No, Microsoft isn't the only one, but they're relevant in this case because they appear to have been the instigator and source of funds. The evidence *doesn't* seem to be conclusive, but it's considerably stronger than just "highly suggestive".
I agree that kernel changes are important, but this article is really light on what those changes are. A name doesn't tell you much unless you already know what that name stands for. I can't tell whether I have any reason to care about this update or not.
In fact, I'm rather annoyed by the way kernel changes reporting is done. Most articles that even pretend to be instructive pass you a link to a change log as if it were an explanation. I'm not a kernel hacker, and I don't really want to be one. I've got other things on my plate. So usually I just end up assuming that whatever the changes are they won't make any difference to me. This time there was the mention of certain specific drivers being included, and those don't matter to me. But at least that was intelligible. I'm guessing that this kernel DOESN'T include the Spectre fix, but that's a guess. (An earlier version apparently included it as a default choice with optional disabling...unless that was Meltdown.)
So I consider kernel news important, but done so poorly as to be annoyingly confusing.
systemd is not a part of the kernel. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, assuming that you didn't realize that. If you don't like systemd and want to use Linux there are various options that I've considered, but not tried. There's Devuan, Slackware, etc., i.e. various distributions that don't use it at all. Or, if you want, you can customize a Debian or Gentoo installation to not use systemd. I'm not sure how long that will be possible, but it is for now.
There are also things like blackbox Linux or Linux from Scratch with allow you to assemble a system with only those pieces you desire.
That said, there are also arguments in favor of various of the BSDs. I would probably have tried them out over systemd if they could handle read/write of ext4 filesystems. There are systems I could use as an intermediate if I felt strongly enough, but systemd may not have given me any advantages, but the problems haven't been very significant, so I've never bothered.
And if you're a troll, at least this was a place to reasonably inform anyone who trusted you.
To be fair, ObamaCare, which I call RomneyCare, was a bad idea. The insurance companies should never have had a seat at the table. Health care is worthwhile, health *insurance* is a terrible idea, that is only made palatable if someone else appears to be picking up the tab, because the insurance companies always are in there to make a profit.
Universal basic health care should be the platform, and just skip any reference to insurance. If you want insurance, it's appropriate for things that are not only expensive, but also unlikely. Then the purpose is to spread the risk. But everyone needs basic health care, so the insurance model is grossly inefficient and excessively expensive. So major medical insurance is reasonable. But neither insurance for basic health care nor for actually optional services. (Reconstructive plastic surgery for burn victims does not count as optional in my book, even if they are not incapacitated without it.)
Sorry, the US doesn't have to justify leaving a power vacuum. It didn't intend to do so, it's just that that's the way things happen. Being the "top dog" is expensive in many ways, and no country can afford to do that forever, even with stolen wealth. Egypt couldn't, Greece couldn't, Rome couldn't, Britain couldn't, and the US can't. Except for Greece (Alexander) the time periods seem to be getting shorter and the area dominated larger, but it hasn't happened often enough to make a pattern that can be trusted. Estimates, however, have been made that the US has spend several times the worth of all the oil remaining in the ground in the Middle East fighting there.
The problems is that times of transition of power have often been violent. This needs to be avoided this time if humanity is to survive.
P.S.: There are several "world powers" I just left out, though with the inclusion of Greece the justice of doing so is questionable. In particular the Assyrians, the Hittites, the Mongols, etc. The Mongols in particular should really have been included, as their "empire" still has an affect on the modern world. Tamerlain shaped the tone of the Moslem religion into a strongly militaristic and Xenophobic form, which it didn't have in the earlier period. The Koran can be read in as many different ways as the rest of the Bible. But with the destruction of the civilized cities along the silk road, the Moslems retreated into a shell of fundamentalism, and many of them have not yet re-emerged. (Now justify why the Christians are doing the same thing without being wiped out by an invading army.) OTOH, leaving out China from the list was not only intentional, but strongly justifiable. China has almost always been heavily introverted. Their traditional stance has been "Nobody outside China matters". The British may have broken this stance, but it wouldn't surprise me to see it re-assert itself. This doesn't mean they don't seek to dominate those they trade with. North Vietnam would have willingly allied itself with the US to avoid Chinese domination, but the US was unwilling to deal honorably with them. This has happened several times where potential allies were turned into enemies because the US refused to deal honorably with them. For explicit examples you could ask the American Indian tribes how honestly the US has maintained it's treaties. Often, however, the US hasn't even been honorable long enough for a treaty to be signed. In Vietnam the Geneva Protocols were first accepted by the US, and then, when the US saw who would win the election, violated. Etc.
The assertion means nothing unless consciousness is defined in an objectively testable manner. If it is, then you can test to see whether it's true or not.
People making assertions about "consciousness" generally handwave and say "you know what I mean", whereas actually you only "sort of" know what they mean, and if you're going to make this kind of assertion, details are significant.
It's worth noting that this is from a philosophy professor addressing the "hard problem of consciousness" which is usually equivalent to "having an internal point of view". This is not a workable definition, as there's no way of testing. This is like the question of "How do you decide whether a robot is conscious?" or "Are there philosophical zombies?". You need an operational definition to convert those from meaningless noise to meaningful. I can create definitions consistent with common usage that will answer those questions either yes or no (i.e., for each question I could come up with two definitions, one of which would have a yes answer and the other a no answer).
I'll accept the CVT repair as a potential benefit, but before I actually accept as an actual benefit I need to know that those who received the "improvement" considered it an improvement. Searching for "CVT automobile transmission automatic upgrade" (without quotes) didn't return any hits on the first page.
The assertion(2) that it helps make newer cars better is a (potential) benefit to the community, but probably not measurably to the individual driver. It's also not proven. That kind of information is just about as often used to make things chintzier. Perhaps more often. True, that *could* lead to lower prices, but that's far from guaranteed, and often doesn't happen.
In the past the situations where this kind of information has been used to the benefit of the operator of the vehicle was in situations where the vehicle was owned by the company/agency that was doing the data collection. Trains and airplanes are examples. When it's been collected by the manufacturer (after sale) it has much more frequently been used to hide problems. It's not clear to me why I shouldn't expect that pattern to continue.
The article, or at least the summary, is wrong when it call this more intrusive than cell phones. Cell phones definitely track your location, well, the location of the phone, at all times. They contain a lot more personal data. And they are more often broken into and the data widely shared.
That's not saying this additional intrusion isn't evil. But lets not engage in false hyperbole.
What reason do you have to think that the end user (i.e. purchaser of the vehicle) will receive any benefits from this system? Can you point to any benefits so far that don't require extra payment in advance?
I don't drive, so I'm a "relatively" unbiased observer of this debate, but nobody, including you, has mentioned any benefits so far that weren't paid extra for in advance.
There are allegations that the allegations are wrong. The source I checked did not include any specifics that would allow their claims to be validated. The original report contained numerous specifics that would allow third parties to validate it.
I'm not going to buy one of those phones, so I would have no way to check either, but if I'm going to decide which to believe, I'm going to believe the one that could be validated.
Which mission? The other poster took one reasonable interpretation, i.e. selling flame throwers. Another reasonable interpretation would be that you believe in automated tunnel construction. Another would be that you believe in electric cars. Another would be that you believe in dying on Mars.
There are so many wildly different interpretations of "I believe in the mission" in that context that it's impossible to make a reasoned interpretation. I'll give you credit for sanity and discount the "believing in selling flame throwers" interpretation, though that's the one that is, on the surface, the most probable. But that still leaves all the others, including many I didn't detail.
Actually, it's not important that you respond to this post, but do think more carefully about what you post if you actually want people to understand what you mean. I will guess that you mean you support SpaceX's mission to Mars. But that *is* a guess, and is based on my biases more than on what you said.
I think the other (critical) poster has a small point. "mass simulator" is a lousy term. "test mass" or some such would be much better. It's got to be a real mass, not a simulation of a mass.
But, to me, launching his car seems a good move. The PR is probably worth more than the car, and he wouldn't want to launch some client's load on something that's so likely to blow up. Besides, it's a great excuse to buy a new car.
It's true that the communications will eat up speed, but the parallel execution will increase it. So you need to redesign the algorithms to optimize things differently. You can't use the same algorithms for this design and get good performance. But for most problems you can use different algorithms and do so.
Note that I talked about using something like the Erlang virtual machine as the machine language. You don't design things the same way for that kind of a machine. Hell, you couldn't even design things the same way for the CDC Star as for the CDC 7600. The architectures are too different. The proposed (cellular) design is more reminiscent of a GPU than of the current multiprocessor CPUs. It just isn't as specialized. Think of it as a hardware implementation of the Actor model, and you won't be too far off.
All that said, we appear to be almost *AT* a local optimum. Any change here is going to be locally down-hill. But I believe this is *far* from the global optimum.
Well, there's this advantage: Patents still expire. This thing will be declared invalid if challenged, and if not challenged will expire without being renewed, and can then be used as prior art to challenge some other patent.
While it's true that Moore's law is, essentially, dead this doesn't mean that computation can't get more powerful. There are lots of well known ways that would work. Most of them, however, require redesigning the algorithms. There's already been a lot of push into parallelizing things, but there could be a **LOT** more. There hasn't been because it was cheaper to rely on Moore's law.
FWIW, I think that the push into complex processor designs was a mistake. It lead to a local optimum that is quite far from the global optimum. What should be done is LOTS of simple processors, each with a SMALL cache of fast memory, and a much larger cache of persistent memory (so that it doesn't consume power and dissipate heat). The different CPUs should communicate via message passing and be programmed in a language that is adapted to this kind of computing. I'm thinking of something like the Erlang virtual machine implemented in hardware. If my guesses are correct, this design should be low enough in heat dissipation that 3D circuits are feasible without excessive work on head dissipation. It probably wouldn't even need water cooling.
This design is "sort of" like the ideas being floated for neural computers that keep showing up on the front pages, but I can't tell whether it's the same or not, because the descriptions are always so vague. They usually talk about "memristor" or some such, but that's just a particular technology that can be used to give non-volatile memory. IIUC any other non-volatile approach would work as well...though core memory would take up too much space, and that would slow things down.
Various towns trying that have found state laws getting passed forbidding them from doing so.
I'll agree that the physical plant in the "last mile" is a natural monopoly. But the companies that might want to eventually move into that natural monopoly don't want anyone they can't drive out of business to run it.
Well, if you can predict his opinion, then in a sense he's trustworthy. You may not like what you can trust him to do, but that's, technically, a different matter.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Microsoft isn't the only one, but they're relevant in this case because they appear to have been the instigator and source of funds. The evidence *doesn't* seem to be conclusive, but it's considerably stronger than just "highly suggestive".
No, for zombies you need to fill their mouth with salt and then sew their lips closed to keep them from spitting it out.
I agree that kernel changes are important, but this article is really light on what those changes are. A name doesn't tell you much unless you already know what that name stands for. I can't tell whether I have any reason to care about this update or not.
In fact, I'm rather annoyed by the way kernel changes reporting is done. Most articles that even pretend to be instructive pass you a link to a change log as if it were an explanation. I'm not a kernel hacker, and I don't really want to be one. I've got other things on my plate. So usually I just end up assuming that whatever the changes are they won't make any difference to me. This time there was the mention of certain specific drivers being included, and those don't matter to me. But at least that was intelligible. I'm guessing that this kernel DOESN'T include the Spectre fix, but that's a guess. (An earlier version apparently included it as a default choice with optional disabling...unless that was Meltdown.)
So I consider kernel news important, but done so poorly as to be annoyingly confusing.
systemd is not a part of the kernel. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, assuming that you didn't realize that. If you don't like systemd and want to use Linux there are various options that I've considered, but not tried. There's Devuan, Slackware, etc., i.e. various distributions that don't use it at all. Or, if you want, you can customize a Debian or Gentoo installation to not use systemd. I'm not sure how long that will be possible, but it is for now.
There are also things like blackbox Linux or Linux from Scratch with allow you to assemble a system with only those pieces you desire.
That said, there are also arguments in favor of various of the BSDs. I would probably have tried them out over systemd if they could handle read/write of ext4 filesystems. There are systems I could use as an intermediate if I felt strongly enough, but systemd may not have given me any advantages, but the problems haven't been very significant, so I've never bothered.
And if you're a troll, at least this was a place to reasonably inform anyone who trusted you.
To be fair, ObamaCare, which I call RomneyCare, was a bad idea. The insurance companies should never have had a seat at the table. Health care is worthwhile, health *insurance* is a terrible idea, that is only made palatable if someone else appears to be picking up the tab, because the insurance companies always are in there to make a profit.
Universal basic health care should be the platform, and just skip any reference to insurance. If you want insurance, it's appropriate for things that are not only expensive, but also unlikely. Then the purpose is to spread the risk. But everyone needs basic health care, so the insurance model is grossly inefficient and excessively expensive. So major medical insurance is reasonable. But neither insurance for basic health care nor for actually optional services. (Reconstructive plastic surgery for burn victims does not count as optional in my book, even if they are not incapacitated without it.)
Sorry, the US doesn't have to justify leaving a power vacuum. It didn't intend to do so, it's just that that's the way things happen. Being the "top dog" is expensive in many ways, and no country can afford to do that forever, even with stolen wealth. Egypt couldn't, Greece couldn't, Rome couldn't, Britain couldn't, and the US can't. Except for Greece (Alexander) the time periods seem to be getting shorter and the area dominated larger, but it hasn't happened often enough to make a pattern that can be trusted. Estimates, however, have been made that the US has spend several times the worth of all the oil remaining in the ground in the Middle East fighting there.
The problems is that times of transition of power have often been violent. This needs to be avoided this time if humanity is to survive.
P.S.: There are several "world powers" I just left out, though with the inclusion of Greece the justice of doing so is questionable. In particular the Assyrians, the Hittites, the Mongols, etc. The Mongols in particular should really have been included, as their "empire" still has an affect on the modern world. Tamerlain shaped the tone of the Moslem religion into a strongly militaristic and Xenophobic form, which it didn't have in the earlier period. The Koran can be read in as many different ways as the rest of the Bible. But with the destruction of the civilized cities along the silk road, the Moslems retreated into a shell of fundamentalism, and many of them have not yet re-emerged. (Now justify why the Christians are doing the same thing without being wiped out by an invading army.)
OTOH, leaving out China from the list was not only intentional, but strongly justifiable. China has almost always been heavily introverted. Their traditional stance has been "Nobody outside China matters". The British may have broken this stance, but it wouldn't surprise me to see it re-assert itself. This doesn't mean they don't seek to dominate those they trade with. North Vietnam would have willingly allied itself with the US to avoid Chinese domination, but the US was unwilling to deal honorably with them. This has happened several times where potential allies were turned into enemies because the US refused to deal honorably with them. For explicit examples you could ask the American Indian tribes how honestly the US has maintained it's treaties. Often, however, the US hasn't even been honorable long enough for a treaty to be signed. In Vietnam the Geneva Protocols were first accepted by the US, and then, when the US saw who would win the election, violated. Etc.
The assertion means nothing unless consciousness is defined in an objectively testable manner. If it is, then you can test to see whether it's true or not.
People making assertions about "consciousness" generally handwave and say "you know what I mean", whereas actually you only "sort of" know what they mean, and if you're going to make this kind of assertion, details are significant.
It's worth noting that this is from a philosophy professor addressing the "hard problem of consciousness" which is usually equivalent to "having an internal point of view". This is not a workable definition, as there's no way of testing. This is like the question of "How do you decide whether a robot is conscious?" or "Are there philosophical zombies?". You need an operational definition to convert those from meaningless noise to meaningful. I can create definitions consistent with common usage that will answer those questions either yes or no (i.e., for each question I could come up with two definitions, one of which would have a yes answer and the other a no answer).
I'll accept the CVT repair as a potential benefit, but before I actually accept as an actual benefit I need to know that those who received the "improvement" considered it an improvement. Searching for "CVT automobile transmission automatic upgrade" (without quotes) didn't return any hits on the first page.
The assertion(2) that it helps make newer cars better is a (potential) benefit to the community, but probably not measurably to the individual driver. It's also not proven. That kind of information is just about as often used to make things chintzier. Perhaps more often. True, that *could* lead to lower prices, but that's far from guaranteed, and often doesn't happen.
In the past the situations where this kind of information has been used to the benefit of the operator of the vehicle was in situations where the vehicle was owned by the company/agency that was doing the data collection. Trains and airplanes are examples. When it's been collected by the manufacturer (after sale) it has much more frequently been used to hide problems. It's not clear to me why I shouldn't expect that pattern to continue.
The article, or at least the summary, is wrong when it call this more intrusive than cell phones. Cell phones definitely track your location, well, the location of the phone, at all times. They contain a lot more personal data. And they are more often broken into and the data widely shared.
That's not saying this additional intrusion isn't evil. But lets not engage in false hyperbole.
What reason do you have to think that the end user (i.e. purchaser of the vehicle) will receive any benefits from this system? Can you point to any benefits so far that don't require extra payment in advance?
I don't drive, so I'm a "relatively" unbiased observer of this debate, but nobody, including you, has mentioned any benefits so far that weren't paid extra for in advance.
Yeah, but the trucking companies own their trucks and they *want* the coverage for legitimate reasons. I'm all in favor of that.
I do want an autonomous car. But that doesn't mean a remotely controlled one.
There are allegations that the allegations are wrong. The source I checked did not include any specifics that would allow their claims to be validated. The original report contained numerous specifics that would allow third parties to validate it.
I'm not going to buy one of those phones, so I would have no way to check either, but if I'm going to decide which to believe, I'm going to believe the one that could be validated.
That is a denial, not a debunking. And it's not only a denial, it's a denial by an interested party.
A debunking would require validatable evidence substantiating claims made.
Nearly impossible.
So you follow http://www.the-whiteboard.com/... ? I did notice that today's episode was about flame throwers.
Which mission?
The other poster took one reasonable interpretation, i.e. selling flame throwers.
Another reasonable interpretation would be that you believe in automated tunnel construction.
Another would be that you believe in electric cars.
Another would be that you believe in dying on Mars.
There are so many wildly different interpretations of "I believe in the mission" in that context that it's impossible to make a reasoned interpretation. I'll give you credit for sanity and discount the "believing in selling flame throwers" interpretation, though that's the one that is, on the surface, the most probable. But that still leaves all the others, including many I didn't detail.
Actually, it's not important that you respond to this post, but do think more carefully about what you post if you actually want people to understand what you mean. I will guess that you mean you support SpaceX's mission to Mars. But that *is* a guess, and is based on my biases more than on what you said.
I think the other (critical) poster has a small point. "mass simulator" is a lousy term. "test mass" or some such would be much better. It's got to be a real mass, not a simulation of a mass.
But, to me, launching his car seems a good move. The PR is probably worth more than the car, and he wouldn't want to launch some client's load on something that's so likely to blow up. Besides, it's a great excuse to buy a new car.
It's true that the communications will eat up speed, but the parallel execution will increase it. So you need to redesign the algorithms to optimize things differently. You can't use the same algorithms for this design and get good performance. But for most problems you can use different algorithms and do so.
Note that I talked about using something like the Erlang virtual machine as the machine language. You don't design things the same way for that kind of a machine. Hell, you couldn't even design things the same way for the CDC Star as for the CDC 7600. The architectures are too different. The proposed (cellular) design is more reminiscent of a GPU than of the current multiprocessor CPUs. It just isn't as specialized. Think of it as a hardware implementation of the Actor model, and you won't be too far off.
All that said, we appear to be almost *AT* a local optimum. Any change here is going to be locally down-hill. But I believe this is *far* from the global optimum.
How about "without the use of tools other than optionally a flat-head or Phillips-head screwdriver."?
Well, there's this advantage:
Patents still expire. This thing will be declared invalid if challenged, and if not challenged will expire without being renewed, and can then be used as prior art to challenge some other patent.
While it's true that Moore's law is, essentially, dead this doesn't mean that computation can't get more powerful. There are lots of well known ways that would work. Most of them, however, require redesigning the algorithms. There's already been a lot of push into parallelizing things, but there could be a **LOT** more. There hasn't been because it was cheaper to rely on Moore's law.
FWIW, I think that the push into complex processor designs was a mistake. It lead to a local optimum that is quite far from the global optimum. What should be done is LOTS of simple processors, each with a SMALL cache of fast memory, and a much larger cache of persistent memory (so that it doesn't consume power and dissipate heat). The different CPUs should communicate via message passing and be programmed in a language that is adapted to this kind of computing. I'm thinking of something like the Erlang virtual machine implemented in hardware. If my guesses are correct, this design should be low enough in heat dissipation that 3D circuits are feasible without excessive work on head dissipation. It probably wouldn't even need water cooling.
This design is "sort of" like the ideas being floated for neural computers that keep showing up on the front pages, but I can't tell whether it's the same or not, because the descriptions are always so vague. They usually talk about "memristor" or some such, but that's just a particular technology that can be used to give non-volatile memory. IIUC any other non-volatile approach would work as well...though core memory would take up too much space, and that would slow things down.
Various towns trying that have found state laws getting passed forbidding them from doing so.
I'll agree that the physical plant in the "last mile" is a natural monopoly. But the companies that might want to eventually move into that natural monopoly don't want anyone they can't drive out of business to run it.
So you switched from a bad company to a horrible one. Smooth move.
Well, if you can predict his opinion, then in a sense he's trustworthy. You may not like what you can trust him to do, but that's, technically, a different matter.