Doesn't this equate to a very small subset of humanity solving a handful of NP-complete problems in polynomial time?
No. First of all, I'm not sure that I agree with the statement that mathematical proofs are good examples of NP-complete problems. Secondly, NP does not mean Not polynomial. It means Non-Deterministically polynomial. So what the quote indicates is that a small subset of humanity solved some NP-complete problems non-deterministically.
How is this explained if P does NOT eqaul NP? Do human "intuitive leaps" somehow fall outside computation limitations
Yes. Humans are not Turing machines. The big technical difference between P and NP is that P are solvable in polynomial time on a Deterministic machine, while NP are known to be solvable in polynomial time on a Non-Deterministic Machine. -- JimFive
Wow! That would be some crazy Rainbow-6 level, briefcase-handcuffed-to-my-wrist level backup!
I'm not sure where you got that from what was essentially "put it in your pocket". But hey, I'm not the one who thinks I need to protect my backup drive from a fire and then fails to do so. My home backups are to avoid the inconvenience of a hardware failure. If my house burns down I have more important things to worry about. -- JimFive
ya how exactly is "the best place to put speed traps" NOT being used to improve traffic safety?
A speed trap is a stretch of road where the speed limit is lower than necessary for safety. This stretch is then used to catch people speeding through that section as a revenue generating tool. In the case in the summary I expect that the police force is finding stretches of road where the limit is already lower than it should be from a safety standpoint and using them as a trap.
N.B. If there is a real safety concern then the accident rate would have identified these areas without using the GPS data.
"As in the rest of the nation, most vehicle fatalities in South Carolina and Georgia are attributed to one or more of those three factors: speeding, drunken driving or not wearing a seat belt."
It should be noted that it is common for statistics of this type to be heavy handed. E.g. if a person dies and someone had been drinking then the death is attributed to "drunk driving" even if the death could not have been averted.
Speed traps can catch: cell phones, texting, not wearing a seat belt and speeding, and drunk driving.
But they won't, except incidentally. The point of a speed trap is to issue citations quickly and easily in a small space. Adding on an extra ticket for not wearing a seatbelt is gravy. However, they aren't on the road watching for erratic driving, they are hidden to the side and pointing a radar gun. -- JimFive
On your person. There are, basically, two scenarios:
1. A fire occurs when you are at home. In this case you grab some stuff and usher your kids out of the house. The drive needs to be in the group of "some stuff" that you're going to grab without thinking too much.
2. A fire occurs when you are away from home. The only way to save the drive is to have it also be away from home.
So: Coat pocket, briefcase, purse, perhaps your car.
You might also consider performing an "important papers only" backup onto a thumb drive that you keep on your keychain. Part of document management is deciding which documents don't need to be kept.
-- JimFive
My tip is to keep your backup harddrive in the same firesafe box. Mine is one of those little bus-powered USB drives. I do a backup ever week or so, then put the drive back in the firesafe box.
This is a bad idea. That firesafe box is designed to protect papers from combustion by inhibiting the available air. It is not going to keep your backup drive from being damaged by heat. -- JimFive
There's definitely no right to be running botnet code.
You might be surprised. There is certainly a "natural right" to run whatever code I wish on a computer that I own. My exercising of that right (as with other natural rights) is limited by its effect on others. The common expression is "your right to swing your arms ends at my nose."
Since the botnet software itself(*) is not affecting you there is a right to run it. However, if the commands that the botnet CnC send begin to affect you then I may not have the right to execute those commands.
If you didn't have this right then you would not have the right to run any distributed computing environment such as SETI@home.
(*)I am making a distinction here between the software that allows a computer to receive commands from the command server, and the commands that are received. -- JimFive
I still occasionally use metrics as a way to do "thru conversions", in particular between volume and mass (because one deci-meter of water is one liter of water is approx 1 kg).
You might be interested to know that a pint of water (16 fl oz) weighs 1 pound (16 oz). -- JimFive
Do you really think this debate will go anywhere productive?
Of course not, but that goes right back to the point of the article. Allowing foaming at the mouth extreme positions to stand without a reasoned opposition abdicates to the wackos, not just the terms of the debate, but the ability to debate. -- JimFive
On the other side of this teacher debate you might start to ask why it is that in states where the teachers are paid the most correlate well
with states that have the worst education?
I don't believe this to be true, so a citation is needed. While there are certainly high pay, poor performing districts I seriously doubt the correlation you posit.
Even so, it is disingenuous to make this comparison at the state level. Within states teacher pay and school quality vary widely between districts. Thus any such comparison would need to compare on a district level, not a state level. Also, teacher pay should be normalized to the average pay of the district to account for cost of living issues.
I am saying that seniority instead of merit based firing decisions can not but fail to produce good education.
Even though that would be best for the districts, schools and the students it is not done.
Why?
Seniority is not a particularly good way to handle teacher advancement. However, it does eliminate a form of coercion that would exist in an "merit" based system. The "Don't teach evolution or get fired" form of coercion. Or the "Don't fail my child or don't get a raise" form of coercion.
Once you find a good, objective way to measure merit (and standardized testing of the students isn't it) then we can talk about merit based raises and firing decisions.
This discussion has made me think that it might be a good idea to look at who the editor is for the ebook. Books with a good editor will at least be readable, if even they aren't worthwhile to read. Unedited books are much more likely to be trash. Ideally, the editting contract would have a provision for the editor withdrawing es name from the book if it doesn't meet es standards. A new writer would be able to hire a competent editor to gain a certain amount of credibility.
-- JimFive
Note this requires an attacker to already have access to the config.db, i.e. one must have physical access to the machine and already be logged in as a privileged user or owner of the config.db.
No it doesn't. It requires an attacker to create their own config.db file and guess the hostID. How long is that HostID and how is it generated? -- JimFive
I've always thought it rather obvious that Science is a Faith. If a word cannot be used to define itself, than how can Science ever be used to prove itself?
If a word cannot be used to define itself then how can a sphere be spherical.
Science is not a THING. Science is a process, a method, of using our experience of the material world to describe WHAT happens.
Science proves itself by being able to describe the world in a way that proves useful to us in our endeavors. e.g. We can build airplanes and computers. -- JimFive
Demonstrate dark matter, dark energy, weak interaction, or hell how gravity works
A current lack of knowledge about any given topic is not a refutation of science. It is perfectly legitimate to say that we don't know how gravity works. That doesn't invalidate the Theory of Gravity, or the Law of Gravity. In fact, if we knew how gravity worked then that would no longer be an interesting question in science. -- JimFive
If we had smarter more adaptable CLIs people would be far more familiar instead you find out you missed a comma somewhere and it takes you 5 minutes to track that down. Or you try to figure out if adjusting contrast is even a function at all.
Many years ago there was a shell for the Macintosh (pre OSX) called MPW. One of the features of this shell was a tool called "Commando". You would type in the command name and press a hotkey and a dialog showing all of the parameters would show up. You would enter the parameters and when you exited the commando window the full command line would return to the shell ready for you to execute, or read and learn, or copy into a script.
I've occasionally thought that a good OSS project would be to create similar functionality in linux with a generic front end that read specially formatted help data to build the commando box and return the command line. Ideally, a standardized option flag like ls --commando would return a formatted string (possibly XML) that the commando interface would interpret for building the dialog box. Alternatively, the commando options string could be stored in a separate location so that it could be added without changing the tools. -- JimFive
I do not think that linking to _anything_ is a crime, but is in undeniable that it can make it easy for people who want it to commit a crime. I don't know what's the correct English wording for it, but I think that it is not wrong to say that in such cases they can be considered "accessory to a crime".
I don't think that the printer of the city map can be held responsible for helping the bank robber find the bank, nor can the nice person at the tourist office that gave directions. Thus, I don't agree that a search engine can be held responsible for helping an internet user find a website. Therefore I don't agree that it is "reasonable for search engines to be protected by explicit laws" because creating that specific law creates an environment where a large number of other acts are now questionable. Once a law is made specifically allowing a type of activity then any related activites that are not addressed in law are now suspect.
-- JimFive
In a normal market, pricing drops closer to the cost of production.
This is not correct. In a commodity market prices drop closer to the cost of production. Music, tv, and movies are not commodities. An episode of Glee is not interchangeable with an episode of Mythbusters. When you pay for an tv episode you are not paying for 23 minutes of undifferentiated content, you are paying for the quality that you perceive in the product.
Personally, I think it's a good idea not having a bunch of kids standing in the dark waiting for a school bus during the winter.
I just wanted to point out that there are two things wrong with this view. 1. Winter is Standard Time, thus there is no need to change the clocks for the kids.
2. Kids are waiting for the bus in the dark anyway. Therefore, changing the clocks (in this manner) is ineffective at protecting the children. -- JimFive
Way back in the days of CompuServ, there were two billing models for internet use. By the minute or by the byte. Most home usage was by the minute. When "unlimited internet" came to be it meant that you were charged a flat monthly rate and there were no time limits on your connection. It had nothing to do with how much data you sent across the wire. More recently, as broadband internet became popular it was advertised as "Always On" again, contrasting itself with a time limited dial-up connection. (Even though the dialup was unlimited in terms of time, it was not common for people to leave it connected, because they, you know, wanted to use the phone).
Now that always on, broadband(ish) connections are common, we, the consumers, think that unlimited should mean unlimited bytes, even though it has, historically, never meant that.
TL;DR: Because "unlimited" is more ambiguous as you think. -- JimFive
also suspect there will be loopholes to buy an extraordinary yacht and keep it somewhere else most of the time, killing the argument that at least the rich are getting taxed more than they do now.
The rich will either buy everything they want somewhere that doesn't have a sales tax, or move out completely.
It should also help skew the economy towards one with a savings rate by taxing spending,
One person's spending is another person's income. Increasing the savings rate will necessarily reduce economic growth. -- JimFive
What I mean is that it pretty much involves keeping track of the receipts yourself and then there has to be some way of sending the money and the receipts in to the state.
When ordering from out of state you are likely to use a credit card or other third party payment system; keeping track of the purchases is pretty easy. You don't need to send the receipts to the state, just a statement and money.
I'm not aware of any state that actually advertises the process or enforces compliance.
In Michigan there is a line/worksheet to fill out as part of the state's Income Tax filing. -- JimFive
With the thermostat example, you're saying that a human is intelligent because it can choose to not lower the temperature at night even though it would save energy while the thermostat would have to always lower the temperature to save energy.
A human may choose to not lower the temperature for any number of reasons, including: being cold. Intelligence can react to unanticipated situations, the thermostat cannot.
So basically your definition of Intelligence is the ability to choose to act non-intelligently?
There are two problems with this statement as a statement. The first is ambiguity in the use of the word intelligent, where in the second usage you are using it as a synonym for rational. Intelligence does not require that one always be rigidly rational. The second is that it is a strawman. -- JimFive
Without getting bogged down in philosophical discourse it means the ability to choose otherwise.
what you think of as "freedom of choice" is really an illusion.
I am not going to argue for or against determinism here, but if the above statement is correct then there is no reasoning, no decision making, and no intelligence in the universe. -- JimFive
intelligence is the measurement of the amount of reasoning or decision making capability an entity has.
I can agree to using this definition with the caveat that making a decision and reasoning both require freedom of action. A thermostat does not have freedom of action.
When you make a decision do you not think there is some underlying set of chemical and electrical processes that occur that generate that decision?
How humans generate decisions is a red herring. When the thermostat turns on the furnace it is the builder/user of the thermostat that made the decision.
Obviously if there were just programmers in the back room making all the decisions that wouldn't have needed a multi-million dollar computer. While I agree that having the programmers involved during the games taints the results, the programmers were merely tweaking the algorithms
I think you misunderstand. The decisions that I was referring to as made by the programmers are precisely the decisions of what algorithms to use for the evaluation function, how to trim the minmax tree, etc. By the time it gets to the computer the board position is plugged in and the computer makes the determined move. The computer does not decide what move to make.
Parallel parking is a lot harder than you imagine, having to process visual input, make judgments as to how much to turn the wheels, how much to back up or go forward, judging the distance to the curb and the cars in front and back. If if were that easy it would have been made available years ago.
Visual (camera) input isn't necessary, proximity/range sensors would suffice. A human judges distance, an automated car measures it. Decisions about how much to turn/move are likely made by the programmers, not the vehicles computer. The difficulties that prevented this from being available years ago are likely problems with control precision, not decision logic.
RE: cross country driving
Here's where I think the problem is: Let's say you you have a computer that can control a car well enough to drive around the block and down the freeway and it knows the "rules of the road":
Q. Why can't you just tell it to drive to LA?
A. Because it isn't intelligent.
Now, just because a car CAN drive to LA, that doesn't mean that it's intelligent. If you have to program in every possible thing that could go wrong, still not intelligent. If it can adapt to unanticipated situations on the fly then it might be intelligent.
-- JimFive
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't this equate to a very small subset of humanity solving a handful of NP-complete problems in polynomial time?
No. First of all, I'm not sure that I agree with the statement that mathematical proofs are good examples of NP-complete problems. Secondly, NP does not mean Not polynomial. It means Non-Deterministically polynomial. So what the quote indicates is that a small subset of humanity solved some NP-complete problems non-deterministically.
How is this explained if P does NOT eqaul NP? Do human "intuitive leaps" somehow fall outside computation limitations
Yes. Humans are not Turing machines. The big technical difference between P and NP is that P are solvable in polynomial time on a Deterministic machine, while NP are known to be solvable in polynomial time on a Non-Deterministic Machine.
--
JimFive
Wow! That would be some crazy Rainbow-6 level, briefcase-handcuffed-to-my-wrist level backup!
I'm not sure where you got that from what was essentially "put it in your pocket". But hey, I'm not the one who thinks I need to protect my backup drive from a fire and then fails to do so. My home backups are to avoid the inconvenience of a hardware failure. If my house burns down I have more important things to worry about.
--
JimFive
ya how exactly is "the best place to put speed traps" NOT being used to improve traffic safety?
A speed trap is a stretch of road where the speed limit is lower than necessary for safety. This stretch is then used to catch people speeding through that section as a revenue generating tool. In the case in the summary I expect that the police force is finding stretches of road where the limit is already lower than it should be from a safety standpoint and using them as a trap.
N.B. If there is a real safety concern then the accident rate would have identified these areas without using the GPS data.
"As in the rest of the nation, most vehicle fatalities in South Carolina and Georgia are attributed to one or more of those three factors: speeding, drunken driving or not wearing a seat belt."
It should be noted that it is common for statistics of this type to be heavy handed. E.g. if a person dies and someone had been drinking then the death is attributed to "drunk driving" even if the death could not have been averted.
Speed traps can catch: cell phones, texting, not wearing a seat belt and speeding, and drunk driving.
But they won't, except incidentally. The point of a speed trap is to issue citations quickly and easily in a small space. Adding on an extra ticket for not wearing a seatbelt is gravy. However, they aren't on the road watching for erratic driving, they are hidden to the side and pointing a radar gun.
--
JimFive
Can you suggest a better on-site solution?
On your person. There are, basically, two scenarios:
1. A fire occurs when you are at home. In this case you grab some stuff and usher your kids out of the house. The drive needs to be in the group of "some stuff" that you're going to grab without thinking too much.
2. A fire occurs when you are away from home. The only way to save the drive is to have it also be away from home.
So: Coat pocket, briefcase, purse, perhaps your car.
You might also consider performing an "important papers only" backup onto a thumb drive that you keep on your keychain. Part of document management is deciding which documents don't need to be kept.
--
JimFive
My tip is to keep your backup harddrive in the same firesafe box. Mine is one of those little bus-powered USB drives. I do a backup ever week or so, then put the drive back in the firesafe box.
This is a bad idea. That firesafe box is designed to protect papers from combustion by inhibiting the available air. It is not going to keep your backup drive from being damaged by heat.
--
JimFive
There's definitely no right to be running botnet code.
You might be surprised. There is certainly a "natural right" to run whatever code I wish on a computer that I own. My exercising of that right (as with other natural rights) is limited by its effect on others. The common expression is "your right to swing your arms ends at my nose."
Since the botnet software itself(*) is not affecting you there is a right to run it. However, if the commands that the botnet CnC send begin to affect you then I may not have the right to execute those commands.
If you didn't have this right then you would not have the right to run any distributed computing environment such as SETI@home.
(*)I am making a distinction here between the software that allows a computer to receive commands from the command server, and the commands that are received.
--
JimFive
I still occasionally use metrics as a way to do "thru conversions", in particular between volume and mass (because one deci-meter of water is one liter of water is approx 1 kg).
You might be interested to know that a pint of water (16 fl oz) weighs 1 pound (16 oz).
--
JimFive
Do you really think this debate will go anywhere productive?
Of course not, but that goes right back to the point of the article. Allowing foaming at the mouth extreme positions to stand without a reasoned opposition abdicates to the wackos, not just the terms of the debate, but the ability to debate.
--
JimFive
On the other side of this teacher debate you might start to ask why it is that in states where the teachers are paid the most correlate well with states that have the worst education?
I don't believe this to be true, so a citation is needed. While there are certainly high pay, poor performing districts I seriously doubt the correlation you posit.
Even so, it is disingenuous to make this comparison at the state level. Within states teacher pay and school quality vary widely between districts. Thus any such comparison would need to compare on a district level, not a state level. Also, teacher pay should be normalized to the average pay of the district to account for cost of living issues.
I am saying that seniority instead of merit based firing decisions can not but fail to produce good education. Even though that would be best for the districts, schools and the students it is not done. Why?
Seniority is not a particularly good way to handle teacher advancement. However, it does eliminate a form of coercion that would exist in an "merit" based system. The "Don't teach evolution or get fired" form of coercion. Or the "Don't fail my child or don't get a raise" form of coercion.
Once you find a good, objective way to measure merit (and standardized testing of the students isn't it) then we can talk about merit based raises and firing decisions.
--
JimFive
This discussion has made me think that it might be a good idea to look at who the editor is for the ebook. Books with a good editor will at least be readable, if even they aren't worthwhile to read. Unedited books are much more likely to be trash. Ideally, the editting contract would have a provision for the editor withdrawing es name from the book if it doesn't meet es standards. A new writer would be able to hire a competent editor to gain a certain amount of credibility.
--
JimFive
Note this requires an attacker to already have access to the config.db, i.e. one must have physical access to the machine and already be logged in as a privileged user or owner of the config.db.
No it doesn't. It requires an attacker to create their own config.db file and guess the hostID. How long is that HostID and how is it generated?
--
JimFive
I've always thought it rather obvious that Science is a Faith. If a word cannot be used to define itself, than how can Science ever be used to prove itself?
If a word cannot be used to define itself then how can a sphere be spherical.
Science is not a THING. Science is a process, a method, of using our experience of the material world to describe WHAT happens.
Science proves itself by being able to describe the world in a way that proves useful to us in our endeavors. e.g. We can build airplanes and computers.
--
JimFive
Demonstrate dark matter, dark energy, weak interaction, or hell how gravity works
A current lack of knowledge about any given topic is not a refutation of science. It is perfectly legitimate to say that we don't know how gravity works. That doesn't invalidate the Theory of Gravity, or the Law of Gravity. In fact, if we knew how gravity worked then that would no longer be an interesting question in science.
--
JimFive
If we had smarter more adaptable CLIs people would be far more familiar instead you find out you missed a comma somewhere and it takes you 5 minutes to track that down. Or you try to figure out if adjusting contrast is even a function at all.
Many years ago there was a shell for the Macintosh (pre OSX) called MPW. One of the features of this shell was a tool called "Commando". You would type in the command name and press a hotkey and a dialog showing all of the parameters would show up. You would enter the parameters and when you exited the commando window the full command line would return to the shell ready for you to execute, or read and learn, or copy into a script.
I've occasionally thought that a good OSS project would be to create similar functionality in linux with a generic front end that read specially formatted help data to build the commando box and return the command line. Ideally, a standardized option flag like ls --commando would return a formatted string (possibly XML) that the commando interface would interpret for building the dialog box. Alternatively, the commando options string could be stored in a separate location so that it could be added without changing the tools.
--
JimFive
I do not think that linking to _anything_ is a crime, but is in undeniable that it can make it easy for people who want it to commit a crime. I don't know what's the correct English wording for it, but I think that it is not wrong to say that in such cases they can be considered "accessory to a crime".
I don't think that the printer of the city map can be held responsible for helping the bank robber find the bank, nor can the nice person at the tourist office that gave directions. Thus, I don't agree that a search engine can be held responsible for helping an internet user find a website. Therefore I don't agree that it is "reasonable for search engines to be protected by explicit laws" because creating that specific law creates an environment where a large number of other acts are now questionable. Once a law is made specifically allowing a type of activity then any related activites that are not addressed in law are now suspect.
--
JimFive
In a normal market, pricing drops closer to the cost of production.
This is not correct. In a commodity market prices drop closer to the cost of production. Music, tv, and movies are not commodities. An episode of Glee is not interchangeable with an episode of Mythbusters. When you pay for an tv episode you are not paying for 23 minutes of undifferentiated content, you are paying for the quality that you perceive in the product.
--
JimFive
Personally, I think it's a good idea not having a bunch of kids standing in the dark waiting for a school bus during the winter.
I just wanted to point out that there are two things wrong with this view.
1. Winter is Standard Time, thus there is no need to change the clocks for the kids.
2. Kids are waiting for the bus in the dark anyway. Therefore, changing the clocks (in this manner) is ineffective at protecting the children.
--
JimFive
Way back in the days of CompuServ, there were two billing models for internet use. By the minute or by the byte. Most home usage was by the minute. When "unlimited internet" came to be it meant that you were charged a flat monthly rate and there were no time limits on your connection. It had nothing to do with how much data you sent across the wire. More recently, as broadband internet became popular it was advertised as "Always On" again, contrasting itself with a time limited dial-up connection. (Even though the dialup was unlimited in terms of time, it was not common for people to leave it connected, because they, you know, wanted to use the phone).
Now that always on, broadband(ish) connections are common, we, the consumers, think that unlimited should mean unlimited bytes, even though it has, historically, never meant that.
TL;DR: Because "unlimited" is more ambiguous as you think.
--
JimFive
also suspect there will be loopholes to buy an extraordinary yacht and keep it somewhere else most of the time, killing the argument that at least the rich are getting taxed more than they do now.
The rich will either buy everything they want somewhere that doesn't have a sales tax, or move out completely.
It should also help skew the economy towards one with a savings rate by taxing spending,
One person's spending is another person's income. Increasing the savings rate will necessarily reduce economic growth.
--
JimFive
What I mean is that it pretty much involves keeping track of the receipts yourself and then there has to be some way of sending the money and the receipts in to the state.
When ordering from out of state you are likely to use a credit card or other third party payment system; keeping track of the purchases is pretty easy. You don't need to send the receipts to the state, just a statement and money.
I'm not aware of any state that actually advertises the process or enforces compliance.
In Michigan there is a line/worksheet to fill out as part of the state's Income Tax filing.
--
JimFive
create an alternative currency that cannot be manipulated or controlled by centralized authorities.
Until someone decides to corner the market to run up the price and then dump them for a huge profit.
--
JimFive
Any analogy can be stretched too far. You are also unlikely to drop your house at a restaurant and not notice that you had lost it.
--
JimFive
With the thermostat example, you're saying that a human is intelligent because it can choose to not lower the temperature at night even though it would save energy while the thermostat would have to always lower the temperature to save energy.
A human may choose to not lower the temperature for any number of reasons, including: being cold. Intelligence can react to unanticipated situations, the thermostat cannot.
So basically your definition of Intelligence is the ability to choose to act non-intelligently?
There are two problems with this statement as a statement. The first is ambiguity in the use of the word intelligent, where in the second usage you are using it as a synonym for rational. Intelligence does not require that one always be rigidly rational. The second is that it is a strawman.
--
JimFive
What does freedom of action mean?
Without getting bogged down in philosophical discourse it means the ability to choose otherwise.
what you think of as "freedom of choice" is really an illusion.
I am not going to argue for or against determinism here, but if the above statement is correct then there is no reasoning, no decision making, and no intelligence in the universe.
--
JimFive
intelligence is the measurement of the amount of reasoning or decision making capability an entity has.
I can agree to using this definition with the caveat that making a decision and reasoning both require freedom of action. A thermostat does not have freedom of action.
When you make a decision do you not think there is some underlying set of chemical and electrical processes that occur that generate that decision?
How humans generate decisions is a red herring. When the thermostat turns on the furnace it is the builder/user of the thermostat that made the decision.
Obviously if there were just programmers in the back room making all the decisions that wouldn't have needed a multi-million dollar computer. While I agree that having the programmers involved during the games taints the results, the programmers were merely tweaking the algorithms
I think you misunderstand. The decisions that I was referring to as made by the programmers are precisely the decisions of what algorithms to use for the evaluation function, how to trim the minmax tree, etc. By the time it gets to the computer the board position is plugged in and the computer makes the determined move. The computer does not decide what move to make.
Parallel parking is a lot harder than you imagine, having to process visual input, make judgments as to how much to turn the wheels, how much to back up or go forward, judging the distance to the curb and the cars in front and back. If if were that easy it would have been made available years ago.
Visual (camera) input isn't necessary, proximity/range sensors would suffice. A human judges distance, an automated car measures it. Decisions about how much to turn/move are likely made by the programmers, not the vehicles computer. The difficulties that prevented this from being available years ago are likely problems with control precision, not decision logic.
RE: cross country driving
Here's where I think the problem is: Let's say you you have a computer that can control a car well enough to drive around the block and down the freeway and it knows the "rules of the road":
Q. Why can't you just tell it to drive to LA?
A. Because it isn't intelligent.
Now, just because a car CAN drive to LA, that doesn't mean that it's intelligent. If you have to program in every possible thing that could go wrong, still not intelligent. If it can adapt to unanticipated situations on the fly then it might be intelligent.
--
JimFive