It is also quite possible that he is actually suffering from mental illness -- schizophrenia often manifests itself in early adulthood, for example -- and that his books were originally written as a coping mechanism for the early stages of illness.
The problem with that is that they are keeping him in an undisclosed location.
But they're revealing that he is undergoing psychiatric evaluation.
Wouldn't they just send him to the closest psychiatric hospital AND TELL THE PRESS THAT HE WENT THERE for evaluation? If there is no problem with the actions of the police then there is no need for secrecy.
The police are under no requirements to act - they even won a Supreme Court case regarding the matter.
The problem is that there are very few people with the guts to say "I will take the responsibility for ending this investigation right now because I believe there is no risk".
Once "the children" are invoked then anything can be justified to protect "the children".
And who is going to end his/her career by saying there is no risk when someone else might find something that was missed in the perpetrator's background?
Asking nerds what apps are good is like strolling into a literature forum and asking "I haven't read a book in 15 years - anything new out that you think is good?"
Well this "Twilight" series is a best seller. As is this "50 Shades of Grey".
I really with the old Twilight Zone was still running. I think that that premise would make a great episode.
I'm going to map my drive to work, by driving it a few dozen times.
And that is if you are the ONLY person with a robot car on that road. Which may be correct for the initial roll-out. But this is a great example of the "network effect". If 100 people in your state own robot cars then a LOT of your state will be continuously mapped / re-mapped / re-re-mapped / etc.
Are we really whining because a brand new technology can't do EVERYTHING for us? Because it only takes care of MOST of the drudgery?
There is space to be filled and page hits to be collected. Demanding instant perfection for every edge-case is a good way of doing both.
Google has logged over 700,000 miles in those vehicles. Without a single robot-controlled accident.
There might be problems in certain weather conditions. Or in certain other conditions. Or whatever. In which case the driver should take over.
And since it is software, eventually those problems should be solved.
If a new stop light appeared overnight, for example, the car wouldn't know to obey it.
Got it. So the cars cannot handle changes in traffic markers.
Google's cars can detect and respond to stop signs that aren't on its map, a feature that was introduced to deal with temporary signs used at construction sites.
So they cannot deal with new stop LIGHTS but they can deal with new stop SIGNS. WTF?
But in a complex situation like at an unmapped four-way stop the car might fall back to slow, extra cautious driving to avoid making a mistake.
And it would be "unmapped" for the first attempt. Right? Because the cars should be sending back data on road conditions and such to HQ. Right?
Maps have so far been prepared for only a few thousand miles of roadway, but achieving Google's vision will require maintaining a constantly updating map of the nation's millions of miles of roads and driveways.
And the car needs the map to drive, right?
Google's cars have safely driven more than 700,000 miles.
So they just drove over the same "few thousand miles of roadway" again and again and again and again? Until they got to 700,000 miles?
The car's sensors can't tell if a road obstacle is a rock or a crumpled piece of paper, so the car will try to drive around either.
As it should. Because you don't know if that piece of paper is covering a rock or a pothole or whatever.
For example, John Leonard, an MIT expert on autonomous driving, says he wonders about scenarios that may be beyond the capabilities of current sensors, such as making a left turn into a high-speed stream of oncoming traffic.
Isn't that one of the easier problems? The car waits until it detects a gap of X size where X is dependent upon the speed of oncoming vehicles and the distance it needs to cross PLUS a pre-set "safety margin".
This is the primary problem with "sweep" methods of collecting data.
There MIGHT be something in the "sweep" that MAY impact a current investigation. Therefore, ALL of the "sweep" must be hidden from the public.
Bullshit. There shouldn't be any difficulty in removing the items relevant to a current investigation. The should already be tagged as such. Then release the rest.
This is a case of "collect EVERYTHING and keep it FOREVER" so that anyone can be backtracked if the cops or politicians decide to do so. Where do you go? When? Why? What do you do there?
Now imagine a cop tracking your daughter to find out where she lives and where she works and which college she goes to and when she leaves for classes.
Roombas (and variants) are common household robots. YouTube has a lot of videos about Roombas cleaning a room while being ridden by a cat. Sometimes the cat is wearing a shark-suit.
Therefore, as this project progresses, Roombas will start to hunt cats in the neighborhood in order to get them to sit on top of them while they clean a room.
Or TFA is massively overstating the research and the concept and even robotics.
I've never heard someone saying a sentence like this in high school (girls or boys). Anyone?
Not me, either. If anything that would happen in college, wouldn't it?
Anyway, from TFA (by the way, is it really displaying as grey text on a white background):
NCWIT senior research scientist Catherine Ashcraft cites the 2008 Harvard Business Review study "The Athena Factor," which found that "56% of technical women leave their private sector jobs by mid-career," she said. "But 75% continue to work full-time, and approximately half of these continue to work in technical occupations.
Check my math, okay? 100 tech women 56% leave the private sector (56 in this example) 75% of the 56 continue to work full time (42 in this example) ~50% of 42 continue in tech (21 in this example)
So that 21 plus the 44 that did not change is 65. So only 35% of women in tech leave tech in mid-career. 65% are in tech and stay in tech full time.
What's the percentage of men who leave tech in mid-career? How does that compare to the 35% for women?
In her position as a professor of computer science at Union College, Barr found contextualizing computer science classes led to an increase in female enrollment.
I don't mean to sound mercenary here, but isn't "money" a major motivating factor? Paying the mortgage and such?
Police told My Fox Chicago that Stone was difficult during questioning and they arrested him and charged him with disturbing the school.
How did "the school" know about this? At most his teacher and the school principal and the regional/district/whatever superintendent should have been aware of the issue.
If anyone was "disturbing" "the school" it would have been one of those three (or the cops) and they should be arrested.
For a student, being "difficult during questioning" should (at most) result in expulsion AND NOT ARREST.
I agree. Even if what TFA says is true (it is not) then the US companies would be competing with companies around the world for those people. And their own governments.
Not to mention the ones who start their own companies and work for themselves.
Which would mean that those awesome programmers would have all the bargaining power. They wouldn't be accepting H-1B wages.
Statistically, there cannot be enough of "the best" to feed the stated demand for "the best".
But it makes sense if you substitute "cheaper" for "the best".
And that is reflected in the quality of the code being produced.
But the counter argument is that he clicks on links sent to him via email prior to verifying their origin (who sent them) or destination (where do they link to).
Next episode - If only there was some way to inform people that they should not click on links in email. Even if they think they're from someone they know. How will the bitter rivalry between MySpace and Friendster play out?
Given a choice, I think autonomous cars at some point WILL be programmed with such a choice. For example, hitting an elderly person in order to avoid hitting a small child.
Congratulations. Your product just injured Senator Somebody in order to avoid hitting a Betsy-wetsy doll.
Senator Somebody has filed "lawsuit" against your company. It is super-effective. All your assets are belong to him.
I wonder whether your insurance company would demand to know how you have set your car, and adjust your rates accordingly?
That does not matter because it won't be an option.
That is because "A.I." cars will never exist.
They will not exist because they will have to start out as less-than-100%-perfect than TFA requires. And that imperfection will lead to mistakes.
Those mistakes will lead to lawsuits. You were injured when a vehicle manufactured by "Artificially Intelligent Motors, inc (AIM, inc)" hit you by "choice". That "choice" was programmed into that vehicle at the demand of "AIM, inc" management.
So no. No company would take that risk. And anyone stupid enough to try would not write perfect code and would be sued out of existence after their first patch.
Do you remember that day when you lost your mind? You aimed your car at five random people down the road.
WTF?!? That makes no sense.
Thankfully, your autonomous car saved their lives by grabbing the wheel from you and swerving to the right.
Again, WTF?!? Who would design a machine that would take control away from a person TO HIT AN OBSTACLE? That's a mess of legal responsibility.
This scene, of course, is based on the infamous "trolley problem" that many folks are now talking about in AI ethics.
No. No they are not. The only "many folks" who are talking about it are people who have no concept of what it takes to program a car.
Or legal liability.
Itâ(TM)s a plausible scene, since even cars today have crash-avoidance features: some can brake by themselves to avoid collisions, and others can change lanes too.
No, it is not "plausible". Not at all. You are speculating on a system that would be able to correctly identify ALL THE OBJECTS IN THE AREA and that is never going to happen.
try them as a business communication tool, email beats them hands down
Exactly. While "kids" may "flock" to whatever is "cool" today, eventually you do have to deal with other adults in structured environments.
With email, usernames can be assigned in a structured fashion. And potentially offensive combinations can be weeded out.
With closed systems, it is usually first-come-first-served from around the world (and that's not counting multiple accounts per person). So you might not be able to get johnsmith. And "sukmahp3n1s" does not work so well when dealing with other companies.
1. Meaningful, specific error/log messages when something goes wrong.
Do this.
And make the error reports unique. No more "an unexpected error has occurred". Even "purple-monkey-dishwasher" is better than that. Make it easy for your users to report real problems to your developers. And that means making each error unique enough that the developers can search the code for it.
And have someone spend some time sorting through your forums (make sure you have forums) who can move threads and messages around while still maintaining the links to them. So someone with a "purple-monkey-dishwasher" error can see the other posts about that WITHOUT having to dig through unrelated "vitamin-can-hook" errors. Sortable by version. And by date.
Are things easier than they used to be? Perhaps for they basic system administration tasks.
But those have never been where the bulk of time and budget go.
They could be if you did not know what you were doing. Like I suspect the author of TFA did not know.
From TFA:
Where we once walked on tightropes every day doing basic server maintenance, we are now afforded nearly instant undo buttons, as snapshots of virtual servers allow us to roll back server updates and changes with a click.
If he's talking about a production system then he's an idiot.
If he's talking about a test system then what does it matter? The time spent running the tests was a lot longer than the time spent restoring a system if any of those tests failed.
And finally:
Within the course of a decade or so, we saw networking technology progress from 10Base-2 to 10Base-T, to 100Base-T to Gigabit Ethernet. Each leap required systemic changes in the data center and in the corporate network.
WTF is 10Base-2 doing there? I haven't seen that since the mid-90's. Meanwhile, every PC that I've seen in the last 10 years has had built-in gigabit Ethernet.
If he wants to talk about hardware then he needs to talk about thing like Cisco Nexus. And even that is not "new".
And, as you pointed out, the PROGRAMMING aspects always lag way behind the physical aspects. And writing good code is as difficult today as it has ever been.
What's not modern about using assembler where it's appropriate to do so?
Because it is InfoWorld. Seriously.
Here's item # 3.
Developer tool No. 3: Libraries
Do you remember the first time you used a library? But they're new because programmers 5 years ago did not have libraries.
It gets better:
Developer tool No. 4: APIs
Yeah. That's a radical new concept there.
Fuck it.
Developer tool No. 6: Browsers
Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1995.
And, finally:
The work involved in telling computers what to do is markedly different than it was even five years ago, and it's quite possible that any Rip Van Winkle-like developer who slept through the past 10 years would be unable to function in the today's computing world.
No it is not. Not they would not. Windows XP was released in 2001 and there are still people using it. That's 13 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that is that they are keeping him in an undisclosed location.
But they're revealing that he is undergoing psychiatric evaluation.
Wouldn't they just send him to the closest psychiatric hospital AND TELL THE PRESS THAT HE WENT THERE for evaluation? If there is no problem with the actions of the police then there is no need for secrecy.
The problem is that there are very few people with the guts to say "I will take the responsibility for ending this investigation right now because I believe there is no risk".
Once "the children" are invoked then anything can be justified to protect "the children".
And who is going to end his/her career by saying there is no risk when someone else might find something that was missed in the perpetrator's background?
I'm old. I remember when playing games at school was fun. Even if it was pretend assassination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin_(game)
Well this "Twilight" series is a best seller. As is this "50 Shades of Grey".
I really with the old Twilight Zone was still running. I think that that premise would make a great episode.
And that is if you are the ONLY person with a robot car on that road. Which may be correct for the initial roll-out. But this is a great example of the "network effect". If 100 people in your state own robot cars then a LOT of your state will be continuously mapped / re-mapped / re-re-mapped / etc.
There is space to be filled and page hits to be collected. Demanding instant perfection for every edge-case is a good way of doing both.
Google has logged over 700,000 miles in those vehicles. Without a single robot-controlled accident.
There might be problems in certain weather conditions. Or in certain other conditions. Or whatever. In which case the driver should take over.
And since it is software, eventually those problems should be solved.
Judging by how badly TFA was written.
Got it. So the cars cannot handle changes in traffic markers.
So they cannot deal with new stop LIGHTS but they can deal with new stop SIGNS. WTF?
And it would be "unmapped" for the first attempt. Right? Because the cars should be sending back data on road conditions and such to HQ. Right?
And the car needs the map to drive, right?
So they just drove over the same "few thousand miles of roadway" again and again and again and again? Until they got to 700,000 miles?
As it should. Because you don't know if that piece of paper is covering a rock or a pothole or whatever.
Isn't that one of the easier problems? The car waits until it detects a gap of X size where X is dependent upon the speed of oncoming vehicles and the distance it needs to cross PLUS a pre-set "safety margin".
This is the primary problem with "sweep" methods of collecting data.
There MIGHT be something in the "sweep" that MAY impact a current investigation. Therefore, ALL of the "sweep" must be hidden from the public.
Bullshit. There shouldn't be any difficulty in removing the items relevant to a current investigation. The should already be tagged as such. Then release the rest.
This is a case of "collect EVERYTHING and keep it FOREVER" so that anyone can be backtracked if the cops or politicians decide to do so. Where do you go? When? Why? What do you do there?
Now imagine a cop tracking your daughter to find out where she lives and where she works and which college she goes to and when she leaves for classes.
Roombas (and variants) are common household robots. YouTube has a lot of videos about Roombas cleaning a room while being ridden by a cat. Sometimes the cat is wearing a shark-suit.
Therefore, as this project progresses, Roombas will start to hunt cats in the neighborhood in order to get them to sit on top of them while they clean a room.
Or TFA is massively overstating the research and the concept and even robotics.
Not me, either. If anything that would happen in college, wouldn't it?
Anyway, from TFA (by the way, is it really displaying as grey text on a white background):
Check my math, okay?
100 tech women
56% leave the private sector (56 in this example)
75% of the 56 continue to work full time (42 in this example)
~50% of 42 continue in tech (21 in this example)
So that 21 plus the 44 that did not change is 65. So only 35% of women in tech leave tech in mid-career. 65% are in tech and stay in tech full time.
What's the percentage of men who leave tech in mid-career? How does that compare to the 35% for women?
I don't mean to sound mercenary here, but isn't "money" a major motivating factor? Paying the mortgage and such?
From TFA:
How did "the school" know about this? At most his teacher and the school principal and the regional/district/whatever superintendent should have been aware of the issue.
If anyone was "disturbing" "the school" it would have been one of those three (or the cops) and they should be arrested.
For a student, being "difficult during questioning" should (at most) result in expulsion AND NOT ARREST.
a. He's a he.
b. He's a teenager.
c. He goes to a school.
d. He wrote the word "gun" in a "fantasy" story.
Mandatory panic! Alert the police! Search EVERYTHING! Connect the dots!
Personally, I blame the teacher for not sufficiently explaining the limits of the assignment.
I agree. Even if what TFA says is true (it is not) then the US companies would be competing with companies around the world for those people. And their own governments.
Not to mention the ones who start their own companies and work for themselves.
Which would mean that those awesome programmers would have all the bargaining power. They wouldn't be accepting H-1B wages.
Statistically, there cannot be enough of "the best" to feed the stated demand for "the best".
But it makes sense if you substitute "cheaper" for "the best".
And that is reflected in the quality of the code being produced.
But the counter argument is that he clicks on links sent to him via email prior to verifying their origin (who sent them) or destination (where do they link to).
Next episode - If only there was some way to inform people that they should not click on links in email. Even if they think they're from someone they know. How will the bitter rivalry between MySpace and Friendster play out?
Congratulations. Your product just injured Senator Somebody in order to avoid hitting a Betsy-wetsy doll.
Senator Somebody has filed "lawsuit" against your company. It is super-effective. All your assets are belong to him.
Which is an order of magnitude EASIER TO PROGRAM.
And computers can recognize an obstacle and brake faster than a person can.
And that is why autonomous cars will NEVER be programmed with a "choice" to hit person X in order to avoid hitting person A.
So the premise of TFA is flawed.
That does not matter because it won't be an option.
That is because "A.I." cars will never exist.
They will not exist because they will have to start out as less-than-100%-perfect than TFA requires. And that imperfection will lead to mistakes.
Those mistakes will lead to lawsuits. You were injured when a vehicle manufactured by "Artificially Intelligent Motors, inc (AIM, inc)" hit you by "choice". That "choice" was programmed into that vehicle at the demand of "AIM, inc" management.
So no. No company would take that risk. And anyone stupid enough to try would not write perfect code and would be sued out of existence after their first patch.
From TFA:
WTF?!? That makes no sense.
Again, WTF?!? Who would design a machine that would take control away from a person TO HIT AN OBSTACLE? That's a mess of legal responsibility.
No. No they are not. The only "many folks" who are talking about it are people who have no concept of what it takes to program a car.
Or legal liability.
No, it is not "plausible". Not at all. You are speculating on a system that would be able to correctly identify ALL THE OBJECTS IN THE AREA and that is never going to happen.
Wired is being stupid in TFA.
Exactly. While "kids" may "flock" to whatever is "cool" today, eventually you do have to deal with other adults in structured environments.
With email, usernames can be assigned in a structured fashion. And potentially offensive combinations can be weeded out.
With closed systems, it is usually first-come-first-served from around the world (and that's not counting multiple accounts per person). So you might not be able to get johnsmith. And "sukmahp3n1s" does not work so well when dealing with other companies.
Do this.
And make the error reports unique. No more "an unexpected error has occurred". Even "purple-monkey-dishwasher" is better than that. Make it easy for your users to report real problems to your developers. And that means making each error unique enough that the developers can search the code for it.
And have someone spend some time sorting through your forums (make sure you have forums) who can move threads and messages around while still maintaining the links to them. So someone with a "purple-monkey-dishwasher" error can see the other posts about that WITHOUT having to dig through unrelated "vitamin-can-hook" errors. Sortable by version. And by date.
Whether you agree with the politics of a particular site or not, the easiest solution is just to not enable posting graphics.
If someone wants to make an offensive graphic and host it somewhere, fine. But why would anyone running a controversial site allow posting such?
Imagine /. with goatse images.
They could be if you did not know what you were doing. Like I suspect the author of TFA did not know.
From TFA:
If he's talking about a production system then he's an idiot.
If he's talking about a test system then what does it matter? The time spent running the tests was a lot longer than the time spent restoring a system if any of those tests failed.
And finally:
WTF is 10Base-2 doing there? I haven't seen that since the mid-90's. Meanwhile, every PC that I've seen in the last 10 years has had built-in gigabit Ethernet.
If he wants to talk about hardware then he needs to talk about thing like Cisco Nexus. And even that is not "new".
And, as you pointed out, the PROGRAMMING aspects always lag way behind the physical aspects. And writing good code is as difficult today as it has ever been.
Except that they'd have to put in a LOT of hours training on those systems to get that increase.
And for most of them, the majority of time is spent thinking about what to type.
That's because you are now holding the position of a senior engineer with 15 years of experience.
Look at what someone who is just starting needs to know. How much different is it than what you needed to know when you started 15 years ago?
Because it is InfoWorld. Seriously.
Here's item # 3.
Do you remember the first time you used a library? But they're new because programmers 5 years ago did not have libraries.
It gets better:
Yeah. That's a radical new concept there.
Fuck it.
Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1995.
And, finally:
No it is not. Not they would not. Windows XP was released in 2001 and there are still people using it. That's 13 years ago.
InfoWorld sucks.
And that is (excuse the capitalization) because VISIBLE PHYSICAL TRAITS ARE NOT SUFFICIENT FOR DEFINING "RACE".
Yet everyone who wants to talk about "race" usually resorts to visible physical characteristics.
Race X has visible physical characteristic A.
Race Y has visible physical characteristic B.
What happens when those races mix? What race is the baby?
Yes it is because that "false theory" is being published as a book AND because it claims to cite those scientists.
Thus it is implying that those scientists support that "false theory".
And since the "false theory" is racist, it is implying that those scientists who are implied as supporting that "false theory" are also racist.
So a public condemnation of the "false theory" and the author and the work is entirely reasonable.