IIUC, the only information that we have to prove this is their public statements.
OTOH it is well known that even without intentionally providing backdoors there are often exploits which will effectively be the same thing. And if one of these should happen to be there on purpose there'd be no way to demonstrate it. I will grant that this is not the same as "phoning home". but the known "phoning home" is also known to be sufficient to provide a list of targets.
I think a lot of the disagreement about what a security violation MSWind10 is is due to sloppy language, and most of the rest is due to disagreement about what degree of coerced communication is reasonable. (And whether a sly person being able to evade the coercion is sufficient to excuse it.)
I, personally, tend to come down on the side of people not trusting MS due to past unethical actions. This is not proof that this time they are acting unethically, but it's sufficient reason to not give them any "benefit of the doubt".
I've never been really convinced of that. It may be true, but just having it in print doesn't make it true. I'll admit that there's reasonable evidence that they have something that claims to be the windows source code, but the last time I looked deeply (admittedly this was somewhere around 1998 or 2000) they didn't have the tools to actually compile it, so there was no way to compare the binaries.
So to me it seems more honest to say they have something represented as the source code. But perhaps my information is out of date or incomplete.
Yeah, individual model runs have to be different, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about different models trying to predict the ensuing state when given the same data for the current state.
OTOH, the report I read was 4-5 years ago. And it was a condensation of several technical reports intended of a "lay" audience. (I'm no expert in weather models.)
Saying that " the ensemble means match each other pretty well" isn't exactly correct, though. Of course, history has already proven it wrong in detail (glaciers are collapsing a lot faster than predicted, nobody can explain the Antarctica Sea Ice, etc.).
If there are ANY climate models that predicted BOTH the collapse of the ice in the Arctic and the rise of sea ice around Antarctica, then I haven't heard of them. it's my guess that the Antarctica sea ice will prove to be explainable within the current framework, but that hasn't yet been done. My wild guess is that the Antarctica continental ice is losing heat to the ocean faster than any of the models estimate, and this is what causes the expansion of sea ice. Unfortunately for this theory the sea ice doesn't seem to be as low in salinity as this would most easily predict. (The easiest mechanism of heat transfer would be via subsurface streams of thawed water such as have been seen in Greenland.) Perhaps there are caves under the ice where tidal surges flow in and out. That might speed the transference of heat.
But as I said, I'm no expert, and these are just wild guesses.
I didn't check particular models, I read how the published results were obtained. I'm not deeply into weather models, and though I was once deeply involved in traffic models and journey to work models what this did was convince me that a brief study of how a model worked would be useless, as things are extremely dependent on small assumptions.
Consider, they're modeling a chaotic system, and the best they can ever hope to do is pick out where the boundaries between different state attractors is. And it's not like there's only just a few (either boundaries or attractors).
Thanks. I don't live there, so my memory of the reported weather can be a bit unreliable. Or Perhaps it was Europe that was having some extremely cold weather.
Ruby's current threads cannot do concurrent operations. There's a "global interpreter lock", though I'm not sure that's the terminology they use. This is *the* JRuby advantage. And every program that implements things via Java underneath uses 16-bit characters for it's characters. And this *does* affect the strings.
When Java was designed CPUs had 16 bit registers, so a 16 bit character seemed to make sense. But they baked that definition into the language spec, which was a mistake. They've had plenty of chances to fix it but never seemed to care to do so. Currently there's a work-around using arrays of codepoints, but that's clumsy compared to any language that has a decent character implementation, whether it's based around utf-8 or utf-32. 16 bit characters combine the worst features of both.
FWIW, I often need to handle single characters from strings. In the languages that are based around 32 bit chars this is trivial. In the languages based around 8 bit chars this means using library routines, but if the language has implemented things well it's still easy, and it *does* save on memory. Java has library routines that presume 16 bit chars, and JRuby is implemented on top of that with all the inherent problems. (Ruby doesn't really handle unicode chars at all well, but there are decent libraries, and Ruby 2.1+, at least, handles the basics.)
For JRuby to handle characters well would require abandoning Java Strings. I'd really be surprised if they do that.
If you live in the US it is appropriate the scream that the US is responsible. This doesn't deny that China is doing more (though they are improving).
FWIW, if you drive a car you are not only responsible for the emissions that you create when you drive, but also for the emissions created during the manufacture, and later during it's disposal. So while the manufacturers are responsible, SO ARE THE USERS.
That said, if the US continues to decrease Carbon emissions, then the main problem will be consumption of goods which are polluting to create or to discard. It's improper to not count external costs.
Do I think China needs to do more? Yes. And there should be an import tax that reflects the amount of gaseous/oceanic pollution that was externalized during the creation of any purchased merchandise. And an additional purchase tax that accounts for the cost of disposal. (When glass was expensive, companies did this via deposits on bottles that were large enough that people would bother to return them for the deposit. Something analogous seems appropriate.)
Unfortunately, I acknowledge that my proposals would be more difficult to implement than to state. China has a history of importing coal plants with chimney scrubbers to clean the emissions, and having the installers intentionally neglect to put them into operation because they would result in the plant needing more fuel to generate the same amount of power. So determining the amount of externalized Carbon emissions might be difficult when imposing the tax.
The last time I checked we could be certain that most of the models were incorrect, because they differed significantly in their predictions. Of course, they tended to predict the same general class of thing. I don't think any predicted that there would be increased CO2 and decreased global warming.
This is why the actual predictions that got published tended to be an average of an ensemble of predictions. And it was "pretty good, but sure not perfect". Unfortunately, when the average is better than any of the predictions it's not quite clear how to fix things.
IIUC the current way to "validate" a model is to feed in some known past data set and see how well it predicts what actually happened next. None of them are all that good. Some people believe that it's because they need to take more local effects into consideration, which means smaller cells, which does horrible things to the amount of computer cycles required. It's too bad this seems such a plausible explanation...or perhaps it a good thing, as long as faster computers keep coming along. But weather models already run on the largest super computer they have access to.
It is probably as early and as extreme as it is due to El NiÅo, but it's a lot warmer a lot earlier than it was during the last strong El NiÅo. Perhaps it's just that this one's stronger, but that isn't entirely happenstance (only partially).
Personally, I tend to blame it on the Arctic sea ice nearly disappearing last summer, so this winter it didn't make the ocean current flowing past it as cold as it usually does...but this is just my personal speculation, and I haven't run it past any expert for a critique. To me, however, it seems quite plausible.
I thought the east cost had some record cold last December, or possibly early January.
I know that last week I was thinking what a beautiful spring day it was, but today it felt more like summer. I *do* acknowledge that this is weather rather than climate, but it's quite unusual weather. And climate is composed of the sum of lots of weather.
P.S.: I've got to disagree with the above poster who called global weather climate. Climate isn't specifically global, but it is specifically a long term average...and what is long term can vary depending on lots of different things, including the point you're trying to make. Some words don't really have sharp boundaries around their definitions. But the climate of an area is the moving average of the weather in that area. To be sensible on planet Earth you need to compare days at the same time of year, of course. But one can reasonably talk about the climate of an area, which can be larger or smaller. Or even about the emotional climate. The meaning of the term is about the same.
You can be rather certain that the OS is MSWind, and not just MSWind, but multiple different versions of MSWind, with different machines demanding that only some particular version be used. By now they've probably replaced all the MSWind95 and MSWind98 machines, but don't bet they don't have some MSWindNT and MSWind2000 machines. They may even have some DOS machines (which likely aren't restricted to only MSDOS, but could be if they depend on particular RAM locations).
IIUC when they buy an expensive machine, it comes certified to work with a particular version of an OS, and the OS us usually MSWind. But certification is expensive, so they don't get the same model of the machine certified when a new release comes out. And the machines are expensive, so the machines aren't replaced just because a new model is being sold by the manufacturer.
And I know that everytime I've been able to determine which OS was running in a doctor's office, it has been some version of MSWind.
You want to know what's stupid? If you go to the main web page the only description of the code you get is a sample "Hello, World" application, and the link that claimed to lead me to more examples instead lead to an advertisement for a book on the language.
If you won't let me look at it... Why do you expect me to buy a pig in a poke.
I believe that you excessively denigrate Java. But Oracle sure hasn't helped it much.
I expect that JRuby will only be successful until Ruby manages to successfully implement a reasonable parallel execution of threads.
Perhaps you are right about Scala and Clojure, but I don't know. I have my doubts about any VM that insists that the character type is 16 bits. 32 I could understand, and 8 I could understand, but 16 seems a historical relic that only made sense on machines with 16 bit registers.
I didn't say it was humane, I said that given the historical precedents it was *relatively* humane. I also indicated that you should expect things to get worse.
Assyria did things like intentional genocide. Rome did things like cutting all the right hands off all the males in a village, and then blinding most of them, but leaving a few with sight so that they could guide the rest on the walk home. The Huns wanted to make the entire world a place for horses to graze, so they destroyed all the cities of the Muslim Caliphate. Etc. (And do realize I'm just picking out highlights.)
The immediate always seems worse than the more distant, and this isn't unreasonable when planning actions, but when evaluating the place of something in the moral scheme of things, the time it occurred should be irrelevant.
FWIW, war has been uneconomic since the days of Napoleon (perhaps even then), so future wars should have little economic reason for occurring. Politics and religion, however, don't follow economic rationale, so wars *will* still occur. AFAICT the current US incursions into the Middle East are purely political (with economic justifications, but underneath those are merely justifications, not actual reasons). Note that when the USSR officially collapsed the US didn't take any particular economic advantage of it. (Political advantage always has indirect economic advantages, and I suspect the same for religious advantage, but that wasn't primary.)
We can hope that the rising power, be it China, India, or someone else, comes to dominance through purely economic power (automated factories? robots? something else) and that the transition is relatively peaceful. There are signs that this may be happening. China seems to have already bought much of the US industry. People don't seem willing to believe this, but I'm rather convinced that the US government wouldn't implement ANY plan that China really objected to. And this isn't about any one thing, like rare earths, but rather an extremely broad swath of things. Cloth, food, electronics, etc. Any sector you can name seems to have some aspect of it where China is sufficiently dominant that they could severely impact it if they chose.... And if they chose to act across many of them...
IIRC there was a story awhile back about LG TVs (or monitors?) doing the same thing. The difference is that this was an announcement from the manufacturer rather than from a third party.
You need to study a bit of history. Actually, SO FAR the western domination has been relatively humane. Contemplate Assyria, consider the Peloponesian wars, look into the history of Athens and Crete. I'm not as well versed in Asian history, but from brief glimses they would also fit.
But do note the "SO FAR". Generally the worst atrocities come when the dominate power starts to fear that it's losing it's power.
That said, small groups that feel themselves either divinely guided or immune to repercussions, perhaps because of not being noticed, can also be extremely evil, and this technology doesn't require the immense amounts of capital that even a small nuclear weapon does. This is within the budget of a moderate university or corporation. It's true you need access to some high tech tools, but those tools have already been developed. So even the smallest country could afford this.
But that brings up an interesting bit of nomenclature. How does one define "Rogue Scientist"? Is it one who does the bidding of his government, or one who refuses? And when different governments disagree?
Sorry to disagree, but things happening at the chromosome level doesn't mean they aren't also genetic...chromosomes being made out of genes. Now if you'd claimed that epigenetic modifications weren't genetic you'd have a reasonable point, as even though those happen at the chromosome level, they aren't changes in the genes. Even then, though, I can also see calling them genetic modifications as they affect the expression of the genes.
Actually, we can be quite sure that they have, as long as you don't refuse to allow anything before 1800. I don't know how effective it was but there is decent evidence that blankets that smallpox victims had slept in were collected and sold to the Indians in the US at various times. And I suspect that measles was used the same way more frequently...but with less record, because measles wasn't seen as dangerous to the people handling the materials.
I think there are also some records from the middle ages, but I'm less certain about that.
I've still got that "general-purpose AI capable of self-taught complex problem solving" pegged at 2030 [+|- a bit]. Of course, I'm including "manipulating bodies in the real world" as part of the problem it needs to solve, as well as "debugging and improving concurrent AI programs".
The problem is, most jobs don't need an AI. They need a bit of manipulation and a bit of pattern matching. Some of them need to be redesigned a bit. We're already there. Now what's needed is for the cost to come down and the reliability to go up. (Fancy manipulators are still
Long before that point we need to solve the problem of people who don't have a job. This is already rather crucial, but it's going to rapidly get worse over the next couple of decades. So far the omens aren't very promising.
FWIW, I believe this should be handled by a combination of a guaranteed income and a smoothly graduated tax scale with NO exemptions. (If you want to promote some particular business, do it outside the tax code.) And I believe that this should have been implemented a couple of decades ago. Get rid of welfare, stop promoting Social Security, replace it with a guaranteed income, and phase it up. Health services should not be dependent on holding down a job. If you're sick enough you probably CAN'T hold down a job. So single payer for everyone. You can supplement it if you want to and can afford to. And this feels urgent, and more urgent every time I hear a different one of these predictions (from a different source). Or when I hear about the next astounding new piece of automation advancement. Granted the news is usually overblown, but each separate report is evidence that automation capabilities are advancing (though not nearly as fast as claimed).
We *ALREADY* have a huge number of people who are unemployed. So much so that I've noticed twice when they re-jiggered the ways they count unemployment, and have to guess at how often they did it when I wasn't paying attention. Is it still "If you haven't had a job in the last 6 months, you no longer count as unemployed"? One source says: "People are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work. Actively looking for work may consist of any of the following activities: " And they list a list of reasonable approaches, but many of them don't appear to be easily measurable. So I guess it's now (or when that web page was created) "If you haven't had a job in the last month, you no longer count as unemployed". Since some of the ways are plausibly measurable perhaps one could extend that to 2 months.
Think about it. This means that there's a huge amount of unemployment that just not counted. When I graduated from college it took me 6 months to land a decent job, and for most of that time I would not have counted as unemployed by that definition. (Well, to be fair I was pretty sure I had a job in the queue, so I wasn't actively looking. But still, if I'd needed a job sooner I'm not sure I could have gotten one..)
"Earned' is a social agreement. There is absolutely NO objective way of determining it. The same is true of "value". An individual can assess the relative value of something to him, but this says nothing about what the value would be to someone else.
Price is objectively measurable, even though subject to intense social manipulation.
If someone says someone else "earned" his wealth, or poverty, there is no objective way to demonstrate the truth or falsity of the statement. It's the same order of statement as "The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the one true god.".
They also demonstrably don't know the difference between their star performers and their parasites. And this is inevitable, as part of their training (presuming they went to a normal MBA school) is that a good manager can manage anything, he doesn't need to know about the product.
That is one of the most destructive beliefs ever to infest management training. The only one I can recall that's nearly as bad is that one should focus all of one's attention on the next quarter's financials, and nearly ignore the further future.
Are you sure? Before I retired the top management always had someone else type up his rough notes. Spelling, grammar, etc. we never his responsibility.
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IIUC, the only information that we have to prove this is their public statements.
OTOH it is well known that even without intentionally providing backdoors there are often exploits which will effectively be the same thing. And if one of these should happen to be there on purpose there'd be no way to demonstrate it. I will grant that this is not the same as "phoning home". but the known "phoning home" is also known to be sufficient to provide a list of targets.
I think a lot of the disagreement about what a security violation MSWind10 is is due to sloppy language, and most of the rest is due to disagreement about what degree of coerced communication is reasonable. (And whether a sly person being able to evade the coercion is sufficient to excuse it.)
I, personally, tend to come down on the side of people not trusting MS due to past unethical actions. This is not proof that this time they are acting unethically, but it's sufficient reason to not give them any "benefit of the doubt".
I've never been really convinced of that. It may be true, but just having it in print doesn't make it true. I'll admit that there's reasonable evidence that they have something that claims to be the windows source code, but the last time I looked deeply (admittedly this was somewhere around 1998 or 2000) they didn't have the tools to actually compile it, so there was no way to compare the binaries.
So to me it seems more honest to say they have something represented as the source code. But perhaps my information is out of date or incomplete.
Yeah, individual model runs have to be different, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about different models trying to predict the ensuing state when given the same data for the current state.
OTOH, the report I read was 4-5 years ago. And it was a condensation of several technical reports intended of a "lay" audience. (I'm no expert in weather models.)
Saying that " the ensemble means match each other pretty well" isn't exactly correct, though. Of course, history has already proven it wrong in detail (glaciers are collapsing a lot faster than predicted, nobody can explain the Antarctica Sea Ice, etc.).
If there are ANY climate models that predicted BOTH the collapse of the ice in the Arctic and the rise of sea ice around Antarctica, then I haven't heard of them. it's my guess that the Antarctica sea ice will prove to be explainable within the current framework, but that hasn't yet been done. My wild guess is that the Antarctica continental ice is losing heat to the ocean faster than any of the models estimate, and this is what causes the expansion of sea ice. Unfortunately for this theory the sea ice doesn't seem to be as low in salinity as this would most easily predict. (The easiest mechanism of heat transfer would be via subsurface streams of thawed water such as have been seen in Greenland.) Perhaps there are caves under the ice where tidal surges flow in and out. That might speed the transference of heat.
But as I said, I'm no expert, and these are just wild guesses.
I didn't check particular models, I read how the published results were obtained. I'm not deeply into weather models, and though I was once deeply involved in traffic models and journey to work models what this did was convince me that a brief study of how a model worked would be useless, as things are extremely dependent on small assumptions.
Consider, they're modeling a chaotic system, and the best they can ever hope to do is pick out where the boundaries between different state attractors is. And it's not like there's only just a few (either boundaries or attractors).
Thanks. I don't live there, so my memory of the reported weather can be a bit unreliable. Or Perhaps it was Europe that was having some extremely cold weather.
Ruby's current threads cannot do concurrent operations. There's a "global interpreter lock", though I'm not sure that's the terminology they use. This is *the* JRuby advantage. And every program that implements things via Java underneath uses 16-bit characters for it's characters. And this *does* affect the strings.
When Java was designed CPUs had 16 bit registers, so a 16 bit character seemed to make sense. But they baked that definition into the language spec, which was a mistake. They've had plenty of chances to fix it but never seemed to care to do so. Currently there's a work-around using arrays of codepoints, but that's clumsy compared to any language that has a decent character implementation, whether it's based around utf-8 or utf-32. 16 bit characters combine the worst features of both.
FWIW, I often need to handle single characters from strings. In the languages that are based around 32 bit chars this is trivial. In the languages based around 8 bit chars this means using library routines, but if the language has implemented things well it's still easy, and it *does* save on memory. Java has library routines that presume 16 bit chars, and JRuby is implemented on top of that with all the inherent problems. (Ruby doesn't really handle unicode chars at all well, but there are decent libraries, and Ruby 2.1+, at least, handles the basics.)
For JRuby to handle characters well would require abandoning Java Strings. I'd really be surprised if they do that.
If you live in the US it is appropriate the scream that the US is responsible. This doesn't deny that China is doing more (though they are improving).
FWIW, if you drive a car you are not only responsible for the emissions that you create when you drive, but also for the emissions created during the manufacture, and later during it's disposal. So while the manufacturers are responsible, SO ARE THE USERS.
That said, if the US continues to decrease Carbon emissions, then the main problem will be consumption of goods which are polluting to create or to discard. It's improper to not count external costs.
Do I think China needs to do more? Yes. And there should be an import tax that reflects the amount of gaseous/oceanic pollution that was externalized during the creation of any purchased merchandise. And an additional purchase tax that accounts for the cost of disposal. (When glass was expensive, companies did this via deposits on bottles that were large enough that people would bother to return them for the deposit. Something analogous seems appropriate.)
Unfortunately, I acknowledge that my proposals would be more difficult to implement than to state. China has a history of importing coal plants with chimney scrubbers to clean the emissions, and having the installers intentionally neglect to put them into operation because they would result in the plant needing more fuel to generate the same amount of power. So determining the amount of externalized Carbon emissions might be difficult when imposing the tax.
The last time I checked we could be certain that most of the models were incorrect, because they differed significantly in their predictions. Of course, they tended to predict the same general class of thing. I don't think any predicted that there would be increased CO2 and decreased global warming.
This is why the actual predictions that got published tended to be an average of an ensemble of predictions. And it was "pretty good, but sure not perfect". Unfortunately, when the average is better than any of the predictions it's not quite clear how to fix things.
IIUC the current way to "validate" a model is to feed in some known past data set and see how well it predicts what actually happened next. None of them are all that good. Some people believe that it's because they need to take more local effects into consideration, which means smaller cells, which does horrible things to the amount of computer cycles required. It's too bad this seems such a plausible explanation...or perhaps it a good thing, as long as faster computers keep coming along. But weather models already run on the largest super computer they have access to.
It is probably as early and as extreme as it is due to El NiÅo, but it's a lot warmer a lot earlier than it was during the last strong El NiÅo. Perhaps it's just that this one's stronger, but that isn't entirely happenstance (only partially).
Personally, I tend to blame it on the Arctic sea ice nearly disappearing last summer, so this winter it didn't make the ocean current flowing past it as cold as it usually does...but this is just my personal speculation, and I haven't run it past any expert for a critique. To me, however, it seems quite plausible.
I thought the east cost had some record cold last December, or possibly early January.
I know that last week I was thinking what a beautiful spring day it was, but today it felt more like summer. I *do* acknowledge that this is weather rather than climate, but it's quite unusual weather. And climate is composed of the sum of lots of weather.
P.S.: I've got to disagree with the above poster who called global weather climate. Climate isn't specifically global, but it is specifically a long term average...and what is long term can vary depending on lots of different things, including the point you're trying to make. Some words don't really have sharp boundaries around their definitions. But the climate of an area is the moving average of the weather in that area. To be sensible on planet Earth you need to compare days at the same time of year, of course. But one can reasonably talk about the climate of an area, which can be larger or smaller. Or even about the emotional climate. The meaning of the term is about the same.
One may hope so. I'm not sure how that would work, though, if they are attacking from, say, Somalia.
You can be rather certain that the OS is MSWind, and not just MSWind, but multiple different versions of MSWind, with different machines demanding that only some particular version be used. By now they've probably replaced all the MSWind95 and MSWind98 machines, but don't bet they don't have some MSWindNT and MSWind2000 machines. They may even have some DOS machines (which likely aren't restricted to only MSDOS, but could be if they depend on particular RAM locations).
IIUC when they buy an expensive machine, it comes certified to work with a particular version of an OS, and the OS us usually MSWind. But certification is expensive, so they don't get the same model of the machine certified when a new release comes out. And the machines are expensive, so the machines aren't replaced just because a new model is being sold by the manufacturer.
And I know that everytime I've been able to determine which OS was running in a doctor's office, it has been some version of MSWind.
You want to know what's stupid? If you go to the main web page the only description of the code you get is a sample "Hello, World" application, and the link that claimed to lead me to more examples instead lead to an advertisement for a book on the language.
If you won't let me look at it... Why do you expect me to buy a pig in a poke.
I believe that you excessively denigrate Java. But Oracle sure hasn't helped it much.
I expect that JRuby will only be successful until Ruby manages to successfully implement a reasonable parallel execution of threads.
Perhaps you are right about Scala and Clojure, but I don't know. I have my doubts about any VM that insists that the character type is 16 bits. 32 I could understand, and 8 I could understand, but 16 seems a historical relic that only made sense on machines with 16 bit registers.
I didn't say it was humane, I said that given the historical precedents it was *relatively* humane. I also indicated that you should expect things to get worse.
Assyria did things like intentional genocide. Rome did things like cutting all the right hands off all the males in a village, and then blinding most of them, but leaving a few with sight so that they could guide the rest on the walk home. The Huns wanted to make the entire world a place for horses to graze, so they destroyed all the cities of the Muslim Caliphate. Etc. (And do realize I'm just picking out highlights.)
The immediate always seems worse than the more distant, and this isn't unreasonable when planning actions, but when evaluating the place of something in the moral scheme of things, the time it occurred should be irrelevant.
FWIW, war has been uneconomic since the days of Napoleon (perhaps even then), so future wars should have little economic reason for occurring. Politics and religion, however, don't follow economic rationale, so wars *will* still occur. AFAICT the current US incursions into the Middle East are purely political (with economic justifications, but underneath those are merely justifications, not actual reasons). Note that when the USSR officially collapsed the US didn't take any particular economic advantage of it. (Political advantage always has indirect economic advantages, and I suspect the same for religious advantage, but that wasn't primary.)
We can hope that the rising power, be it China, India, or someone else, comes to dominance through purely economic power (automated factories? robots? something else) and that the transition is relatively peaceful. There are signs that this may be happening. China seems to have already bought much of the US industry. People don't seem willing to believe this, but I'm rather convinced that the US government wouldn't implement ANY plan that China really objected to. And this isn't about any one thing, like rare earths, but rather an extremely broad swath of things. Cloth, food, electronics, etc. Any sector you can name seems to have some aspect of it where China is sufficiently dominant that they could severely impact it if they chose. ... And if they chose to act across many of them ...
IIRC there was a story awhile back about LG TVs (or monitors?) doing the same thing. The difference is that this was an announcement from the manufacturer rather than from a third party.
Ah, but how many of them understand commands directed to them by voice? I think that's still beyond local computing capability.
You need to study a bit of history. Actually, SO FAR the western domination has been relatively humane. Contemplate Assyria, consider the Peloponesian wars, look into the history of Athens and Crete. I'm not as well versed in Asian history, but from brief glimses they would also fit.
But do note the "SO FAR". Generally the worst atrocities come when the dominate power starts to fear that it's losing it's power.
That said, small groups that feel themselves either divinely guided or immune to repercussions, perhaps because of not being noticed, can also be extremely evil, and this technology doesn't require the immense amounts of capital that even a small nuclear weapon does. This is within the budget of a moderate university or corporation. It's true you need access to some high tech tools, but those tools have already been developed. So even the smallest country could afford this.
But that brings up an interesting bit of nomenclature. How does one define "Rogue Scientist"? Is it one who does the bidding of his government, or one who refuses? And when different governments disagree?
Sorry to disagree, but things happening at the chromosome level doesn't mean they aren't also genetic...chromosomes being made out of genes. Now if you'd claimed that epigenetic modifications weren't genetic you'd have a reasonable point, as even though those happen at the chromosome level, they aren't changes in the genes. Even then, though, I can also see calling them genetic modifications as they affect the expression of the genes.
Actually, we can be quite sure that they have, as long as you don't refuse to allow anything before 1800. I don't know how effective it was but there is decent evidence that blankets that smallpox victims had slept in were collected and sold to the Indians in the US at various times. And I suspect that measles was used the same way more frequently...but with less record, because measles wasn't seen as dangerous to the people handling the materials.
I think there are also some records from the middle ages, but I'm less certain about that.
I've still got that "general-purpose AI capable of self-taught complex problem solving" pegged at 2030 [+|- a bit]. Of course, I'm including "manipulating bodies in the real world" as part of the problem it needs to solve, as well as "debugging and improving concurrent AI programs".
The problem is, most jobs don't need an AI. They need a bit of manipulation and a bit of pattern matching. Some of them need to be redesigned a bit. We're already there. Now what's needed is for the cost to come down and the reliability to go up. (Fancy manipulators are still
Long before that point we need to solve the problem of people who don't have a job. This is already rather crucial, but it's going to rapidly get worse over the next couple of decades. So far the omens aren't very promising.
FWIW, I believe this should be handled by a combination of a guaranteed income and a smoothly graduated tax scale with NO exemptions. (If you want to promote some particular business, do it outside the tax code.) And I believe that this should have been implemented a couple of decades ago. Get rid of welfare, stop promoting Social Security, replace it with a guaranteed income, and phase it up. Health services should not be dependent on holding down a job. If you're sick enough you probably CAN'T hold down a job. So single payer for everyone. You can supplement it if you want to and can afford to. And this feels urgent, and more urgent every time I hear a different one of these predictions (from a different source). Or when I hear about the next astounding new piece of automation advancement. Granted the news is usually overblown, but each separate report is evidence that automation capabilities are advancing (though not nearly as fast as claimed).
We *ALREADY* have a huge number of people who are unemployed. So much so that I've noticed twice when they re-jiggered the ways they count unemployment, and have to guess at how often they did it when I wasn't paying attention. Is it still "If you haven't had a job in the last 6 months, you no longer count as unemployed"?
One source says:
"People are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work. Actively looking for work may consist of any of the following activities: "
And they list a list of reasonable approaches, but many of them don't appear to be easily measurable. So I guess it's now (or when that web page was created) "If you haven't had a job in the last month, you no longer count as unemployed". Since some of the ways are plausibly measurable perhaps one could extend that to 2 months.
Think about it. This means that there's a huge amount of unemployment that just not counted. When I graduated from college it took me 6 months to land a decent job, and for most of that time I would not have counted as unemployed by that definition. (Well, to be fair I was pretty sure I had a job in the queue, so I wasn't actively looking. But still, if I'd needed a job sooner I'm not sure I could have gotten one..)
"Earned' is a social agreement. There is absolutely NO objective way of determining it. The same is true of "value". An individual can assess the relative value of something to him, but this says nothing about what the value would be to someone else.
Price is objectively measurable, even though subject to intense social manipulation.
If someone says someone else "earned" his wealth, or poverty, there is no objective way to demonstrate the truth or falsity of the statement. It's the same order of statement as "The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the one true god.".
They also demonstrably don't know the difference between their star performers and their parasites. And this is inevitable, as part of their training (presuming they went to a normal MBA school) is that a good manager can manage anything, he doesn't need to know about the product.
That is one of the most destructive beliefs ever to infest management training. The only one I can recall that's nearly as bad is that one should focus all of one's attention on the next quarter's financials, and nearly ignore the further future.
Are you sure? Before I retired the top management always had someone else type up his rough notes. Spelling, grammar, etc. we never his responsibility.