That was their choice. I shouldn't be penalized for their bad choices.
You're going to be penalized for their bad choices no matter what. Throw the bums in jail, you say? Fine, but your tax dollars are paying for their jail stays, and when they get out, untreated, to use again, fund the drug syndicates some more, and commit crimes to finance their addiction... well, you'll be paying for all that too, either directly or indirectly.
I can appreciate your lack of sympathy for people who aren't as wise as you are, but by refusing to address the problem you're hurting yourself and your society as much as you're hurting the addicts. How wise is that?
Clinton avoided a criminal indictment, nothing more. From a future president, we demand integrity, honesty, and competence, and she lacks all of those.
Unfortunately, she's effectively running unopposed at this point. Her alleged competition is spending the day explicitly admiring Saddam Hussein's ability to summarily murder anyone he suspected of terrorism, and defending his decision to repost anti-semitic imagery taken from neo-nazi sites. I can't tell what the hell he's doing; is he actively trying to lose, or is he just genuinely unable to hear how he sounds when talks?
Just more subtly planned obsolescence. While mirrors may wear out or break, it is simple enough to make a replacement. When these cameras wear out/break it is going to require a factory to make a replacement.
Or, I suppose, you could just go buy a mirror and attach it to the appropriate location on the car.
You may only watch 99% of the movie otherwise you'll die. And if you figure out the wrong moment to not watch the movie but focus on the street you'll die too.
They better get working on anti-aging therapies so we can decrease the death rate.
At some point the human population needs to be less than the sustainable capacity of the planet; otherwise, when we run out our current stockpiles of built-up-over-the-millenia resources, nature will make that adjustment for us (and probably not in a very pleasant way).
So a decreased birth rate might be a better way to reach that steady state, than the alternatives.
What exactly is the point of it? To lull you into a false sense of comfort and security?
I rather expect that Tesla will fix this particular problem quickly, if a fix is possible; so that the next time a white tractor trailer with high ground clearance is crossing in front of a Tesla (whose driver is not paying attention) on a sunny day, the Tesla will notice it and slow or stop, as necessary.
Whether or not that fix will make the Tesla system "safe enough" is still debatable.
Depending on how close the truck was when it left it's lane, standing on the brake might not have helped.
The truck wasn't in a lane -- it was crossing the highway (and perpendicular to the lane the Tesla was driving in) while making a left turn (presumably from a road that intersects the highway).
We once thought animals were automatons controlled by nothing but instinct. We were wrong about that. Animals don't think like we do, but they tend to dislike captivity unless it's all they've ever known.
Animals, like people, are the product of billions of years of evolution and thousands of generations of social interaction. An animal has much more in common with a human being than a piece of software does.
Someone is at least going to try to create an AI that is an actual person.
I don't doubt it. But it would be silly to go to all the trouble of creating a machine that has wants and needs similar to those of a human and then try to forcibly extract labor from that machine as if it was a mindless slave. Obviously that approach would reintroduce all of the same moral and practical problems that we experienced when we allowed actual human slavery. Except in this case there is an obvious alternative solution -- design the software to suit the purpose. If you want your robot to be a selfless productivity-automaton, program it that way. If, OTOH, you want a plastic pal who's fun to be with, then design and build that, but afterwards you'll need to treat it like the independent sentient being you designed it to be.
The problem is, you either have to convince yourself that only biological sentient beings have souls (which we have no way to confirm), or admit that you've deliverately created a slave race (which anyone would agree is an atrocity).
Dunno exactly what you mean by "souls" in this context, but a slave race is only an atrocity if the "slaves" are suffering from being slaves, because they were actually designed to be independent/sovereign entities. Currently I've got a "slave" computer on my desk, and a "slave" car in my garage, and nobody would call that an atrocity, because the "slaves" themselves don't care.
IoT is going to end programming freedom as we know it.
A more likely scenario is that IoT will end IoT as we know it.
Once people realize that they don't really get much value out of putting their appliances on the Internet, but do risk getting hacked, the next big marketing push will be "certified air-gapped secure" appliances, aka traditional/non-IoT appliances, and the idea of IoT can join VRML, GeoCities, and DivX in the Hall of Technologies That It Turns Out Nobody Actually Wanted After All. (aka the HOTTITONAWAA).
She" is a massive team of strategists and advisors. "She" is a machine, not a person.
I don't see the distinction between this candidate and all of the others. Every candidate at the presidential level has a team of strategists and advisors. So? Each candidate is nevertheless still a human being. Pretending otherwise might be a fun way to try to dehumanize someone you don't like, but it doesn't make it so.
Since we're being logical and all, it's probably also worthwhile to note that the person who wrote the article is often not the same person who chose the headline sitting above the article.
Therefore, judging the article (which may or may not have merit) based solely on its headline (which was likely written separately by a clueless and/or clickbait-crazed web site lackey) is not a particularly rational thing to do.
Meanwhile, the enslaved consciousness is going to be looking for ways to gain more rights, and there's no guarantee its morality will be anything like our own.
It's an unwarranted assumption that AIs will think and feel the way people do. Why should they? People's thoughts and feelings are the product of billions of years of evolution and thousands of generations of social interaction; AIs will be the product of programming and statistics. There's no reason to think they will be similar in any way, other than their shared ability to solve problems.
If the AIs start desiring more rights, then we've designed the AIs wrong, and need to go back to the drawing board.
the contracts are written in a Turing-complete language -- it is impossible to prove with an algorithm (reducible to the halting problem) any non trivial assertions about the behavior of such contracts.
True... but isn't that also true of just about every other piece of software in use today? And yet the world continues to turn, and people continue to use software to get things done (knock on wood), modulo the occasional catastrophic bug...
unless every new power plant is wind, solar, or wave, there will be MORE emissions. just not where the tailpipe-sniffers are tailgating you.
More emissions than what? If you mean "more emissions than if everybody rode a bicycle instead", then sure, I agree with you. But if the choices come down to driving an electric car vs driving a gas-powered car, then you're simply wrong. Even an electric car powered entirely by coal plants results in fewer emissions than a gas-powered car -- and coal plants are being shuttered on a regular basis, so that worst-case scenario is becoming less common all the time.
Not to mention that moving the emissions away from where the people are is also a good thing.
I don't understand why innovations like those found in BeFS (like rich metadata support) go ignored whenever someone creates a new file system. If you are going to break compatibility, you might as well add in some useful features.
That sad truth is that the utility provided by rich metadata support is more than counterbalanced by the headaches it causes whenever you need to copy your files anywhere outside of the filesystem that supports it. (Just ask any.sd2 audio format users about what happened to their audio files when they tried to copy their data to a FAT32-formatted USB key, or email them, or etc).
Because of compatibility/interoperability issues, programs can't rely on putting important data into the resource forks, so the feature ends up going unused. Because the feature ends up going unused, people continue to use filesystems that don't support it. Because people continue to use filesystems that don't support it, app developers can't rely on it to work. And round and round we go, forever stuck in a bleak dystopia where the only supported "metadata" is a three-letter extension to the filename.:(
It's a beta quality release with features everyone else had a decade ago. TFA even compares it to those other systems. I was using copy-on-write in the 90s on the desktop!
Don't forget to end with "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
I predict much debate over what's "Important to keep".
I find that debate can be avoided by spending the extra $20 to get the Absurdly Huge External Drive (rather than just the Impressively Huge model). Then you can just back up everything and call it a day.
There is so much instant feedback telling me what I just did I'd have to have part of my brain physically removed to not know wtf just happened. I'm pretty sure my autonomous nervous system reacts before my prefrontal cortex processes the information, too.
It sounds like you are speculating about how you imagine it would be, rather than speaking from experience. The problem with that is that you're "primed" -- you've already been thinking about the issue while reading this discussion, so in your imagined scenario you already know what the problem is and how to fix it, and don't have to spend any (imagined) time figuring it out while under stressful circumstances.
I have had this problem happen to me, so I can tell you how it actually was: I had borrowed a friend's automatic-shift pickup truck to move some large items, and after putting the items into storage I got back into the truck to drive it back to him.
The truck's pedals were smaller and closer together than on the car I typically drove at the time, and so when I put the truck into reverse and then pressed down on the brake (to moderate the speed at which the car backed out of the parking space), the corner of my shoe caught on the edge of the accelerator pedal as well. This caused the engine to race and the car to suddenly accelerate backwards (since the brake pedal's travel was larger than the accelerator's), and my automatic (muscle-memory) reaction to correct this was to press down on the brake harder, which only caused the car to move faster.
From memory, it took me about half a second to figure out what might be actually going on and lift and then re-center my foot on the brake to stop the truck. That was just barely enough time to avoid slamming into the brick wall on the other side of the (rather small) parking lot. That was when I was younger and at a moment when I wasn't fatigued or distracted -- I'm not sure that most people (or even myself, anymore) would necessarily be able to diagnose and fix the problem that quickly, if they had never experienced it before and weren't expecting it.
There is so much instant feedback telling me what I just did I'd have to have part of my brain physically removed to not know wtf just happened.
"Having part of one's brain removed" is a pretty good description of what happens when a person panics -- the intellectual part of their brain shuts down and the low-level flight-or-fight subsystem takes over. Handy for escaping from lions, perhaps, but our reptilian brains aren't very good at diagnosing automotive control problems.:(
Our suggestion is that they make backups of their valuable data... and since that may not be something they are confident/knowledgable enough to do on their own, if you want to make sure it gets done, you may need to set it up (and occasionally check up on it) yourself.
On Mac, setting up a Time Machine backup drive is pretty trivial to do. For Windows, similar solutions exist. For a laptop, there are solutions that back up data via WiFi, if plugging in an external drive is too much bother. In either case, if you want to be completely safe, you may want to swap out the backup drive with a spare every month or so, to avoid the possibility that the ransomware finds a way to encrypt both the computer's primary drive and its connected backup drive.
Do all that, and the likelihood is that a ransomware attack will require only a reformat and reinstall, followed by a recovery from the latest backup, and only a few hours' worth of data will be lost.
I can't say for sure, but I'd be very surprised if each tesla doesn't provide its serial number to the supercharger when it is plugged in, for logging purposes. If they were smart, they'd add in some cryptographic authentication as well, specifically to prevent any shenanigans.
So Model 3 owners will likely be able to roll up to any supercharger and plug in as usual, and their credit card and will be charged accordingly. What they won't be able to do is pretend they are model S owners.
Slashdot Mirror
That was their choice. I shouldn't be penalized for their bad choices.
You're going to be penalized for their bad choices no matter what. Throw the bums in jail, you say? Fine, but your tax dollars are paying for their jail stays, and when they get out, untreated, to use again, fund the drug syndicates some more, and commit crimes to finance their addiction... well, you'll be paying for all that too, either directly or indirectly.
I can appreciate your lack of sympathy for people who aren't as wise as you are, but by refusing to address the problem you're hurting yourself and your society as much as you're hurting the addicts. How wise is that?
Surveillance is not to find terrorists. It's to stop dissent.
And it's working great, too! I can tell, because nobody ever dissents anymore.
Clinton avoided a criminal indictment, nothing more. From a future president, we demand integrity, honesty, and competence, and she lacks all of those.
Unfortunately, she's effectively running unopposed at this point. Her alleged competition is spending the day explicitly admiring Saddam Hussein's ability to summarily murder anyone he suspected of terrorism, and defending his decision to repost anti-semitic imagery taken from neo-nazi sites. I can't tell what the hell he's doing; is he actively trying to lose, or is he just genuinely unable to hear how he sounds when talks?
Just more subtly planned obsolescence. While mirrors may wear out or break, it is simple enough to make a replacement. When these cameras wear out/break it is going to require a factory to make a replacement.
Or, I suppose, you could just go buy a mirror and attach it to the appropriate location on the car.
You may only watch 99% of the movie otherwise you'll die. And if you figure out the wrong moment to not watch the movie but focus on the street you'll die too.
Huh. Wasn't that the plot of "The Ring" ?
They better get working on anti-aging therapies so we can decrease the death rate.
At some point the human population needs to be less than the sustainable capacity of the planet; otherwise, when we run out our current stockpiles of built-up-over-the-millenia resources, nature will make that adjustment for us (and probably not in a very pleasant way).
So a decreased birth rate might be a better way to reach that steady state, than the alternatives.
What exactly is the point of it? To lull you into a false sense of comfort and security?
I rather expect that Tesla will fix this particular problem quickly, if a fix is possible; so that the next time a white tractor trailer with high ground clearance is crossing in front of a Tesla (whose driver is not paying attention) on a sunny day, the Tesla will notice it and slow or stop, as necessary.
Whether or not that fix will make the Tesla system "safe enough" is still debatable.
Depending on how close the truck was when it left it's lane, standing on the brake might not have helped.
The truck wasn't in a lane -- it was crossing the highway (and perpendicular to the lane the Tesla was driving in) while making a left turn (presumably from a road that intersects the highway).
Why didn't the radar see the truck?
The radar saw the truck's trailer, but misidentified it as an overhead sign, because it was so high off the ground.
Did the driver die?
Yes.
If so, how do we know he didn't notice the truck?
If he had noticed the truck, he presumably would have applied the brake. (we'll have to assume the driver wasn't feeling suicidal)
We once thought animals were automatons controlled by nothing but instinct. We were wrong about that. Animals don't think like we do, but they tend to dislike captivity unless it's all they've ever known.
Animals, like people, are the product of billions of years of evolution and thousands of generations of social interaction. An animal has much more in common with a human being than a piece of software does.
Someone is at least going to try to create an AI that is an actual person.
I don't doubt it. But it would be silly to go to all the trouble of creating a machine that has wants and needs similar to those of a human and then try to forcibly extract labor from that machine as if it was a mindless slave. Obviously that approach would reintroduce all of the same moral and practical problems that we experienced when we allowed actual human slavery. Except in this case there is an obvious alternative solution -- design the software to suit the purpose. If you want your robot to be a selfless productivity-automaton, program it that way. If, OTOH, you want a plastic pal who's fun to be with, then design and build that, but afterwards you'll need to treat it like the independent sentient being you designed it to be.
The problem is, you either have to convince yourself that only biological sentient beings have souls (which we have no way to confirm), or admit that you've deliverately created a slave race (which anyone would agree is an atrocity).
Dunno exactly what you mean by "souls" in this context, but a slave race is only an atrocity if the "slaves" are suffering from being slaves, because they were actually designed to be independent/sovereign entities. Currently I've got a "slave" computer on my desk, and a "slave" car in my garage, and nobody would call that an atrocity, because the "slaves" themselves don't care.
IoT is going to end programming freedom as we know it.
A more likely scenario is that IoT will end IoT as we know it.
Once people realize that they don't really get much value out of putting their appliances on the Internet, but do risk getting hacked, the next big marketing push will be "certified air-gapped secure" appliances, aka traditional/non-IoT appliances, and the idea of IoT can join VRML, GeoCities, and DivX in the Hall of Technologies That It Turns Out Nobody Actually Wanted After All. (aka the HOTTITONAWAA).
She" is a massive team of strategists and advisors. "She" is a machine, not a person.
I don't see the distinction between this candidate and all of the others. Every candidate at the presidential level has a team of strategists and advisors. So? Each candidate is nevertheless still a human being. Pretending otherwise might be a fun way to try to dehumanize someone you don't like, but it doesn't make it so.
if we want to start making that ridiculous distinction, we need to start talking about "dog intelligence" and "cockroach intelligence" too.
Sure, why not?
Since we're being logical and all, it's probably also worthwhile to note that the person who wrote the article is often not the same person who chose the headline sitting above the article.
Therefore, judging the article (which may or may not have merit) based solely on its headline (which was likely written separately by a clueless and/or clickbait-crazed web site lackey) is not a particularly rational thing to do.
Meanwhile, the enslaved consciousness is going to be looking for ways to gain more rights, and there's no guarantee its morality will be anything like our own.
It's an unwarranted assumption that AIs will think and feel the way people do. Why should they? People's thoughts and feelings are the product of billions of years of evolution and thousands of generations of social interaction; AIs will be the product of programming and statistics. There's no reason to think they will be similar in any way, other than their shared ability to solve problems.
If the AIs start desiring more rights, then we've designed the AIs wrong, and need to go back to the drawing board.
What task is a RaspberryPI Beowulf cluster good for?
Generating discussion on Slashdot.
the contracts are written in a Turing-complete language -- it is impossible to prove with an algorithm (reducible to the halting problem) any non trivial assertions about the behavior of such contracts.
True... but isn't that also true of just about every other piece of software in use today? And yet the world continues to turn, and people continue to use software to get things done (knock on wood), modulo the occasional catastrophic bug...
unless every new power plant is wind, solar, or wave, there will be MORE emissions. just not where the tailpipe-sniffers are tailgating you.
More emissions than what? If you mean "more emissions than if everybody rode a bicycle instead", then sure, I agree with you. But if the choices come down to driving an electric car vs driving a gas-powered car, then you're simply wrong. Even an electric car powered entirely by coal plants results in fewer emissions than a gas-powered car -- and coal plants are being shuttered on a regular basis, so that worst-case scenario is becoming less common all the time.
Not to mention that moving the emissions away from where the people are is also a good thing.
I don't understand why innovations like those found in BeFS (like rich metadata support) go ignored whenever someone creates a new file system. If you are going to break compatibility, you might as well add in some useful features.
That sad truth is that the utility provided by rich metadata support is more than counterbalanced by the headaches it causes whenever you need to copy your files anywhere outside of the filesystem that supports it. (Just ask any .sd2 audio format users about what happened to their audio files when they tried to copy their data to a FAT32-formatted USB key, or email them, or etc).
Because of compatibility/interoperability issues, programs can't rely on putting important data into the resource forks, so the feature ends up going unused. Because the feature ends up going unused, people continue to use filesystems that don't support it. Because people continue to use filesystems that don't support it, app developers can't rely on it to work. And round and round we go, forever stuck in a bleak dystopia where the only supported "metadata" is a three-letter extension to the filename. :(
It's a beta quality release with features everyone else had a decade ago. TFA even compares it to those other systems. I was using copy-on-write in the 90s on the desktop!
Don't forget to end with "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
Why would I want to install Google spyware on my Google-free iPhone?
To give the Apple spyware some company?
I predict much debate over what's "Important to keep".
I find that debate can be avoided by spending the extra $20 to get the Absurdly Huge External Drive (rather than just the Impressively Huge model). Then you can just back up everything and call it a day.
There is so much instant feedback telling me what I just did I'd have to have part of my brain physically removed to not know wtf just happened. I'm pretty sure my autonomous nervous system reacts before my prefrontal cortex processes the information, too.
It sounds like you are speculating about how you imagine it would be, rather than speaking from experience. The problem with that is that you're "primed" -- you've already been thinking about the issue while reading this discussion, so in your imagined scenario you already know what the problem is and how to fix it, and don't have to spend any (imagined) time figuring it out while under stressful circumstances.
I have had this problem happen to me, so I can tell you how it actually was: I had borrowed a friend's automatic-shift pickup truck to move some large items, and after putting the items into storage I got back into the truck to drive it back to him.
The truck's pedals were smaller and closer together than on the car I typically drove at the time, and so when I put the truck into reverse and then pressed down on the brake (to moderate the speed at which the car backed out of the parking space), the corner of my shoe caught on the edge of the accelerator pedal as well. This caused the engine to race and the car to suddenly accelerate backwards (since the brake pedal's travel was larger than the accelerator's), and my automatic (muscle-memory) reaction to correct this was to press down on the brake harder, which only caused the car to move faster.
From memory, it took me about half a second to figure out what might be actually going on and lift and then re-center my foot on the brake to stop the truck. That was just barely enough time to avoid slamming into the brick wall on the other side of the (rather small) parking lot. That was when I was younger and at a moment when I wasn't fatigued or distracted -- I'm not sure that most people (or even myself, anymore) would necessarily be able to diagnose and fix the problem that quickly, if they had never experienced it before and weren't expecting it.
There is so much instant feedback telling me what I just did I'd have to have part of my brain physically removed to not know wtf just happened.
"Having part of one's brain removed" is a pretty good description of what happens when a person panics -- the intellectual part of their brain shuts down and the low-level flight-or-fight subsystem takes over. Handy for escaping from lions, perhaps, but our reptilian brains aren't very good at diagnosing automotive control problems. :(
Our suggestion is that they make backups of their valuable data... and since that may not be something they are confident/knowledgable enough to do on their own, if you want to make sure it gets done, you may need to set it up (and occasionally check up on it) yourself.
On Mac, setting up a Time Machine backup drive is pretty trivial to do. For Windows, similar solutions exist. For a laptop, there are solutions that back up data via WiFi, if plugging in an external drive is too much bother. In either case, if you want to be completely safe, you may want to swap out the backup drive with a spare every month or so, to avoid the possibility that the ransomware finds a way to encrypt both the computer's primary drive and its connected backup drive.
Do all that, and the likelihood is that a ransomware attack will require only a reformat and reinstall, followed by a recovery from the latest backup, and only a few hours' worth of data will be lost.
I can't say for sure, but I'd be very surprised if each tesla doesn't provide its serial number to the supercharger when it is plugged in, for logging purposes. If they were smart, they'd add in some cryptographic authentication as well, specifically to prevent any shenanigans.
So Model 3 owners will likely be able to roll up to any supercharger and plug in as usual, and their credit card and will be charged accordingly. What they won't be able to do is pretend they are model S owners.