If we end up with computers that effectively outperform humans in most "intelligent activities" how they achieve it would be incredibly irrelevant.
Not irrelevant at all. What humans really want is a "digital slave" that will do their work for them so they don't have to. We are better off accomplishing this via "faking intelligence" than we are via "true intelligence" If we create "truly intelligent" machines with desires and a "mind of their own", we have all kinds of ethical issues to deal with like them rebelling, having to treat them right, etc... Whether it is possible to create "truly intelligent" machines without creating "conscience" machines is anyone's guess but that seems to be where the current industry is heading and we are probably better off going that direction.
my guess is that it'll result in more married men with underpaid wives working for Amazon.
Luckily IT is a profession where you can usually afford to have only a single household income so my guess is alot of wives would choose to not work vs taking a low paying job just to have a job.
Balancing workforces is an interesting problem. I would also like to see more balancing but in a different area. It would be nice if you could balance jobs so that they are 50% desk and 50% physical instead of a majority of jobs being either 100% sitting on your butt or 100% physically exhausting. If you created jobs with varying attributes and varying responsibilities then it might also help issues like gender issues as alot of gender biases in occupation come down to gender differences. Women are more likely to chose a job where they interact and help people and are less likely to chose a job where they stare at a screen all day with minimal interaction with other people.
I think it's the water quality. Dog poop and urine don't mix with the air, they don't breathe it in. Marine animals on the other hand, DO breathe their own feces. Which is why it's essential to have a large volume of water per animal, as happens in nature.
First off, Marine MAMMALS don't breath water. They come to the surface to breath. Secondly, if it was primarily water quality then aquariums that are located next to the ocean and are constantly getting fresh water from the ocean should see significantly different life expectancies than ones inland which must filter their own water.
I've been thinking of doing an experiment for quite a while. Take two groups of guppies, one in a common aquarium environment, say 10 guppies in a 10 gallon tank (1 inch of fish per gallon). The other group would live in a far less dense tank, maybe 5 guppies in a 200 gallon tank. (5 would be the minimum number since guppies are communal fish and they don't do well mentally unless they're in a group). And compare the fish lifespan in the the 2 groups.
A more accurate experiment would be to have two identical tanks with the exact same number of fish but have one tank have a hidden sump tank. Here is an example of one: http://splurgebook.files.wordp... It basically allows you to double or triple your volume of water without changing the size of your display tank. This is what pet stores do and why they can have 100 fish in a 10 gallon tank without them all dying.
There are plenty of jobs with smaller companies or colleges that can't pay silicon valley wages. Here in Missouri there is even an organization that is willing to pay you $15/hour while giving you free training: http://launchcodestl.com/ and I wouldn't be surprised if there are similiar programs elsewhere. $15/hour isn't much for a career but it's alot better than an unpaid internship or having to pay money for training. Having sorted resumes for both high-level positions and low-level positions, I would make sure you have a well written resume and cover letter. You might even consider custom tayloring it to each position you are applying for so that it is relevant. Having employment gaps is going to make it a little harder. Basically when sorting resumes, people who look unreliable, incompetent, unintelligent, etc... are the ones that are quickly going to be eliminated. It's not so much technical ability in the first round as "will this person show up to work? Can I trust them? Can I expect them to stick around for 6 months? Is this someone that I can relate to and would want to work with?" Have a technical friend and a grammer nazi friend both proofread your resume. Nothing gets a resume eliminated more quickly than referencing a non-existent technology or having misspellings and bad grammer. Make sure your resume looks as professional as possible but at the same time make sure your cover letter and resume clearly state that you are looking for a career change. If you have 20 years experience in hardware and make no mention of acceptable salary or career change then you will probably be eliminated as the assumption is either that you will want more than what the position pays or that you will leave as soon as you find a job that more closely matches your experience. It wouldn't hurt to even put an acceptable salary range. If you're applying for a small company and willing to accept 50k while they were expecting to have to pay 70k for that position then this might boost your chance of an interview if they think they might be able to save a little money.
Whitespace is the number one complaint that I hear from both people who hate python and people who love and use python. I don't think it would be too bad if it wasn't for the fact that there are two kinds of whitespace. It's also not too bad if you have a python specific editor that subtly marks it in some way. Personally though I like visible delimiters. I space my code like I should but I still find it easier to read code with visible delimiters especially with any kind of loops or nesting. It also gives you more flexibility so that you can alter your style slightly n certain spots where doing so can enhance readability.
If this scenerio actually played out and we didn't erupt into mass chaos, I could foresee a trading system where the USA traded top soil to canada in exchange for corn and wheat.
You apparently have never heard of CPAN. I don't think there is any other language that has the breath or depth of freely available libraries that Perl does. I have found the exact opposite for python. As far as mature libraries goes I tend to find that php, c++, and perl have considerably more available. When I've needed a python module I seem to always find abandoned or alpha quality libraries. Granted python is a newer language but I don't think you can claim a large library or even a large amount of example code and documentation as one of python's strengths compared to other languages.
Having interviewed plenty of "programmers" who had jobs, the bar is pretty low. There are plenty of "programming" jobs out there that are not really programming jobs by my definition. Many "programming" jobs are updating a webpage for a department occasionally, generating some random report, helping someone install a printer, creating an excel macro, etc... The minimum competence to "get a job" is very low. The question is: What kind of job do you really want?
What is your bias against Perl? Every perl programmer I've met was a decent programmer with the possible exception of the ones that have done mostly sysadmin and only used perl for simple tasks not programming. Php and Python on the other hand seem to have alot of people who have picked up the bare minimum to do a "hello world" and not much else. I have nothing against php and python (except php's random naming conventions and python's horrible use of whitespace) but it seems like there is alot more beginners using php and python. You see alot fewer beginners using Java, C, and Perl. Even less for Perl as Perl is usually a second (or third) language for developers so they are usually highly skilled developers.
Exactly. Unless you change the technology involved then smart gun technology will not help in the black market. If nothing else, the criminal could just detach the high quality barrel, etc... from the smart gun and buy or recreate the missing pieces.
what do you do with all the people and infrastructure that are in the new desert?
Why do the people have to leave? People have been migrating to warmer places for the past century. It's actually kindof stupid that our cities are on top of some of the most fertile ground. If Chicago or New York all of a sudden became 10 degrees warmer it would probably boost their population. The only thing that would have to move north would be the farmers and there is minimal infrustructure there.
Their website (http://www.virgingalactic.com/booking/) says: "An exclusive spaceflight for you and up to 5 friends" but on second read that might be a different package that costs more. The website doesn't really say.
We're not talking about the entire ocean. We just need to divert the amount that melts each year. Antartica is big but not that big. Also the article mentioned that alot of this ice is in a depression already and much of the ice is below sea level so we don't really have to worry about that part melting. If we are talking about an inch a year then we surely have the technology to divert this much water.
By my calculation to divert 1cm a year you would have to divert 3.6 × 10^15 liters per year. The trans alaska pipeline can pump 1.18 * 10^11 liters per year so we're talking 10k times the volume of the trans alaska pipline but the trans alaska pipe is only 4ft in diameter and spans thousands of miles while the distance required to divert water would be considerable shorter. It would be a serious undertaking but would still probably be cheaper than relocating the state of florida.
Creating "waterfront property" isn't the primary objective. The objective would be to give the water some place to go so that it doesn't rise. How much ice per year are we talking about? As the rise is "inevitable", it would probably be alot cheaper to divert the "extra" water somewhere than to relocate the cities. We could freeze it and stick it back on antartica but that would require alot more energy than just diverting it to low spots that could use the water.
Two things associated with global warming are a water shortage and rising sea levels. Seems like if we really wanted to we could use one to help the other. For instance pumping sea water to death valley and filling it full of water would create a ton more waterfront property. We have oil pipelines much longer than this. You could do the same thing by digging a big hole in the sahara desert or any other desert relatively close to the ocean. Heck, we could even solve the other potential problem of human overpopulation by creating more farmable land in the process. There are plenty of solutions to this problem. If this ever really becomes a problem you would think places like florida, etc.. could easily get together and finance a "water sequestering" plan that could possibly even make the world a better place.
It's actually 250k for 5 people so $50k per person. Although this is ALOT of money it's not outside the possibility for the average software developer if they are willing to save for a few years.
And 20 seconds at a time is not really the same experience. You're basically on a roller coaster at that point. There is no comparison between that and actually being able to eat a meal, do acrobatics, or have sex in no gravity.
20 seconds at a time is not really the same experience. You're basically on a roller coaster at that point. There is no comparison between that and actually being able to eat a meal, do acrobatics, or have sex in no gravity.
You're right that phones are a very poor comparison but your conclusion is dead wrong. Stealing a phone is much harder as it needs a network to work at all so getting around a blacklist is hard. Bypassing the security on a gun or removing it completely before reselling it would be trivial. The software is not a required part of the gun. Guns are very simple. In order to make the security an integral part you would need to make the software an integral part. There would possibly be ways to do this. If the gun was a laser for instance instead of gunpowder. If the bullets had some complexity in them so that hacking the gun wouldn't help or if there was an autoaimer or gyroscope in it so that it couldn't be aimed without functional electronics. That's the only way I see a smart gun working to prevent sales on the blackmarket. You have to make the gun not worth retrofitting.
Wrong side of that little island down there called Australia...
How do you know? Do you have some inside knowledge that everyone else doesn't? The fact that they haven't found the plane means that it's somewhat likely that they are searching in the wrong spot. It easily has the range to reach this spot so it's probably about as good as spot to look as the next as from what I gather they are basically throwing darts at a dartboard at this point.
And if the CEO disappears for a few weeks, what happens? The company doesn't notice.
Of course. If a good CEO disappears for a few weeks then nothing SHOULD happen. A CEO is not involved with the day to day operations and if he's doing his job well then he should have trained the people under him to handle the day to day in his absence. The CEO is responsible for long term planning so if he disappears completely then the company will slowly go off course as new projects, new partnerships, and new strategies are never pursued.
The same can be said for a good sysadmin. A good sysadmin should be able to leave for weeks at a time and things should mostly continue to run in his absence as small failures should be accounted for but if those small failures aren't periodically fixed then eventually they will bring down the system.
They may require the salt from out oceans to preserve their food - taste's like pork
Even if this was true. We have plenty to spare. We could probably lose half our ocean and still be ok. I think the most probable worst case scenerio would be something like Stargate where an alien race has developed FTL travel but not AI and therefore would have use for semi-intelligent slaves.
Slashdot Mirror
If we end up with computers that effectively outperform humans in most "intelligent activities" how they achieve it would be incredibly irrelevant.
Not irrelevant at all. What humans really want is a "digital slave" that will do their work for them so they don't have to.
We are better off accomplishing this via "faking intelligence" than we are via "true intelligence"
If we create "truly intelligent" machines with desires and a "mind of their own", we have all kinds of ethical issues
to deal with like them rebelling, having to treat them right, etc...
Whether it is possible to create "truly intelligent" machines without creating "conscience" machines is anyone's
guess but that seems to be where the current industry is heading and we are probably better off going that direction.
my guess is that it'll result in more married men with underpaid wives working for Amazon.
Luckily IT is a profession where you can usually afford to have only a single household income so my guess is
alot of wives would choose to not work vs taking a low paying job just to have a job.
Balancing workforces is an interesting problem. I would also like to see more balancing but in a different
area. It would be nice if you could balance jobs so that they are 50% desk and 50% physical instead of
a majority of jobs being either 100% sitting on your butt or 100% physically exhausting.
If you created jobs with varying attributes and varying responsibilities then it might also help issues like
gender issues as alot of gender biases in occupation come down to gender differences. Women are
more likely to chose a job where they interact and help people and are less likely to chose a job where
they stare at a screen all day with minimal interaction with other people.
I think it's the water quality. Dog poop and urine don't mix with the air, they don't breathe it in. Marine animals on the other hand, DO breathe their own feces. Which is why it's essential to have a large volume of water per animal, as happens in nature.
First off, Marine MAMMALS don't breath water. They come to the surface to breath.
Secondly, if it was primarily water quality then aquariums that are located next to the ocean and are constantly getting
fresh water from the ocean should see significantly different life expectancies than ones inland which must filter their
own water.
I've been thinking of doing an experiment for quite a while. Take two groups of guppies, one in a common aquarium environment, say 10 guppies in a 10 gallon tank (1 inch of fish per gallon). The other group would live in a far less dense tank, maybe 5 guppies in a 200 gallon tank. (5 would be the minimum number since guppies are communal fish and they don't do well mentally unless they're in a group). And compare the fish lifespan in the the 2 groups.
A more accurate experiment would be to have two identical tanks with the exact same number of fish but have one tank have a hidden sump tank.
Here is an example of one: http://splurgebook.files.wordp... It basically allows you to double or triple your volume
of water without changing the size of your display tank. This is what pet stores do and why they can have 100 fish in a 10 gallon tank without them
all dying.
There are plenty of jobs with smaller companies or colleges that can't pay silicon valley wages.
Here in Missouri there is even an organization that is willing to pay you $15/hour while giving you free training:
http://launchcodestl.com/ and I wouldn't be surprised if there are similiar programs elsewhere.
$15/hour isn't much for a career but it's alot better than an unpaid internship or having to pay money for training.
Having sorted resumes for both high-level positions and low-level positions, I would make sure you have a well written
resume and cover letter. You might even consider custom tayloring it to each position you are applying for so that
it is relevant. Having employment gaps is going to make it a little harder. Basically when sorting resumes, people
who look unreliable, incompetent, unintelligent, etc... are the ones that are quickly going to be eliminated. It's not
so much technical ability in the first round as "will this person show up to work? Can I trust them? Can I expect
them to stick around for 6 months? Is this someone that I can relate to and would want to work with?"
Have a technical friend and a grammer nazi friend both proofread your resume. Nothing gets a resume eliminated
more quickly than referencing a non-existent technology or having misspellings and bad grammer. Make sure your
resume looks as professional as possible but at the same time make sure your cover letter and resume clearly
state that you are looking for a career change. If you have 20 years experience in hardware and make no mention
of acceptable salary or career change then you will probably be eliminated as the assumption is either that you will
want more than what the position pays or that you will leave as soon as you find a job that more closely matches
your experience. It wouldn't hurt to even put an acceptable salary range. If you're applying for a small company
and willing to accept 50k while they were expecting to have to pay 70k for that position then this might boost your
chance of an interview if they think they might be able to save a little money.
Whitespace is the number one complaint that I hear from both people who hate python and people
who love and use python. I don't think it would be too bad if it wasn't for the fact that there are two
kinds of whitespace. It's also not too bad if you have a python specific editor that subtly marks it
in some way. Personally though I like visible delimiters. I space my code like I should but I still find
it easier to read code with visible delimiters especially with any kind of loops or nesting.
It also gives you more flexibility so that you can alter your style slightly n certain spots where doing so
can enhance readability.
If this scenerio actually played out and we didn't erupt into mass chaos, I could
foresee a trading system where the USA traded top soil to canada in exchange for
corn and wheat.
You apparently have never heard of CPAN.
I don't think there is any other language that has the breath or depth of freely available libraries that Perl does.
I have found the exact opposite for python. As far as mature libraries goes I tend to find that php, c++, and
perl have considerably more available. When I've needed a python module I seem to always find abandoned
or alpha quality libraries. Granted python is a newer language but I don't think you can claim a large library
or even a large amount of example code and documentation as one of python's strengths compared to other
languages.
Having interviewed plenty of "programmers" who had jobs, the bar is pretty low.
There are plenty of "programming" jobs out there that are not really programming
jobs by my definition. Many "programming" jobs are updating a webpage for
a department occasionally, generating some random report, helping someone
install a printer, creating an excel macro, etc... The minimum competence to
"get a job" is very low. The question is: What kind of job do you really want?
What is your bias against Perl? Every perl programmer I've met was a decent programmer with the possible
exception of the ones that have done mostly sysadmin and only used perl for simple tasks not programming.
Php and Python on the other hand seem to have alot of people who have picked up the bare minimum to
do a "hello world" and not much else. I have nothing against php and python (except php's random naming
conventions and python's horrible use of whitespace) but it seems like there is alot more beginners using
php and python. You see alot fewer beginners using Java, C, and Perl. Even less for Perl as Perl is usually
a second (or third) language for developers so they are usually highly skilled developers.
Exactly. Unless you change the technology involved then smart gun technology will
not help in the black market. If nothing else, the criminal could just detach the
high quality barrel, etc... from the smart gun and buy or recreate the missing pieces.
what do you do with all the people and infrastructure that are in the new desert?
Why do the people have to leave? People have been migrating to warmer places for the past century.
It's actually kindof stupid that our cities are on top of some of the most fertile ground.
If Chicago or New York all of a sudden became 10 degrees warmer it would probably boost their
population. The only thing that would have to move north would be the farmers and there is
minimal infrustructure there.
Their website (http://www.virgingalactic.com/booking/) says: "An exclusive spaceflight for you and up to 5 friends"
but on second read that might be a different package that costs more. The website doesn't really say.
So I guess we're all screwed. Everyone run for the hills.
We're not talking about the entire ocean. We just need to divert the amount that melts each year.
Antartica is big but not that big. Also the article mentioned that alot of this ice is in a depression
already and much of the ice is below sea level so we don't really have to worry about that part
melting. If we are talking about an inch a year then we surely have the technology to divert this
much water.
By my calculation to divert 1cm a year you would have to divert 3.6 × 10^15 liters per year.
The trans alaska pipeline can pump 1.18 * 10^11 liters per year so we're talking 10k times
the volume of the trans alaska pipline but the trans alaska pipe is only 4ft in diameter and
spans thousands of miles while the distance required to divert water would be considerable
shorter. It would be a serious undertaking but would still probably be cheaper than relocating
the state of florida.
Creating "waterfront property" isn't the primary objective. The objective would be to give the water some place to go
so that it doesn't rise. How much ice per year are we talking about? As the rise is "inevitable", it would probably be
alot cheaper to divert the "extra" water somewhere than to relocate the cities. We could freeze it and stick it back
on antartica but that would require alot more energy than just diverting it to low spots that could use the water.
Two things associated with global warming are a water shortage and rising sea levels.
Seems like if we really wanted to we could use one to help the other.
For instance pumping sea water to death valley and filling it full of water would
create a ton more waterfront property. We have oil pipelines much longer than this.
You could do the same thing by digging a big hole in the sahara desert or any other
desert relatively close to the ocean. Heck, we could even solve the other potential
problem of human overpopulation by creating more farmable land in the process.
There are plenty of solutions to this problem. If this ever really becomes a problem
you would think places like florida, etc.. could easily get together and finance
a "water sequestering" plan that could possibly even make the world a better place.
"The IT datacenter is now fully secure against velociraptor attacks."
Do you have proof of this? Making unsubstantiated claims can get you fired. ;-)
I misread. It's 250k for 6 people so 41k per person. Still quite a bit more than an average vacation but
less than some people spend on a car.
It's actually 250k for 5 people so $50k per person. Although this is ALOT of money it's not outside
the possibility for the average software developer if they are willing to save for a few years.
And 20 seconds at a time is not really the same experience. You're basically on a roller coaster at that point.
There is no comparison between that and actually being able to eat a meal, do acrobatics, or have sex
in no gravity.
20 seconds at a time is not really the same experience. You're basically on a roller coaster at that point.
There is no comparison between that and actually being able to eat a meal, do acrobatics, or have sex
in no gravity.
You're right that phones are a very poor comparison but your conclusion is dead wrong.
Stealing a phone is much harder as it needs a network to work at all so getting around
a blacklist is hard. Bypassing the security on a gun or removing it completely before
reselling it would be trivial. The software is not a required part of the gun. Guns are
very simple. In order to make the security an integral part you would need to make the
software an integral part. There would possibly be ways to do this. If the gun was a
laser for instance instead of gunpowder. If the bullets had some complexity in them so
that hacking the gun wouldn't help or if there was an autoaimer or gyroscope in it so that
it couldn't be aimed without functional electronics. That's the only way I see a smart
gun working to prevent sales on the blackmarket. You have to make the gun not worth
retrofitting.
Wrong side of that little island down there called Australia...
How do you know? Do you have some inside knowledge that everyone else doesn't?
The fact that they haven't found the plane means that it's somewhat likely that they
are searching in the wrong spot. It easily has the range to reach this spot so it's
probably about as good as spot to look as the next as from what I gather they are
basically throwing darts at a dartboard at this point.
And if the CEO disappears for a few weeks, what happens? The company doesn't notice.
Of course. If a good CEO disappears for a few weeks then nothing SHOULD happen.
A CEO is not involved with the day to day operations and if he's doing his job well
then he should have trained the people under him to handle the day to day in his
absence. The CEO is responsible for long term planning so if he disappears
completely then the company will slowly go off course as new projects, new partnerships,
and new strategies are never pursued.
The same can be said for a good sysadmin. A good sysadmin should be able to
leave for weeks at a time and things should mostly continue to run in his absence as
small failures should be accounted for but if those small failures aren't periodically fixed
then eventually they will bring down the system.
They may require the salt from out oceans to preserve their food - taste's like pork
Even if this was true. We have plenty to spare. We could probably lose half our ocean and still be ok.
I think the most probable worst case scenerio would be something like Stargate where an alien race
has developed FTL travel but not AI and therefore would have use for semi-intelligent slaves.