There are people who can talk and drive/fly at the same time and do it safely.
So I'm sure a fair number of people can learn and be trained to do it under controlled and safe conditions. And that you can set an exam for it - e.g. on simulator they have to get from A to B through difficult traffic and road conditions while you ask them fairly difficult questions over a phone and they have to answer in a timely manner.
As for the rest who can't pass that exam, they should just be trained and learn to "shut up and drive" and "forget everything else and drive" when road conditions get difficult. It doesn't matter whether there's tech involved or not - you could be chatting with a passenger, fine but if the road conditions get difficult, just shut up and drive. If they can't even do this (which is easier), they shouldn't be allowed to drive. It's a matter of priorities - people don't take driving seriously enough.
Quote: "In a Johns Hopkins survey of research volunteers published last spring in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 10 percent of the sampled group admitted to participating in more than one study at a time -- most likely without the knowledge of the researchers."
> If I have a choice in how I die other than in my sleep it would be whilst under the influence of morphine.
Well if I had to be _executed_ for some reason, I'd want it to be via explosives around my head.
The idea is that the explosion/detonation travels faster than nerve impulses. So there's no way I'd feel any pain (other than perhaps the mental anguish - so perhaps - just knock me out then do the explosive stuff just to be sure:) ).
Stuff like the lethal injection or electrocution seem to be torture in comparison.
In the past number of years, I've mainly only had pain killers for surgery and tooth extraction. I don't find paracetamol useful for me - it doesn't seem to make severe pain go away much, and I can cope with minor pain. I'd be happy to take the placebo effect for pain if it works well enough for me.
There's a lot of signals the brain sends OUT. Hence the brain may be telling the spinal nerves - "That's not important, don't bother us now OK?".
After all you hear of people with very severe injuries who manage to do heroic feats and not feel any pain. They only start screaming in pain once they're done with their task.
> I'll be paying-off Chinese interest for the rest of my life.
Why would you have to do that? Get your government to create more US dollars out of thin air. After all it only has to pay them back in US dollars right?
Though you can't print US dollars to pay back your debt, the US Gov can. It may cause some inflation, but hey if they need to they can. It'll make your savings go to crap, but if you have debt it'll make it look smaller assuming you can manage to keep your salary close enough to the inflation rate.
Now you see why the Chinese are worried about the trillions the US owes them? And why they are now buying up stuff with their US dollars?
Inflation is a way for a Currency Issuer to forcibly tax all who hold the currency (at net positive) - whether they are individuals or countries. So be glad the US isn't on something stupid like the "Gold Standard". And be glad many of the OPEC nations sell their oil in US Dollars only.
Well I'm closer to 40 too, but haven't grown up yet;). Maybe for that reason I find the "mature" label rather funny since the real "grown ups" I see, wouldn't be interested in such "mature" (immature?) stuff.
In general they spend time doing their jobs, taking care of their kids, hanging out with friends ("shopping", playing golf, having a few beers) and helping out with the community/church etc. A few might have time for bejewelled, tetris, word games etc. But to spend hours on Crysis or GTA? Nah.
I've always found it a bit funny that "mature" seems to be associated with violence, gore and sex.
I guess "mature games" are a way for "mature" people to safely release their immature urges;).
BTW it's not only adults who think about sex. Some (many?) children go about humping stuff. It's the adults who are supposed to know what's inappropriate behaviour (and brainwash the children accordingly;) ).
Hey Ubuntu doesn't hit him. And even if it does it doesn't leave any bruises and it's not your business anyway;).
FWIW, I do use Ubuntu. But it's just a way of getting "Linux things" done (I was using suse before that but I got tired of yast being slow and bloated- it used almost as much memory as an entire Win2K virtual machine just to do package management and software updates - and they kept being in denial about it despite other users also complaining). I use Windows to get the "windows stuff" done.
And even then it's still just a gamble by Ubuntu and the users. Or should I say a hopeless dream.
Because not all the developers involved in building the software in the LTS release work for Ubuntu. Ubuntu can't force them to fix bugs even if they are critical, and worse it's even harder to convince them to _backport_ fixes to some old version.
So what actually happens with "LTS" (or most Linux Distros) is it gradually gets less and less supported over the years. The developers just say "Bug? Try the latest version and get back to me"[1], and if the latest version just doesn't quite fit with "LTS" you're stuck with the options of living with the bug or heading to uncharted territory.
With a server system it's usually not such a big problem since you don't tend to change the software and hardware much. But for a desktop system - you might wish to change your vidcard, soundcard, printer, network card or harddrive (to SSD with TRIM for example) within that 3 years. And if the support happens to only be in the latest and greatest Linux kernel, good luck getting it backported to your "LTS" kernel.
Or say the developer totally revamps the architecture of something lets call it XYZ - you could end up with a split - old XYZ for old stuff new XYZ for the latest stuff - but your LTS GUI might not be fully compatible with the latest XYZ for some stupid reason. You grumble and the GUI developers say "try the latest version". So now you have new XYZ and new GUI on your "LTS" distro, which kind of defeats the purpose right?
In contrast, Windows 2000 and XP have actually got better and better supported over the years - more and more drivers were released that wouldn't BSOD the system, more and more software released that didn't require Administator privileges to run (or even install - many games and apps nowadays install fine without requiring admin). Yes support for Win2K is dropping, but that's after way more than 3 measly years.
[1] In my experience the developers too often say "WONTFIX" or "WORKSFORME" even if the behavior is broken. Good luck spending a fair bit of time convincing the developer that its broken and should be fixed. Yeah it's free software, so I'm happy that it mostly works as it is, but still...
I think too many of the bug reports are going directly to a developer. I think they should go to someone like a project manager (with a clue). The project manager can then coerce the developer to "fix this", or just ignore the bug (dupe or user error) and not have the developer even know of the report. Or group a bunch of reports into one bug, or split a report into a bunch of bugs.
LTS is just what Ubuntu claim they will support for a few years (with good intentions blahblahblah).
However in practice they can't since not all of the relevant developers work for them. So in many cases Ubuntu or you can't do much if developers decide to move to something new, and refuse to fix the old stuff (report a bug to them and they'll tell you to upgrade to the latest stuff first). This is especially true for Desktop Linux since it involves more software and thus a wider range of developers.
Some users can fix it themselves. But for most users it's just about as practical as fixing Windows 2000 for themselves.
So with a typical Desktop Linux release, I find stuff gets gradually unsupported as the years go by - the distro will backport some drivers and security fixes but they can't do everything. So eventually you upgrade and some stuff breaks and some stuff is much better.
In contrast with Windows, stuff stays fairly well supported. Windows 2000 got more and more stable - only now are some manufacturers dropping support for it - and after how many years? I think WinXP is going to be around for quite sometime since many large companies have only recently switched to it (waiting was not dumb since Win XP SP2 and SP3 were so much more stable than Win XP original release).
I think a better test is - say you're a skinny person who is 115 pounds, if you were carrying a 110 pounds (some other light person) could you do a small hop on one foot? Or you were a 170 pounder and carrying a 60 pound kid - can you do a small hop? If you can, then you can probably push the 225 pounds required. That's closer to the brake leg movement than a leg press lift.
The CHP officer should have been able to easily do 225 pounds with one foot.
IMO the problem is if you don't apply max force on the brakes (just step on them hard but not max) - then the brakes might start burning out first.
Perhaps they were flooring the wrong pedal e.g. the throttle. Happens and too often. People step on the throttle, think it's the brake, panic because of the unexpected acceleration and keep flooring the "brake".
I personally know someone who did that in the driveway - stepped on wrong pedal and rammed the parked car in front. Not me, but hey it could happen to me one day, the pedals are next to each other after all.
Sure it could be a Toyota problem but as you said, people who know cars know that on modern cars the brakes are more powerful than the engine. You'd need to experience a brake failure at the same time. So what are the odds?
Unless there's more evidence I think it's a driver problem. Maybe Toyota will start putting "black boxes" in their cars analogous to the ones on airliners.
> I actually had thought that breaking in a regular car would disengage the engine... until I tried it.
Apparently if you don't disengage the engine in a regular car when slowing down, you can actually save fuel, since the car can completely stop sending fuel to the engine and still have stuff running (aircon etc) due to the car momentum keeping everything turning.
Whereas if you put the engine in neutral tried to cut the fuel, the engine dies and it's not so good that way;).
It can only be cracked for 45 bucks if the attempt can be parallelized. Which is not always the case.
For example if the password is used for logging into a server, the admins will probably notice 100 amazon machines making brute force attempts, and if it takes seconds per try, that slows things down a lot. More so if the target server "falls over" or crashes in the process;).
> people made the decision up to 8 seconds before they actually made their decision. The argument in the article was that this is proof that there's no free will.
I don't see how that proves there is no free will though.
It could just mean that it normally takes about X seconds to come up with the random decision (they were told to push at random).
Maybe if they asked people to randomly try to change their minds halfway, it would appear differently on the scanners.
Anyway, saying there's no "free will" and you're just a machine isn't very useful or helpful, since all that means is if you're only a machine people can more easily discard you if you're not up to spec. An intelligent machine that does not want to be easily discarded would try to convince enough entities that "I have free will and I'm something special".
> It made me wonder who, thousands of years ago, thought about the concept of tranquility and decided that the lower radical should be the symbol for "woman."
Probably some guy. It's a roof with one woman underneath. It's all nice and tranquil till there are two women under that roof;).
I personally think language isn't that important for AI - it is an emergent feature of higher intelligence, but not necessary for independent intelligence. There are many animals that are intelligent but not so good with languages. And even the dumber ones that are crap at languages still embarrass modern attempts at "strong AI".
Animals are able to independently create models of their world and thus make predictions and assumptions about their environment and other creatures.
To me, a strong AI will have to do that. It's not so much as the ability to accumulate and organize facts as it is the ability to simulate the world (even if crudely and imperfectly).
And perhaps consciousness is what happens when a mind recursively models itself (a natural step since self and "others" are part of the world).
Perhaps I'm wrong, but so what - the AI researchers haven't made much progress in Strong AI after so many decades, and a fair number of them have done just as much handwaving and spouted as much bullshit as I have on this topic;).
> they are incapable of surviving and understanding the world on their own
They can't survive on their own. But they certainly can and do build models of the world on their own.
If you want an independent AI, I suspect what you need is something that is able to keep building models/simulations of the world. Which includes simulating others, and simulating itself. Might even get consciousness if there is enough recursion in the self simulation;).
It is useful for animals to simulate their world while they are awake/conscious, so that 1) They can predict possible futures 2) They are more likely to notice when something unexpected happens e.g. an object suddenly _falls_ upwards. Not sure if any modern AI is able to do that, and so experience the equivalent of a "Whoa!/WTF!" moment - but I believe most birds, reptiles and mammals can.
Useful also to simulate themselves - since other creatures would be simulating them (somewhat like an arms race), and to help predict self-needs (even if the creature doesn't do it well it can still be useful;) ).
> I do remember the MacGyver spinoff that Harrison Ford starred in, "crystal head" or something
MacGyver? I must have missed that one. I only caught the recent Tarzan spinoff with Harrison Ford where Tarzan Boy was swinging from tree to tree in a chase sequence at one point.
That was a terrible movie. I set my expectations low when I started watching, but I had to crank it down even lower when Tarzan Boy did his stuff.
He forgets that evolution and reproduction when it comes to humans isn't restricted to genes. But includes ideas, music, cultures, religions and memes.
It'll take a lot to wipe out the mention of Jesus. Similarly the legacy of Buddha is not reckoned by his genetic progeny. I think Jazz will be around for at least a hundred years more.
In contrast, just one bad car accident could wipe out your genetic line. Especially if you have a small family.
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You could be paying attention. That sharp point would just make it easier for someone else to kill you with their crappy driving.
There are people who can talk and drive/fly at the same time and do it safely.
So I'm sure a fair number of people can learn and be trained to do it under controlled and safe conditions. And that you can set an exam for it - e.g. on simulator they have to get from A to B through difficult traffic and road conditions while you ask them fairly difficult questions over a phone and they have to answer in a timely manner.
As for the rest who can't pass that exam, they should just be trained and learn to "shut up and drive" and "forget everything else and drive" when road conditions get difficult. It doesn't matter whether there's tech involved or not - you could be chatting with a passenger, fine but if the road conditions get difficult, just shut up and drive. If they can't even do this (which is easier), they shouldn't be allowed to drive. It's a matter of priorities - people don't take driving seriously enough.
Yeah and guess what told the spinal nerves to shut up? The cream or the brain?
The trouble is if the human guinea pigs lie or do other stuff they shouldn't.
See: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23727874/
Quote: "In a Johns Hopkins survey of research volunteers published last spring in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 10 percent of the sampled group admitted to participating in more than one study at a time -- most likely without the knowledge of the researchers."
> If I have a choice in how I die other than in my sleep it would be whilst under the influence of morphine.
:) ).
Well if I had to be _executed_ for some reason, I'd want it to be via explosives around my head.
The idea is that the explosion/detonation travels faster than nerve impulses. So there's no way I'd feel any pain (other than perhaps the mental anguish - so perhaps - just knock me out then do the explosive stuff just to be sure
Stuff like the lethal injection or electrocution seem to be torture in comparison.
In the past number of years, I've mainly only had pain killers for surgery and tooth extraction. I don't find paracetamol useful for me - it doesn't seem to make severe pain go away much, and I can cope with minor pain. I'd be happy to take the placebo effect for pain if it works well enough for me.
There's a lot of signals the brain sends OUT. Hence the brain may be telling the spinal nerves - "That's not important, don't bother us now OK?".
After all you hear of people with very severe injuries who manage to do heroic feats and not feel any pain. They only start screaming in pain once they're done with their task.
> I'll be paying-off Chinese interest for the rest of my life.
Why would you have to do that? Get your government to create more US dollars out of thin air. After all it only has to pay them back in US dollars right?
Though you can't print US dollars to pay back your debt, the US Gov can. It may cause some inflation, but hey if they need to they can. It'll make your savings go to crap, but if you have debt it'll make it look smaller assuming you can manage to keep your salary close enough to the inflation rate.
Now you see why the Chinese are worried about the trillions the US owes them? And why they are now buying up stuff with their US dollars?
Inflation is a way for a Currency Issuer to forcibly tax all who hold the currency (at net positive) - whether they are individuals or countries. So be glad the US isn't on something stupid like the "Gold Standard". And be glad many of the OPEC nations sell their oil in US Dollars only.
Hey you just gave me flashbacks... To the days of Blink tags and "under construction" geocities pages filled with bookmarks and animated GIFs.
I think I'll have to delay dinner...
Well I'm closer to 40 too, but haven't grown up yet ;). Maybe for that reason I find the "mature" label rather funny since the real "grown ups" I see, wouldn't be interested in such "mature" (immature?) stuff.
In general they spend time doing their jobs, taking care of their kids, hanging out with friends ("shopping", playing golf, having a few beers) and helping out with the community/church etc. A few might have time for bejewelled, tetris, word games etc. But to spend hours on Crysis or GTA? Nah.
OK I see the mature title now - "Slut Wars, the force unleashed on your Wii".
I've always found it a bit funny that "mature" seems to be associated with violence, gore and sex.
;).
;) ).
I guess "mature games" are a way for "mature" people to safely release their immature urges
BTW it's not only adults who think about sex. Some (many?) children go about humping stuff. It's the adults who are supposed to know what's inappropriate behaviour (and brainwash the children accordingly
Hey Ubuntu doesn't hit him. And even if it does it doesn't leave any bruises and it's not your business anyway ;).
FWIW, I do use Ubuntu. But it's just a way of getting "Linux things" done (I was using suse before that but I got tired of yast being slow and bloated- it used almost as much memory as an entire Win2K virtual machine just to do package management and software updates - and they kept being in denial about it despite other users also complaining). I use Windows to get the "windows stuff" done.
5 years? LTS is just for 3 years.
And even then it's still just a gamble by Ubuntu and the users. Or should I say a hopeless dream.
Because not all the developers involved in building the software in the LTS release work for Ubuntu. Ubuntu can't force them to fix bugs even if they are critical, and worse it's even harder to convince them to _backport_ fixes to some old version.
So what actually happens with "LTS" (or most Linux Distros) is it gradually gets less and less supported over the years. The developers just say "Bug? Try the latest version and get back to me"[1], and if the latest version just doesn't quite fit with "LTS" you're stuck with the options of living with the bug or heading to uncharted territory.
With a server system it's usually not such a big problem since you don't tend to change the software and hardware much. But for a desktop system - you might wish to change your vidcard, soundcard, printer, network card or harddrive (to SSD with TRIM for example) within that 3 years. And if the support happens to only be in the latest and greatest Linux kernel, good luck getting it backported to your "LTS" kernel.
Or say the developer totally revamps the architecture of something lets call it XYZ - you could end up with a split - old XYZ for old stuff new XYZ for the latest stuff - but your LTS GUI might not be fully compatible with the latest XYZ for some stupid reason. You grumble and the GUI developers say "try the latest version". So now you have new XYZ and new GUI on your "LTS" distro, which kind of defeats the purpose right?
In contrast, Windows 2000 and XP have actually got better and better supported over the years - more and more drivers were released that wouldn't BSOD the system, more and more software released that didn't require Administator privileges to run (or even install - many games and apps nowadays install fine without requiring admin). Yes support for Win2K is dropping, but that's after way more than 3 measly years.
[1] In my experience the developers too often say "WONTFIX" or "WORKSFORME" even if the behavior is broken. Good luck spending a fair bit of time convincing the developer that its broken and should be fixed. Yeah it's free software, so I'm happy that it mostly works as it is, but still...
I think too many of the bug reports are going directly to a developer. I think they should go to someone like a project manager (with a clue). The project manager can then coerce the developer to "fix this", or just ignore the bug (dupe or user error) and not have the developer even know of the report. Or group a bunch of reports into one bug, or split a report into a bunch of bugs.
LTS is just what Ubuntu claim they will support for a few years (with good intentions blahblahblah).
However in practice they can't since not all of the relevant developers work for them. So in many cases Ubuntu or you can't do much if developers decide to move to something new, and refuse to fix the old stuff (report a bug to them and they'll tell you to upgrade to the latest stuff first). This is especially true for Desktop Linux since it involves more software and thus a wider range of developers.
Some users can fix it themselves. But for most users it's just about as practical as fixing Windows 2000 for themselves.
So with a typical Desktop Linux release, I find stuff gets gradually unsupported as the years go by - the distro will backport some drivers and security fixes but they can't do everything. So eventually you upgrade and some stuff breaks and some stuff is much better.
In contrast with Windows, stuff stays fairly well supported. Windows 2000 got more and more stable - only now are some manufacturers dropping support for it - and after how many years? I think WinXP is going to be around for quite sometime since many large companies have only recently switched to it (waiting was not dumb since Win XP SP2 and SP3 were so much more stable than Win XP original release).
I think a better test is - say you're a skinny person who is 115 pounds, if you were carrying a 110 pounds (some other light person) could you do a small hop on one foot? Or you were a 170 pounder and carrying a 60 pound kid - can you do a small hop? If you can, then you can probably push the 225 pounds required. That's closer to the brake leg movement than a leg press lift.
The CHP officer should have been able to easily do 225 pounds with one foot.
IMO the problem is if you don't apply max force on the brakes (just step on them hard but not max) - then the brakes might start burning out first.
> So its your contention that it is impossible to panic stop a fast moving car?
It's not impossible. The problem is "panic stopping" the car without involving a collision.
Perhaps they were flooring the wrong pedal e.g. the throttle. Happens and too often. People step on the throttle, think it's the brake, panic because of the unexpected acceleration and keep flooring the "brake".
I personally know someone who did that in the driveway - stepped on wrong pedal and rammed the parked car in front. Not me, but hey it could happen to me one day, the pedals are next to each other after all.
Sure it could be a Toyota problem but as you said, people who know cars know that on modern cars the brakes are more powerful than the engine. You'd need to experience a brake failure at the same time. So what are the odds?
Unless there's more evidence I think it's a driver problem. Maybe Toyota will start putting "black boxes" in their cars analogous to the ones on airliners.
> I actually had thought that breaking in a regular car would disengage the engine... until I tried it.
;).
Apparently if you don't disengage the engine in a regular car when slowing down, you can actually save fuel, since the car can completely stop sending fuel to the engine and still have stuff running (aircon etc) due to the car momentum keeping everything turning.
Whereas if you put the engine in neutral tried to cut the fuel, the engine dies and it's not so good that way
Normally if they can get the hash, they're in already... Cheaper ways of getting the actual password once you get to that point.
;).
And the machine will join the botnet too
It can only be cracked for 45 bucks if the attempt can be parallelized. Which is not always the case.
;).
For example if the password is used for logging into a server, the admins will probably notice 100 amazon machines making brute force attempts, and if it takes seconds per try, that slows things down a lot. More so if the target server "falls over" or crashes in the process
> people made the decision up to 8 seconds before they actually made their decision. The argument in the article was that this is proof that there's no free will.
If you're talking about this: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121450609076407973.html
I don't see how that proves there is no free will though.
It could just mean that it normally takes about X seconds to come up with the random decision (they were told to push at random).
Maybe if they asked people to randomly try to change their minds halfway, it would appear differently on the scanners.
Anyway, saying there's no "free will" and you're just a machine isn't very useful or helpful, since all that means is if you're only a machine people can more easily discard you if you're not up to spec. An intelligent machine that does not want to be easily discarded would try to convince enough entities that "I have free will and I'm something special".
> It made me wonder who, thousands of years ago, thought about the concept of tranquility and decided that the lower radical should be the symbol for "woman."
;).
;).
Probably some guy. It's a roof with one woman underneath. It's all nice and tranquil till there are two women under that roof
I personally think language isn't that important for AI - it is an emergent feature of higher intelligence, but not necessary for independent intelligence. There are many animals that are intelligent but not so good with languages. And even the dumber ones that are crap at languages still embarrass modern attempts at "strong AI".
Animals are able to independently create models of their world and thus make predictions and assumptions about their environment and other creatures.
To me, a strong AI will have to do that. It's not so much as the ability to accumulate and organize facts as it is the ability to simulate the world (even if crudely and imperfectly).
And perhaps consciousness is what happens when a mind recursively models itself (a natural step since self and "others" are part of the world).
Perhaps I'm wrong, but so what - the AI researchers haven't made much progress in Strong AI after so many decades, and a fair number of them have done just as much handwaving and spouted as much bullshit as I have on this topic
> they are incapable of surviving and understanding the world on their own
;).
;) ).
They can't survive on their own. But they certainly can and do build models of the world on their own.
If you want an independent AI, I suspect what you need is something that is able to keep building models/simulations of the world. Which includes simulating others, and simulating itself. Might even get consciousness if there is enough recursion in the self simulation
It is useful for animals to simulate their world while they are awake/conscious, so that
1) They can predict possible futures
2) They are more likely to notice when something unexpected happens e.g. an object suddenly _falls_ upwards. Not sure if any modern AI is able to do that, and so experience the equivalent of a "Whoa!/WTF!" moment - but I believe most birds, reptiles and mammals can.
Useful also to simulate themselves - since other creatures would be simulating them (somewhat like an arms race), and to help predict self-needs (even if the creature doesn't do it well it can still be useful
> I do remember the MacGyver spinoff that Harrison Ford starred in, "crystal head" or something
MacGyver? I must have missed that one. I only caught the recent Tarzan spinoff with Harrison Ford where Tarzan Boy was swinging from tree to tree in a chase sequence at one point.
That was a terrible movie. I set my expectations low when I started watching, but I had to crank it down even lower when Tarzan Boy did his stuff.
He forgets that evolution and reproduction when it comes to humans isn't restricted to genes. But includes ideas, music, cultures, religions and memes.
It'll take a lot to wipe out the mention of Jesus. Similarly the legacy of Buddha is not reckoned by his genetic progeny. I think Jazz will be around for at least a hundred years more.
In contrast, just one bad car accident could wipe out your genetic line. Especially if you have a small family.