net neutrality -- with the bulk of all lobbying money ($572 million) being spent by just four companies: AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA).

The simple truth is the big telecom companies want to have the benefits of common carrier legal protection, without the limitations. They ALREADY have the rights, and abilities, to provide quality of service based on type of traffic. There is NOTHING stopping them from prioritizing VoIP traffic over e-mail because of the real-time nature of the service.

That is what they try and claim they can't do, but that isn't what they really want.

What they want is the ability to shape traffic based on DESTINATION. That is, Comcast will prioritize *THEIR* VoIP traffic but not competitors, like Vonage, unless they pay a premium for it.

That immediately sets up a protection-like racket where major ISPs can force non-ISP content providers to pay extra or their traffic gets degraded.

They've already tried to do this with Netflix and Vonage, to name a couple.

Net neutrality requires that any QoS or throttling that is done for bandwidth management be done UNIFORMLY, and not selectively.

What the hell, more links just because it is so easy:

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/21376597/ns/technology_and_science-internet/t/comcast-blocks-some-internet-traffic/

https://www.wired.com/2014/05/google-fiber-netflix/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflix-agrees-to-pay-comcast-to-improve-its-streaming-1393175346

https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/28/5662580/netflix-signs-traffic-deal-with-verizon

How about Comcast astroturfing the FCC with bot-generated comments attacking net neutrality?

Comcast injecting packets to slow or disable traffic? Sure!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Comcast#Net_neutrality

Hey, how about Municipal Broadband? Guess who opposes it tooth-and-nail even in areas they have no presence in? That's right, the Big ISPs.

Net Neutrality is by far and away in the best interests of both consumers and small ISPs.

A pill doesn't solve all the problems with sex, just birth control. A condom isn't perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than a non-existant pill with the added benefit of preventing STDs.

I'm disappointed that the male contraceptive that basically glued the vas deferens closed but could be dissolved by another solvent hasn't taken off: https://wired.com/2011/04/ff_v...

Birth control is not just for one night stands. Sometimes wedded couples decide they have enough kids at whatever number they have and would like birth control that doesn't make the wife throw up and allows them to have sex. A LOT of married men would gladly take birth control over expensive constant buying of condoms.

If I have to take my eyes off the road at speed to adjust anything, that's shit design. If I have to do that and go through menus, oh lordy.

Physical buttons are still king for this, due to feedback and fixed placement.

Check out this crazy F1 steering wheel. Wouldn't it be better if everything was just an anti-reflection coated touch screen? No, no it would not.

Some companies are talking about providing internet service from a swarm of low orbiting mini-satellites. If this comes about, in spite of the reservation in the article, would they be censorship proof?

https://www.wired.com/1999/01/...

Before you blame "gun nuts" for the lack of smart guns, educate yourself a bit about the engineering challenges involved...
Whatever strategy you choose, you're going to face problems and tradeoffs.

Wow. Problems and trade-offs.

Dealing with problems and trade-offs is what engineers do for living.

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/...

Very interesting article. You did read it, right? It basically says that the hardest problems with smart guns are not technical:

But the hurdles aren’t only technical; they are sociopolitical as well. The National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which represents the gun industry, say they’re not against smart guns per se, just for consumer choice. But in practice they have formed a united front against smart guns, after abortive efforts to develop them in the 1990s by companies like Smith and Wesson and Colt faltered, in part thanks to an NRA boycott...

...gun-rights true believers made it a holy mission to bar smart guns from the marketplace and stop the New Jersey ban from kicking in.

Before you blame "gun nuts" for the lack of smart guns, educate yourself a bit about the engineering challenges involved:

"'If we can set it up so you can’t unlock your phone unless you’ve got the right fingerprint, why can’t we do the same thing for our guns?' - Barack Obama
It turns out that it is, in fact, a lot harder to build an iGun (as one smart gun design is dubbed) than an iPhone. One reason: it’s simply tough to design it right and build it well.
Whatever strategy you choose, you’re going to face problems and tradeoffs. When people use guns for self-defense, police work, or in the military, they care most about reliability. You don’t want bugs in the software; you don’t want sweat or temperature extremes to cause a malfunction. The inside of a gun, smart gun proponents admit, is hard on electronics. In terms of engineering tolerances and failsafe expectations, making a smart gun is less like making an iPhone than like building an airplane."

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/...

Reminds me a little of Theranos.

Similar to this story, Wired has also written quite a bit about Thearnos as well.

Reminds me a little of Theranos.

Similar to this story, Wired has also written quite a bit about Thearnos as well.

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/... was an interesting long read about Apple Park's design.

The Prius has been on sale for 20 years so culmulative sales aren't exactly instructive. I bet Prius sales are falling off a cliff of late because people inclined to buy a Prius have many better vehicles to choose from these days.

Toyota's target sales for the 1st year of their Prius Prime are 20k for USA & 30k for Japan.
Tesla's deliveries of the Model 3 could come close to the combined total before the end of 2017 and will almost certainly double it before the start of Q3 2018.

An interesting fact regarding the Prius & the Model S is that almost 16% of Model S buyers up to Spring 2014 were Prius-only drivers, more than either BMW or Mercedes-Benz
https://www.wired.com/2014/03/...

one example: https://www.wired.com/2011/04/...
another: http://www.businessinsider.com...

Apple has also stated publicly "We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, location, and the time zone where an Apple product is used so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising."

ah yea spardon my double post on myself i just remembered something i read YEARS ago, this is not about drones okay but (lol) https://www.wired.com/2009/04/... good luck with the jam, dont forget the peanut butter

Mushroom Networks. If it was good enough for Willie Nelson in 2009, It is good enough for your no-name band (let's hope you become a household name in the future).

More info here:

https://www.wired.com/2009/10/...

Chicken chicken, chicken chicken chicken.
  Chicken.
  Chicken?
  Chicken!

Chicken chicken chicken, chicken. Chicken?

Cazes provided his own encryption backdoor, because the police literally walked into his house through the back door and found his computer running unencrypted and connected to alphabay.

Although the linked article doesn't mention the link between his email and his 'front' company, the Wired article says that police identified him because his Hotmail address was linked to a PayPal account which was linked to his company.

My head reels at the inept OpSec of this clown. He runs the largest illegal marketplace in the world, yet posts links to his real PayPal account. With no visible source of income, he lives a high profile lifestyle in Bangkok with 3 houses and the most expensive Lamborghini they make, while running the marketplace with an unattended decrypted laptop. Another demonstration that intelligence and common sense rarely go hand-in-hand.

Uh, yes, that's actually a very strong point of the Geneva convention. Military weapons should have the goal of killing the target rather than maiming the target.

That makes sense because the alternative to is have thousands of troops come back disabled with missing limbs, blinded, lame, ruined lungs, cancerous, poisoned, or diseased. Bluntly, these people are a burden to society, or at least less productive. That might be changing though. Back in the day, if a wounded vet couldn't perform manual labor, they couldn't hold a real job as that was the work required. These days there's more office and mental work. As long as their noggin still works, they're good to go. ...OH SHIT!

Point being that the Geneva convention bans weapons that purposely try and maim soldiers rather than flat-out kill them. And there's reasons that weapon designers would want to maim rather than kill. The wounded are also a burden on the mission. If a weapon cripples a soldier, someone has to come help drag him back to a hospital. Now you've taken TWO soldiers out of the fight.

So anyway, if your cyber-punk novel needs an excuse for everyone to have cyberlimbs and replacement eyes and external lungs, a no-holds-barred brutal war that takes a piss on the Geneva convention is a good justification.

You are a few years behind the times. The engine, brakes, throttle and more have already been hacked remotely, and not by state sponsored terrorist groups with thousands of workers and billions of dollars in support but by two people out of thier garage. Auto makers have no perceived incentive to make thier vehicles safe from hacking and do stupid shit like attach the wireless enabled infotainment system to the can bus that runs critical vehicle safety functions.

I'm in favor of this, even if it's not implemented in precisely that way. I wouldn't want augmented reality in the umpire's mask to be a distraction from making another call like a balk or catcher interference. In the test, it wasn't implemented that way. Someone else (in the test, former major leaguer Eric Byrnes) was responsible for operating the equipment and making the calls, but it actually went well. You can read about it at https://www.wired.com/2015/07/baseball-game-no-umpire/. I believe it would be an improvement because it would get rid of a lot of the biases in the calls umpires make, which are documented at http://www.fangraphs.com/community/the-2016-strike-zone-and-the-umpires-who-control-it/. That last link is a really interesting read and shows that there are a lot of biases in the calling of balls and strikes.

This also isn't something you'd want to implement right away. Pitchfx has its own errors, partially due to technical limitations that the flight of the ball is extrapolated over the last few feet before getting to the plate. While the overall biases during the course of a season are normally distributed about zero, there can be larger systematic biases over smaller scales like within the course of a game. These are discussed in quite a bit of detail at http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=13109. I'm okay with a randomly distributed error of a half inch or even an inch, provided that there's no systematic bias. On the other hand, if the calibration is off and the horizontal error is two or three inches, that's pretty significant. If the goal of automating calling balls and strikes, you don't want to implement a system that has some of the same systematic biases that human umpires have. The solution is to commit to the technology and put the resources of MLB toward fixing the calibration issues with Pitchfx.

I'm absolutely in favor of doing this. But even if the "baseball purists" immediately dropped their opposition, it would take a little while to properly implement this. I think there's more involved here than, say, implementing instant replay over the course of an offseason.

https://www.wired.com/story/tr...

Yet, THIS DOESN'T HAPPEN.

Except when it does.

Not the first time either

Those are the things that caused Network Neutrality to become an issue. I'm sure there's more, more subtle examples that have been less widely publicized too.

Now imagine if there was explicitly no legal framework to prevent this. Imagine if it was not only expressly legal but accepted. There would be no competition for online services, no innovation, and higher prices for inferior service.

So when you say shit like this:

If a problem comes along, and it is a REAL problem, THEN regulate.

You clearly have your head in the sand.
=Smidge=

The way this works in the US is:...

Yes, and one country's method results in jail time if you decide to become a conscientious objector while the other results in a slow painful death from radiation poison. By all means, fight your country's injustices, but don't try to morally equate them.

It's idiotic to blame all hacking by Russians on the Russian government. Many of those people really just do it for personal profit.

I'm not talking about how many "cyber" criminals reside in Russia, I'm talking about the very obvious state-sponsored groups.

The smashing, violence, and beatings is overwhelmingly coming from the left. That's how it's been for many years.

I have to agree.

So you feel obligated to agree with a falsehood? Interesting. Why not challenge it? Why not consider how the FBI's report on right-wing violence was suppressed?

My personal theory is that many of the violent people have convinced themselves that their political enemies are in fact bad people and "fair game" for anything.

Yes, the right goes out of its way to declare that people on the left are, in fact, bad people, and see themselves as the martyred heroes for saving themselves from the dastardly villains. That was, in fact, the whole justification of Nazi aggression.

Ever so slightly interesting that you don't mention it.

But it's hardly unknown, it's even in this movie trailer.

It goes like this: It's okay to punch a Nazi; conservatives are all Nazis... and then comes the punching.

Actually, it's conservatives who go to tortuous lengths to declare that liberals are Nazis. It's terribly amusing, and rather pathetic. Not to mention the Muslim accusations, the Communist accusations, and more.

Of course, it turns out the people dumb enough to sell out to the Russians were Trumps, but we can't be paying attention to that.

Here is a web page linking multiple articles arguing that the violence used to prevent Milo Yiannopolous from speaking at Berkeley was justified. "Violence helped ensure safety of students" is a real headline. There was also this quote: "...some white nationalists got their ***** beat." (Just like the Nazi thing above, only this time using "white nationalist". Someone who wanted to hear Milo speak --> white nationalist --> someone it's okay to send to the hospital.)

Here's a video of those white Nationalists's major work:

http://www.pbs.org/video/2365957904/

Do see how they're behaving and justifying themselves.

Even the removal of statues leads to threats of violence.

Some people can't even worship in peace.

Yet you show not the slightest concern about that.

Also, the media coverage may tend to embolden these people. The people who smash things, light things on fire, and send people to the hospital are described as "protesters". The people who wanted to hear Milo speak are described as "alt-Right extremists". I don't want to overstate the contribution of the media but I think it's a part.

The media coverage of the feigned victimization of right-wing speakers was indeed a part, people actually started to believe it was a real problem, or some sudden development, until it petered out, as comments by Milo that even the right-wing couldn't stomach came out, and he, the poster-child for the supposed martydom, became a persona non-grata. So it petered out.

Personally I think that the correct remedy for bad speech is counter-speech.

So not walking away? Not ignoring them? You don't say they're unacceptable, but why not correct?

But ok, enjoy my speech.

Violence isn't acceptable to prevent speech, even if you really disagree.

So is h

Here's a great article about why this makes no sense (basically, regulating a market that doesn't need it):
https://www.wired.com/2016/11/...

1. Wait for something bad to happen. 2. Blame it on Russia. 3. Ask the US for money.

Well, let's see.
1. Russia and Ukraine are essentially at war.
2. Russia is one of the most capable countries when it comes to electronic espionage.
3. Russia has already been waging this campaign against Ukraine for years now. See Andy Greenberg's recent Wired article. The intrusions are well-documented.

Russia Behind Cyber-attack, Says Ukraine's Security Service

I think it's premature to jump to such conclusions since we know that our very own CIA has also been implicated...

Vault 7 and more.

"We're talking about the FCC, so how about sticking to the USA? I have no idea what the laws are regarding ISPs in Kenya or Zambizia or wherever, but I do know about the USA. There are no ISPs with government granted monopolies."

Local governments, e.g. county or city, provide monopolistic franchise agreements with cable and internet providers. Gas and electric are usually covered by state Public Services Commission and are provided effective natural monopolies.

https://www.wired.com/2013/07/...

"Before building out new networks, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must negotiate with local governments for access to publicly owned “rights of way” so they can place their wires above and below both public and private property. ISPs also need “pole attachment” contracts with public utilities so they can rent space on utility poles for above-ground wires, or in ducts and conduits for wires laid underground.

http://gizmodo.com/5830956/why...

"Throughout most of cable's history, it's been regulated at the local level. Counties and cities were the agencies responsible for allowing cable franchises. That is changing, slightly. More than 20 states now have franchise authority, due largely to intensive lobbying by telcos like Verizon and AT&T. You know you're fucked when you're relying on AT&T to make things better. Ultimately, this patchwork of local regulation means cable companies themselves are often more powerful than the body overseeing them. And as long as none of the micro-monopolies grows too large nationally, it can continue to control the local weather.

That's why I kept saying "local government".

Smartphones and their apps track and trace peoples purchases, movements, social groups, etc. Apple itself is but a small portion of it but they created a surveillance ecosystem.

Google (Hint: the maker of Android) reads your mail, tracks your browser history, your shopping habits and your movements among other things. I'm pretty sure Apple is an amateur convention compared to Google when it comes to monitoring every single thing their customers do.

Actually, Apple has, and continues to, take great steps to NOT track you.

Even when they want anonymized statistical data, they have instituted cutting-edge techniques to separate the data from the user's, or device's, IDs. Here's some examples:

https://www.wired.com/2016/06/...

https://www.theverge.com/2016/...

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.c...

No. That's fanboy reality distortion field BS.

The LG Prada smart phone was winning design awards almost a year before the Iphone was actually released, and the Iphone looked almost exactly like the Prada and used the same typical smart phone interface. The only arguments that the fanboys have come up with are qualitative claims, such as the Prada's web browser or touch screen was not as "good" as that of the Iphone, and such subjective claims are not only dubious, but they have nothing to do with the innovation of the smart phone.

Nope. The LG Prada beat the later Iphone, but neither LG nor Prada had the legion of blind followers that Apple had.

Apple has actually originated very little.

Sorry. The iPhone didn't look like the Prada (other than the fact that they are both rectangular); but the Samsung phone looked EXACTLY like the iPhone.

https://www.wired.com/2007/02/...

http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/1...

So now what?

https://www.wired.com/2013/08/...

You think they didn't? All we know is from a heavily redacted, two-year old FOIA document.

My money says they were given new identities, and promoted into the group that gave us CherryBlossom.

CAPTCHA = "prying". Effing Slashdot AI is getting too smart for our own good.

... Windows for Warships?

(Seriously, that exists)

Anyway: despite windows XP's age Microsoft will still actively support it for organizations willing to send them a boatload of money, and the rates only go up the more time passes. But when you're talking about the operating costs of a large warship, the cost for continued xp support is only a rounding error in the total.

I LOL'd We have an aircraft carrier running NT.
"The data contained a zero where it shouldn't have, and when the software attempted to divide by zero, a buffer overrun occurred – crashing the entire network and causing the ship to lose control of its propulsion
system. https://www.wired.com/1998/07/...

Might be cheaper to plant trees and landscaping in an urban environment. Several tech companies are using rooftop gardens to put the heat to better use.

https://www.wired.com/2015/03/facebook-moves-new-garden-roofed-fantasyland/

Those exceptions are so rare people are still writing about how unusual it is that Dropbox left the public cloud with headlines like "THE EPIC STORY OF DROPBOX'S EXODUS FROM THE AMAZON CLOUD EMPIRE". This is only worth doing at extremely large scale. And, as the competition between providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) continues and their scale increase, prices continue to be driven down which means fewer and fewer customers are large enough to build these platforms themselves less expensively.

I think we'll continue to see lots of hybrid clouds because right now the big providers aren't worried about building for unusual edge-case workloads. Right now their best return is focusing on moving generalized workloads as quickly into public clouds to drive growth and ultimately their scale to reduce their cost. Once we see that growth slow down we'll start to see more specialized offerings. Which is why you'll still see hybrid clouds being very popular in the short to mid-term.

Two-factor authentication based on SMS texts can be less secure than just a password because the SMSes can be redirected by the attacker.

Truly. If they're sharing them with Russia, they should share with EVERYONE - draw an open-source license.

IBM et al. are biting the bullet because they want to sell to the Russian market... perhaps because if they don't, someone else will and make lots of oil-soaked rubles and countless Russian intangibles. But if they give away these "secrets" to the Russians, we can pretty much assume such secrets are in the wild, perhaps immediately handed to the teams of patriotic but not-at-all-affiliated with the government Russians (wink, wink) who are taking down Ukrane's power grid. The point of keeping them secret is so that other people won't copy what you've done and sell it and compete with you. But for sure that's exactly what the Russians will do with this... build their own so they don't have to give up their oil rubles to Western companies. And there's no guarantee the Russians won't sell what they've learned to the Chinese (or any other highest bidder), who will be happy to pass it on to some half-state-owned conglomerate to build their own equipment for 1/1000 of what the Western companies would sell for.

The only people NOT getting in on the source code is the open-source community who might do something good with it, like find bugs.

Put short, if you're going to have to open your code to Russia to sell to Russia, draw an open-source license first. If you can't afford the open-source community to see and copy your code, you damn well can't afford the Russians to do it.

Me, if I want to purchase "secure" equipment from these companies, I damn-well want to make they're products that have NOT been sold and opened-up to the Russians, or for my money such equipment is de-facto NON-secure. Should have some kind of NOT OPENED TO RUSSIANS certification or something.

He also hints that any social media account you have with a picture is linked.

That is why I poison that well every chance I get. When Facebook thinks it has found a face in a picture of mine I say it is me. Personally I like that for a long while it would find faces in mariposa lilies so I would always tag them as myself and get others to do the same. It also seems to do a good job of finding faces in pictures of random piles of leaves and bushes. Let us not forget this article from a couple of years back about a very confused computer vision system.

There have been plenty of real advances in the last few years, not just speed improvements. For me, the most impressive thing was Generative Adversarial Networks in 2014, but there have been plenty of advances. The most recent article I read was on Relational Reasoning https://www.technologyreview.c... .

Here as some more recent advances
Turing Learning - https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ne...
Evolution Strategies - https://www.technologyreview.c...
Bayesian Program Synthesis - https://techxplore.com/news/20...
Gaussian Processes - https://www.wired.com/2017/02/...
AI Passes Standard Intelligence Test - https://phys.org/news/2017-01-...
Semi-Supervised Learning For Handwriting Recognition - https://phys.org/news/2016-12-...
Lipreading - https://www.technologyreview.c...
One-Shot Learning - https://www.technologyreview.c...
Differentiable Neural Computer - http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-...
Bayesian Program Learning - http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech...

Close the N.S.A.'s Back Doors. (New York Times, Sept. 21, 2013)

NSA's own Hardware Backdoors May Still Be a "Problem from Hell". (MIT Technology Review, Oct. 8, 2013)

This 'Demonically Clever' Backdoor Hides In a Tiny Slice of a Computer Chip. (Wired.com, June 1, 2016)

Expert Says NSA Have Backdoors Built Into Intel And AMD Processors. (Eteknix, 2014)

When spyware is detected, that particular vulnerability is fixed:

Red alert! Intel patches remote execution hole that's been hidden in chips since 2010. (The Register, May 1, 2017)

Intel Active Management Technology, Intel Small Business Technology, and Intel Standard Manageability Escalation of Privilege (Intel Corporation, May 5, 2017 ) Quote: "Severity rating: Critical"

We have an innate sense of fairness. Lying goes against that.

Or not...

Yeah, sounds doable conceptually but no idea about the packaging of it, although compute power could be off-board. Dynamic refocus could be tricky I think... probably needs eye tracking so the glasses know where the eyes are looking through the lenses, but yeah, you could have a fluid or viscous layer and use a combination of pressure and if you're brave perhaps magnetic attraction/repulsion between the outer layers to shape the lens. Most folks would just use a servo motor or linear drive through and forgo the extra lens shaping step.

You could probably skip the eye tracking if you used a range-finder and the wearer got used to moving their head with relatively fixed eye position.

Or, buy something like this: https://www.wired.com/2010/07/fluid-filled-adjustable-eye-glasses/

Talk is here: https://www.ted.com/talks/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid_filled_eyeglasses

Is there a degree program, or other paths to skill and knowledge, for a programmer who's convinced that "AI is today what the web was in 1993"?

Well you have to be smart enough to earn one or more PhDs. Someone who believes that is probably not going to be able to do that, but if he tries he will probably quickly learn what a stupid idea it was. Hopefully he will still decide to get his PhD though. We can always use more AI researchers. Although dumb ones are less valuable you never know who might get lucky and stumble upon some cool breakthrough.

The first point is that the only example we have of intelligence is intimately tied to life and can only really be viewed as an aspect of that and the idea that intelligence can be separated from life or at least some form of artificial life is speculative at best. As someone who was quite interested in a career in AI research back in the 80s and has been following the feeble creep of its progress since then I am convinced that wetware is going to be the real future and not so much neural net ASICs like Google's TPU or whatever Nvidia is working on to run neural network architecture which although useful is I think not going to be the foundation for real AI that can give a nice robot chassis like Boston Dynamic's Atlas some level of general intelligence or common sense.

Think of something more like putting a rat/pig/monkey brain into an Atlas Robot. That is figuring out how to digitally interface with a brain-in-jar and train it directly as if it were a complete living animal. Even a rat brain is a far more sophisticated neural network machine than anything we will probably build from scratch in the next few hundred years.

Current neural network architectures are based on a highly simplified model of how real brains actually work. We still really don't know how real brains work. There are projects like The Allen Brain Atlas, The Human Connectome Project, The Brain Activity Map, or whatever Henry Markram is currently up to. There is an interesting Wired article about him that you should read. Maybe consider pursuing a career path like his.

I'd also suggest maybe thinking in at least as much in terms of DNA programming as CPU or GPU programming via Synthetic Biology and follow a career more like Craig Venter who famously made his own artificial bacteria or rather wrote the DNA and inserted it into an empty host cell. That's just a small start of course but it may eventually lead to being able to build artificial life forms that we can make intelligent just by giving them a large enough brain or encephalization quotient. Ultimately even an Atlas Robot with something like an Nvidia P100 cluster running deep learning style neural nets is a kind of very primitive life form. Going fully wet and nano is just another way to attack the same problem in a more integrated fashion: the way I think a far more advanced civ tech would do it.

I guess you should really think in terms of which vision of AI you want to follow or place your bets on. Silicon based connectionism is in vogue at the moment and I think that is great because a lot of progress was lost back in the 80s when it was considered a dead end. It is certainly a more powerful and promising approach than trying to hand code intelligence into a piece of software, but I still think we are just nipping at the heels of an even better approach: biology. Ultimately we are copying the only machine in existence that can create intelligence and that is the

"640K should be good enough...."

What a poor comparison, 640K maximum was a software limitation, and then as hardware evolved over about 10 years, the software started to hold back capabilities of newer hardware, the old hardware from the time the software was built, would still worked have worked fine. And also be aware that what you're quoting is made up.

At one point 640K was "enough", then quite a while later it wasn't. While undoubtedly 50Mb/s will at some point be "too slow", in the meantime for almost all of today's smartphone needs, and almost certainly for the typical lifetime any 2017 smartphone, it's plenty.

First of all if you are talking about true AI and not just basically the same sort of connectionist statistical learning algorithms that have been around for many years you are perhaps better off getting into electrical engineering rather than machine learning because we don't yet really have the hardware to properly run the software on.

AI is all about research and research is still at a very early stage. When it comes to AI we are cavemen with crude stone axes. We need some fundamental breakthroughs and they are more likely to come from new hardware than new software.

Actually I suspect we may find that the best approach is by cheating with a bit of biology. We may find it easier to grow our own biological neurons that map themselves than trying to figure out what a brain does and emulate it with electronic circuits. So you may be better off getting a degree in some sort of biological science and specializing in the brain.

My suggestion is to get at least 3 PhDs. One on the software side related to machine learning / artificial neural networks, another on the electrical engineering side of things designing something like Google's TPU but even more optimized for the most effective neural network architecture of the day, and perhaps most importantly a degree in Synthetic Biology and/or Cognitive Science for the wetware aspects which I predict will be the most successful in the future.

Probably the most effective approach to creating intelligence will be with making other species smarter. Genetically engineering bonobos or parrots or corvids to give them a better cerebral cortex for instance or figuring out how to give them some of our human genetics that makes our brains so effective in general. Of course that won't really be artificial intelligence but is just as cool in some ways and will probably happen before we can figure out how to build a brain from scratch.

There is also the artificial life angle: looking at life itself as an engineering problem. Life forms are basically just electrochemical robots evolved with genetic algorithms designed at the molecular nanotech level. Figure out for instance how to make your own form of life that is not based on DNA or even carbon. Again however this would start to stretch the meaning of 'artificial'. Once you figure out this puzzle everything starts to look artificial.

Forget Nuclear power. It's not going to happen because when you break ground for a new plant thousands of crazy people

Some nuclear-friendly federal regulation and funding could fix that. Research funding into next-gen safer designs? Streamlined permit approvals toward pilot programs? Tax incentives, perhaps to convert aging coal plants? A little DARPA action, enough to encourage universities to offer nuclear engineering degrees again?

When the Soviets were around, propagandizing a nuclear world with nuclear plants that fit on trucks to show off how nuclear they were, the U.S. was red hot to show how nuclear it could be. Now with the Soviets and their propaganda gone, U.S. politicians have no balls for moon-shot beat-the-russians tech stuff.

Or maybe it's not completely gone. The Russians and the Chinese are getting back into nuclear, even in spite of the Russians sitting on shit-tons of fossil fuels. The Chinese want to quickly power up these little islands they're building in the China Sea to claim as their new territory. The Russians want to fill the melting Arctic with flag-flying nuclear ice-breakers to get at all the stuff up there (the U.S. hasn't built an ice-breaker since the late 1970s). Gosh, if we would only elect Congress-people who gave a fuck, we might be able to get in on this while there's something still to get got.

TFA doesn't load at all if you don't permit Javascript, because it is not a web page. Wired is offering an actual web page on the same subject, which is more suitable for linking to a site for nerds like Slashdot, where noscript is common.

Technically speaking, RT is based out of Moscow, and is a foreign corporation. The 1st Amendment rights of corporations is still a gray area, and Constitution protections for foreigners is still highly subjective and is still decided on a case-by-case basis. Even cases such as Citizens United really only touch on campaign contributions as a "form" of free speech, and contrary to popular belief, was pretty limited in the resultant decision. There have been many court cases that have decided that foreign nationals are not automatically covered under the Bill of Rights as these where meant for actual citizens of the US. Combining these factors together, this leads to the conclusion that RT would NOT be covered under any 1st Amendment rights.

As for the evidence of Russian involvement, there is proof. However, the actual "list" or whatever is currently still highly classified and not released into the general public yet. The real question is if the involvement was coordinated on the "state level", and was the Trump administration an active participant in said involvement or just a beneficiary. There is evidence of similar tampering in France; however Marcon's cyber team was prepared for this and may have actually done some preemptive "informational poisoning" to derail it.

People who can't see this trail are just keeping their heads buried in the sand; I blame it on something akin to the "beaten spouse syndrome". However, I don't think Clinton was a very good candidate either, and would have brought her own long list of issues with her. It's sad that out of 330 million people these two rose to "the top". We can do better than this; we MUST do better than this. Personally I advocate for replacing the House of Representatives with a proportional representation system to encourage the viability and formation of real third party choices. The US stands alone in having the meme "third party" due to the mathematical fact that our system only allows two sides due to our "winner take all" system. These sides often switch platforms, and absorb any emergent 3rd parties within a few election cycles.

Sources:
RT Network
Are foreign nationals covered under the Constitution?
Corporate personhood
First Amendment and “Foreign-Controlled” U.S. Corporations
Can US election hack be traced to Russia?
Putin: Patriotic Russians may be involved in hacking
The Macedonian Teens Who Mastered Fake News
Macedonia’s fake news industry sets sights on Europe
Russian Cyber Attack Repelled During French Elections
Proportional representation