That simply isn't true. The 4th Amendment says that:
no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
IOW, they can ask for a warrant when they have a strong reason to believe that something contains evidence; they don't have to be absolutely certain. That's what "probable cause" means: enough evidence to convince a skeptical individual that something is probably true. It's a fairly strong standard- the person asking for a warrant needs to present some kind of evidence rather than just a hunch- but it doesn't demand certainty. That's why people who ask for warrants are not routinely punished when the warrants don't pan out; they only get in trouble if it can be shown that they materially misrepresented facts they used to support their warrant request.
You're thinking about the 4th Amendment right to avoid unreasonable searches and seizures, but cyborg implants potentially invoke the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. If the implant is actually a part of the person, some lawyer will argue that forcing the person to divulge the information on it is forcing them to testify against themself. When does the information in the cyborg implant stop being like information on a device like a phone and start being like information in your brain?
All of which are difficult and expensive due to protests and alarmist by the anti-nuclear crowd.
Yeah, those crazy alarmists worried about whatmighthappen with nuclear power. Everyone knows that nuclear power is perfectly safe, and people who suggest accidents might leave large regions uninhabitable for generations are a bunch of stupid hippies.
A lot of power usage isn't residential, either. Some light commercial users may be able to get away with off-the-grid solar solutions, but I don't think it's going to be practical for industry, which is a huge user of electricity.
I don't think the gigafactory is really what you need to solve the storage problems for practical off-the-grid solar. Electric vehicles are hauling their batteries with them wherever they go, so they need ones that are as light as possible for the energy capacity, even if that drives up the price. That's why Tesla is concentrating on expensive lithium technology. Off-the-grid storage couldn't care about weight, since the batteries are just sitting there. It mostly needs batteries that are as cheap and reliable as possible, which mostly means old-tech lead-acid.
If you can see it from public property and tell what it is, it's (effectively) in the public domain, isn't it?
It may be practically difficult to prevent that information from getting out to people who want it, but that doesn't make it legal to do so. Plenty of governments continue to try keeping stuff secret even when there's no real hope of doing so.
There are other cases when you can have multiple service entrances beyond different voltages. A building may have more than one by special permission if it has multiple tenants and no common areas where a common service could be located, or if it's too big to be practically served by a single service. And a building can always be served by multiple services if the electrical demands are larger than the utility can provide with a single service. A quick look says that multiple services are always allowed if the demand exceeds 2000 amps at 600V, which could happen pretty easily in a building large enough to hold 5000 workers.
That is an exaggeration. Things grow as a continuum, but they can get separated when the parts in the middle die off. You wind up with a branched structure because things really can get far enough separated that when the middle dies off they can't reconnect. For example, mammals really are distinct from other tetrapods because the forms that connected them died off and they've been developing in different directions ever since.
The extent to which the FDA makes US food crappy is ludicrous.
And you know this because you've read the relevant sections of 21CFR? I actually have, and I can tell you that the FDA does not for the most part force food to be crappy. In many cases it allows food to be crappy by setting standards primarily for safety rather than quality, but most kinds of food can be produced to higher standards than the FDA minimum. There are only a few cases- cheeses aged for less than 60 days and made with unpasteurized milk being the most commonly given example- where the FDA gets in the way, but they're the exception rather than the rule. And, BTW, the FDA is not the relevant authority for meat, which is regulated by USDA.
Meat thermometers connected to oven controls have been around for a long time. You put the thermometer into the thing you're cooking, connect it to a socket inside the oven, and set the oven to give an alarm when the food reaches the desired temperature. The hardest part is designing it so you don't burn yourself on the oven when using it.
Actually, a lot of serious/professional cooks are buying exactly the kind of extremely fancy cooking gear Myhrvold likes talking about. This stuff got started because there are things that are much easier to prepare with the right technology, and high-end restaurants thrive on providing things that other places can't. Professionals have been the driving force behind sous vide cooking, for instance.
They do already host this on their own, but putting it on Wikimedia Commons makes it easily accessible to people who want to use it for articles in any of the Wikimedia sites (e.g. Wikipedia, Wikiquote, etc.). Also, by doing an official upload, they reduce the chance of somebody claiming the files are illegitimate. This is basically a courtesy to Wikimedia.
I expect it would depend on the details. People have experimented with at least two classes of blood substitutes: hemoglobin based and fluorocarbon based. I assume people with religious scruples would be OK with fluorocarbon-based substitutes. Hemoglobin-based substitutes would probably be classified as processed blood still be off limits, unless the hemoglobin were actually recombinant and not extracted from blood.
All of the examples you're talking about are single-purpose systems designed to solve problems within a fairly narrow domain. The idea of the test as Turing originally proposed it was that it was intended to be a test of general-purpose intelligence. The questioners were not supposed to be limited to a single domain of knowledge or topic of conversation but were allowed and encouraged to ask anything they felt like as a way of probing the mind they were interacting with. If we come up with a program that can do a decent job of all the problems you're describing and be able to learn new areas without explicit intervention from a programmer, then we'll be getting somewhere at producing general purpose AI. That's what Turing was getting at.
It isn't so much that the Turing test was a thought experiment as that it was intended to be a much more stringent test. It was supposed to involve skeptical inquirers who were given as much time as they needed and were allowed to ask open ended questions. He certainly didn't mention any 5 minute time limit; it's a lot easier to fool people with simple tricks like pretending to be an ignorant youngster if you're given a time limit.
Show me a machine that listens to me say "make a payment" and then says "sorry I didn't hear that right, can you repeat it?"
My phone does something like that with its voice command stuff. If it can't make out what you say, it will say "Sorry, I didn't get that. Could you repeat it?" On some kinds of ambiguous input it will say "I think you asked for X. Is that correct?"
Frequently because management forces them to include a minimum percentage of comment in their code. It would be much better to find a piece of really well documented code and a piece of really badly documented code and force them to read both so they can see what the difference is.
Bad comments tell what the code is doing when that's obvious from the code itself. Good comments explain why, especially when they're fixes for non-obvious bugs. If you spent a lot of time figuring out the solution to a tough problem, you owe the next guy to see your code an explanation.
Society at large is not of one mind about it. Capital punishment is supported by a majority in the US, but it's a shrinking majority with a substantial and growing minority opposed. About 2/3 of the states have capital punishment and about 1/3 don't, and the recent trend has been for states to abolish it. It's clearly a contentious issue without a well settled consensus.
They don't "let" Netflix do it. It's netflix's right to do so and the movie studios tried to stop them
To be more specific, by the first sale doctrine, when Netflix buys a physical disk, they are legally free to do with it as they see fit. They can rent it, sell it, give it away, or throw it into a shredder, and there's nothing the studios can legally do to stop them. As long as the disk doesn't get copied, the studio's copyright is still being respected. This is well settled law, as much as the studios hate it. If they want to sell the disk to the public, they can't avoid selling it to Netflix, who can then legally rent it.
That doesn't mean the OPs basic point about economics is invalid. The studios clearly have different policies about different movies when it comes time to offer streaming rights. They know that a popular recent movie, or a still popular classic, will have much higher disk sales than an older or less popular one, so they deliberately avoid making it available for streaming to maximize their sales revenue. Netflix can still offer it on a physical disk, but given that they're paying full price for it, they have to offer physical disk rentals as a premium service. By the time the disks are ready for the remainder bin, the studio has pretty much exhausted its sales revenue stream, so they can make more money by offering it for streaming. It's about the same policy that they've followed with making movies available for TV; they only do it after making as much as they can selling physical copies.
The publishers aren't paying for research. If anything, they're taking money away from research by charging too much for journals and, in many cases, additional fees to authors to get their work published. Most of the money paying for research comes from government grants, and thus ultimately from the public, and then the journal publishers try to lock it up and make everyone pay a second time to see the work they've already paid for.
Grading on the curve assumes that all student cohorts are pretty similar, but that some courses/exams are easy and some are hard. Your way assumes that all courses are exactly as hard as each other, but makes no assumptions about the other students.
Grading on a curve assumes that the question grades are intended to answer is the relative positioning of the students in the class. Grading on a straight percentage assumes that the most interesting question is how well the students have mastered the material. I would argue that the second question is more interesting than the first. If you discover that the students are routinely getting mostly good grades, that means it's time to make the course (or maybe just the test) more challenging, not to give some of them artificially bad grades even though they've learned the material.
My general feeling is that grading on a curve is a crutch for professors who don't know or care how to write good tests. Rather than creating a test that will do a good job of sorting the students out by ability, they create any old test and then force-fit the scores to the distribution they expect. It forces the students to compete for an artificially limited number of good scores, making them competitors and discouraging cooperation that might actually help them learn better.
As the summary says, knowing that you're being monitored all of the time would keep the cops on their best behavior.
Only as long as the records are as readily available to people outside the police force as to the police themselves. If the police are free to produce recordings only when they find it convenient, they are useless for holding the police accountable.
I certainly wouldn't say that Prop 13 is an unalloyed good, but you're partly misunderstanding how it works. The assessment only goes up- or only goes up by more than 2%/year- when the property changes ownership, i.e. when it's sold or inherited, not when it changes occupants. This means it has the kind of effect you're describing mostly for owner occupied housing, not for rental apartments. What it really does is to give a tax advantage to owners who have owned a long time, whether they live in the property or not.
It's also important not to exaggerate the importance of property tax in the overall cost of a property. Prop 13 also rolled back property taxes to 1% of the value of the property, and while there have been some tax increases since then, typical property tax rates in California are around 1.25%. If somebody wants to sell their house to move into a smaller house, a big jump in real estate prices will generally give them big windfall profits on the sale that will soften the blow of higher taxes on the new place. There's also a special clause that lets people over 65 carry some of the reduced assessment from their old house if they sell and buy a new place; value in their new house up to the sale price of their old house will be assessed at the assessment for their old house, so their taxes won't go up unless they're moving into a more expensive house.
Slashdot Mirror
That simply isn't true. The 4th Amendment says that:
IOW, they can ask for a warrant when they have a strong reason to believe that something contains evidence; they don't have to be absolutely certain. That's what "probable cause" means: enough evidence to convince a skeptical individual that something is probably true. It's a fairly strong standard- the person asking for a warrant needs to present some kind of evidence rather than just a hunch- but it doesn't demand certainty. That's why people who ask for warrants are not routinely punished when the warrants don't pan out; they only get in trouble if it can be shown that they materially misrepresented facts they used to support their warrant request.
You're thinking about the 4th Amendment right to avoid unreasonable searches and seizures, but cyborg implants potentially invoke the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. If the implant is actually a part of the person, some lawyer will argue that forcing the person to divulge the information on it is forcing them to testify against themself. When does the information in the cyborg implant stop being like information on a device like a phone and start being like information in your brain?
Yeah, those crazy alarmists worried about what might happen with nuclear power. Everyone knows that nuclear power is perfectly safe, and people who suggest accidents might leave large regions uninhabitable for generations are a bunch of stupid hippies.
A lot of power usage isn't residential, either. Some light commercial users may be able to get away with off-the-grid solar solutions, but I don't think it's going to be practical for industry, which is a huge user of electricity.
I don't think the gigafactory is really what you need to solve the storage problems for practical off-the-grid solar. Electric vehicles are hauling their batteries with them wherever they go, so they need ones that are as light as possible for the energy capacity, even if that drives up the price. That's why Tesla is concentrating on expensive lithium technology. Off-the-grid storage couldn't care about weight, since the batteries are just sitting there. It mostly needs batteries that are as cheap and reliable as possible, which mostly means old-tech lead-acid.
It may be practically difficult to prevent that information from getting out to people who want it, but that doesn't make it legal to do so. Plenty of governments continue to try keeping stuff secret even when there's no real hope of doing so.
There are other cases when you can have multiple service entrances beyond different voltages. A building may have more than one by special permission if it has multiple tenants and no common areas where a common service could be located, or if it's too big to be practically served by a single service. And a building can always be served by multiple services if the electrical demands are larger than the utility can provide with a single service. A quick look says that multiple services are always allowed if the demand exceeds 2000 amps at 600V, which could happen pretty easily in a building large enough to hold 5000 workers.
That is an exaggeration. Things grow as a continuum, but they can get separated when the parts in the middle die off. You wind up with a branched structure because things really can get far enough separated that when the middle dies off they can't reconnect. For example, mammals really are distinct from other tetrapods because the forms that connected them died off and they've been developing in different directions ever since.
Nobody else around here lets that kind of thing stop them.
And you know this because you've read the relevant sections of 21CFR? I actually have, and I can tell you that the FDA does not for the most part force food to be crappy. In many cases it allows food to be crappy by setting standards primarily for safety rather than quality, but most kinds of food can be produced to higher standards than the FDA minimum. There are only a few cases- cheeses aged for less than 60 days and made with unpasteurized milk being the most commonly given example- where the FDA gets in the way, but they're the exception rather than the rule. And, BTW, the FDA is not the relevant authority for meat, which is regulated by USDA.
Meat thermometers connected to oven controls have been around for a long time. You put the thermometer into the thing you're cooking, connect it to a socket inside the oven, and set the oven to give an alarm when the food reaches the desired temperature. The hardest part is designing it so you don't burn yourself on the oven when using it.
Actually, a lot of serious/professional cooks are buying exactly the kind of extremely fancy cooking gear Myhrvold likes talking about. This stuff got started because there are things that are much easier to prepare with the right technology, and high-end restaurants thrive on providing things that other places can't. Professionals have been the driving force behind sous vide cooking, for instance.
They do already host this on their own, but putting it on Wikimedia Commons makes it easily accessible to people who want to use it for articles in any of the Wikimedia sites (e.g. Wikipedia, Wikiquote, etc.). Also, by doing an official upload, they reduce the chance of somebody claiming the files are illegitimate. This is basically a courtesy to Wikimedia.
I expect it would depend on the details. People have experimented with at least two classes of blood substitutes: hemoglobin based and fluorocarbon based. I assume people with religious scruples would be OK with fluorocarbon-based substitutes. Hemoglobin-based substitutes would probably be classified as processed blood still be off limits, unless the hemoglobin were actually recombinant and not extracted from blood.
Or directly to a hospital that collects its own donations. Even non-profits like the Red Cross add extra layers of bureaucracy.
All of the examples you're talking about are single-purpose systems designed to solve problems within a fairly narrow domain. The idea of the test as Turing originally proposed it was that it was intended to be a test of general-purpose intelligence. The questioners were not supposed to be limited to a single domain of knowledge or topic of conversation but were allowed and encouraged to ask anything they felt like as a way of probing the mind they were interacting with. If we come up with a program that can do a decent job of all the problems you're describing and be able to learn new areas without explicit intervention from a programmer, then we'll be getting somewhere at producing general purpose AI. That's what Turing was getting at.
It isn't so much that the Turing test was a thought experiment as that it was intended to be a much more stringent test. It was supposed to involve skeptical inquirers who were given as much time as they needed and were allowed to ask open ended questions. He certainly didn't mention any 5 minute time limit; it's a lot easier to fool people with simple tricks like pretending to be an ignorant youngster if you're given a time limit.
My phone does something like that with its voice command stuff. If it can't make out what you say, it will say "Sorry, I didn't get that. Could you repeat it?" On some kinds of ambiguous input it will say "I think you asked for X. Is that correct?"
Frequently because management forces them to include a minimum percentage of comment in their code. It would be much better to find a piece of really well documented code and a piece of really badly documented code and force them to read both so they can see what the difference is.
Bad comments tell what the code is doing when that's obvious from the code itself. Good comments explain why, especially when they're fixes for non-obvious bugs. If you spent a lot of time figuring out the solution to a tough problem, you owe the next guy to see your code an explanation.
Society at large is not of one mind about it. Capital punishment is supported by a majority in the US, but it's a shrinking majority with a substantial and growing minority opposed. About 2/3 of the states have capital punishment and about 1/3 don't, and the recent trend has been for states to abolish it. It's clearly a contentious issue without a well settled consensus.
To be more specific, by the first sale doctrine, when Netflix buys a physical disk, they are legally free to do with it as they see fit. They can rent it, sell it, give it away, or throw it into a shredder, and there's nothing the studios can legally do to stop them. As long as the disk doesn't get copied, the studio's copyright is still being respected. This is well settled law, as much as the studios hate it. If they want to sell the disk to the public, they can't avoid selling it to Netflix, who can then legally rent it.
That doesn't mean the OPs basic point about economics is invalid. The studios clearly have different policies about different movies when it comes time to offer streaming rights. They know that a popular recent movie, or a still popular classic, will have much higher disk sales than an older or less popular one, so they deliberately avoid making it available for streaming to maximize their sales revenue. Netflix can still offer it on a physical disk, but given that they're paying full price for it, they have to offer physical disk rentals as a premium service. By the time the disks are ready for the remainder bin, the studio has pretty much exhausted its sales revenue stream, so they can make more money by offering it for streaming. It's about the same policy that they've followed with making movies available for TV; they only do it after making as much as they can selling physical copies.
The publishers aren't paying for research. If anything, they're taking money away from research by charging too much for journals and, in many cases, additional fees to authors to get their work published. Most of the money paying for research comes from government grants, and thus ultimately from the public, and then the journal publishers try to lock it up and make everyone pay a second time to see the work they've already paid for.
Grading on a curve assumes that the question grades are intended to answer is the relative positioning of the students in the class. Grading on a straight percentage assumes that the most interesting question is how well the students have mastered the material. I would argue that the second question is more interesting than the first. If you discover that the students are routinely getting mostly good grades, that means it's time to make the course (or maybe just the test) more challenging, not to give some of them artificially bad grades even though they've learned the material.
My general feeling is that grading on a curve is a crutch for professors who don't know or care how to write good tests. Rather than creating a test that will do a good job of sorting the students out by ability, they create any old test and then force-fit the scores to the distribution they expect. It forces the students to compete for an artificially limited number of good scores, making them competitors and discouraging cooperation that might actually help them learn better.
Only as long as the records are as readily available to people outside the police force as to the police themselves. If the police are free to produce recordings only when they find it convenient, they are useless for holding the police accountable.
I certainly wouldn't say that Prop 13 is an unalloyed good, but you're partly misunderstanding how it works. The assessment only goes up- or only goes up by more than 2%/year- when the property changes ownership, i.e. when it's sold or inherited, not when it changes occupants. This means it has the kind of effect you're describing mostly for owner occupied housing, not for rental apartments. What it really does is to give a tax advantage to owners who have owned a long time, whether they live in the property or not.
It's also important not to exaggerate the importance of property tax in the overall cost of a property. Prop 13 also rolled back property taxes to 1% of the value of the property, and while there have been some tax increases since then, typical property tax rates in California are around 1.25%. If somebody wants to sell their house to move into a smaller house, a big jump in real estate prices will generally give them big windfall profits on the sale that will soften the blow of higher taxes on the new place. There's also a special clause that lets people over 65 carry some of the reduced assessment from their old house if they sell and buy a new place; value in their new house up to the sale price of their old house will be assessed at the assessment for their old house, so their taxes won't go up unless they're moving into a more expensive house.