But good engineering requires the math. I ignored the math for a long time and that was a huge mistake. I am not talking about proving P=NP kind of CS but just figuring out what to do with 60GB of data kind of CE. You need math. But why make it so hard? Is the goal of the education to figure out who can take the most torture or to guide the people into being better programmers?
A great example was a recent Cryptography course that I took. The guy used as much math notation as was possible and would talk about things like RSA in terms of 1000 bit primes. I was puzzling over this so I dug around and found an awesome example that used 2 digit primes as the basis of the encryption. That way I could mess with the RSA algorithm using numbers that didn't cause a buffer overflow in my head. I coded up the RSA in no time and could test it against simple numbers that my eyeballs could understand in a flash. Plus if it generated crap results the numbers meant something to me so I could see the scale of my mistake and quickly puzzle it out. With 1000 bit numbers I won't see the difference if it is out by a 100 or 10000000000000000. It was then a breeze to bump my algorithm into the properly large numbers. Basically it boiled down to one way I learned and one way I didn't yet both ways were just as easy to demonstrate. Thus the guy demonstrating it was being a jerk.
Why aren't the building codes in that area either requiring that or at least storm shelters? That school falling over was just bizarre. I am willing to bet that they have spent much time and money training for school shootings while ignoring the giant storms that rush by quite often.
I would love one for doing retina destined design. Presently if I don't scale the iPad simulator on my screen it is 8 feet high. Doesn't quite give me the right sense of proportion. I suspect that more and more mobile devices are going to go with higher density displays and thus it would be nice to get into at least the same density ballpark on my desktop. The sad part is that most if not all of these monitors will be really BIG. Personally for development I don't like going much over 22" per monitor. I'd just like 4K crammed into that 22".
Often on US ballots there are 8 zillion things to vote on, president, congress, senate, dog-catcher, judges, propositions, etc.
A pure paper vote is going to be filled out wrong 99% of the time.
I am a huge fan of electronic voting machines that print out your ballot and in clear text it lays out who and what you voted for. Then you take the paper ballot and put it in a ballot box. Then when the vote counting happens the computers can feed out a preliminary vote in seconds which is followed by the official count of the paper ballots themselves. The paper ballots would have the final say if there were any disagreement between them and the machines.
A system like this would increase security in many ways in that if someone tampered with the machines the paper ballots would effectively let anyone audit their own vote. And if the paper ballots are messed with they will disagree with the computer tally giving cause for an investigation. So to mess with an election you would now have to mess with both.
I certainly hope that everyone on slashdot agrees that computer only polling stations are about as secure as Windows 98.
I have been on teams where someone pulled some process out of their ass and proceeded to turn the whole project into another thing that regularly comes out of asses.
This is not to say formal processes and procedures are a problem just that bad ones are.
Sometimes they come from the heads of stupid people and well that can be understood. But often they come out of the heads of stupid evil people. They are too stupid to actually contribute so they come up with rules that they can then enforce to make other productive people look really bad. They can then write up reports that document just how much everyone around them sucks. "I was doing a code review and found 280 instances where your code was out of spec" (this is because their coding standard required two spaces before and after the == and they weren't there 140 times. "I wrote you up for not using the proper commenting system." "I wrote you up for not coming to the team building meeting scheduled for Saturday at my house." "I wrote you up for handing in an improperly formatted resignation letter."
I am not talking about bad managers, no no no, that is a whole other post, in the above I am talking about a co-worker who thinks that they can take power by quoting specs and standards that nobody else agreed to and they have no authority to create. I worked with a programmer who took an agile programming seminar and came back with binder after binder about agile programming. Whatever the heck they taught him wasn't agile. It was sclerotic programming easily requiring each programmer to generate at least 12 separate process related documents a day. I had only worked at the company a week and went into the owners and said that if they implemented this system that productivity would drop to around 10%. They said that I should be flexible and give it a try. I had received a counter offer to a job I had turned down the week before so I took that job the next day. The company died a year or so later(for mostly fraud related reasons) and the lawsuits among investors continue to this day.
I will unreservedly say that the more math I have learned the better my programming has become. I am not sure what the limits(no pun intended) are but even calculus has been useful in ML applications. Discrete is great for thinking through networks and parallel computing. Statistics and ML are great for getting interesting information out of the hoards of data that most systems can gather. Matrix math is useful for both 3D and ML. The list goes on. But I like you looked at the crazy math until my eyes bled. Then I started to find resources where someone takes some bit and simplifies it. So bit by bit I learned the nasty stuff.
But and this is a huge but; you are completely correct that many of the origins of CS seem to be largely old math professors who repurposed themselves. The result is some shockingly pedantic math in place of pretty simple math. So often a CS textbook or paper will use some bamboozling math formula instead of shockingly simple pseudo code. Worst case scenario they could use both side by side. So out comes the sigma notation instead of some pseudo code that says bandwidth_required=sum(network1..networkN);
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the sigma notation make the person feel smarter. I will now quote from the intro to "Calculus made easy" written around 100 years ago.:
"The fools who write the text-books of advanced mathematics-- and they are mostly clever fools-- seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way."
Now some people are going to blah blah about the conciseness of math notation. But I say bah humbug. I'll take clarity any day over conciseness. Plus you can always put the math notation in a box or something so it is not either or. Plus leave the jargon at home. It is not a network topology it is a bunch of networked computers. Plus as programmers we only use a tiny handful of variables x, y, t, i. Not theta, not epsilon, not gamma. Once you need to put a double stroke in your character you have certainly lost me a page ago. If you use:= to differentiate from == then you are a putz.
Yes I can see where a particularly deranged group might then have a coup where they take over the robotic controls and now you have gone from a dictatorship (at least a bit bad) to nightmare bad.
One of the problems that I have long had with the idea of robot soldiers is that it makes war too easy. When you have huge emotional and financial costs to war your government will think twice about either getting involved or at least be pressured into "Bringing the boys home." but if you are sending robot planes with loads of robot warriors, why not have a war, or two, or five? A bunch of dead dehumanized "others' is not so bad especially seeing that it generates jobs at homes and pork spending for politicians.
War is rarely the correct solution. In fact it it usually a clear sign of a long series of failures or the sign of a madman.
Plus robotic warriors are, for the next short while, going to be the plaything of western countries. But how long before some tin-pot nut job flies the same machines into NYC or LA? Or even a homebrew nutjob? Again the key is that the consequences are potentially far less for the perpetrator. You can't usefully arrest the bot. You mightn't even end up with the slightest clue who sent it. Again the same problem. This tool makes waging whatever stupid war that pops into your head too easy.
Robots have the potential to turn this planet into Utopia or into Distopia. I suspect that some governments are philosophically predisposed toward Utopia and others Distopia in regards to using robots wisely. A simple question: If your country can, using robots, vastly decrease the cost of running prisons will your country increase its incarceration rate?
Very good point but I am thinking about the human waste products that actively look for known exploits to exploit. For example there are a whole lot of people who wait for OS updates to see what has changes so they can run out and make exploits knowing that a huge number of people don't upgrade very quickly.
But yes giving information so that people can run for the hills can be useful.
It all boils down to information being power. So who will best use that power should be the key question before releasing the information. Not paternalisticly but realistically who will, in actuality, use the information for good.
If one hour ago I was notified of a flaw in my app, and 59 minutes ago I fixed it, and 58 minutes ago I submitted it for approval it could easily be a week before it get approved.
I would say that after a week they should notify that there is a flaw, but not what the flaw is. Then maybe after 30 days release the kraken (exploitable flaw that is).
Let's say they discover a pacemaker flaw where a simple android app could be cobbled together to give pacemaker people nearby fatal heart attacks. If they release that in a week then they are vile human beings.
Most companies do seem pretty slothful in fixing these things but pushing for a company to process the flaw, analyze the flaw, find a solution, assign the workers, fix it, test it, and deploy it in under a week seems pretty extreme.
I have built maybe 30 Javascript heavy websites and not once did I use anything but free Javascript. Not out of any philosophical bent but just that there is so much awesome free Javascript out there in so many forms. Occasionally I stumble on some library where they want money but 5 seconds later I find something free that makes me go oooooh. Or I build it myself.
So instead of going on and on about how much of a waste of time this is I'll suggest a few campaigns of more importance: Better freedom of information acts. Less stupid patent laws. Less stupid copywrite laws. Better privacy regulations severely limiting what data governments and corporations can gather. Better built in security into nearly everything I use so that people can't backdoor their way into my data (i.e. no backdoors into things like Skype). To name just a few of the 100 million more important causes out there.
But if I have 100 arm chips they will be very sleepy when not in use. I find server usage spikes and jumps so they can come alive and absorb the blows. Also some processes go stupid so having the ability to have many jammed threads and still have the server run find is great.
I just see intel as being more efficient in a perfect world and ARM being more resilient to an imperfect world. Plus I would love to see some fresh blood in the server world.
Networked computers are great. I work with them all day every day. But if I had something even a 1/1000th as secret (say an embarrassing video) I would keep it offline, encrypted, and in a physically secure location. My assumption from a security standpoint is that networked cyber security is 99.9% to keep the script kiddies out. Keeping out the determined evildoer take some serious and continuous effort; or you just make it a physical effort for the bad guys.
Even the guys with the Rob Ford Crack video wouldn't let the reporter hold their phone.
This comment sounds like paranoid ravings except that you are 100% correct. I don't want you to be correct, and I hope another way is found. But my simple quest is to identify which countries are going to get this right and move to one of them.
The flip side of what you are saying is that robots could be the basis of a near utopia.
But keep in mind that one of the horrible institutions that will become robotized (and thus a cheap option) is policing and prisons. So when people are losing their minds and rioting they can be neatly rounded up and kept away from the few remaining employed people.
I would love to know where to get a cheap 64 core 1U server. And I don't mean that in the usual snarky slashdot (I think you're wrong) way but I truly would love to know.
Actually that was exactly my meaning society needs to be restructured. I don't believe in boring tax and spend but I would love to see taxes that are based upon levels of employment and ratio of wages and profits. So if you have say a grocery chain that eliminates most of their employees and replaces them with robots resulting in massive profits; their income taxes on both profits and management salaries should approach 100%. This would then appeal to the greed of the shareholders and management to not only hire more people but to pay them well. Most companies would not just hire people and have them stand around. They would look to put them to effective work. This might even involve horrible things like providing on the job training and education.
This is basic game theory. Each company will act in their best interests by reducing costs which will generally mean more and more technological replacement of human employees. But this does not actually work out in the end if there is mass unemployment. Tax and spend just results in insane Soviet inefficiencies. Banning technology is also just stupid as it just drive up the cost of living. The only thing left is to insent companies to hire more humans. Taxes are an excellent way to do just that. Finding the right balance generally will be hard but a simple formula would be to base it somewhat on the unemployment rate. If you are running a fantastically profitable company in an area with 15% unemployment then whoosh, up go your taxes. If you in an area with 2% unemployment then the tax incentive can be somewhat withdrawn. You have to be careful that companies don't just all move somewhere expensive to live that has a low unemployment rate so much would just be based upon national rates combined with the range of their products. So a locally owned store would be more regional while Apple would be more national.
Any country that gets this right will flourish in the mid to late 21st century. Any country that doesn't will end up in a Game Theory Nash Equilibrium where a tiny number of heavily automated companies are fighting over the few employed customers remaining in their country while nearly non-stop civil unrest drives up their security costs. Plus they will end up paying high taxes as the few remaining taxpayers anyway.
I have long pined for a server with maybe 10 4 core ARM CPUS. Basically my server spends its time serving up web stuff from memory. Each web request needs to do a bit of thinking and then fire the data out the port. Disk IO is not an issue nor is server bandwidth. Quite simply I don't need much CPU but I need many CPUs. A big powerful intel is of less interest.
Also by breaking up the system into physically separate CPUs I suspect that an interesting memory accessing architecture could be conjured up preventing another potential choke point.
In my town they went with a GPS and electronically dispatched system. I asked a driver what changes it made and he said that it nearly instantly doubled his income and then it nearly doubled again over the next couple of months. First he said that the old drivers had some sort of kickback system with the dispatchers. So he could be pretty well parked across the street from a call yet the dispatcher would send a taxi that was presently across town and presently had a fare. So he said that with the modern system the old dispatchers and drivers all quit overnight. Another set of drivers that quit were the illiterate drivers who couldn't work the system. He also said that the silence was bliss. If his computer bleeped he had a fare but otherwise it was reading time.
The slower increase in his income was when everybody discovered that the computer based cab company was much much faster.
Now it was too early at that point but one problem for him would be that the training time to become a fairly good cabbie would be nearly zero. You didn't have to learn to work the radio and with the computer both telling you how to get to your fair and the route to dropping them off you could be pretty well fresh off the boat and still be able to be a halfway decent cabbie in this city.
So when all is said and done the technological solution will benefit the customer and the cab company but not the worker.
Personally I am a huge fan of technological improvements but society is not well structured to prevent people from really getting hurt by all this. As robotics take this all to the next logical step there will be a point where very few owners are able to have huge businesses with almost zero workers. While individually this will be great for the producers and providers, the real base of any economy is consumption not production. So without employed people there will be little consumption and much rioting and crime. Society needs to be restructured so as to make sure that inequality doesn't get out of control. This would even hurt those who would like to be unequal.
I my town there is a guy who pushes a cart full of cans down the street who's rantings are pretty hostile. I can't imagine how long the list of people he has threatened would be but it might very well include everybody. I wouldn't hire him to babysit but his total kill count seems to hover around 0.
So if they want to arrest people for having mad ramblings they could start with anyone possessing almost any religious text.
I thought the word careless was assumed to proceed user. I think that basically every slashdotter has been called to help some "careless" user who has 3 toolbars, 2 AV bloatwares, and countless other bits of crap that came along with all their downloads. Yet they will swear on a stack of bibles that "they never installed nothin' "
So any malware that depends on users being careless will be a huge success. The other key will be ease of use.
That being said, I generally stick with my brother's rule: "I wouldn't transmit it electronically if I wouldn't want it on the front page of a national newspaper." My niece texted me her password the other day; I pointed out the error of her ways.
I did just come up with an app for Google glasses. You send someone encrypted messages that are displayed on their screen as a QR code. Their glasses decrypt it temporarily while it is in view. The phone can't decrypt, the glasses don't store. Glasses can still get hacked though but at least you do not have a plaintext message store.
I don't know, many times things were because someone just did them after many other people fretting that it couldn't be done. Look at all kinds of inventions like the stirrup or the rearview mirror that anyone could have built after seeing one for just a few seconds. This only applies to some science but fear of failure and complacency holds many people back from many things. Setting a distant and firm goal can be great in guiding your actions as you can continuously ask "Does this get me closer to the goal." The key is the ability to be able to recognize that you might have stumbled upon something even greater. Cooking up an awesome chemical refrigerant but stumble upon Teflon then run with the Teflon.
What I feel sorry for is any researcher who wants to do some genuine research into cold fusion. To me it would cause rate up there with inventions such as fire/math/smelting ore/cooking food/clothing.
If cold fusion were invented tomorrow everything changes, world politics, anything involving oil or energy production, the environment, space travel, food production, basically everything. So while it attracts cranks by the boatload I would be happy to see huge amounts of funding going to CF. Yet I suspect that if you are a legitimate researcher and you mention cold fusion that there is stunned silence in the room. You might as well bookend it with paranormal research.
Fully Agree, I loved traveling to client locations. Even the crappy locations had something fun about them even if it was just a story about how crappy they were. The best companies have the programmers and the customers mix it up a bit. The worst hide the programmers in a vault fearing that the client will steal them away.
Slashdot Mirror
But good engineering requires the math. I ignored the math for a long time and that was a huge mistake. I am not talking about proving P=NP kind of CS but just figuring out what to do with 60GB of data kind of CE. You need math. But why make it so hard? Is the goal of the education to figure out who can take the most torture or to guide the people into being better programmers?
A great example was a recent Cryptography course that I took. The guy used as much math notation as was possible and would talk about things like RSA in terms of 1000 bit primes. I was puzzling over this so I dug around and found an awesome example that used 2 digit primes as the basis of the encryption. That way I could mess with the RSA algorithm using numbers that didn't cause a buffer overflow in my head. I coded up the RSA in no time and could test it against simple numbers that my eyeballs could understand in a flash. Plus if it generated crap results the numbers meant something to me so I could see the scale of my mistake and quickly puzzle it out. With 1000 bit numbers I won't see the difference if it is out by a 100 or 10000000000000000. It was then a breeze to bump my algorithm into the properly large numbers. Basically it boiled down to one way I learned and one way I didn't yet both ways were just as easy to demonstrate. Thus the guy demonstrating it was being a jerk.
Why aren't the building codes in that area either requiring that or at least storm shelters? That school falling over was just bizarre. I am willing to bet that they have spent much time and money training for school shootings while ignoring the giant storms that rush by quite often.
I would love one for doing retina destined design. Presently if I don't scale the iPad simulator on my screen it is 8 feet high. Doesn't quite give me the right sense of proportion. I suspect that more and more mobile devices are going to go with higher density displays and thus it would be nice to get into at least the same density ballpark on my desktop. The sad part is that most if not all of these monitors will be really BIG. Personally for development I don't like going much over 22" per monitor. I'd just like 4K crammed into that 22".
Often on US ballots there are 8 zillion things to vote on, president, congress, senate, dog-catcher, judges, propositions, etc.
A pure paper vote is going to be filled out wrong 99% of the time.
I am a huge fan of electronic voting machines that print out your ballot and in clear text it lays out who and what you voted for. Then you take the paper ballot and put it in a ballot box. Then when the vote counting happens the computers can feed out a preliminary vote in seconds which is followed by the official count of the paper ballots themselves. The paper ballots would have the final say if there were any disagreement between them and the machines.
A system like this would increase security in many ways in that if someone tampered with the machines the paper ballots would effectively let anyone audit their own vote. And if the paper ballots are messed with they will disagree with the computer tally giving cause for an investigation. So to mess with an election you would now have to mess with both.
I certainly hope that everyone on slashdot agrees that computer only polling stations are about as secure as Windows 98.
I have been on teams where someone pulled some process out of their ass and proceeded to turn the whole project into another thing that regularly comes out of asses.
This is not to say formal processes and procedures are a problem just that bad ones are.
Sometimes they come from the heads of stupid people and well that can be understood. But often they come out of the heads of stupid evil people. They are too stupid to actually contribute so they come up with rules that they can then enforce to make other productive people look really bad. They can then write up reports that document just how much everyone around them sucks. "I was doing a code review and found 280 instances where your code was out of spec" (this is because their coding standard required two spaces before and after the == and they weren't there 140 times. "I wrote you up for not using the proper commenting system." "I wrote you up for not coming to the team building meeting scheduled for Saturday at my house." "I wrote you up for handing in an improperly formatted resignation letter."
I am not talking about bad managers, no no no, that is a whole other post, in the above I am talking about a co-worker who thinks that they can take power by quoting specs and standards that nobody else agreed to and they have no authority to create. I worked with a programmer who took an agile programming seminar and came back with binder after binder about agile programming. Whatever the heck they taught him wasn't agile. It was sclerotic programming easily requiring each programmer to generate at least 12 separate process related documents a day. I had only worked at the company a week and went into the owners and said that if they implemented this system that productivity would drop to around 10%. They said that I should be flexible and give it a try. I had received a counter offer to a job I had turned down the week before so I took that job the next day. The company died a year or so later(for mostly fraud related reasons) and the lawsuits among investors continue to this day.
I will unreservedly say that the more math I have learned the better my programming has become. I am not sure what the limits(no pun intended) are but even calculus has been useful in ML applications. Discrete is great for thinking through networks and parallel computing. Statistics and ML are great for getting interesting information out of the hoards of data that most systems can gather. Matrix math is useful for both 3D and ML. The list goes on. But I like you looked at the crazy math until my eyes bled. Then I started to find resources where someone takes some bit and simplifies it. So bit by bit I learned the nasty stuff.
:= to differentiate from == then you are a putz.
But and this is a huge but; you are completely correct that many of the origins of CS seem to be largely old math professors who repurposed themselves. The result is some shockingly pedantic math in place of pretty simple math. So often a CS textbook or paper will use some bamboozling math formula instead of shockingly simple pseudo code. Worst case scenario they could use both side by side. So out comes the sigma notation instead of some pseudo code that says bandwidth_required=sum(network1..networkN);
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the sigma notation make the person feel smarter. I will now quote from the intro to "Calculus made easy" written around 100 years ago.:
"The fools who write the text-books of advanced mathematics-- and they are mostly clever fools-- seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way."
Now some people are going to blah blah about the conciseness of math notation. But I say bah humbug. I'll take clarity any day over conciseness. Plus you can always put the math notation in a box or something so it is not either or. Plus leave the jargon at home. It is not a network topology it is a bunch of networked computers. Plus as programmers we only use a tiny handful of variables x, y, t, i. Not theta, not epsilon, not gamma. Once you need to put a double stroke in your character you have certainly lost me a page ago. If you use
I can't wait until some new rules derived from first principles are wrung out of this data.
Yes I can see where a particularly deranged group might then have a coup where they take over the robotic controls and now you have gone from a dictatorship (at least a bit bad) to nightmare bad.
One of the problems that I have long had with the idea of robot soldiers is that it makes war too easy. When you have huge emotional and financial costs to war your government will think twice about either getting involved or at least be pressured into "Bringing the boys home." but if you are sending robot planes with loads of robot warriors, why not have a war, or two, or five? A bunch of dead dehumanized "others' is not so bad especially seeing that it generates jobs at homes and pork spending for politicians.
War is rarely the correct solution. In fact it it usually a clear sign of a long series of failures or the sign of a madman.
Plus robotic warriors are, for the next short while, going to be the plaything of western countries. But how long before some tin-pot nut job flies the same machines into NYC or LA? Or even a homebrew nutjob? Again the key is that the consequences are potentially far less for the perpetrator. You can't usefully arrest the bot. You mightn't even end up with the slightest clue who sent it. Again the same problem. This tool makes waging whatever stupid war that pops into your head too easy.
Robots have the potential to turn this planet into Utopia or into Distopia. I suspect that some governments are philosophically predisposed toward Utopia and others Distopia in regards to using robots wisely. A simple question: If your country can, using robots, vastly decrease the cost of running prisons will your country increase its incarceration rate?
Very good point but I am thinking about the human waste products that actively look for known exploits to exploit. For example there are a whole lot of people who wait for OS updates to see what has changes so they can run out and make exploits knowing that a huge number of people don't upgrade very quickly.
But yes giving information so that people can run for the hills can be useful.
It all boils down to information being power. So who will best use that power should be the key question before releasing the information. Not paternalisticly but realistically who will, in actuality, use the information for good.
If one hour ago I was notified of a flaw in my app, and 59 minutes ago I fixed it, and 58 minutes ago I submitted it for approval it could easily be a week before it get approved.
I would say that after a week they should notify that there is a flaw, but not what the flaw is. Then maybe after 30 days release the kraken (exploitable flaw that is).
Let's say they discover a pacemaker flaw where a simple android app could be cobbled together to give pacemaker people nearby fatal heart attacks. If they release that in a week then they are vile human beings.
Most companies do seem pretty slothful in fixing these things but pushing for a company to process the flaw, analyze the flaw, find a solution, assign the workers, fix it, test it, and deploy it in under a week seems pretty extreme.
I have built maybe 30 Javascript heavy websites and not once did I use anything but free Javascript. Not out of any philosophical bent but just that there is so much awesome free Javascript out there in so many forms. Occasionally I stumble on some library where they want money but 5 seconds later I find something free that makes me go oooooh. Or I build it myself.
So instead of going on and on about how much of a waste of time this is I'll suggest a few campaigns of more importance: Better freedom of information acts. Less stupid patent laws. Less stupid copywrite laws. Better privacy regulations severely limiting what data governments and corporations can gather. Better built in security into nearly everything I use so that people can't backdoor their way into my data (i.e. no backdoors into things like Skype). To name just a few of the 100 million more important causes out there.
But if I have 100 arm chips they will be very sleepy when not in use. I find server usage spikes and jumps so they can come alive and absorb the blows. Also some processes go stupid so having the ability to have many jammed threads and still have the server run find is great.
I just see intel as being more efficient in a perfect world and ARM being more resilient to an imperfect world. Plus I would love to see some fresh blood in the server world.
Networked computers are great. I work with them all day every day. But if I had something even a 1/1000th as secret (say an embarrassing video) I would keep it offline, encrypted, and in a physically secure location. My assumption from a security standpoint is that networked cyber security is 99.9% to keep the script kiddies out. Keeping out the determined evildoer take some serious and continuous effort; or you just make it a physical effort for the bad guys.
Even the guys with the Rob Ford Crack video wouldn't let the reporter hold their phone.
This comment sounds like paranoid ravings except that you are 100% correct. I don't want you to be correct, and I hope another way is found. But my simple quest is to identify which countries are going to get this right and move to one of them.
The flip side of what you are saying is that robots could be the basis of a near utopia.
But keep in mind that one of the horrible institutions that will become robotized (and thus a cheap option) is policing and prisons. So when people are losing their minds and rioting they can be neatly rounded up and kept away from the few remaining employed people.
I would love to know where to get a cheap 64 core 1U server. And I don't mean that in the usual snarky slashdot (I think you're wrong) way but I truly would love to know.
Actually that was exactly my meaning society needs to be restructured. I don't believe in boring tax and spend but I would love to see taxes that are based upon levels of employment and ratio of wages and profits. So if you have say a grocery chain that eliminates most of their employees and replaces them with robots resulting in massive profits; their income taxes on both profits and management salaries should approach 100%. This would then appeal to the greed of the shareholders and management to not only hire more people but to pay them well. Most companies would not just hire people and have them stand around. They would look to put them to effective work. This might even involve horrible things like providing on the job training and education.
This is basic game theory. Each company will act in their best interests by reducing costs which will generally mean more and more technological replacement of human employees. But this does not actually work out in the end if there is mass unemployment. Tax and spend just results in insane Soviet inefficiencies. Banning technology is also just stupid as it just drive up the cost of living. The only thing left is to insent companies to hire more humans. Taxes are an excellent way to do just that. Finding the right balance generally will be hard but a simple formula would be to base it somewhat on the unemployment rate. If you are running a fantastically profitable company in an area with 15% unemployment then whoosh, up go your taxes. If you in an area with 2% unemployment then the tax incentive can be somewhat withdrawn. You have to be careful that companies don't just all move somewhere expensive to live that has a low unemployment rate so much would just be based upon national rates combined with the range of their products. So a locally owned store would be more regional while Apple would be more national.
Any country that gets this right will flourish in the mid to late 21st century. Any country that doesn't will end up in a Game Theory Nash Equilibrium where a tiny number of heavily automated companies are fighting over the few employed customers remaining in their country while nearly non-stop civil unrest drives up their security costs. Plus they will end up paying high taxes as the few remaining taxpayers anyway.
I have long pined for a server with maybe 10 4 core ARM CPUS. Basically my server spends its time serving up web stuff from memory. Each web request needs to do a bit of thinking and then fire the data out the port. Disk IO is not an issue nor is server bandwidth. Quite simply I don't need much CPU but I need many CPUs. A big powerful intel is of less interest.
Also by breaking up the system into physically separate CPUs I suspect that an interesting memory accessing architecture could be conjured up preventing another potential choke point.
In my town they went with a GPS and electronically dispatched system. I asked a driver what changes it made and he said that it nearly instantly doubled his income and then it nearly doubled again over the next couple of months. First he said that the old drivers had some sort of kickback system with the dispatchers. So he could be pretty well parked across the street from a call yet the dispatcher would send a taxi that was presently across town and presently had a fare. So he said that with the modern system the old dispatchers and drivers all quit overnight. Another set of drivers that quit were the illiterate drivers who couldn't work the system. He also said that the silence was bliss. If his computer bleeped he had a fare but otherwise it was reading time.
The slower increase in his income was when everybody discovered that the computer based cab company was much much faster.
Now it was too early at that point but one problem for him would be that the training time to become a fairly good cabbie would be nearly zero. You didn't have to learn to work the radio and with the computer both telling you how to get to your fair and the route to dropping them off you could be pretty well fresh off the boat and still be able to be a halfway decent cabbie in this city.
So when all is said and done the technological solution will benefit the customer and the cab company but not the worker.
Personally I am a huge fan of technological improvements but society is not well structured to prevent people from really getting hurt by all this. As robotics take this all to the next logical step there will be a point where very few owners are able to have huge businesses with almost zero workers. While individually this will be great for the producers and providers, the real base of any economy is consumption not production. So without employed people there will be little consumption and much rioting and crime. Society needs to be restructured so as to make sure that inequality doesn't get out of control. This would even hurt those who would like to be unequal.
I my town there is a guy who pushes a cart full of cans down the street who's rantings are pretty hostile. I can't imagine how long the list of people he has threatened would be but it might very well include everybody. I wouldn't hire him to babysit but his total kill count seems to hover around 0.
So if they want to arrest people for having mad ramblings they could start with anyone possessing almost any religious text.
I thought the word careless was assumed to proceed user. I think that basically every slashdotter has been called to help some "careless" user who has 3 toolbars, 2 AV bloatwares, and countless other bits of crap that came along with all their downloads. Yet they will swear on a stack of bibles that "they never installed nothin' "
So any malware that depends on users being careless will be a huge success. The other key will be ease of use.
That being said, I generally stick with my brother's rule: "I wouldn't transmit it electronically if I wouldn't want it on the front page of a national newspaper." My niece texted me her password the other day; I pointed out the error of her ways.
I did just come up with an app for Google glasses. You send someone encrypted messages that are displayed on their screen as a QR code. Their glasses decrypt it temporarily while it is in view. The phone can't decrypt, the glasses don't store. Glasses can still get hacked though but at least you do not have a plaintext message store.
I don't know, many times things were because someone just did them after many other people fretting that it couldn't be done. Look at all kinds of inventions like the stirrup or the rearview mirror that anyone could have built after seeing one for just a few seconds. This only applies to some science but fear of failure and complacency holds many people back from many things. Setting a distant and firm goal can be great in guiding your actions as you can continuously ask "Does this get me closer to the goal." The key is the ability to be able to recognize that you might have stumbled upon something even greater. Cooking up an awesome chemical refrigerant but stumble upon Teflon then run with the Teflon.
What I feel sorry for is any researcher who wants to do some genuine research into cold fusion. To me it would cause rate up there with inventions such as fire/math/smelting ore/cooking food/clothing.
If cold fusion were invented tomorrow everything changes, world politics, anything involving oil or energy production, the environment, space travel, food production, basically everything. So while it attracts cranks by the boatload I would be happy to see huge amounts of funding going to CF. Yet I suspect that if you are a legitimate researcher and you mention cold fusion that there is stunned silence in the room. You might as well bookend it with paranormal research.
Fully Agree, I loved traveling to client locations. Even the crappy locations had something fun about them even if it was just a story about how crappy they were. The best companies have the programmers and the customers mix it up a bit. The worst hide the programmers in a vault fearing that the client will steal them away.
When you rage quit a company the remaining sheep always dish the dirt (while scouting for jobs themselves).