The test consists of answering questions about yourself and your thought processes, including things you "believe" and predicting future behavior. It's hard to come up with a definition of self awareness that's much better than being capable of answering those types of questions. In other words, his test assumes a device with enough self awareness to complete the test, which is where an iPhone (and every other device) fails.
What they are talking about is the same phenomenon in medieval terms; they're arguing that even by our current understanding they had limited contact with the wider world. Look at it this way, at an average spread of 2km per day and an incubation period of days or weeks, all it would is a single traveler to blow that average out of the water. One guy riding a horse for 2 hours a day could plant incubation sites 50 or 100 km ahead of the larger wave of the outbreak before he even knew he was sick. So, either there were practically zero long distance travelers (an idea which I find hard to believe) or long distance travel all but stopped after the outbreak started.
So? The only people that would significantly impact negatively is... the people doing high frequency trading. The people who buy a bit of stock a few times a year, or even a few times a week and hold on to it for a few months or years (aka the people who are actually investing in a company) will see a tiny fraction of their investment going to transaction costs. The people who buy and sell based on millisecond to millisecond changes that reflect absolutely nothing about the company whose stock is being traded will see their business crumble. Fine be me.
Actually, the opposite is what happens: sell prices are minimized while buy prices are maximized. That's the whole point, they make their money in the difference. Where in a non high speed system, someone looking to sell at 10 and someone looking to buy at 11 will end up with one or the other of them getting screwed out of money they could have captured, a HFT system will notice the spread, but from one at 11 and sell it to the other at 10 and capture the difference for themselves. Neither the buyer, nor the seller gain anything except getting their money/stock a few seconds sooner.
I understand your complaint, I really do. But if they had said "15-20 meter" asteroid, no one would have any idea the destructive potential the asteroid poses. Since the primary topic of the article is that they want to gauge the danger that similarly sized asteroids pose, it makes sense to talk about asteroids using a known sample as a reference point. What they should have said was "looking for asteroids in the same size range as what caused the Chelyabinsk meteor" but that is several times longer and more awkward.
The funny thing is, the people who used to say "fusion power is 20 years away" always ended it "with appropriate funding". The same people saying that said that it was 50+ years away with funding at then current levels. Actual funding levels have been below what was current when those estimates were made and significant progress has still been made. So in reality, their estimates were if anything conservative.
3. Eliminate Gerrymandering. Districts must be drawn that are representative of the state's demographics.
How? Who determines that? Who gathers and manages the data? Who draws the lines? It would be far easier and less manipulable to just do a single transferable vote ballot and elect representatives at large.
It's just boilerplate legal speak put into the contracts. It was never meant to ban what they are explicitly excluding now, it was just put in to differentiated between commercial and residential service. They wanted a line in the contract to throw at you if you abused to the service for commercial use, so far as I know no one was ever booted by their ISP for running a VPN or hosting a multi-player game (though occasionally their networks settings made it difficult to do things).
This will probably get me crucified, and perhaps rightly so:
Along with many other Midwesterners, Finkle-McGraw put in a few weeks building levees out of sandbags and plastic sheeting. Once again he was struck by the national media coverage—reporters from the coasts kept showing up and announcing, with some bewilderment, that there had been no looting.... Finkle-McGraw began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, that while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never voiced.
One website, that's expected to have incredibly heavy loads[...]
Well here's the rub. In regular operation, the loads aren't going to be incredibly high. They'll be "very" high, but not ridiculously. You could argue that their single largest mistake was trying to do a massive roll out to everyone in the country all at once. They should have rolled out to a small number of people, worked the kinks out and come back in a month with a slightly larger roll out. Rinse and repeat until it's available for everyone and you have some idea what your actual day to day usage numbers are going to be.
Well, this is a situation where computerized voting could actually be an improvement.
You go into the voting booth and enter your ID. Voting machine's first question: "Are you being coerced to vote a certain way?"
If they answer yes, bring up a ballot with big flashing red highlight at the top: "Fill this ballot the way your coercer wants you to vote". And the machine generates a vote ID. Then bring up another ballot with big flashing red highlight "Fill this ballot the way you wish to vote". And the machine generates a second vote ID. Then when you get home there's a website where you can enter a vote ID and see the corresponding ballot. Whether the vote is "real" or not is stored in a hidden variable that can't be accessed from the public facing website. You can punch in the fake vote ID to show your boss or union leader and you can punch in the real one to verify your own vote.
The problem is that you're trusting the software to properly record which votes are real. This doesn't actually let the voter verify that their vote was properly recorded which is the whole end goal of them being able to pull up their ballot from the website. One way to *maybe* get around that is if instead of generating a fake ballot, the software matched it with someone else's real vote, then there's simply two pointers to the same vote. If you did it on for each individual race on the ballot it could work, but you'd have to give them a printout of their vote ID's to keep track of them all.
But then, in the US we can't even understand such terrifying concepts as a ranked voting system. Something as complicated as all that will never fly.
Even folks who keep smartphones an unusual amount of time do not generally exceed 24-36 months.
I think you have a very strange idea of what the "usual" replacement cycle is. At least in the US, nearly everyone keeps their phone for 2 years, since that is the length of the standard contract to get the "subsidized" rate. Personally, I know no one that ditches their phone (and takes a multi-hundred dollar hit) every 6-12 months. That might be different in other circles of course, but my sample is young-ish engineers who have both the interest and cash to do it if they really wanted to.
You could argue that a decent way to figure out the rest is to simulate what we know and look at how it goes wrong. We're pretty sure the signals flowing through the neurons are the key part so we start there. Being able to see how the neurons behave with out the 80% being there tells a lot about what the 80% does.
Assuming for the moment that Moore's law continues to hold true, along with the usual knock ons in price per performance. 10,000,000,000 cutting in half every 18 months. It'll take at least 3 decades before their artificial human brain is cost competitive with a human brain. However, there are still possible advantages. Imagine making an artificial human brain that is a genius at the very skills required to make it (at least as intelligent as the human's involved in the original project), then you run that artificial brain at an accelerated rate. After 2 iterations of Moore's law, you could get 12 years of perfectly focused, genius level work out of the machine in 1 year (4x faster, working 24 hours per day), which could easily put you a head of the competition or even shorten the doubling time for the next generation.
Of course, that's assuming Moore's Law holds true for that long, which is starting to seem doubtful. When Feynman gave his "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" lecture, it was incredibly true. But when it comes to modern IC manufacturing that's no longer true. We might eek out a few more rounds of improvement with process shrinks, and a few more rounds of improvement with 3D chip layouts. But there's only so much room.
In other words, if you're arrested, suppose the cops really are so dumb and/or evil that they would quote your "I never liked the guy" out of context to try and get you convicted. So, taking Professor Duane's advice, you say nothing. Do you still trust those same police officers to handle the other aspects of your case fairly? To make sure any exculpatory evidence is brought to light? To interrogate other witnesses without leading them towards a pre-set conclusion?
His opinion seems to be "if they're so corrupt to take you out of context they'll screw you some other way so you may as well make said screwing easier for them". What he doesn't understand is that even if the entire system is 90% squeaky clean, the 10% can still ruin your life forever. Especially when the 90% don't do their job in identifying and removing from power the 10%.
I wish someone would make a cop show a la Breaking Bad. A good cop, doing the best that he can. Bends the rules occasionally to get the job done but things slowly, inevitably get out of hand as the bending becomes breaking and the breaking becomes outright flaunting. End it with him sending someone to death row and the whole thing finally come crashing down on his head. Hell, I'd just be happy if once the "bad guy" that they railroaded into a conviction from one episode turned out to be innocent later on and the real criminal is off killing people in the meantime.
They've got it easier here, they spend most of the movie in their suits in open space. Relatively trivial to do with CGI these days and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than 15 trips on the vomit comet.
I do. I fucking care that I can't communicate without big brother leaning over my shoulder to make sure I'm a good citizen. It's fucked up. Even if they never used a single byte of the data, the act itself is fucked up. Besides that, laws change. Much more of your day to day life than you imagine is already illegal to some extent or another. With pervasive eavesdropping you're just one ticked off bureaucrat away from a prison sentence. And even if you yourself by some miracle live (an almost impossible) squeaky clean lifestyle, it's even less likely that your family and friends to as well.
The vast, vast majority of senate and house representatives have no need for the money they are paid. Nearly all of them are wealthy long before they enter politics. It would be incredibly stupid to put a small number of them in the position that they can be leaned on to vote one direction or the other simply because they are one of the few who actually depend on their paycheck.
Detecting a light colored red is very easy. Differentiating between every red light you are likely to see on the road and an actual stop stoplight is a bit harder. Detecting the transition to yellow and determining if it's safe to stop is also a bit harder. Determining where the stop line is, also a bit harder. Doing it all with 8 9's of accuracy? Damn hard.
Do you understand the point of terrorism? It's not to "win" the fight. It's to scare the ever loving piss out of your enemies. It's one thing to have CNN say "3 hostages were killed" and another to watch armed gunmen kill 3 people in cold blood on a live video feed.
I agree with you to some extent. An algorithm searching for keywords and displaying appropriate ads? I really don't have a problem with that. Where I do have an issue is where the information gleaned goes into a big database that Google has on me. A big database that can be subpoenaed, or leaked, or stolen. A database that slowly but surely includes information from nearly every act of communication and internet usage. Even if I were to opt out of Google's services, the fact is if I send an email it's likely going to a gmail address, if I browse the internet there are likely Google servers providing parts of the page.
The act of changing particle A disentangles it from particle B. All you can do is measure particle A and say a measurement on B will have the same result, which doesn't transfer any information. Repeat after me: "quantum entanglement does not break causality".
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The test consists of answering questions about yourself and your thought processes, including things you "believe" and predicting future behavior. It's hard to come up with a definition of self awareness that's much better than being capable of answering those types of questions. In other words, his test assumes a device with enough self awareness to complete the test, which is where an iPhone (and every other device) fails.
What they are talking about is the same phenomenon in medieval terms; they're arguing that even by our current understanding they had limited contact with the wider world. Look at it this way, at an average spread of 2km per day and an incubation period of days or weeks, all it would is a single traveler to blow that average out of the water. One guy riding a horse for 2 hours a day could plant incubation sites 50 or 100 km ahead of the larger wave of the outbreak before he even knew he was sick. So, either there were practically zero long distance travelers (an idea which I find hard to believe) or long distance travel all but stopped after the outbreak started.
So? The only people that would significantly impact negatively is... the people doing high frequency trading. The people who buy a bit of stock a few times a year, or even a few times a week and hold on to it for a few months or years (aka the people who are actually investing in a company) will see a tiny fraction of their investment going to transaction costs. The people who buy and sell based on millisecond to millisecond changes that reflect absolutely nothing about the company whose stock is being traded will see their business crumble. Fine be me.
...that's until the U.S.'s tolerance of gay marriage changes its trajectory.
I'm not sure why this was down modded. I actually got a chuckle out of it personally.
Actually, the opposite is what happens: sell prices are minimized while buy prices are maximized. That's the whole point, they make their money in the difference. Where in a non high speed system, someone looking to sell at 10 and someone looking to buy at 11 will end up with one or the other of them getting screwed out of money they could have captured, a HFT system will notice the spread, but from one at 11 and sell it to the other at 10 and capture the difference for themselves. Neither the buyer, nor the seller gain anything except getting their money/stock a few seconds sooner.
I understand your complaint, I really do. But if they had said "15-20 meter" asteroid, no one would have any idea the destructive potential the asteroid poses. Since the primary topic of the article is that they want to gauge the danger that similarly sized asteroids pose, it makes sense to talk about asteroids using a known sample as a reference point. What they should have said was "looking for asteroids in the same size range as what caused the Chelyabinsk meteor" but that is several times longer and more awkward.
The funny thing is, the people who used to say "fusion power is 20 years away" always ended it "with appropriate funding". The same people saying that said that it was 50+ years away with funding at then current levels. Actual funding levels have been below what was current when those estimates were made and significant progress has still been made. So in reality, their estimates were if anything conservative.
3. Eliminate Gerrymandering. Districts must be drawn that are representative of the state's demographics.
How? Who determines that? Who gathers and manages the data? Who draws the lines? It would be far easier and less manipulable to just do a single transferable vote ballot and elect representatives at large.
It's just boilerplate legal speak put into the contracts. It was never meant to ban what they are explicitly excluding now, it was just put in to differentiated between commercial and residential service. They wanted a line in the contract to throw at you if you abused to the service for commercial use, so far as I know no one was ever booted by their ISP for running a VPN or hosting a multi-player game (though occasionally their networks settings made it difficult to do things).
This will probably get me crucified, and perhaps rightly so:
Along with many other Midwesterners, Finkle-McGraw put in a few weeks building levees out of sandbags and plastic sheeting. Once again he was struck by the national media coverage—reporters from the coasts kept showing up and announcing, with some bewilderment, that there had been no looting. ... Finkle-McGraw began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, that while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never voiced.
One website, that's expected to have incredibly heavy loads[...]
Well here's the rub. In regular operation, the loads aren't going to be incredibly high. They'll be "very" high, but not ridiculously. You could argue that their single largest mistake was trying to do a massive roll out to everyone in the country all at once. They should have rolled out to a small number of people, worked the kinks out and come back in a month with a slightly larger roll out. Rinse and repeat until it's available for everyone and you have some idea what your actual day to day usage numbers are going to be.
Well, this is a situation where computerized voting could actually be an improvement.
You go into the voting booth and enter your ID.
Voting machine's first question: "Are you being coerced to vote a certain way?"
If they answer yes, bring up a ballot with big flashing red highlight at the top: "Fill this ballot the way your coercer wants you to vote". And the machine generates a vote ID. Then bring up another ballot with big flashing red highlight "Fill this ballot the way you wish to vote". And the machine generates a second vote ID. Then when you get home there's a website where you can enter a vote ID and see the corresponding ballot. Whether the vote is "real" or not is stored in a hidden variable that can't be accessed from the public facing website. You can punch in the fake vote ID to show your boss or union leader and you can punch in the real one to verify your own vote.
The problem is that you're trusting the software to properly record which votes are real. This doesn't actually let the voter verify that their vote was properly recorded which is the whole end goal of them being able to pull up their ballot from the website. One way to *maybe* get around that is if instead of generating a fake ballot, the software matched it with someone else's real vote, then there's simply two pointers to the same vote. If you did it on for each individual race on the ballot it could work, but you'd have to give them a printout of their vote ID's to keep track of them all.
But then, in the US we can't even understand such terrifying concepts as a ranked voting system. Something as complicated as all that will never fly.
Even folks who keep smartphones an unusual amount of time do not generally exceed 24-36 months.
I think you have a very strange idea of what the "usual" replacement cycle is. At least in the US, nearly everyone keeps their phone for 2 years, since that is the length of the standard contract to get the "subsidized" rate. Personally, I know no one that ditches their phone (and takes a multi-hundred dollar hit) every 6-12 months. That might be different in other circles of course, but my sample is young-ish engineers who have both the interest and cash to do it if they really wanted to.
You could argue that a decent way to figure out the rest is to simulate what we know and look at how it goes wrong. We're pretty sure the signals flowing through the neurons are the key part so we start there. Being able to see how the neurons behave with out the 80% being there tells a lot about what the 80% does.
Assuming for the moment that Moore's law continues to hold true, along with the usual knock ons in price per performance. 10,000,000,000 cutting in half every 18 months. It'll take at least 3 decades before their artificial human brain is cost competitive with a human brain. However, there are still possible advantages. Imagine making an artificial human brain that is a genius at the very skills required to make it (at least as intelligent as the human's involved in the original project), then you run that artificial brain at an accelerated rate. After 2 iterations of Moore's law, you could get 12 years of perfectly focused, genius level work out of the machine in 1 year (4x faster, working 24 hours per day), which could easily put you a head of the competition or even shorten the doubling time for the next generation.
Of course, that's assuming Moore's Law holds true for that long, which is starting to seem doubtful. When Feynman gave his "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" lecture, it was incredibly true. But when it comes to modern IC manufacturing that's no longer true. We might eek out a few more rounds of improvement with process shrinks, and a few more rounds of improvement with 3D chip layouts. But there's only so much room.
In other words, if you're arrested, suppose the cops really are so dumb and/or evil that they would quote your "I never liked the guy" out of context to try and get you convicted. So, taking Professor Duane's advice, you say nothing. Do you still trust those same police officers to handle the other aspects of your case fairly? To make sure any exculpatory evidence is brought to light? To interrogate other witnesses without leading them towards a pre-set conclusion?
His opinion seems to be "if they're so corrupt to take you out of context they'll screw you some other way so you may as well make said screwing easier for them". What he doesn't understand is that even if the entire system is 90% squeaky clean, the 10% can still ruin your life forever. Especially when the 90% don't do their job in identifying and removing from power the 10%.
I wish someone would make a cop show a la Breaking Bad. A good cop, doing the best that he can. Bends the rules occasionally to get the job done but things slowly, inevitably get out of hand as the bending becomes breaking and the breaking becomes outright flaunting. End it with him sending someone to death row and the whole thing finally come crashing down on his head. Hell, I'd just be happy if once the "bad guy" that they railroaded into a conviction from one episode turned out to be innocent later on and the real criminal is off killing people in the meantime.
At first glance, however, Gravity appears to err on the side of realism.
There are rumors of a flight from Hubble to the ISS using a backpack thruster unit, so I take that with a big grain of salt.
They've got it easier here, they spend most of the movie in their suits in open space. Relatively trivial to do with CGI these days and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than 15 trips on the vomit comet.
For the rest, nobody cares
I do. I fucking care that I can't communicate without big brother leaning over my shoulder to make sure I'm a good citizen. It's fucked up. Even if they never used a single byte of the data, the act itself is fucked up. Besides that, laws change. Much more of your day to day life than you imagine is already illegal to some extent or another. With pervasive eavesdropping you're just one ticked off bureaucrat away from a prison sentence. And even if you yourself by some miracle live (an almost impossible) squeaky clean lifestyle, it's even less likely that your family and friends to as well.
The vast, vast majority of senate and house representatives have no need for the money they are paid. Nearly all of them are wealthy long before they enter politics. It would be incredibly stupid to put a small number of them in the position that they can be leaned on to vote one direction or the other simply because they are one of the few who actually depend on their paycheck.
Very few of the people who have a X need one.
Where X is any damn thing beyond food, water, and shelter.
Detecting a light colored red is very easy. Differentiating between every red light you are likely to see on the road and an actual stop stoplight is a bit harder. Detecting the transition to yellow and determining if it's safe to stop is also a bit harder. Determining where the stop line is, also a bit harder. Doing it all with 8 9's of accuracy? Damn hard.
Do you understand the point of terrorism? It's not to "win" the fight. It's to scare the ever loving piss out of your enemies. It's one thing to have CNN say "3 hostages were killed" and another to watch armed gunmen kill 3 people in cold blood on a live video feed.
I agree with you to some extent. An algorithm searching for keywords and displaying appropriate ads? I really don't have a problem with that. Where I do have an issue is where the information gleaned goes into a big database that Google has on me. A big database that can be subpoenaed, or leaked, or stolen. A database that slowly but surely includes information from nearly every act of communication and internet usage. Even if I were to opt out of Google's services, the fact is if I send an email it's likely going to a gmail address, if I browse the internet there are likely Google servers providing parts of the page.
The act of changing particle A disentangles it from particle B. All you can do is measure particle A and say a measurement on B will have the same result, which doesn't transfer any information. Repeat after me: "quantum entanglement does not break causality".