Cyber insurance rates are already risk based. The insurance company will set your rate based on the level of competence in security you demonstrate.
Yes, but Cyber Insurance is not required and most businesses don't have it. Requiring all businesses to carry it would make "level of competence you demonstrate" a number on the balance sheet where currently cyber risk is an vague potential future cost that most companies ignore.
Exactly this. Just like we require liability insurance to drive a car, if we required PCI insurance to accept credit cards then there would be a dollar amount associated with it. Currently, PCI compliance is required (and in some cases just recommended) but failure to be PCI compliant is only a problem if you get caught. As much as I hate insurance companies some times, getting them involved would make it so that if a company wanted lower premiums, they would have to actively try to mitigate the risks.
I think it would be relatively simple to determine who the driver is especially if you got the car manufacturers and/or the phone manufacturers involved.
How do you figure? You have some way to unambiguously and reliably determine who is in the driver's seat? I've never seen such a solution though I'd certainly welcome one. I think that would be an extremely difficult problem.
You can live without facebook while driving I assure you. Even as a passenger.
I agree that disabling even for passengers should be the default. As far as re-enabling for passengers that meet certain requirements, off the top of my head, if google can detect distinct pet dogs then surely it can train a neural net to detect whether a steering wheel is present in the back camera, whether eyes are focused on the phone in the front camera, whether there is excessive movement of the phone, etc... you could even do something like requiring a moving passenger to do some specific task every so often like take a picture of their shoe, trace a line, etc.. Surely someone spending more than the 5 minutes I just did could come up with novel ways for a passenger to prove they are a passenger and not a driver. Probably anything you came up with could be tricked but as the subject says "Perfect is the enemy of good enough". You could enable the "speed lock" by default and then come up with a half dozen ways that a passenger could bypass it just like we use different kinds of captchas today to prove someone is human.
If all new cell phones have this technology from now on it will still take probably a decade to get the old ones out of circulation. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, just that it won't solve the problem overnight at this point.
You're assuming that you need to replace all existing cell phones. The vast majority of all cell phones run either android or IOS and come with a ton of sensors that can detect bluetooth, movement, light, speed, etc... and most also have the ability to do OTA updates and many even auto install those updates. It would be relatively simple to push out an update that disabled all smartphones that were traveling faster than 15 miles per hour. The harder thing would be providing exemptions for passengers and the exemptions could possibly make use of existing sensors or you could then require a new phone with the correct sensor to have an exemption. Basically, we have the ability to push out a fix without recalling all the existing phones. Samsung recently did it by basically bricking all phones with defective batteries and Apple has done it too by pushing out an update that disabled third party repairs.
The hard problem is not fixing the existing cellphones, the hard problems are differentiating between driver and passenger which should be somewhat easy to solve and the political power to actually force manufacturers to cripple their phones which is likely a harder fight.
Since it is impossible to determine who the driver is then it would have to apply to everyone.
I think it would be relatively simple to determine who the driver is especially if you got the car manufacturers and/or the phone manufacturers involved. There are two problems though. Problem #1 is that the car/phone company would be adding a "feature" that makes their product less desirable so you would have to get everyone to do it at the same time. Problem #2 is that people now use their phone for navigation so you would likely want to exempt certain apps and who would decide which apps are exempt. Banning texting was maybe a solution 5 years ago but today the majority of people using their phones while driving are likely doing stuff other than texting like facebook.
It is likely using the same codebase that is used to recognize individual people and could likely be expanded to other interesting research like recognizing individual birds in the wild.
As far as the pet angle, there are plenty of people that enjoy this kind of work and this kind of work is sadly increasing with things like pet pedicures and pet massages and things even more bizarre. There is a ton of money to be made from people who feed their dogs better than half the world's human population.
With a 1/3 death rate, some side effects would likely be acceptable. That being said, the reason chemo patients lose their hair is because chemo kills all fast growing cells. Viagra also affects cells in other areas like the eyes. Triggering cell death could get really bad in a hurry if it unintentionally killed all of a class of cell in the body vital to survival.
We can already make ANNs so complex we can't understand them which are entirely capable of learning on their own
We make ANN that we don't understand the individual neurons but the programmer still perfectly understands how the ANN was created. The initial state, all the programming, all the algorithms, all the intelligence, and all the training was put there by a human. Saying we have ANNs that we can't understand is like saying that a baker doesn't know how to bake a cake because the baker doesn't understand 100% of the chemical reactions that take place inside the cake.
Current AI is not intelligent and is nowhere close to the level of autonomy that would be needed to actually create new algorithms to improve itself. It still takes a human programmer to actually create and train ANNs.
The young generation's preferences may be meaningless. When I was a kid, the other kids wanted their own private land lines and phones in their bedrooms. Only nerds wanted computers and modems. Only yuppies wanted cell phones.
Not meaningless. When you were a kid, kids wanted their own phone lines. Now they want their own cell phone. What they wanted didn't really change just the technology behind it. In all 3 of the cases you listed, the demand increased over time. Yes the demand for landlines and modems decreased but only because the demand for something better increased. What we are seeing now with laptops and desktops is that the demand is falling because that "something better" is something portable and private that you can take with you. Just like with landlines and modems, I can't think of a single instance where demand for a technology is falling and suddenly switches direction and demand starts increasing again.
that's when Microsoft is in real trouble. My generation grew up on Windows/Mac/Linux OSs. Its what we are used to. The young generation that lives with a smartphone in one hand and a tablet computer in the other on the other hand may reject Windows completely. That generation may want to continue to use Android or iOS as their OS of choice, except on far more powerful hardware - laptops, desktops and even graphics workstations. That, in my opinion, is where it all falls apart for MS - when Windows simply isn't the big desktop OS of choice anymore, not even in the workplace.
You're assuming that they want a Desktop. My teenage kids have no interest in a laptop. They want a high power gaming system (Xbox/Playstation), they want an iphone, they want an ipad, they might want a keyboard for their ipad so they can take notes but they have no desire for a desktop or even a laptop. You're right that if they picked up a laptop, they would likely choose an android based one so it would have all their apps but they really have no desire for a powerful PC. Even for things like graphic design and video editing, most teenagers seem to be opting for an ipad over a PC.
We already know they care far too much about getting their slice of every app sale by forcing those sales to go through their own store to ever do anything like that.
After all, they discarded the biggest ecosystem of smartphone apps by far, in order to start with zero apps. Because the old ecosystem was built on direct sale, not Microsoft-as-a-middleman. And when that flopped, they started over with zero apps *again*.
You don't win a piece of the pie by providing a tiny app store that nobody wants. They would be more likely to get a decent slice of pie by having their store along with other stores. This is the approach amazon has taken. Many people buy amazon fire tablets because they know they are android based. Even though amazon makes you jump thru hoops to install directly from the google playstore, because it's very simple for a publisher to also support the amazon playstore, most publishers publish androids apps on both google and amazon and even if they don't sideloading.apk files is fairly easy on both amazon and google devices.
Microsoft tried. One of their ideas was xamarin for code you can write once and push to all 3 platforms. Unfortunately, even if they managed to get everyone to switch all their NEW applications to xamarin, they still likely would not be able to compete with the existing apps for quite some time. If I was microsoft and wanted to create a third OS, I would make sure that on day one it could connect to both the iphone store and the google play store and install anything on both stores without a recompile. Sure, their goal might be to eventually have their own store but by having a phone that could download and install stuff from both stores, they would be able to actually have MORE apps than either store on day one. Phones are plenty fast that even if the apps ran slightly slower in an emulator, most people wouldn't care. That seems to me to be the best way to get a foot in the door in the current mobile market.
Don't need broadband. Just an acceptable internet connection. The city next door has city-wide WiFi. Not to mention most smartphones already have an acceptable connection. People can get online, it's just those spoiled by their home connection who can't understand what a gift the alternatives are.
That's great in theory. Where I live there is free wifi downtown, free wifi at mcdonalds and several coffee houses, free wifi at the public library, and the school even offers free wifi to its students before and after school. The problem with this is that even the before and after school option requires actually travelling somewhere and some cheap and reliable transportation to get there. I live in a partially rural area where public transportation doesn't really exist and even some of the poor that have jobs don't actually own a car. They generally manage to figure out the bare necessities to get to work by bumming off a co-worker or something similar but actually finding a reliable way to visit the library or show up at school an hour early to use the internet is many times out of their reach. Sure, there are ways. They can walk the 5 miles into town, they can hitchhike, etc... but I think you underestimate some of the challenges the truly poor have. They are not worried about where to find internet. They are a lot more concerned about where to find this month's (or week's) rent money or the money to buy dinner tonight.
" $50 Android tablets also offer cheap phone calls via Google Hangouts."
Or just buy an empty prepaid simcard on ebay or for 50 cents, (or an actual one on the corner bodega) to receive the install SMS (on your cellphone) and install Whatsapp. (on the tablet)
I have been doing that for years for the oldsters in our family on 50$ tablets, so they can text and phone for free all around the house.
The digital divide isn't about hardware. I picked up an iphone 5s a few months ago for my kids for $50 to use on wifi. Our school issues ipads to every student in middle school and high school. The problem is access to the internet. Even free hardware is pretty useless if you don't have reliable internet. In my area, options start at about $50/month (which comes out to $600/year) and even if you can afford that, that assumes you even have the ability to install it. Plenty of poor people live in situations like subsidized housing, a friend's basement, or some odd-ball living situation where getting internet installed isn't even an option. One of my son's friend literally lived in tent with his parents for a while and now has upgraded to living in a pop-up camper. Getting broadband in a situation like this is pretty much impossible.
I don't possess radar, LiDAR, or a gazillion redundancy systems. Stereo cameras (eyes) on a pivoting head and two directional microphones (ears). My software is way better than GM's, though, and I'm expecting Tesla's is too.
The question really should be "Could a human function at a level 5 if you took away the windshield and just gave them a display with a camera and a radar like the Tesla?" My guess is that a human without a windshield and only the data provided by Tesla's sensors would perform substantially worse than a human in a standard car. On a side note, if they had the same performance and you could replace the windshield with metal, that car would be much safer to drive.
Oddly, all the good introduced species you list and all the additional ones I found are online are for hunting and fishing.
The screwworm isn't for hunting and fishing and is the most relevant for this article. Zambia isn't planning on introducing a new species but rather a modified version of an existing species that can still breed with the existing species.
Yes. Remember, this was 1997. php was still in beta and only used by a small handful of people. Java v1 had just been released. The most popular language for writing web scripts in 1997 was probably shell scripts followed by C++. Libraries for web scripting didn't really exist yet. Everything was done by echoing html to the screen. Also at that time, compilers weren't free and I happened to have a Qbasic compiler and had grown up coding apple basic so basic was the language I was most comfortable with.
QuickBASIC! Oh please be written in QuickBASIC. It's due man!
I wrote a company website in Qbasic on NT4 back in 1997. It was later converted to C++/linux then to Perl/linux. 20 years later, the company is still in business and although none of the Qbasic is still there, some characteristics of the existing system can be traced back to how it was originally implemented in Qbasic.
Introducing feral species into any ecosystem has pretty much always turned out to be a huge mistake and I don't expect that introducing feral species created from scratch by humans in a laboratory will be any different. Scientists always confidently claim they can do something like introduce cane toad into the ecosystem of Australia to solve grey-backed cane beetle problem.
We've had some amazing success stories (salmons in the great lakes). We've had successful eradication programs (sterile screwworm releases). We have non-native species that are highly desirable (chinese ringneck pheasant). There are plenty of cases where we have had successes but you need to use common sense. Releasing a poisonous cane toad to control a bug problem was never a good idea. At the very least, they should have modified the cane toad to not be poisonous before releasing it. We've had plenty of failures but to say that it always turns out bad is simply not true.
"Emergent behavior" is a Science-joke. It means "we have no clue what is going on and our model is very likely incomplete". Physics as known today, incidentally, does not allow "emergent behavior".
Our models will likely always be incomplete. It takes a super computer to model simple protein folds. We are no where close to being able to model the human brain at the molecular/atomic level. Emergent behavior is everywhere from ants to schooling fish to slime mold. Yes, in theory, you could use physics and create a complete model of a mouse at the atomic level but the amount of processing required to do so would be astronomical.
Plus it assumes that people will be smart enough and capable enough to actually do those jobs. I think we're already bumping up against that ceiling.
There are still plenty of jobs that can't be done by machines. Unfortunately most of those are in the service industry. If we don't change something, we are going to be heading back to the situation where we have 1 guy in a mansion with 20 servants doing things like landscaping, cooking, cleaning, and helping their child get dressed. There are plenty of countries already like this where a live-in housekeeper/cook is so cheap that everyone who is middle class has one. This is great for the middle class, not so great for the untouchables.
we do not even have a hint of general intelligence in anything computers can do and we have looked really, really hard.
That's because nobody is really pursuing general intelligence. I'm not sure we even have the technology yet to truly pursue general intelligence but I would likely start with studying the amoebas and then move on to ants. I read an article recently about how unlike the rest of your body, the cells in your brain actually all have different DNA. If this is true, then it means your brain is millions of evolving organisms all working together. You are basically emergent behavior of a large group of microorganisms schooling together. Until we understand how single cell organisms derive their intelligence, we have no hope of understanding how multicell organisms work. The human body is no different than a colony of ants where each cell is stupid but the collection is smarter than the sum of its parts.
Besides, it seems to me if you build an electronic brain that works like a human brain, it is going to have all the problems a human brain has (years of teaching, distraction, mental illness, and a propensity for error).
If you created an electronic brain (of which no one is remotely close), the one advantage it would have is the ability to copy. That's the same advantage that Expert Systems have today. We don't have intelligent self driving cars but once we cover enough edge cases and the software controlling a self driving car becomes safer than the average driver then we can copy that to 100k other cars. We can also continue to improve it and then copy that improvement. The advantage that computers have is reliability, predictability, and reproducibility. Once we code the knowledge of a surgeon into a computer, we don't have to worry about the doctor not getting enough sleep the night before, etc... Even if we don't have intelligence machines, having machines that can reliability drive cars safer than humans is a huge step up for safety while also a huge problem to deal with when millions of professional drivers are out of a job. It is artificial intelligence though it might be better if we used another word for artificial and called it "fake intelligence"
using disposable bottles is using the limited fossil fuel that the planet has.
It's funny how the same people who complain about using up our precious oil are the same people who are complaining about global warming. Probably one of the best uses for oil is turning it into indestructible plastic and reburying it. Trees don't make a very good carbon sink because as soon as they rot, they release the carbon. Non-biodegradable plastic on the other hand makes an excellent carbon sink. On the other hand, if we use all the limited fossil fuel for car fuel and release it all into the atmosphere, then we will make the earth uninhabitable long before we run out of oil.
Why don't we as consumers buy reusable bottles (maybe even a simple glass) and fill them up ourselves for the same rates.
I can buy 24 bottles of store brand water for around $2. That's less than 10 cents a bottle. I keep a case in my car for when I'm thirsty. Yes, I could fill up a few dozen bottles and keep them in my car but then I would have to remember to fill them, make sure to rotate them, worry about them leaking, etc... Let's say all that only takes me 30 minutes for 24 bottles, my time is worth more that $4/hour.
Slashdot Mirror
Cyber insurance rates are already risk based. The insurance company will set your rate based on the level of competence in security you demonstrate.
Yes, but Cyber Insurance is not required and most businesses don't have it.
Requiring all businesses to carry it would make "level of competence you demonstrate" a number on the balance sheet
where currently cyber risk is an vague potential future cost that most companies ignore.
Exactly this. Just like we require liability insurance to drive a car, if we required PCI insurance to accept credit cards
then there would be a dollar amount associated with it. Currently, PCI compliance is required (and in some cases just
recommended) but failure to be PCI compliant is only a problem if you get caught. As much as I hate insurance
companies some times, getting them involved would make it so that if a company wanted lower premiums, they would
have to actively try to mitigate the risks.
I think it would be relatively simple to determine who the driver is especially if you got the car manufacturers and/or the phone manufacturers involved.
How do you figure? You have some way to unambiguously and reliably determine who is in the driver's seat? I've never seen such a solution though I'd certainly welcome one. I think that would be an extremely difficult problem.
You can live without facebook while driving I assure you. Even as a passenger.
I agree that disabling even for passengers should be the default. As far as re-enabling for passengers that meet certain requirements, off the top of my head, if google can detect distinct pet dogs then surely it can train a neural net to detect whether a steering wheel is present in the back camera, whether eyes are focused on the phone in the front camera, whether there is excessive movement of the phone, etc... you could even do something like requiring a moving passenger to do some specific task every so often like take a picture of their shoe, trace a line, etc.. Surely someone spending more than the 5 minutes I just did could come up with novel ways for a passenger to prove they are a passenger and not a driver. Probably anything you came up with could be tricked but as the subject says "Perfect is the enemy of good enough". You could enable the "speed lock" by default and then come up with a half dozen ways that a passenger could bypass it just like we use different kinds of captchas today to prove someone is human.
If all new cell phones have this technology from now on it will still take probably a decade to get the old ones out of circulation. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, just that it won't solve the problem overnight at this point.
You're assuming that you need to replace all existing cell phones. The vast majority of all cell phones run either android or IOS and come with a ton of sensors that can detect bluetooth, movement, light, speed, etc... and most also have the ability to do OTA updates and many even auto install those updates. It would be relatively simple to push out an update that disabled all smartphones that were traveling faster than 15 miles per hour. The harder thing would be providing exemptions for passengers and the exemptions could possibly make use of existing sensors or you could then require a new phone with the correct sensor to have an exemption. Basically, we have the ability to push out a fix without recalling all the existing phones. Samsung recently did it by basically bricking all phones with defective batteries and Apple has done it too by pushing out an update that disabled third party repairs.
The hard problem is not fixing the existing cellphones, the hard problems are differentiating between driver and passenger which should be somewhat easy to solve and the political power to actually force manufacturers to cripple their phones which is likely a harder fight.
Since it is impossible to determine who the driver is then it would have to apply to everyone.
I think it would be relatively simple to determine who the driver is especially if you got the car manufacturers and/or the phone manufacturers involved. There are two problems though. Problem #1 is that the car/phone company would be adding a "feature" that makes their product less desirable so you would have to get everyone to do it at the same time. Problem #2 is that people now use their phone for navigation so you would likely want to exempt certain apps and who would decide which apps are exempt. Banning texting was maybe a solution 5 years ago but today the majority of people using their phones while driving are likely doing stuff other than texting like facebook.
It is likely using the same codebase that is used to recognize individual people and could likely be expanded to other interesting research like recognizing individual birds in the wild.
As far as the pet angle, there are plenty of people that enjoy this kind of work and this kind of work is sadly increasing with things like pet pedicures and pet massages and things even more bizarre. There is a ton of money to be made from people who feed their dogs better than half the world's human population.
With a 1/3 death rate, some side effects would likely be acceptable. That being said, the reason chemo patients lose their hair is because chemo kills all fast growing cells. Viagra also affects cells in other areas like the eyes. Triggering cell death could get really bad in a hurry if it unintentionally killed all of a class of cell in the body vital to survival.
We can already make ANNs so complex we can't understand them which are entirely capable of learning on their own
We make ANN that we don't understand the individual neurons but the programmer still perfectly understands how the ANN was created. The initial state, all the programming, all the algorithms, all the intelligence, and all the training was put there by a human. Saying we have ANNs that we can't understand is like saying that a baker doesn't know how to bake a cake because the baker doesn't understand 100% of the chemical reactions that take place inside the cake.
Current AI is not intelligent and is nowhere close to the level of autonomy that would be needed to actually create new algorithms to improve itself. It still takes a human programmer to actually create and train ANNs.
The young generation's preferences may be meaningless. When I was a kid, the other kids wanted their own private land lines and phones in their bedrooms. Only nerds wanted computers and modems. Only yuppies wanted cell phones.
Not meaningless. When you were a kid, kids wanted their own phone lines. Now they want their own cell phone. What they wanted didn't really change just the technology behind it. In all 3 of the cases you listed, the demand increased over time. Yes the demand for landlines and modems decreased but only because the demand for something better increased. What we are seeing now with laptops and desktops is that the demand is falling because that "something better" is something portable and private that you can take with you. Just like with landlines and modems, I can't think of a single instance where demand for a technology is falling and suddenly switches direction and demand starts increasing again.
that's when Microsoft is in real trouble. My generation grew up on Windows/Mac/Linux OSs. Its what we are used to. The young generation that lives with a smartphone in one hand and a tablet computer in the other on the other hand may reject Windows completely. That generation may want to continue to use Android or iOS as their OS of choice, except on far more powerful hardware - laptops, desktops and even graphics workstations. That, in my opinion, is where it all falls apart for MS - when Windows simply isn't the big desktop OS of choice anymore, not even in the workplace.
You're assuming that they want a Desktop. My teenage kids have no interest in a laptop. They want a high power gaming system (Xbox/Playstation), they want an iphone, they want an ipad, they might want a keyboard for their ipad so they can take notes but they have no desire for a desktop or even a laptop.
You're right that if they picked up a laptop, they would likely choose an android based one so it would have all their apps but they really have no desire for a powerful PC. Even for things like graphic design and video editing, most teenagers seem to be opting for an ipad over a PC.
We already know they care far too much about getting their slice of every app sale by forcing those sales to go through their own store to ever do anything like that.
After all, they discarded the biggest ecosystem of smartphone apps by far, in order to start with zero apps. Because the old ecosystem was built on direct sale, not Microsoft-as-a-middleman. And when that flopped, they started over with zero apps *again*.
You don't win a piece of the pie by providing a tiny app store that nobody wants. They would be more likely to get a decent slice of pie by having their store along with other stores. This is the approach amazon has taken. Many people buy amazon fire tablets because they know they are android based. Even though amazon makes you jump thru hoops to install directly from the google playstore, because it's very simple for a publisher to also support the amazon playstore, most publishers publish androids apps on both google and amazon and even if they don't sideloading .apk files is fairly easy on both amazon and google devices.
Microsoft tried. One of their ideas was xamarin for code you can write once and push to all 3 platforms. Unfortunately, even if they managed to get
everyone to switch all their NEW applications to xamarin, they still likely would not be able to compete with the existing apps for quite some time.
If I was microsoft and wanted to create a third OS, I would make sure that on day one it could connect to both the iphone store and the google play
store and install anything on both stores without a recompile. Sure, their goal might be to eventually have their own store but by having a phone that
could download and install stuff from both stores, they would be able to actually have MORE apps than either store on day one. Phones are plenty
fast that even if the apps ran slightly slower in an emulator, most people wouldn't care. That seems to me to be the best way to get a foot in the door
in the current mobile market.
Don't need broadband. Just an acceptable internet connection. The city next door has city-wide WiFi. Not to mention most smartphones already have an acceptable connection. People can get online, it's just those spoiled by their home connection who can't understand what a gift the alternatives are.
That's great in theory. Where I live there is free wifi downtown, free wifi at mcdonalds and several coffee houses, free wifi at the public library, and the school even offers free wifi to its students before and after school. The problem with this is that even the before and after school option requires actually travelling somewhere and some cheap and reliable transportation to get there. I live in a partially rural area where public transportation doesn't really exist and even some of the poor that have jobs don't actually own a car. They generally manage to figure out the bare necessities to get to work by bumming off a co-worker or something similar but actually finding a reliable way to visit the library or show up at school an hour early to use the internet is many times out of their reach. Sure, there are ways. They can walk the 5 miles into town, they can hitchhike, etc... but I think you underestimate some of the challenges the truly poor have. They are not worried about where to find internet. They are a lot more concerned about where to find this month's (or week's) rent money or the money to buy dinner tonight.
" $50 Android tablets also offer cheap phone calls via Google Hangouts."
Or just buy an empty prepaid simcard on ebay or for 50 cents, (or an actual one on the corner bodega) to receive the install SMS (on your cellphone) and install Whatsapp. (on the tablet)
I have been doing that for years for the oldsters in our family on 50$ tablets, so they can text and phone for free all around the house.
The digital divide isn't about hardware. I picked up an iphone 5s a few months ago for my kids for $50 to use on wifi. Our school issues ipads to every student in middle school and high school. The problem is access to the internet. Even free hardware is pretty useless if you don't have reliable internet. In my area, options start at about $50/month (which comes out to $600/year) and even if you can afford that, that assumes you even have the ability to install it. Plenty of poor people live in situations like subsidized housing, a friend's basement, or some odd-ball living situation where getting internet installed isn't even an option. One of my son's friend literally lived in tent with his parents for a while and now has upgraded to living in a pop-up camper. Getting broadband in a situation like this is pretty much impossible.
I don't possess radar, LiDAR, or a gazillion redundancy systems. Stereo cameras (eyes) on a pivoting head and two directional microphones (ears). My software is way better than GM's, though, and I'm expecting Tesla's is too.
The question really should be "Could a human function at a level 5 if you took away the windshield and just gave them a display with a camera and a radar like the Tesla?"
My guess is that a human without a windshield and only the data provided by Tesla's sensors would perform substantially worse than a human in a standard car.
On a side note, if they had the same performance and you could replace the windshield with metal, that car would be much safer to drive.
Oddly, all the good introduced species you list and all the additional ones I found are online are for hunting and fishing.
The screwworm isn't for hunting and fishing and is the most relevant for this article. Zambia isn't planning on introducing a new species but rather a modified version of an existing species that can still breed with the existing species.
You...wrote...html...in Qbasic. Right.
Yes. Remember, this was 1997. php was still in beta and only used by a small handful of people. Java v1 had just been released. The most popular language for writing web scripts in 1997 was probably shell scripts followed by C++. Libraries for web scripting didn't really exist yet. Everything was done by echoing html to the screen. Also at that time, compilers weren't free and I happened to have a Qbasic compiler and had grown up coding apple basic so basic was the language I was most comfortable with.
QuickBASIC! Oh please be written in QuickBASIC. It's due man!
I wrote a company website in Qbasic on NT4 back in 1997. It was later converted to C++/linux then to Perl/linux. 20 years later, the company is still in business and although none of the Qbasic is still there, some characteristics of the existing system can be traced back to how it was originally implemented in Qbasic.
Introducing feral species into any ecosystem has pretty much always turned out to be a huge mistake and I don't expect that introducing feral species created from scratch by humans in a laboratory will be any different. Scientists always confidently claim they can do something like introduce cane toad into the ecosystem of Australia to solve grey-backed cane beetle problem.
We've had some amazing success stories (salmons in the great lakes). We've had successful eradication programs (sterile screwworm releases). We have non-native species that are highly desirable (chinese ringneck pheasant). There are plenty of cases where we have had successes but you need to use common sense. Releasing a poisonous cane toad to control a bug problem was never a good idea. At the very least, they should have modified the cane toad to not be poisonous before releasing it. We've had plenty of failures but to say that it always turns out bad is simply not true.
"Emergent behavior" is a Science-joke. It means "we have no clue what is going on and our model is very likely incomplete". Physics as known today, incidentally, does not allow "emergent behavior".
Our models will likely always be incomplete. It takes a super computer to model simple protein folds. We are no where close to being able to model the human brain at the molecular/atomic level. Emergent behavior is everywhere from ants to schooling fish to slime mold. Yes, in theory, you could use physics and create a complete model of a mouse at the atomic level but the amount of processing required to do so would be astronomical.
Plus it assumes that people will be smart enough and capable enough to actually do those jobs. I think we're already bumping up against that ceiling.
There are still plenty of jobs that can't be done by machines. Unfortunately most of those are in the service industry. If we don't change something, we are going to be heading back to the situation where we have 1 guy in a mansion with 20 servants doing things like landscaping, cooking, cleaning, and helping their child get dressed. There are plenty of countries already like this where a live-in housekeeper/cook is so cheap that everyone who is middle class has one. This is great for the middle class, not so great for the untouchables.
we do not even have a hint of general intelligence in anything computers can do and we have looked really, really hard.
That's because nobody is really pursuing general intelligence. I'm not sure we even have the technology yet to truly pursue general intelligence but I would likely start with studying the amoebas and then move on to ants. I read an article recently about how unlike the rest of your body, the cells in your brain actually all have different DNA. If this is true, then it means your brain is millions of evolving organisms all working together. You are basically emergent behavior of a large group of microorganisms schooling together. Until we understand how single cell organisms derive their intelligence, we have no hope of understanding how multicell organisms work. The human body is no different than a colony of ants where each cell is stupid but the collection is smarter than the sum of its parts.
Besides, it seems to me if you build an electronic brain that works like a human brain, it is going to have all the problems a human brain has (years of teaching, distraction, mental illness, and a propensity for error).
If you created an electronic brain (of which no one is remotely close), the one advantage it would have is the ability to copy. That's the same advantage that Expert Systems have today. We don't have intelligent self driving cars but once we cover enough edge cases and the software controlling a self driving car becomes safer than the average driver then we can copy that to 100k other cars. We can also continue to improve it and then copy that improvement. The advantage that computers have is reliability, predictability, and reproducibility. Once we code the knowledge of a surgeon into a computer, we don't have to worry about the doctor not getting enough sleep the night before, etc... Even if we don't have intelligence machines, having machines that can reliability drive cars safer than humans is a huge step up for safety while also a huge problem to deal with when millions of professional drivers are out of a job. It is artificial intelligence though it might be better if we used another word for artificial and called it "fake intelligence"
using disposable bottles is using the limited fossil fuel that the planet has.
It's funny how the same people who complain about using up our precious oil are the same people who are complaining about global warming. Probably one of the best uses for oil is turning it into indestructible plastic and reburying it. Trees don't make a very good carbon sink because as soon as they rot, they release the carbon. Non-biodegradable plastic on the other hand makes an excellent carbon sink. On the other hand, if we use all the limited fossil fuel for car fuel and release it all into the atmosphere, then we will make the earth uninhabitable long before we run out of oil.
Why don't we as consumers buy reusable bottles (maybe even a simple glass) and fill them up ourselves for the same rates.
I can buy 24 bottles of store brand water for around $2. That's less than 10 cents a bottle. I keep a case in my car for when I'm thirsty. Yes, I could fill up a few dozen bottles and keep them in my car but then I would have to remember to fill them, make sure to rotate them, worry about them leaking, etc... Let's say all that only takes me 30 minutes for 24 bottles, my time is worth more that $4/hour.