So one can now "be a parent" without having to actually be physically present and not even have to hire a body double? Awesome!
No, these implementations are clearly incomplete, 'Simple Newborn Management Protocol', they say; but it's all read-only. The MIBs look a bit thin, as well.
Until they fix that, you'll still need a supply of excuses for why it's always the junior admin's turn when you need to go poke the thing.
Seems strange to dismiss something, when you have no proof either way it works.
Monitoring isn't free (either in terms of instruments, operator attention, or reactions to false positives), so throwing some unvalidated mechanism at a group of deeply emotionally invested, and mostly statistically clueless, operators is pretty much certain to give them another thing to stress out about, but far less certain to provide either reduced mortality or even useful information.
There are a great many things that would be neat to look at if the cost of looking were lower; but there are a lot of low-probability events where the cost of looking (either in instruments, or in operator attention and sanity) is just too high to be worth the trouble.
The baby's picture is on the main screen on the phone, the phone mimics/displays all of the baby's vital signs, and gives readings on all baby-related matters... in this way, the device is the baby. However, we're going to depend on the same parent that can't care for the baby itself, to monitor the device that's monitoring the baby? How odd indeed.
Maybe they can then sell little baby clothes to put on your iPhone.
Just think of it as a Tamagotchi; but connected to some obnoxious squirmy thing that smells funny, eventually turns into a teenager, does some drugs, and has to be sent to college.
Are you saying that staring at a screen full of numbers isn't somehow intrinsically enlightening, even when you don't know what the numbers mean, and have no idea what they should look like, so you can't even say that they don't look right, much less anything more enlightened than that?
I was attempting emphasis through understatement. Even if Voyager had the correct instruments, it might as well be sitting in my living room for all the difference its travel has made on this kind of scale (and, even if it could reach the site, we'll be waiting a longer than life has so far existed for the reports to come back...)
Unless physics are radically different than suspected, and in a deeply convenient way, something like this is observation only, period, full stop.
That was my intended point: very few entities actually have a quantum channel between point A and point B. Virtually everybody, even the ones with fiber links, has a link to some local telco or peering point and then is N hops away from their destination. At present (and barring substantial advances in all-photonic switching), that means that a 'compromised' quantum channel is the expected state, since there are multiple hops between you and your destination.
If you have the cash for old-school point-to-point hard lines between your facilities, quantum encryption offers a (relatively) cheap way of checking link integrity; but that helps relatively few people. If traceroute says you are more than one hop away from your destination, you probably aren't one of them (again, barring substantial advances in switching technology that allow preserving the quantum properties of photons).
To the best of my (layman's) knowledge, the stuff is ironclad within its area of ability (unlike classical crypto schemes, which tend to make people a bit nervous); but its area of ability is actually really small. It's more of a link-integrity verification system(and one that, since it depends on subtle physical properties, only works over physically continuous links, no VPN-type cases) than a drop-in for classical encryption.
More likely, there would suddenly be a huge demand for unbreakable quantum encryption, followed by massive investment in developing quantum computing technologies.
Unless they mean something rather different by 'quantum encryption' than the present usage, it won't be of much use.
If you are particularly paranoid, and operate on the theory that your fiber isn't being tapped, quantum encryption comes in at a price that compares favorably to having trusted guys with guns stand around keeping people away from your fiber. If, however, you don't have the luxury of a continuous run between you and the destination (like, oh, almost everybody), the fact that a third party has access to your photons isn't news, it's how the network networks.
Why not just simplify things with corporate death sentences and death sentences for corporate officers? So much less paperwork and risk of 'silent partner' activity.
Is it zero? Can we be legitimately concerned about indefinite human unemployment and the long-term phasing out of capitalism yet?
The last few will probably be stubborn; but today's technology has decimated agricultural-sector employment throughout the developed world already.
In the case of Australia, farmers represent a whopping 1.7% of the population, so even their total extirpation as an employment class would be relatively minor shift. Probably one with substantial cultural resonance; but just not that big in absolute or relative terms.
Unless she doesn't value her time, or 'Kleargear' has absolutely no clout to speak of, she'll have a delightful time clearing up the matter with the credit reporting agencies...
Even without atlatls, we've been distancing ourselves from our enemies since politics. Convincing a lackey to and try to stab the other guy, while you attend to vital administrative matters and/or depraved feasting, has been an important leadership skill for millenia.
At least with CIWS, the humans have to flip the switch to 'automated'; but once that step is taken (and, presumably, any killer robot has to be powered up at least once), it will fire purely algorithmically without human intervention (the use case is incoming missiles closing faster than human reflexes could respond, so this isn't really optional, though full-manual and 'automated-target, human pulls trigger' modes are available for slower aircraft and surface threats).
Now, because the robots aren't wildly competent at avoiding friendly fire, human judgement is encouraged to keep the problem space as constrained as possible, but within their scope, it's fire at will.
I'm no cosmologist, so I have no comment there; but the difficultly of looking at what is basically a black box (almost 300 objects at 10 billion light years? Voyager might be a few years away...) statistically is somewhat maddening.
Even a trivially simplified case (say I have a coin, that I allege is fair, and you get to flip it as many times as you want before deciding if you believe me) cannot be decided with certainty. Any finite sequence of flips is equally likely as any other (though sequences that are approximately 50/50 should be overwhelmingly more common if the coin is in fact fair, I have no idea how the behavior changes if you choose infinitely many flips), and you can only gain greater or lesser doubt in the fairness of my coin.
For a much more complex phenomenon, like the origin of the universe, deciding whether you are simply looking at an improbable; but perfectly possible, local perturbation, or whether there is some 'tilt' in the system not covered by current accounts... It's a mathematically cogent exercise; but 'mathematically cogent' and 'easy' are very, very, very different things.
Perhaps, but I can't help thinking that making assumptions will lead to unpredictable and inconsistent behaviour. Convention over configuration and type inference is one thing, but assumptions are completely another. It's like the dangers in lower level languages where a programmer assumes memory will be zeroed... and _usually_ it is. It leads to obscure errors. There's a lot to be said for beiong explicit where possible.
This is Stephen "A New Kind of Science" Wolfram. The guy who cataloged some cellular autonoma (and had his uncredited research peons catalog a bunch more) and then decided that he'd answered all the profound questions of metaphysics. I'm not sure that banal matters of 'software engineering' are his problem anymore.
very sharp guy. However, like many sharp guys, he seems to have entered his obsessive pseudoscience and grandiosity phase. Same basic trajectory as Kurzweil, whose achievements are not to be underestimated; but who now basically evangelizes for nerd cyber-jesus full time.)
If any concern should know better than falling for the cloud BS, especially one that's managed by another, private concern, it's the CIA. Jesus, even I, Mister Nobody, don't put anything in any cloud that matters, and keep my own valuable (to me) data on my own servers...
Ironically, since Amazon has a Server Access Logging system (which can be fairly robust and powerful, if you set it up), there's an argument to be made that they are a step ahead of the NSA on that score...
That sort of bundling is probably attractive to a spook shop for secrecy reasons, as well.
The details would remain hazy; but a public bid would provide some fodder for educated guesses, and the more detailed the breakdown of the goods being procured, the better a guess anybody reasonably skilled in the art of datacenter-wrangling could make about exactly what sort of capacity they are building.
A nice, round, lump sum, on the other hand, provides only the roughest of outlines.
And, come to think of it, CIWS systems. Those are only slightly autonomous (mounted on a turret, limited field of fire, only fully computer controlled when set to that mode, which is something that people generally avoid unless necessary because their IFF isn't so hot...); but when the switch is flipped, that's one or more autocannons raining computer-controlled death as the mood strikes them. And those robots don't die on impact, like warhead guidance systems do. Armored vehicle active-intercept systems might count as well, if anybody actually has one working right now, not sure where in development those are.
It's not really "ze cloud" then, right? Fuck, I'm tired of hearing that word.
'Cloud' is a pretty nebulous term. Like it or loath it (the latter being the correct answer), it is definitely sometimes applied to purely internal arrangements, if the internal infrastructure has been sufficiently abstracted in a manner similar to that used by one of the external 'cloud' services.
The trivial case would be an internal Eucalyptus implementation, where the entire point is to be wholly compatible with a public cloud provider, either for code reuse or for expansion options. Where exactly the dividing line between something like this, and 'yeah, sure, the devs probably all have a copy of VMware Workstation. Why?' is a matter for largely fruitless debate.
> Do the feds or any states consider cloned cards to be presumptively instruments of fraud?
Of course, and why not? It is certainly breach of contract, and there are many ways it could be used to defraud. It is hard to imagine a legitimate use, and even then it remains breach of contract. If you want a second card, just ask your bank, they are usually happy to help.
I'm sure that others differ a bit; and there are, no doubt, 2,634 pages of fine print and a mandatory binding arbitration process if they feel the need; but I grovelled through this sample contract, and the only references to the card concerned a demand to destroy it upon involuntary termination of the contract, the ability of the issuer to issue a new card (superseding the old) at any time and for any reason, and the possibility of incurring liability if an 'authorized user' of the account retains possession of the card and you are unable to retrieve it. Absolutely nothing about cloning, or even any broader references to not making 'card not present' transactions when it would be possible to present the card, or anything of that nature.
I don't doubt that a robot could be made to exhibit such desires (unless you throw your lot in with the Cartesian dualists, anything a human can do a sufficiently complex robot could do); but I do doubt that anyone with purely pragmatic uses for robots (as opposed to AI researchers trying to pass Turing tests), would want such 'features'.
People consider the IT department enough of a drain as it is, just imagine what a mess it would be if you had to add a bunch of computational psychologists and computer systems therapists to the mix...
The one exception (though it would take considerable...pressure... for such a concept to make it to anywhere but the bottom shelf of DARPA's toy chest, much less mass-deployment) might be area denial mechanisms. With presently available technology, the only area denial strategies we can pull off are being cheap, quiet, and dangerously persistent (land mines, slow-evaporating chemical agents), with some limited 'autonomy' if you count human manipulation of organisms (spore-forming bacteria, say, like anthrax, can persist for years or decades in soil; but also reproduce in denser populations.)
Area denial gear has a very, very, nasty reputation, and you'd need technology on the verge of being biology-by-other-means to pull it off with robots; but I suspect that somebody would buy a few batches of air-droppable hunter/killer bots that would sneak around wreaking havoc until a suitably cryptographically signed 'stand-down' order were broadcast, if anybody had the ability to sell such a thing.
As said, such a thing would be crazy difficult to pull off, and actually using them would make you deeply unpopular; but they'd sell.
Slashdot Mirror
So one can now "be a parent" without having to actually be physically present and not even have to hire a body double? Awesome!
No, these implementations are clearly incomplete, 'Simple Newborn Management Protocol', they say; but it's all read-only. The MIBs look a bit thin, as well.
Until they fix that, you'll still need a supply of excuses for why it's always the junior admin's turn when you need to go poke the thing.
Seems strange to dismiss something, when you have no proof either way it works.
Monitoring isn't free (either in terms of instruments, operator attention, or reactions to false positives), so throwing some unvalidated mechanism at a group of deeply emotionally invested, and mostly statistically clueless, operators is pretty much certain to give them another thing to stress out about, but far less certain to provide either reduced mortality or even useful information.
There are a great many things that would be neat to look at if the cost of looking were lower; but there are a lot of low-probability events where the cost of looking (either in instruments, or in operator attention and sanity) is just too high to be worth the trouble.
The baby's picture is on the main screen on the phone, the phone mimics/displays all of the baby's vital signs, and gives readings on all baby-related matters... in this way, the device is the baby. However, we're going to depend on the same parent that can't care for the baby itself, to monitor the device that's monitoring the baby? How odd indeed. Maybe they can then sell little baby clothes to put on your iPhone.
Just think of it as a Tamagotchi; but connected to some obnoxious squirmy thing that smells funny, eventually turns into a teenager, does some drugs, and has to be sent to college.
Are you saying that staring at a screen full of numbers isn't somehow intrinsically enlightening, even when you don't know what the numbers mean, and have no idea what they should look like, so you can't even say that they don't look right, much less anything more enlightened than that?
Heresy!
I was attempting emphasis through understatement. Even if Voyager had the correct instruments, it might as well be sitting in my living room for all the difference its travel has made on this kind of scale (and, even if it could reach the site, we'll be waiting a longer than life has so far existed for the reports to come back...)
Unless physics are radically different than suspected, and in a deeply convenient way, something like this is observation only, period, full stop.
That was my intended point: very few entities actually have a quantum channel between point A and point B. Virtually everybody, even the ones with fiber links, has a link to some local telco or peering point and then is N hops away from their destination. At present (and barring substantial advances in all-photonic switching), that means that a 'compromised' quantum channel is the expected state, since there are multiple hops between you and your destination.
If you have the cash for old-school point-to-point hard lines between your facilities, quantum encryption offers a (relatively) cheap way of checking link integrity; but that helps relatively few people. If traceroute says you are more than one hop away from your destination, you probably aren't one of them (again, barring substantial advances in switching technology that allow preserving the quantum properties of photons).
To the best of my (layman's) knowledge, the stuff is ironclad within its area of ability (unlike classical crypto schemes, which tend to make people a bit nervous); but its area of ability is actually really small. It's more of a link-integrity verification system(and one that, since it depends on subtle physical properties, only works over physically continuous links, no VPN-type cases) than a drop-in for classical encryption.
More likely, there would suddenly be a huge demand for unbreakable quantum encryption, followed by massive investment in developing quantum computing technologies.
Unless they mean something rather different by 'quantum encryption' than the present usage, it won't be of much use.
If you are particularly paranoid, and operate on the theory that your fiber isn't being tapped, quantum encryption comes in at a price that compares favorably to having trusted guys with guns stand around keeping people away from your fiber. If, however, you don't have the luxury of a continuous run between you and the destination (like, oh, almost everybody), the fact that a third party has access to your photons isn't news, it's how the network networks.
Why not just simplify things with corporate death sentences and death sentences for corporate officers? So much less paperwork and risk of 'silent partner' activity.
Is it zero? Can we be legitimately concerned about indefinite human unemployment and the long-term phasing out of capitalism yet?
The last few will probably be stubborn; but today's technology has decimated agricultural-sector employment throughout the developed world already.
In the case of Australia, farmers represent a whopping 1.7% of the population, so even their total extirpation as an employment class would be relatively minor shift. Probably one with substantial cultural resonance; but just not that big in absolute or relative terms.
What sort of sick freak would drink robot milk?
Unless she doesn't value her time, or 'Kleargear' has absolutely no clout to speak of, she'll have a delightful time clearing up the matter with the credit reporting agencies...
can't just she go to court for harassment and get rich?
Do you have a lawyer who will take that case for what you can afford to pay them? If so, sure. Else, haha no.
Even without atlatls, we've been distancing ourselves from our enemies since politics. Convincing a lackey to and try to stab the other guy, while you attend to vital administrative matters and/or depraved feasting, has been an important leadership skill for millenia.
At least with CIWS, the humans have to flip the switch to 'automated'; but once that step is taken (and, presumably, any killer robot has to be powered up at least once), it will fire purely algorithmically without human intervention (the use case is incoming missiles closing faster than human reflexes could respond, so this isn't really optional, though full-manual and 'automated-target, human pulls trigger' modes are available for slower aircraft and surface threats).
Now, because the robots aren't wildly competent at avoiding friendly fire, human judgement is encouraged to keep the problem space as constrained as possible, but within their scope, it's fire at will.
I'm no cosmologist, so I have no comment there; but the difficultly of looking at what is basically a black box (almost 300 objects at 10 billion light years? Voyager might be a few years away...) statistically is somewhat maddening.
Even a trivially simplified case (say I have a coin, that I allege is fair, and you get to flip it as many times as you want before deciding if you believe me) cannot be decided with certainty. Any finite sequence of flips is equally likely as any other (though sequences that are approximately 50/50 should be overwhelmingly more common if the coin is in fact fair, I have no idea how the behavior changes if you choose infinitely many flips), and you can only gain greater or lesser doubt in the fairness of my coin.
For a much more complex phenomenon, like the origin of the universe, deciding whether you are simply looking at an improbable; but perfectly possible, local perturbation, or whether there is some 'tilt' in the system not covered by current accounts... It's a mathematically cogent exercise; but 'mathematically cogent' and 'easy' are very, very, very different things.
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
-Greenspun's Tenth Rule.
Perhaps, but I can't help thinking that making assumptions will lead to unpredictable and inconsistent behaviour. Convention over configuration and type inference is one thing, but assumptions are completely another. It's like the dangers in lower level languages where a programmer assumes memory will be zeroed ... and _usually_ it is. It leads to obscure errors. There's a lot to be said for beiong explicit where possible.
This is Stephen "A New Kind of Science" Wolfram. The guy who cataloged some cellular autonoma (and had his uncredited research peons catalog a bunch more) and then decided that he'd answered all the profound questions of metaphysics. I'm not sure that banal matters of 'software engineering' are his problem anymore.
very sharp guy. However, like many sharp guys, he seems to have entered his obsessive pseudoscience and grandiosity phase. Same basic trajectory as Kurzweil, whose achievements are not to be underestimated; but who now basically evangelizes for nerd cyber-jesus full time.)
Also, pretty much everything that happened in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream...
If any concern should know better than falling for the cloud BS, especially one that's managed by another, private concern, it's the CIA. Jesus, even I, Mister Nobody, don't put anything in any cloud that matters, and keep my own valuable (to me) data on my own servers...
Ironically, since Amazon has a Server Access Logging system (which can be fairly robust and powerful, if you set it up), there's an argument to be made that they are a step ahead of the NSA on that score...
That sort of bundling is probably attractive to a spook shop for secrecy reasons, as well.
The details would remain hazy; but a public bid would provide some fodder for educated guesses, and the more detailed the breakdown of the goods being procured, the better a guess anybody reasonably skilled in the art of datacenter-wrangling could make about exactly what sort of capacity they are building.
A nice, round, lump sum, on the other hand, provides only the roughest of outlines.
And, come to think of it, CIWS systems. Those are only slightly autonomous (mounted on a turret, limited field of fire, only fully computer controlled when set to that mode, which is something that people generally avoid unless necessary because their IFF isn't so hot...); but when the switch is flipped, that's one or more autocannons raining computer-controlled death as the mood strikes them. And those robots don't die on impact, like warhead guidance systems do. Armored vehicle active-intercept systems might count as well, if anybody actually has one working right now, not sure where in development those are.
It's not really "ze cloud" then, right? Fuck, I'm tired of hearing that word.
'Cloud' is a pretty nebulous term. Like it or loath it (the latter being the correct answer), it is definitely sometimes applied to purely internal arrangements, if the internal infrastructure has been sufficiently abstracted in a manner similar to that used by one of the external 'cloud' services.
The trivial case would be an internal Eucalyptus implementation, where the entire point is to be wholly compatible with a public cloud provider, either for code reuse or for expansion options. Where exactly the dividing line between something like this, and 'yeah, sure, the devs probably all have a copy of VMware Workstation. Why?' is a matter for largely fruitless debate.
> Do the feds or any states consider cloned cards to be presumptively instruments of fraud?
Of course, and why not? It is certainly breach of contract, and there are many ways it could be used to defraud. It is hard to imagine a legitimate use, and even then it remains breach of contract. If you want a second card, just ask your bank, they are usually happy to help.
I'm sure that others differ a bit; and there are, no doubt, 2,634 pages of fine print and a mandatory binding arbitration process if they feel the need; but I grovelled through this sample contract, and the only references to the card concerned a demand to destroy it upon involuntary termination of the contract, the ability of the issuer to issue a new card (superseding the old) at any time and for any reason, and the possibility of incurring liability if an 'authorized user' of the account retains possession of the card and you are unable to retrieve it. Absolutely nothing about cloning, or even any broader references to not making 'card not present' transactions when it would be possible to present the card, or anything of that nature.
I don't doubt that a robot could be made to exhibit such desires (unless you throw your lot in with the Cartesian dualists, anything a human can do a sufficiently complex robot could do); but I do doubt that anyone with purely pragmatic uses for robots (as opposed to AI researchers trying to pass Turing tests), would want such 'features'.
People consider the IT department enough of a drain as it is, just imagine what a mess it would be if you had to add a bunch of computational psychologists and computer systems therapists to the mix...
The one exception (though it would take considerable...pressure... for such a concept to make it to anywhere but the bottom shelf of DARPA's toy chest, much less mass-deployment) might be area denial mechanisms. With presently available technology, the only area denial strategies we can pull off are being cheap, quiet, and dangerously persistent (land mines, slow-evaporating chemical agents), with some limited 'autonomy' if you count human manipulation of organisms (spore-forming bacteria, say, like anthrax, can persist for years or decades in soil; but also reproduce in denser populations.)
Area denial gear has a very, very, nasty reputation, and you'd need technology on the verge of being biology-by-other-means to pull it off with robots; but I suspect that somebody would buy a few batches of air-droppable hunter/killer bots that would sneak around wreaking havoc until a suitably cryptographically signed 'stand-down' order were broadcast, if anybody had the ability to sell such a thing.
As said, such a thing would be crazy difficult to pull off, and actually using them would make you deeply unpopular; but they'd sell.