has been used for arctic warfare for hundreds of years as a cheap, effective way of stealthily moving a snowy environment. Hopefully the stealth sled won't ruin those capabilities.
Presumably they want something faster and with greater cargo capacity(with the expensive-but-punchy missiles you can get these days, a tank-killer wouldn't be out of the question), or with better margins for the contractor. Maybe both.
That might be why he said 'criminals and terrorists'.
If the various other disputed aquatic zones are anything to go by, it's a lot of dick waving and diplomatic grandstanding, the occasional shootout between somebody's probably-illegal fishing boat and somebody else's quite-possibly-trigger-happy coast guard, and not too much else.
There's a first time for everything, of course, but it'd have to be a pretty juicy territorial claim to be worth getting into an actual war over.
"Is it any surprise that computers can't "understand" what we mean, given the minefield of language?"
It is certainly no surprise that computers can't; but since we know that humans can (to a substantially greater degree), we can say that this is because computers are far worse than humans at natural language, not because natural language is inherently unknowable.
"The whole field of AI is built around the assumption that we can solve B without solving A."
Unless one harbors active 'intelligent design' sympathies, it becomes more or less necessary to suspect that intelligences can be produced without understanding them. Now, how well you need to understand them in order to deliver results with less than four billion years of brute force across an entire planet... That's a sticky detail.
Unsurprisingly, just as advances in computer technology have allowed us to make bigger, messier, errors faster than ever before, they are allowing us to exploit the fact that human statistical intuition is pretty much shit better than ever.
I had thought fuel cell was an energy storage device, not a generator?
There isn't actually a strict boundary, it just depends on how much of the universe you wish to consider:
A fuel cell is always a means of turning inputs with chemical potential energy into electricity, at some loss from inefficiency. If you start your calculations with synthesizing your inputs (cracking water for hydrogen, say), you will need more energy to produce the fuel (because that is also inefficient) than you will ever gain by sending it through the fuel cell. It's just a way of moving/storing the energy.
If you start your calculations with a fuel already provided, or counting only the cost of extracting and purifying the fuel(as with, say, drilling for natural gas, or hooking up a propane cylinder) it counts as a generator, since your accounting ignores the original synthesis costs and only considers the upside, and possibly a few logistical costs.
While it would be awesome to have your own power plant. You're fighting aginst alot of money.
Won't happen anytime soon.
I assume that 'Big Power' is why ordinary liquid-fuel internal combustion generators can only be obtained on the black market, if you have the right connections, after their brutal suppression? Oh, wait, no, generators are ubiquitous and relatively cheap, they're just a pain in the ass to maintain.
There is certainly a fair amount of capital tied up in generation and distribution infrastructure; but there are some points to remember:
The power company isn't pleased by your fluctuating demand: In an ideal world of steady demand, you could get away with exclusively operating the absolute cheapest (generally a polite way of saying 'coal', except in very good hydro areas) base-load plants 24/7, and size your distribution infrastructure to that load, with a dash of margin for safety. Nice, easy, lowest cost per kilowatt hour. In the real world, with demand fluctuating throughout the day(lights/no lights, commercial facilities open vs. after hours, etc.), throughout the year (A/C in summer, some heating in winter, little of either in spring and fall), and potentially over the longer term(population increases and decreases in a given area, movements of power-intensive industries, turnover of housing stock, improvements or decreases in gadget efficiency), the problem is more complex.
Short term fluctuations mean having to size the grid with peak load in mind (lest you risk some really hairy cascading failures) and mean having to have peak-load plants (often combined cycle natural gas) sitting idle part of the time and burning more-expensive-than-coal fuel the rest of the time. More capital invested, higher cost per kilowatt hour. Seasonal variations potentially mean even more facilities sitting idle, depreciating, part of the time, and longer-term variations mean wacky fun with demand forecasting and the potential for either customer displeasure or wasted facilities built for demand that never came.
If somebody announced, tomorrow, that their 'Unobtanium Plot-point Reactor' could fully replace all legacy electrical infrastructure, it is indeed likely that there would be some... industry unhappiness. However, any widget that costs more than base-load generation and distribution and can be used at the customer site to reduce demand fluctuation and function as a backup unit is a mutually beneficial arrangement: The utility gets closer to their ideal of 100% stable demand, the customer has a backup/peak generator that is ideally less obnoxious than the old diesel unit.
Plus, of course, for any given advance in power generation, there isn't anything stopping a large-scale producer from running the device at a large scale (with capital investment, and engineers on site, and other handy stuff) and offering the result for sale. Unless the transmission overheads or profits are usurious, many people probably don't want to coddle their own generator when they can just plug in for not much. Since the ability of utilities to individualize chargers based on precise per-person expense (ie. transmission line distance, difficulty of terrain, etc.) is typically constrained by some mixture of inadequate information and regulation, the customers who are least impressed by the centralized service (say the ones who live at the flaky edges of the grid, and deal with lots of exciting blackouts and issues, or in an area with brownout problems at peak) are also the customers that are likely to be least profitable.
If the website was in the deceased's name, the contract ended upon that person's death. You are under no obligation to honor a contract to a dead person.
They may not have an obligation, legally speaking; but they have the guy's money (so, unless their pricing minions suck, they should be able to make at least a slight profit on the contract) and they sure look like dicks by immediately going against the customer's expressed wishes.
It is not illegal to exploit absolutely every angle not forbidden by law or contract; but nobody has to like you for it, nor should they.
And, according to the publicly available figures, the FISC almost never refuses. Since its inception, it granted 33,942 requests and denied 11. A brutal.03% denial rate.
The current chief justice was appointed in mid 2007, so we can look more specifically at 2008-present:
2008: 2,082 requests, 2 modified, 1 denied.
2009: 1,329 requests, 14 modified, 1 denied.
2010: 1,511 requests, 14 modified, 1 denied.
2011: 1,676 requests, 30 modified, 0 denied.
2012: 1,789 requests, 40 modified, 0 denied.
He... certainly isn't letting his doubts slow him down.
So, your honor, please tell us why you didn't bring these concerns to our attention before somebody with more guts than you'll ever have brought the matter up?
Hell, you probably could have brought these concerns up without even revealing anything classified, or breaking any rules. They probably didn't remember to make it a state secret that you have no oversight powers worth mentioning, so it would have been entirely licit for you to complain about that.
We might as well be honest here: Every day that you knew you had no oversight; but remained as a FISC justice, much less chief justice, you knowingly operated as a rubber stamp and a pitiful facade of rule of law. A rubber stamp for a program that you cannot have been stupid enough to think was entirely on the up-and-up. Unimpressive. Cowardly. Unworthy of your office.
useless for finding the very slight variations in brightness on a pixel and nearest neighbors when compared to same over month or more than a year, on which kepler's detection methods depend.
I imagine that that is why they are asking for proposals from scientists who have ideas for what you can do with a fairly nice telescope, already in orbit, just need to pay upkeep on the ground station, that don't require the original precision of which Kepler was formerly capable.
As long as the optics are good, and the control is not totally shot, it's still a pretty decent telescope, and people are practically shivving each other for time on good telescopes.
Do you know what sort of bearing/contact point they use for a gyro that is supposed to perform reliably for multiple years, at alarming temperatures, in the vacuum of space? Is there some bearing material or lubricant that actually works under those conditions, or do they run the gyros in a gas-filled and temperature controlled module so that more conventional techniques can be used?
By way of example, Youtube obviously complies with DMCA takedowns; because it would be ruinously risky not to; but they (sometimes to the displeasure of the takedown-demander) always note 'Video X has been removed because of a complaint from FooCorp Media'.
Unless a company is an enthusiastic partner in the censorship scheme, it isn't in their interest for their customers to think that they've fucked up or are deeply unreliable when they are acting on a legal demand.
I would be strongly in favor of not having censored pages look like nonexistent or technically glitched pages, as there's nothing more insidious than silent censorship; but I have to wonder if an HTTP response code is the right tool for the job.
The various existing codes are not particularly granular, and an anti-censorship pressure scheme that has any hope of succeeding needs to be granular.
It doesn't help me if all I now is "Example.org is unavailable for legal reasons". I need to know what jurisidiction, what law, what court order(if any), what private actor (in the case of something like the DMCA), and ideally the asserted reason. Ideally, all that information would be properly marked up (not just a text blob) so that a browser could pretty-print it for the end user, a spider gathering statistics or scraping could gather statistics, and so forth.
You need to, as directly as possible, tie the entities responsible for the fact that you can't see the page to the message that you can't see the page. If you don't do that, people might generate some diffuse displeasure; but will have little way of knowing who is behind the problem.
I'd actually be curious to know how, if at all, the peculiar political status of certain treaty-administered reservation areas would affect a datacenter built there.
For the purposes of day-to-day jurisdiction(beat cops, that sort of thing) they are at least as distinct as a state, in some respects more. On the other hand, there are assorted BIA fed-level things, and it's sort of a tangled mess. Do Navajo servers have to respect DMCA requests? Can they run an offshore gambling operation? If somebody cracks one, are they subject to the CFAA?
"how is that different than microphone placement or NFC antenna orientation."
Microphones and speakers are substantially closer to being omnidirectional than screens and cameras are. Many phones will deliberately cancel some of what they pick up, to get clearer voice input; but if set to speakerphone, your totally-unexceptional mic is impressively sensitive. A camera that isn't pointed right at the target screen, though, isn't going to be able to determine much more than approximate color and brightness.
As for NFC antennas, their placement does vary; but only one element(the antenna) has to be in the correct place, so any NFC phone has at least one correct solution, while in a screen+camera arrangement, two elements have to be in the right place, so phones without a camera on their screen side simply have no correct orientation.
What I find curious about the emphasis on 'physical security'(while the mechanism used is clever) is that it seems to ignore the fact that "How can I safely communicate over an insecure channel?" is a relatively solved problem. Unless this scheme is unbearably slow, you just encrypt what goes over the wire (with the requirement for physical proximity hopefully preventing spoofing by a malicious node, not that NFC does anything different).
As for screen/camera, I imagine that it's because not all phones have a camera on the same side as the screen. Virtually all phones have both items; but unless their locations differ enough between models and manufacturers that interfacing could get tricky.
I wonder how long till my ATC (Average Time Conscious) shows up in my annual review...
That's the least of your problems. Because electrocorticography is not covered by the company health plan, we've graciously decided to assist employees with this expense by recruiting a nurse practitioner with a power drill and a wiring contractor we found in the lobby whose hands looked pretty clean.
Unless my memory is grossly faulty here, Schiavo was considered an atypically unambiguous case medically (with massive amounts of brain that just weren't present anymore, much less electrically active or not); but was a sordid story in messy family feuds being adopted by culture warriors, diagnosis-by-video being performed by histrionic congressmen, and whatnot.
A better understanding of the neurological correlates of consciousness would certainly be a welcome development; but it would never have saved that farce.
Slashdot Mirror
has been used for arctic warfare for hundreds of years as a cheap, effective way of stealthily moving a snowy environment. Hopefully the stealth sled won't ruin those capabilities.
Presumably they want something faster and with greater cargo capacity(with the expensive-but-punchy missiles you can get these days, a tank-killer wouldn't be out of the question), or with better margins for the contractor. Maybe both.
That might be why he said 'criminals and terrorists'.
If the various other disputed aquatic zones are anything to go by, it's a lot of dick waving and diplomatic grandstanding, the occasional shootout between somebody's probably-illegal fishing boat and somebody else's quite-possibly-trigger-happy coast guard, and not too much else.
There's a first time for everything, of course, but it'd have to be a pretty juicy territorial claim to be worth getting into an actual war over.
Great, so once we are all speaking lojban, AI will be a piece of cake, right?
Only if we are speaking lojban on the semantic web. And after we've abandoned empiricism for syllogism.
"Is it any surprise that computers can't "understand" what we mean, given the minefield of language?"
It is certainly no surprise that computers can't; but since we know that humans can (to a substantially greater degree), we can say that this is because computers are far worse than humans at natural language, not because natural language is inherently unknowable.
"The whole field of AI is built around the assumption that we can solve B without solving A."
Unless one harbors active 'intelligent design' sympathies, it becomes more or less necessary to suspect that intelligences can be produced without understanding them. Now, how well you need to understand them in order to deliver results with less than four billion years of brute force across an entire planet... That's a sticky detail.
I'm pretty sure that 'computer science' is either math or dishonestly labelled trade school, depending on where you get it.
Who remembers the classic How to Lie With Statistics?
Unsurprisingly, just as advances in computer technology have allowed us to make bigger, messier, errors faster than ever before, they are allowing us to exploit the fact that human statistical intuition is pretty much shit better than ever.
I had thought fuel cell was an energy storage device, not a generator?
There isn't actually a strict boundary, it just depends on how much of the universe you wish to consider:
A fuel cell is always a means of turning inputs with chemical potential energy into electricity, at some loss from inefficiency. If you start your calculations with synthesizing your inputs (cracking water for hydrogen, say), you will need more energy to produce the fuel (because that is also inefficient) than you will ever gain by sending it through the fuel cell. It's just a way of moving/storing the energy.
If you start your calculations with a fuel already provided, or counting only the cost of extracting and purifying the fuel(as with, say, drilling for natural gas, or hooking up a propane cylinder) it counts as a generator, since your accounting ignores the original synthesis costs and only considers the upside, and possibly a few logistical costs.
Answer is no.
While it would be awesome to have your own power plant. You're fighting aginst alot of money.
Won't happen anytime soon.
I assume that 'Big Power' is why ordinary liquid-fuel internal combustion generators can only be obtained on the black market, if you have the right connections, after their brutal suppression? Oh, wait, no, generators are ubiquitous and relatively cheap, they're just a pain in the ass to maintain.
There is certainly a fair amount of capital tied up in generation and distribution infrastructure; but there are some points to remember:
The power company isn't pleased by your fluctuating demand: In an ideal world of steady demand, you could get away with exclusively operating the absolute cheapest (generally a polite way of saying 'coal', except in very good hydro areas) base-load plants 24/7, and size your distribution infrastructure to that load, with a dash of margin for safety. Nice, easy, lowest cost per kilowatt hour. In the real world, with demand fluctuating throughout the day(lights/no lights, commercial facilities open vs. after hours, etc.), throughout the year (A/C in summer, some heating in winter, little of either in spring and fall), and potentially over the longer term(population increases and decreases in a given area, movements of power-intensive industries, turnover of housing stock, improvements or decreases in gadget efficiency), the problem is more complex.
Short term fluctuations mean having to size the grid with peak load in mind (lest you risk some really hairy cascading failures) and mean having to have peak-load plants (often combined cycle natural gas) sitting idle part of the time and burning more-expensive-than-coal fuel the rest of the time. More capital invested, higher cost per kilowatt hour. Seasonal variations potentially mean even more facilities sitting idle, depreciating, part of the time, and longer-term variations mean wacky fun with demand forecasting and the potential for either customer displeasure or wasted facilities built for demand that never came.
If somebody announced, tomorrow, that their 'Unobtanium Plot-point Reactor' could fully replace all legacy electrical infrastructure, it is indeed likely that there would be some... industry unhappiness. However, any widget that costs more than base-load generation and distribution and can be used at the customer site to reduce demand fluctuation and function as a backup unit is a mutually beneficial arrangement: The utility gets closer to their ideal of 100% stable demand, the customer has a backup/peak generator that is ideally less obnoxious than the old diesel unit.
Plus, of course, for any given advance in power generation, there isn't anything stopping a large-scale producer from running the device at a large scale (with capital investment, and engineers on site, and other handy stuff) and offering the result for sale. Unless the transmission overheads or profits are usurious, many people probably don't want to coddle their own generator when they can just plug in for not much. Since the ability of utilities to individualize chargers based on precise per-person expense (ie. transmission line distance, difficulty of terrain, etc.) is typically constrained by some mixture of inadequate information and regulation, the customers who are least impressed by the centralized service (say the ones who live at the flaky edges of the grid, and deal with lots of exciting blackouts and issues, or in an area with brownout problems at peak) are also the customers that are likely to be least profitable.
If the website was in the deceased's name, the contract ended upon that person's death. You are under no obligation to honor a contract to a dead person.
They may not have an obligation, legally speaking; but they have the guy's money (so, unless their pricing minions suck, they should be able to make at least a slight profit on the contract) and they sure look like dicks by immediately going against the customer's expressed wishes.
It is not illegal to exploit absolutely every angle not forbidden by law or contract; but nobody has to like you for it, nor should they.
And, according to the publicly available figures, the FISC almost never refuses. Since its inception, it granted 33,942 requests and denied 11. A brutal .03% denial rate.
The current chief justice was appointed in mid 2007, so we can look more specifically at 2008-present:
2008: 2,082 requests, 2 modified, 1 denied.
2009: 1,329 requests, 14 modified, 1 denied.
2010: 1,511 requests, 14 modified, 1 denied.
2011: 1,676 requests, 30 modified, 0 denied.
2012: 1,789 requests, 40 modified, 0 denied.
He... certainly isn't letting his doubts slow him down.
So, your honor, please tell us why you didn't bring these concerns to our attention before somebody with more guts than you'll ever have brought the matter up?
Hell, you probably could have brought these concerns up without even revealing anything classified, or breaking any rules. They probably didn't remember to make it a state secret that you have no oversight powers worth mentioning, so it would have been entirely licit for you to complain about that.
We might as well be honest here: Every day that you knew you had no oversight; but remained as a FISC justice, much less chief justice, you knowingly operated as a rubber stamp and a pitiful facade of rule of law. A rubber stamp for a program that you cannot have been stupid enough to think was entirely on the up-and-up. Unimpressive. Cowardly. Unworthy of your office.
useless for finding the very slight variations in brightness on a pixel and nearest neighbors when compared to same over month or more than a year, on which kepler's detection methods depend.
I imagine that that is why they are asking for proposals from scientists who have ideas for what you can do with a fairly nice telescope, already in orbit, just need to pay upkeep on the ground station, that don't require the original precision of which Kepler was formerly capable.
As long as the optics are good, and the control is not totally shot, it's still a pretty decent telescope, and people are practically shivving each other for time on good telescopes.
Do you know what sort of bearing/contact point they use for a gyro that is supposed to perform reliably for multiple years, at alarming temperatures, in the vacuum of space? Is there some bearing material or lubricant that actually works under those conditions, or do they run the gyros in a gas-filled and temperature controlled module so that more conventional techniques can be used?
Navajo Nation Hosting: Where the internet is still a wild west!
What's the Curie temperature of an HDD platter's magnetic coating?
By way of example, Youtube obviously complies with DMCA takedowns; because it would be ruinously risky not to; but they (sometimes to the displeasure of the takedown-demander) always note 'Video X has been removed because of a complaint from FooCorp Media'.
Unless a company is an enthusiastic partner in the censorship scheme, it isn't in their interest for their customers to think that they've fucked up or are deeply unreliable when they are acting on a legal demand.
I would be strongly in favor of not having censored pages look like nonexistent or technically glitched pages, as there's nothing more insidious than silent censorship; but I have to wonder if an HTTP response code is the right tool for the job.
The various existing codes are not particularly granular, and an anti-censorship pressure scheme that has any hope of succeeding needs to be granular.
It doesn't help me if all I now is "Example.org is unavailable for legal reasons". I need to know what jurisidiction, what law, what court order(if any), what private actor (in the case of something like the DMCA), and ideally the asserted reason. Ideally, all that information would be properly marked up (not just a text blob) so that a browser could pretty-print it for the end user, a spider gathering statistics or scraping could gather statistics, and so forth.
You need to, as directly as possible, tie the entities responsible for the fact that you can't see the page to the message that you can't see the page. If you don't do that, people might generate some diffuse displeasure; but will have little way of knowing who is behind the problem.
I'd actually be curious to know how, if at all, the peculiar political status of certain treaty-administered reservation areas would affect a datacenter built there.
For the purposes of day-to-day jurisdiction(beat cops, that sort of thing) they are at least as distinct as a state, in some respects more. On the other hand, there are assorted BIA fed-level things, and it's sort of a tangled mess. Do Navajo servers have to respect DMCA requests? Can they run an offshore gambling operation? If somebody cracks one, are they subject to the CFAA?
"how is that different than microphone placement or NFC antenna orientation."
Microphones and speakers are substantially closer to being omnidirectional than screens and cameras are. Many phones will deliberately cancel some of what they pick up, to get clearer voice input; but if set to speakerphone, your totally-unexceptional mic is impressively sensitive. A camera that isn't pointed right at the target screen, though, isn't going to be able to determine much more than approximate color and brightness.
As for NFC antennas, their placement does vary; but only one element(the antenna) has to be in the correct place, so any NFC phone has at least one correct solution, while in a screen+camera arrangement, two elements have to be in the right place, so phones without a camera on their screen side simply have no correct orientation.
What I find curious about the emphasis on 'physical security'(while the mechanism used is clever) is that it seems to ignore the fact that "How can I safely communicate over an insecure channel?" is a relatively solved problem. Unless this scheme is unbearably slow, you just encrypt what goes over the wire (with the requirement for physical proximity hopefully preventing spoofing by a malicious node, not that NFC does anything different).
As for screen/camera, I imagine that it's because not all phones have a camera on the same side as the screen. Virtually all phones have both items; but unless their locations differ enough between models and manufacturers that interfacing could get tricky.
You're discharging it wrong, don't do that.
I wonder how long till my ATC (Average Time Conscious) shows up in my annual review...
That's the least of your problems. Because electrocorticography is not covered by the company health plan, we've graciously decided to assist employees with this expense by recruiting a nurse practitioner with a power drill and a wiring contractor we found in the lobby whose hands looked pretty clean.
Unless my memory is grossly faulty here, Schiavo was considered an atypically unambiguous case medically (with massive amounts of brain that just weren't present anymore, much less electrically active or not); but was a sordid story in messy family feuds being adopted by culture warriors, diagnosis-by-video being performed by histrionic congressmen, and whatnot.
A better understanding of the neurological correlates of consciousness would certainly be a welcome development; but it would never have saved that farce.
I'm sure Carly handled that.