Sigh... this issue is so bloody simple to resolve.
1. Default to a default set of morals, which include a reasonable (but not excessive) degree of self-sacrifice - based around the sort of decisions a "typical" driver would make.
2. Make a straightforward procedure for people to customize the vehicle's morals. Just run them through a series of scenarios on the screen to see where their cutoff is. Is this a person who would mow through a couple toddlers to avoid having to drive off the road, or a person who would rather drive off a certain-death cliff than risk hitting a single individual carelessly picnicking in the road?
If they start telling the car to make legally questionable decisions, warn them about this, and let them know that they'll be liable if the car has to make such a decision - but let them choose it anyway. Blatantly illegal things, like "mowing through a preschool playground at high speed to save some time on your daily commute", shouldn't be options. Questionable, legally debatable things should be options.
Sure they'll be the little one in the relationship and I'm sure that'll be hard for the "British empire" but they're 61 million people, not 4.3 million as we were back in 1994.
63 million right now. But soon enough they'll be 56-58m; no way Scotland is sticking around after this, and they could possibly lose Northern Ireland, depending on how this goes. The number could drop even lower if they start driving out immigrants. They might end up smaller than Tanzania.
Between the population loss, loss of territorial waters, and the general financial loss as a consequence to BRexit, I wouldn't be surprised to see the UK end up smaller than Italy, Brazil and India. Smaller than France is pretty much guaranteed (and after the recent currency plunge, probably already is so).
I think the prevailing sentiment in the EU is that it'll be fine *after* they can get all of these loose ends tied up it'll be a mixed bag (smaller / weaker market, but no more UK hindering everything that they try to do); however, until that point the divorce process is going to create a huge amount of uncertainty.
If prescription dispensing can be practically hacked, the possibilities are disturbing. Because they not only could kill people; they'd also know who they were killing, and could target specific people. Even high profile ones.
Whenever I read anything written by supporters of the "Leave" campaign, I can't help but imagine it being spoken by the shop owners - with the EU referred to in the same tone as "The Road";)
Good question! Precisely the opposite seems most likely. If Scotland gets another referendum, I foresee a lot of people moving from the south to the north. You'll end up with 1) a conservative "United Kingdom of England and Wales", and 2) a more liberal Scotland. A miniature replica of the US/Canada situation.
Northern Ireland might end up sticking it out with England/Wales, but it's hard to say. The more the rest of the UK devolves, the more I'd expect the formerly-secure "remain" position to weaken. Also, the more the UK economy weakens in response to the consequences of "leave", and potentially further consequences if Scotland leaves, the weaker I'd expect a "remain" position in Northern Ireland to become.
Poor Londoners... they're going to get dragged along for quite a ride. There's no divorcing London from England!
Gibraltar is an interesting case. It looks more and more like Spain may pursue an approach where they give the UK/Gibraltar two choices: 1) close the border (since it's now a border between an EU and non-EU state) - something that residents of Gibraltar are highly opposed to; or 2) accept dual Spanish/British sovereignty over Gibraltar, so that it can remain open. An interesting power play that's been hinted at for a while but now seems to be coming into open discussion.
Gravitational waves are measurements of something. We don't honestly know what.
Is this some sort of joke? We know exactly what they're measurements of: gravitational waves. It's right there in the name.
Are you trying to claim that we don't know how to interpret them? We know exactly how to interpret them - that's why we started looking for them in the first place, because we knew what they should look like. This isn't some sort of cryptic white noise, things like the inspiraling of binary pairs have very distinctive signatures.
but to already make such specific theories on where these are coming from
Beyond knowing what types of things are making the very distinctive signatures, we also have directional information, thanks to the use of multiple detectors.
The detection of gravitational waves may not help one bit in figuring out gravity
What exactly do you consider to be the best avenue to gather data to study gravity if not studying the most major aspect of gravity that we had previously been unable to study but now can?
We have no real proof of a big bang.... Teaching kids things like the Big Bang as a solid theory is wrong. We don't have but 10% of the data we need to make that claim, yet we make it anyway.
Okay, as this conversation is going into fringe territory, it ends here.
Freaking historians REFUSED for decades that the Norse were here in the americas way before any europeans and they dismissed all found evidence as "hoaxes" even though the evidence pool was sound and well documented.
[Citation needed]
The first actual Viking discovery in the Americas, L'Anse aux Meadows, was not particularly controversial. Yes, there were things dismissed as hoaxes before that, like the Kensington Runestone. That's because they were hoaxes.
The problem wasn't that people "disbelieved" claims of Norse settlement - it's that most people were simply unaware of them. There wasn't a great deal of interest outside of places like Iceland in the history of viking exploration until the early 20th century. Around the start of the 20th century there started being an increasing debate as to whether they referred to real places and if so where they were located. Expeditions really began to find them in the 1950s - Jørgen Meldgaard came extremely close, only about 15km from the site at L'Anse Aux Meadows, while following up on earlier suggestions by Tanner and Munn. The only physical find that Meldgaard found significant wasn't found in Canada or the US at all - it was from Greenland, an arrowhead in a viking settlement that matched Canadian native materials (ramah chert) and styles rather than Greenlandic. The Canadian government had offered significant support for his explorations (the Danish National Museum however was more hesitant, preferring that Meldgaard focus his research more on Native American cultures).
The biggest controvery that arose after Ingestad's excavation at L'Anse Aux Meadows was not people insisting that it was fake, but rather a row between Denmark and Norway as to who gets the credit for discovering it first. Denmark went back and tried to push Meldgaard's role in helping find the location (although he never did find any artifacts), and there was a lot of hostility in the Danish and Norwegian press over the issue (for what its worth, Meldgaard and Ingestad had a friendly relationship)
Except that it's established there to "open the envelope" to determine whether something was a blind injection before making announcements. More to the point, the blind injection system wasn't even online during the first discovery.
That's only because he doesn't show any fiscal responsibility. He's always giving his money away to the poor and lepers, getting in trouble with the law, etc. If we moneychangers were to extend him a line of credit, why should we expect to ever get paid back?
Not that I'd want to tell him that to his face - the last time he stopped by he trashed the place and started attacking us with a whip. That guy is mental.
The practical value is that we finally have a way to probe one of the biggest parts of physics that we don't actually understand, gravity. And it has direct implications for all of the other aspects that we don't understand or have major questions about, such as inflation, dark energy, the unification of relativity and quantum physics, etc. The field has massive potential to further our understanding of physics and the universe that we live in.
And LIGO is only the start. When something like eLISA comes online it'd be like going from the blurry images of Galileo's telescope to an actual astronomical observatory.
Never said you'd be making cross-country trips in the thing;) But short flights, up to half an hour or so? Yeah, it has enough power and battery capacity for that.
Why is your banking system so backwards than from the rest of the modern world? Checks have been essentially completely phased out here among the general public because everyone has a common, unified banking system with free transfers between accounts with little effort, a unified billing system (everyone's bank account has a bill "inbox"), etc.
There is a good bit of diversity in scams, however. I've been reading up on the different varieties as I've been looking to make some sizeable purchases from China and the number of scammers operating among the legitimate manufacturers/service providers over there is disturbing.
For example, one involves freight forwarders. They actually do have your goods shipped to your port of destination - but they don't send you the bill of lading, so you can't prove that you actually own the goods and thus can't collect them from customs. They then demand huge sums for the bill of lading so that you can actually collect your goods.
A common one with legitimate manufacturers themselves is exploiting any terms that you didn't specify, especially "price inflation". Unless you have it spelled out, they'll charge you for all sorts of unexpected costs (after you've made your initial deposit, of course) on top of the agreed-upon price. And more common than actual scams are quality issues. It's usually easier for them to just decide to lose you as a potential repeat customer than to spend a lot of money ensuring quality or to fix production errors.
With actual scammers, and sometimes legitimate manufacturers, one's in big trouble if they don't use a service that allows them to dispute the charges (paypal, credit card, legitimate escrow service, etc) and instead get tricked into using western union or other non-contestable source. Even if you're dealing with a legitimate supplier, once they have your money, they have relatively little motivation to follow through. Few have any sort of reputation that they need to protect; they can always just rebrand. And sometimes the company is legitimate but an employee is acting rogue.
Verification is made harder because sometimes the people buyers are supposed to be able to trust are in cahoots with the crooks - for example, there was a scandal a while back involving Alibaba with this sort of thing. An important part of working with foreign manufacturers is ordering an inspection (to see if you're dealing with a real factory that can actually make the real thing you're ordering, and to inspect produced goods before making the final payment). But there's no legal requirements for a person to meet in order to be able to classify themselves as an "inspector" or an "inspection company".
Asimo takes an awkward, brute-force-it approach involving lots of complex rules and experimentally-determined data tables to control what position to move each servo/actuator to at each stage of a step relative to what feedback it's getting from its sensors. Every time you change anything about the scenario - the texture of something, the weight of something, etc - you need to go back to modifying tables and potentially adding whole new rules.
That is, of course, not how lifeforms learn to do things, and it's a serious hindrance to task diversity and development time. We don't work by saying, "bend this joint to 63.02 degrees, this one to 11.17 degrees and this one to 32.88 degrees because I've calculated that this will position your hand where it needs to be". We work kinematically - when there's a task we've never done before, we set our body in motion, get a rough estimate of where our body will end up, and increase or decrease forces, constantly re-evaluating how things our going. The more we do a task, the more our "neural net" gets used to what sort of forces will be needed to accomplish a given task and the less it needs to constantly re-evaluate and adjust. But the key is, we don't work by fixed positions and angles - we work through forces and velocities.
If we want robots to be able to interact with their world the way we do, we need to give them the sort of paradigm that we use. Give them adjustable-tensioned cable "muscles", or at least a good emulation of them. Don't precalculate what angles everything needs to end up in. Do give them the most advanced neural net you can. Do give the neural net the visual or other sensor hardware needed to get an accurate sense of where its extremities are, how they're moving, and where other objects in the scene are and how they're moving (relative to itself). With these things, you'll end up with a task-flexible robot with natural movement. Precalculated angles and positions will always have comparatively poor task flexibility and unnatural movement.
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh... this issue is so bloody simple to resolve.
1. Default to a default set of morals, which include a reasonable (but not excessive) degree of self-sacrifice - based around the sort of decisions a "typical" driver would make.
2. Make a straightforward procedure for people to customize the vehicle's morals. Just run them through a series of scenarios on the screen to see where their cutoff is. Is this a person who would mow through a couple toddlers to avoid having to drive off the road, or a person who would rather drive off a certain-death cliff than risk hitting a single individual carelessly picnicking in the road?
If they start telling the car to make legally questionable decisions, warn them about this, and let them know that they'll be liable if the car has to make such a decision - but let them choose it anyway. Blatantly illegal things, like "mowing through a preschool playground at high speed to save some time on your daily commute", shouldn't be options. Questionable, legally debatable things should be options.
Then again, if you want figures newer than the 2011 census, then you need figures newer than that for other countries as well ;)
(the second part referring to GDP)
63 million right now. But soon enough they'll be 56-58m; no way Scotland is sticking around after this, and they could possibly lose Northern Ireland, depending on how this goes. The number could drop even lower if they start driving out immigrants. They might end up smaller than Tanzania.
Between the population loss, loss of territorial waters, and the general financial loss as a consequence to BRexit, I wouldn't be surprised to see the UK end up smaller than Italy, Brazil and India. Smaller than France is pretty much guaranteed (and after the recent currency plunge, probably already is so).
I think the prevailing sentiment in the EU is that it'll be fine *after* they can get all of these loose ends tied up it'll be a mixed bag (smaller / weaker market, but no more UK hindering everything that they try to do); however, until that point the divorce process is going to create a huge amount of uncertainty.
If prescription dispensing can be practically hacked, the possibilities are disturbing. Because they not only could kill people; they'd also know who they were killing, and could target specific people. Even high profile ones.
Whenever I read anything written by supporters of the "Leave" campaign, I can't help but imagine it being spoken by the shop owners - with the EU referred to in the same tone as "The Road" ;)
Good question! Precisely the opposite seems most likely. If Scotland gets another referendum, I foresee a lot of people moving from the south to the north. You'll end up with 1) a conservative "United Kingdom of England and Wales", and 2) a more liberal Scotland. A miniature replica of the US/Canada situation.
Northern Ireland might end up sticking it out with England/Wales, but it's hard to say. The more the rest of the UK devolves, the more I'd expect the formerly-secure "remain" position to weaken. Also, the more the UK economy weakens in response to the consequences of "leave", and potentially further consequences if Scotland leaves, the weaker I'd expect a "remain" position in Northern Ireland to become.
Poor Londoners... they're going to get dragged along for quite a ride. There's no divorcing London from England!
Gibraltar is an interesting case. It looks more and more like Spain may pursue an approach where they give the UK/Gibraltar two choices: 1) close the border (since it's now a border between an EU and non-EU state) - something that residents of Gibraltar are highly opposed to; or 2) accept dual Spanish/British sovereignty over Gibraltar, so that it can remain open. An interesting power play that's been hinted at for a while but now seems to be coming into open discussion.
Pro-tip: The instant you say "SJW", people stop reading what you're writing.
You forgot to tell them to keep off your lawn.
Double whoosh for confusing pop cinema with a BAFTA-award winning BBC TV series.
Whoosh.
1) I was paraphrasing "League of Gentlemen"
2) I'm not British.
This is a local country, for local people!
Is this some sort of joke? We know exactly what they're measurements of: gravitational waves. It's right there in the name.
Are you trying to claim that we don't know how to interpret them? We know exactly how to interpret them - that's why we started looking for them in the first place, because we knew what they should look like. This isn't some sort of cryptic white noise, things like the inspiraling of binary pairs have very distinctive signatures.
Beyond knowing what types of things are making the very distinctive signatures, we also have directional information, thanks to the use of multiple detectors.
What exactly do you consider to be the best avenue to gather data to study gravity if not studying the most major aspect of gravity that we had previously been unable to study but now can?
Okay, as this conversation is going into fringe territory, it ends here.
[Citation needed]
The first actual Viking discovery in the Americas, L'Anse aux Meadows, was not particularly controversial. Yes, there were things dismissed as hoaxes before that, like the Kensington Runestone. That's because they were hoaxes.
The problem wasn't that people "disbelieved" claims of Norse settlement - it's that most people were simply unaware of them. There wasn't a great deal of interest outside of places like Iceland in the history of viking exploration until the early 20th century. Around the start of the 20th century there started being an increasing debate as to whether they referred to real places and if so where they were located. Expeditions really began to find them in the 1950s - Jørgen Meldgaard came extremely close, only about 15km from the site at L'Anse Aux Meadows, while following up on earlier suggestions by Tanner and Munn. The only physical find that Meldgaard found significant wasn't found in Canada or the US at all - it was from Greenland, an arrowhead in a viking settlement that matched Canadian native materials (ramah chert) and styles rather than Greenlandic. The Canadian government had offered significant support for his explorations (the Danish National Museum however was more hesitant, preferring that Meldgaard focus his research more on Native American cultures).
The biggest controvery that arose after Ingestad's excavation at L'Anse Aux Meadows was not people insisting that it was fake, but rather a row between Denmark and Norway as to who gets the credit for discovering it first. Denmark went back and tried to push Meldgaard's role in helping find the location (although he never did find any artifacts), and there was a lot of hostility in the Danish and Norwegian press over the issue (for what its worth, Meldgaard and Ingestad had a friendly relationship)
Except that it's established there to "open the envelope" to determine whether something was a blind injection before making announcements. More to the point, the blind injection system wasn't even online during the first discovery.
That's only because he doesn't show any fiscal responsibility. He's always giving his money away to the poor and lepers, getting in trouble with the law, etc. If we moneychangers were to extend him a line of credit, why should we expect to ever get paid back?
Not that I'd want to tell him that to his face - the last time he stopped by he trashed the place and started attacking us with a whip. That guy is mental.
The practical value is that we finally have a way to probe one of the biggest parts of physics that we don't actually understand, gravity. And it has direct implications for all of the other aspects that we don't understand or have major questions about, such as inflation, dark energy, the unification of relativity and quantum physics, etc. The field has massive potential to further our understanding of physics and the universe that we live in.
And LIGO is only the start. When something like eLISA comes online it'd be like going from the blurry images of Galileo's telescope to an actual astronomical observatory.
And now they can screw up Ukraine's, Georgia's, and Moldova's environments too.
Meh, at least some people are happy...
Never said you'd be making cross-country trips in the thing ;) But short flights, up to half an hour or so? Yeah, it has enough power and battery capacity for that.
Why is your banking system so backwards than from the rest of the modern world? Checks have been essentially completely phased out here among the general public because everyone has a common, unified banking system with free transfers between accounts with little effort, a unified billing system (everyone's bank account has a bill "inbox"), etc.
Why do people still use checks in this day in age? The mind boggles.
There is a good bit of diversity in scams, however. I've been reading up on the different varieties as I've been looking to make some sizeable purchases from China and the number of scammers operating among the legitimate manufacturers/service providers over there is disturbing.
For example, one involves freight forwarders. They actually do have your goods shipped to your port of destination - but they don't send you the bill of lading, so you can't prove that you actually own the goods and thus can't collect them from customs. They then demand huge sums for the bill of lading so that you can actually collect your goods.
A common one with legitimate manufacturers themselves is exploiting any terms that you didn't specify, especially "price inflation". Unless you have it spelled out, they'll charge you for all sorts of unexpected costs (after you've made your initial deposit, of course) on top of the agreed-upon price. And more common than actual scams are quality issues. It's usually easier for them to just decide to lose you as a potential repeat customer than to spend a lot of money ensuring quality or to fix production errors.
With actual scammers, and sometimes legitimate manufacturers, one's in big trouble if they don't use a service that allows them to dispute the charges (paypal, credit card, legitimate escrow service, etc) and instead get tricked into using western union or other non-contestable source. Even if you're dealing with a legitimate supplier, once they have your money, they have relatively little motivation to follow through. Few have any sort of reputation that they need to protect; they can always just rebrand. And sometimes the company is legitimate but an employee is acting rogue.
Verification is made harder because sometimes the people buyers are supposed to be able to trust are in cahoots with the crooks - for example, there was a scandal a while back involving Alibaba with this sort of thing. An important part of working with foreign manufacturers is ordering an inspection (to see if you're dealing with a real factory that can actually make the real thing you're ordering, and to inspect produced goods before making the final payment). But there's no legal requirements for a person to meet in order to be able to classify themselves as an "inspector" or an "inspection company".
The whole thing is a minefield :P
Asimo takes an awkward, brute-force-it approach involving lots of complex rules and experimentally-determined data tables to control what position to move each servo/actuator to at each stage of a step relative to what feedback it's getting from its sensors. Every time you change anything about the scenario - the texture of something, the weight of something, etc - you need to go back to modifying tables and potentially adding whole new rules.
That is, of course, not how lifeforms learn to do things, and it's a serious hindrance to task diversity and development time. We don't work by saying, "bend this joint to 63.02 degrees, this one to 11.17 degrees and this one to 32.88 degrees because I've calculated that this will position your hand where it needs to be". We work kinematically - when there's a task we've never done before, we set our body in motion, get a rough estimate of where our body will end up, and increase or decrease forces, constantly re-evaluating how things our going. The more we do a task, the more our "neural net" gets used to what sort of forces will be needed to accomplish a given task and the less it needs to constantly re-evaluate and adjust. But the key is, we don't work by fixed positions and angles - we work through forces and velocities.
If we want robots to be able to interact with their world the way we do, we need to give them the sort of paradigm that we use. Give them adjustable-tensioned cable "muscles", or at least a good emulation of them. Don't precalculate what angles everything needs to end up in. Do give them the most advanced neural net you can. Do give the neural net the visual or other sensor hardware needed to get an accurate sense of where its extremities are, how they're moving, and where other objects in the scene are and how they're moving (relative to itself). With these things, you'll end up with a task-flexible robot with natural movement. Precalculated angles and positions will always have comparatively poor task flexibility and unnatural movement.