This shouldn't be ironic, but it is. That's because people tend to think that things that are difficult for people to do are hard, but things that are trivial to learn (if not perform) how to do are easy. But this is wrong.
People evolved to handle certain problems easily and automatically. Other problems we have very little in the way of an evolved skill set. So we tend to think of math as hard, and object recognition as easy. And we tend to think of things that our body has evolved to be able to do as easy. But this is wrong.
OTOH, our robots are also evolving. Roomba is a cheap generation 2 robot. It is almost missing in intelligence, and has a rather inflexible body. (Generation one robots are generally called numerically controlled tools.) We're in the early stages of generation 3 robots which are more flexible, if not great, and have rudimentary intelligence. Automated cars will be a mid-to-late generation 3 robot. More intelligent, though in that case not particularly flexible. There are other variations that are more flexible already, but the use-case isn't there to consider them cost-effective (except, possibly, for certain military applications, of which I know nothing). A decade from now though, should put us in the early stages of generation 4 robots, which will be both more intelligent and more flexible. The questions in my mind have to do with size and cost. If Moore's law is even approximately correct, then expect vast increases in intelligence, which means the ability to control things, at minor increase to actual decrease in cost.
Saying your Roomba can't do it, so a robot a decade hence won't be able to is about as silly as saying that because a gooney bird (DC3) can't do it, neither can a 747. That's not exact because a DC3 was a more advanced airplane than a Roomba is an advanced robot, but then I don't know what the robots a decade hence will be like. I'm pretty sure they won't be like Daneel Olivaw, though. That's generation 6 or 7...and presuming lots of advance on handling power.
OTOH, it does appear to be true that unemployment is actually decreasing at the moment. I haven't yet seen an analysis of *which* jobs are increasing, and what percentage of the population is counted as "not part of the workforce because discouraged", so I don't know what that means.
OTOH, factories in China are being automated because it's cheaper than hiring workers. So far the Chinese government seems to be handling it, but there have been lots of predictions that their approaches will not continue to work.
So I would like to hear your justification as to why "This cannot be true", as a simple assertion doesn't seem very convincing. Complex situations are subject to rapid changes of state. E.g. one accident can jam an entire freeway. If, as predicted, self driving vehicles become a "real thing" in the next few years, that will put a very large number of people out of work, eventually all commercial drivers. And if the cost savings are as predicted, then eventually will probably be on the order of 10 years, in a distribution with a fast rise and a long tail. This will throw about 1/5 of the current work force out of work or at least needing drastic reskilling. Not just the drivers, but the cafe workers, etc. and the mechanics will need LOTS of retraining that will not be cheap...so most of them won't be able to afford it unless subsidized. And note that it wouldn't be cheaper to use automated vehicles if they needed much skilled maintenance. So that will only absorb a very small fraction.
And the above projection doesn't even consider the effects of more and more companies switching to short term contractors (hourly contractors?) to do the work. I was quite shocked to see that this included things like firms of lawyers, but apparently it does. Perhaps for some lawyers this is an advantage, but it strikes me as a "Star system" where some people will be rewarded excessively, and most will loose out totally, with a few in the middle. In this kind of a system the mode is abject failure, and the median is bare survival. It's one thing if the entertainment industry runs that way, but when most industries are run in that pattern, the mode is going to be "out of work".
So to me the estimate seems not only possible, but somewhere between plausible and probable. There are clearly ways around it, but the one's I'm aware of all would require an extensive restructuring of the economic system, and even then they would need lots of debugging.
If you want the women to work at home, you need to pay them for it in some way. Today even with two incomes most families are poorer than their parents were with one income. (And among "the lower classes" women always had to work outside the home to earn additional income.)
IIUC, the existing methods already had a way to mark when the bounds were violated. Compact, however, might well be new. And perhaps the way he marks that bounds have been violated is new...though I wouldn't bet on that...not given what I read in the summary.
For that matter, I'm not expert in the field, but it wouldn't surprise me if some existing library already used an analogous "compact representation". Probably not the same representation, as implementing stuff in hardware usually causes changes, but something close enough that no reasonable patent agency would consider it worth a patent. (That said, this is just me being cynical. As I said, I'm no expert in the field.)
No murder and kidnapping are not real. They are legal constructs. Killing someone is real, but murder is a legal construct. Carrying someone off against their will is real, but kidnapping is a legal construct.
E.g., depending on the laws (and the lawyers), the exact same instance of carrying someone off against their will could be kidnapping, arresting, or protective custody.
*Will* they be disciplined? More than a slap on the wrist (or possibly on the back)?
It often turns out the the abusive police are essentially not disciplined...and the departmental reactions are often those that one would expect if the "offenders" were carrying out unofficial department policy. Usually, though, we either don't hear what happens, of the punishment turns out to be a few days off work at full pay.
Well, the real question is what kind of discipline are the individual police going to get from this abuse, and whose budget pays for the door and the inconvenience and danger entailed by needing it repaired.
The O.J. Simpson case *is* weird. I'm rather sure he was guilty. However..... It is appropriate that the standard for criminal conviction is higher than the standard for civil torts.
It's also true that I encountered several people who assumed that he was innocent, and only charged because he was black. And I only assumed that he was guilty because he had a history of wife beating, and this is often associated with murder. I didn't evaluate the evidence myself. But it was a highly political case because he was such a prominent public figure and because of the racial aspect. It was probably impossible to get an unbiased jury.
As far as I can tell, most police intend to be helpful. But there are a poisonous number who aren't, and the police forces seem to protect and encourage them rather than actually discipline or fire them, or, in some documented cases, charge them with appropriate crimes.
This makes it difficult to trust "police", as opposed to trusting some particular policeman that you happen to know. There are also documented cases where policemen have been disciplined for *not* being abusively belligerent.
And once, when it was appropriate, I did replace the floating point approximation by an integer based approach. But there are costs in every choice. Usually that's a bad idea, even if it does mean the thing will either work properly or fail noticeably (e.g., out of memory error). But any design makes assumptions about the hardware it's running on. It's usually possible to check, but that's usually not a good approach...or wasn't in the environment in which I was working. If I'd been writing a library or program intended to public distribution the appropriate choices would have been different.
E.g.: Is it appropriate to represent a year with two digits? These days the answer is clearly no, but 40 years ago the answer was "probably yes". And that was the correct answer. Memory was a lot more limited and computer time was a lot more expensive. And storage was also more limited and expensive. The problem is that things written 40 years ago that weren't expected to keep being used kept being used without being updated. And also in the intermediate period at some point the default assumptions should have been changed. I was luck during that period. We kept re-writing our programs and updating our assumptions. But this wasn't true everywhere. Until a year ago I still had a computer system that sorted files by the two digit year number...and it was a mass market system. By 1995 the two digit year should have been outdated, but I'm not sure it was the programmer's decision. In 1985, however, disk and memory space was still expensive enough that a two digit year was the right decision.
So. If I write a program in, say, Fortran that makes certain assumptions about how floating point numbers are represented, say I write it for a 32 bit CPU, and someone migrates that code to a 16 bit CPU (this is a guess, not what happened) is that my fault? You can't predict everything, and I was predicting migration to a 64 bit CPU, but it needed to currently fit in a small amount of RAM.
Well, as I said, that's not what happened, but what happened was on mainframes back when nobody was using personal computers, and time was *expensive*, so I designed things to run efficiently. And that means you don't do things like checking array bounds, or floating point precision. You *design* them correctly. And you depend on human checks to catch the errors (which they did, or I wouldn't have found out about it). But sometimes someone else decides to move something from one machine to another, and different machines have different designs for floating point units. IIRC this was between IBM and CDC, but it's been a long time, and I'm not sure anymore. I presume analogous things still happen, though things have changed enough that a lot of features of the analogy will be quite different.
You've got an answer to the problem this was trying to deal with, but what he actually did was just put bounds on the error. As others have said, this has been known for a long time.
The only thing that's been said which "sort of" justifies this patent is that this is the reduction of a known algorithm (interval arithmetic) to a hardware implementation. Why that's worth a patent I'm not sure, but at least, unlike copyrights, patents eventually expire.
Sorry, but while it could be the programmer's fault, this isn't certain. Different processors have different precisions, unless you are saying he should do the entire thing in software using infinite precision integers.
It's reasonable to claim that if it's still running on the platform it was designed for, that it's the programmer's fault, but I've had things migrated without my knowledge. Usually, admittedly, to a platform that had higher precision, but there have been exceptions. One time I *did* rewrite it to to calculations using integers, but I've never gone so far as to use infinite precision integers. There are cost trade-offs in everything.
Nope. Some of the movements have advocated a north/south split. There have been lots of different reasons that different groups have been unhappy. But none of them has gotten any real traction.
Mmmm. Your point about fungi is definitely correct. I'm not certain that you're right about that killing them, but you could be. With bacteria that generally just slows them down.
Not really. California has had movements to split it into multiple states periodically as far back as I can remember. The supreme court decision that the state senate had to district on the basis of population rather than geography didn't do anything to reduce them, though.
If the summary is correct, this doesn't kill the bacteria, it prevents them from attaching. This might not cause the same kind of evolutionary pressure to evolve away from the effect.
You've got a point. The question is, how would you know if you were penetrated by Meltdown? Spectre is something that needs to be dealt with carefully. Meltdown? That's a bit more dangerous.
My personal suggestion is to start by blocking javascript execution. That's not enough, but it buys you some time. But beyond that, I don't know. I'm presuming that it will get sorted out, so buying yourself some time is valuable.
Did you miss the part about "guaranteed bad trips"? Judging from the picture I saw of the cat, it would cause extreme paranoid reactions, probably worse than is normally called clinically severe. The cat was backed up against the wall trying to flee from the mouse sitting in a cage looking puzzled. (Well, as near as I can tell how a mouse is feeling.)
IIUC, rats, at least, can't taste bitter. Perhaps that would discourage other rodents, though. Or maybe not, I don't know how many species of rodent can't taste bitter.
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Because they didn't want to say that most of the jobs lost were low paid and poor status.
This shouldn't be ironic, but it is. That's because people tend to think that things that are difficult for people to do are hard, but things that are trivial to learn (if not perform) how to do are easy. But this is wrong.
People evolved to handle certain problems easily and automatically. Other problems we have very little in the way of an evolved skill set. So we tend to think of math as hard, and object recognition as easy. And we tend to think of things that our body has evolved to be able to do as easy. But this is wrong.
OTOH, our robots are also evolving. Roomba is a cheap generation 2 robot. It is almost missing in intelligence, and has a rather inflexible body. (Generation one robots are generally called numerically controlled tools.) We're in the early stages of generation 3 robots which are more flexible, if not great, and have rudimentary intelligence. Automated cars will be a mid-to-late generation 3 robot. More intelligent, though in that case not particularly flexible. There are other variations that are more flexible already, but the use-case isn't there to consider them cost-effective (except, possibly, for certain military applications, of which I know nothing). A decade from now though, should put us in the early stages of generation 4 robots, which will be both more intelligent and more flexible. The questions in my mind have to do with size and cost. If Moore's law is even approximately correct, then expect vast increases in intelligence, which means the ability to control things, at minor increase to actual decrease in cost.
Saying your Roomba can't do it, so a robot a decade hence won't be able to is about as silly as saying that because a gooney bird (DC3) can't do it, neither can a 747. That's not exact because a DC3 was a more advanced airplane than a Roomba is an advanced robot, but then I don't know what the robots a decade hence will be like. I'm pretty sure they won't be like Daneel Olivaw, though. That's generation 6 or 7...and presuming lots of advance on handling power.
Well, you lived up to your handle.
OTOH, it does appear to be true that unemployment is actually decreasing at the moment. I haven't yet seen an analysis of *which* jobs are increasing, and what percentage of the population is counted as "not part of the workforce because discouraged", so I don't know what that means.
OTOH, factories in China are being automated because it's cheaper than hiring workers. So far the Chinese government seems to be handling it, but there have been lots of predictions that their approaches will not continue to work.
So I would like to hear your justification as to why "This cannot be true", as a simple assertion doesn't seem very convincing. Complex situations are subject to rapid changes of state. E.g. one accident can jam an entire freeway. If, as predicted, self driving vehicles become a "real thing" in the next few years, that will put a very large number of people out of work, eventually all commercial drivers. And if the cost savings are as predicted, then eventually will probably be on the order of 10 years, in a distribution with a fast rise and a long tail. This will throw about 1/5 of the current work force out of work or at least needing drastic reskilling. Not just the drivers, but the cafe workers, etc. and the mechanics will need LOTS of retraining that will not be cheap...so most of them won't be able to afford it unless subsidized. And note that it wouldn't be cheaper to use automated vehicles if they needed much skilled maintenance. So that will only absorb a very small fraction.
And the above projection doesn't even consider the effects of more and more companies switching to short term contractors (hourly contractors?) to do the work. I was quite shocked to see that this included things like firms of lawyers, but apparently it does. Perhaps for some lawyers this is an advantage, but it strikes me as a "Star system" where some people will be rewarded excessively, and most will loose out totally, with a few in the middle. In this kind of a system the mode is abject failure, and the median is bare survival. It's one thing if the entertainment industry runs that way, but when most industries are run in that pattern, the mode is going to be "out of work".
So to me the estimate seems not only possible, but somewhere between plausible and probable. There are clearly ways around it, but the one's I'm aware of all would require an extensive restructuring of the economic system, and even then they would need lots of debugging.
If you want the women to work at home, you need to pay them for it in some way. Today even with two incomes most families are poorer than their parents were with one income. (And among "the lower classes" women always had to work outside the home to earn additional income.)
IIUC, the existing methods already had a way to mark when the bounds were violated. Compact, however, might well be new. And perhaps the way he marks that bounds have been violated is new...though I wouldn't bet on that...not given what I read in the summary.
For that matter, I'm not expert in the field, but it wouldn't surprise me if some existing library already used an analogous "compact representation". Probably not the same representation, as implementing stuff in hardware usually causes changes, but something close enough that no reasonable patent agency would consider it worth a patent. (That said, this is just me being cynical. As I said, I'm no expert in the field.)
No murder and kidnapping are not real. They are legal constructs. Killing someone is real, but murder is a legal construct.
Carrying someone off against their will is real, but kidnapping is a legal construct.
E.g., depending on the laws (and the lawyers), the exact same instance of carrying someone off against their will could be kidnapping, arresting, or protective custody.
*Will* they be disciplined? More than a slap on the wrist (or possibly on the back)?
It often turns out the the abusive police are essentially not disciplined...and the departmental reactions are often those that one would expect if the "offenders" were carrying out unofficial department policy. Usually, though, we either don't hear what happens, of the punishment turns out to be a few days off work at full pay.
Well, the real question is what kind of discipline are the individual police going to get from this abuse, and whose budget pays for the door and the inconvenience and danger entailed by needing it repaired.
The O.J. Simpson case *is* weird. I'm rather sure he was guilty. However.....
It is appropriate that the standard for criminal conviction is higher than the standard for civil torts.
It's also true that I encountered several people who assumed that he was innocent, and only charged because he was black. And I only assumed that he was guilty because he had a history of wife beating, and this is often associated with murder. I didn't evaluate the evidence myself. But it was a highly political case because he was such a prominent public figure and because of the racial aspect. It was probably impossible to get an unbiased jury.
As far as I can tell, most police intend to be helpful. But there are a poisonous number who aren't, and the police forces seem to protect and encourage them rather than actually discipline or fire them, or, in some documented cases, charge them with appropriate crimes.
This makes it difficult to trust "police", as opposed to trusting some particular policeman that you happen to know. There are also documented cases where policemen have been disciplined for *not* being abusively belligerent.
And once, when it was appropriate, I did replace the floating point approximation by an integer based approach. But there are costs in every choice. Usually that's a bad idea, even if it does mean the thing will either work properly or fail noticeably (e.g., out of memory error). But any design makes assumptions about the hardware it's running on. It's usually possible to check, but that's usually not a good approach...or wasn't in the environment in which I was working. If I'd been writing a library or program intended to public distribution the appropriate choices would have been different.
E.g.: Is it appropriate to represent a year with two digits? These days the answer is clearly no, but 40 years ago the answer was "probably yes". And that was the correct answer. Memory was a lot more limited and computer time was a lot more expensive. And storage was also more limited and expensive. The problem is that things written 40 years ago that weren't expected to keep being used kept being used without being updated. And also in the intermediate period at some point the default assumptions should have been changed. I was luck during that period. We kept re-writing our programs and updating our assumptions. But this wasn't true everywhere. Until a year ago I still had a computer system that sorted files by the two digit year number...and it was a mass market system. By 1995 the two digit year should have been outdated, but I'm not sure it was the programmer's decision. In 1985, however, disk and memory space was still expensive enough that a two digit year was the right decision.
So. If I write a program in, say, Fortran that makes certain assumptions about how floating point numbers are represented, say I write it for a 32 bit CPU, and someone migrates that code to a 16 bit CPU (this is a guess, not what happened) is that my fault? You can't predict everything, and I was predicting migration to a 64 bit CPU, but it needed to currently fit in a small amount of RAM.
Well, as I said, that's not what happened, but what happened was on mainframes back when nobody was using personal computers, and time was *expensive*, so I designed things to run efficiently. And that means you don't do things like checking array bounds, or floating point precision. You *design* them correctly. And you depend on human checks to catch the errors (which they did, or I wouldn't have found out about it). But sometimes someone else decides to move something from one machine to another, and different machines have different designs for floating point units. IIRC this was between IBM and CDC, but it's been a long time, and I'm not sure anymore. I presume analogous things still happen, though things have changed enough that a lot of features of the analogy will be quite different.
You've got an answer to the problem this was trying to deal with, but what he actually did was just put bounds on the error. As others have said, this has been known for a long time.
The only thing that's been said which "sort of" justifies this patent is that this is the reduction of a known algorithm (interval arithmetic) to a hardware implementation. Why that's worth a patent I'm not sure, but at least, unlike copyrights, patents eventually expire.
Sorry, but while it could be the programmer's fault, this isn't certain. Different processors have different precisions, unless you are saying he should do the entire thing in software using infinite precision integers.
It's reasonable to claim that if it's still running on the platform it was designed for, that it's the programmer's fault, but I've had things migrated without my knowledge. Usually, admittedly, to a platform that had higher precision, but there have been exceptions. One time I *did* rewrite it to to calculations using integers, but I've never gone so far as to use infinite precision integers. There are cost trade-offs in everything.
What was in tape U1439? The rest of that makes sense.
O, yes, was it 7-track? 9-track? or 6250?
O, he might get his ratings. That's a bit different from supporters, though.
Nope. Some of the movements have advocated a north/south split. There have been lots of different reasons that different groups have been unhappy. But none of them has gotten any real traction.
Mmmm. Your point about fungi is definitely correct. I'm not certain that you're right about that killing them, but you could be. With bacteria that generally just slows them down.
Sorry, it was in Life magazine back in the 1960's or early 1970's.
Not really. California has had movements to split it into multiple states periodically as far back as I can remember. The supreme court decision that the state senate had to district on the basis of population rather than geography didn't do anything to reduce them, though.
If the summary is correct, this doesn't kill the bacteria, it prevents them from attaching. This might not cause the same kind of evolutionary pressure to evolve away from the effect.
Ah, so that's why they said to contact the OEM. The OEM will know which patches (from Intel) are safe to use on their system.
You've got a point. The question is, how would you know if you were penetrated by Meltdown? Spectre is something that needs to be dealt with carefully. Meltdown? That's a bit more dangerous.
My personal suggestion is to start by blocking javascript execution. That's not enough, but it buys you some time. But beyond that, I don't know. I'm presuming that it will get sorted out, so buying yourself some time is valuable.
Did you miss the part about "guaranteed bad trips"? Judging from the picture I saw of the cat, it would cause extreme paranoid reactions, probably worse than is normally called clinically severe. The cat was backed up against the wall trying to flee from the mouse sitting in a cage looking puzzled. (Well, as near as I can tell how a mouse is feeling.)
Rural areas also have rats, though not nearly as many.
IIUC, rats, at least, can't taste bitter. Perhaps that would discourage other rodents, though. Or maybe not, I don't know how many species of rodent can't taste bitter.