There is no discernible reason to invest scarce resources in "smart meters" (which are looking more like "dumb meters"). Ordinary old-style meters do an adequate job, and give employment to a lot of meter-readers. (That's a good thing, by the way). They are sufficiently accurate.
The arguments in favour of "smart meters" are ridiculous. Putting meter-readers out of work to save the company a small amount of money is a bad idea. Besides, most customers would be happy to read their own meters and send in the results by Web or phone. I do.
Transmitting people's energy consumption by wireless is completely insane. This is private information that does not need to be broadcast insecurely to anyone with the right black box.
Most normal people already have an excellent idea of how much energy they are using (often this is "too much", as in "I told you to turn off those lights!" or "Do you have any idea how much it costs to leave that running for so long?") If they really want to know in more detail, there are a lot of very nice cheap little meters you can install and read yourself.
Controlling people's energy supply by wireless is beyond insane - it is literally criminal. It's bad enough that energy suppliers would be able to switch off the supply on a whim (or a computer error). But those guys with the black box could do it too.
The only logical motive for installing "smart meters" is for the manufacturers to make loads of money. And that isn't a proper motive at all.
It's not so much a matter of "got in bed with the swamp". To drain the swamp, you have to go there. Once you're there, you get the mosquitoes and crocodiles and tsetse flies and yellow fever and all the rest of it. If you still want to drain the swamp, you have to work under those conditions.
Unfortunately, Washington D.C. is the vilest political and commercial swamp on the planet. It's extremely doubtful if it can be drained, or even slightly ameliorated. One of Jefferson's less-quoted predictions was, "When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe". Luckily for him, he did not foresee a time when the USA would have cities larger than European ones.
The Founding Fathers had a good deal of political foresight, and did their best to protect future generations against the major threats they knew about. It would have been far harder to anticipate the threats arising from population growth, industrialization, and the resulting social changes.
And you therefore lose. You have accepted a challenge to debate an irrelevant, orthogonal issue. Whether it is right to kill Muslims wholesale does not depend on how many gadgets they invent or how many Nobel Prizes they win.
Their job is to stop Mohammed from blowing up your children.
It's a bit late for that, unless they also have time machines. The best way to prevent "Mohammed from blowing up your children" (and when did that last happen in the USA?) would have been to refrain from blowing up his children. And his wife, and his aunts and uncles and his parents and his friends. And his dog.
Unfortunately that carrier task force sailed decades ago.
It's like how when the CIA discovers a Russian General has a secret to hide they never black mail him but immediately notify the Russian Authorities of their vulnerability.
That's logical, because Russia - like the USA - is the CIA's enemy.
The term "Educational Emails" gives the game away. Presumably those emails have no legal status, and are just intended to warn the recipient that someone thinks they have done something wrong.
I would suggest adding them to your spam blacklist.
If anyone wishes to argue that you have broken a law, let them produce evidence. Otherwise, let them shut up and mind their own business.
...[M]anagement seems to be more about avoiding blame than providing solutions.
Which is a far bigger problem than some AWS systems going down for a few hours. If management really is more about avoiding blame than making the organization successful, success will prove very elusive indeed.
And of course if management is working in the wrong way... that too is a management problem.
Mind you, there's only one local admin left that knows how to read the chicken bones and tea leaves to run the thing...
Which is because no one in a position of power chose to invest in training more people to replace him. Please don't tell me it's impossible; with enough money and commitment, most things are possible.
What isn't possible is to get a result when you are too stingy to provide the necessary means.
If your cloud hosting partner fucks up, it's breach of contract and not your fault.
That turns out not to be the case. Anything you do as a senior executive is your responsibility, and if it turns out badly for the corporation it's your head on the block.
That's why there used to be a saying, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". The clear implication was that you could well be fired for buying from some other vendor. IBM was unique, both because it swung enough weight to rescue anyone who got into trouble for choosing its products and services, and because it was always best chums with the CEO and his inner circle.
Also, of course, because it had the resources to make things right before anything scandalous happened that could hurt IBM's reputation.
"Hello my name is Mike, I'm a GDE and lead at NY Times, I don't know what np complete means. Should I?"
1. Since he works at the NYT, nothing he does matters. The newspaper's output is harmful or nonsensical, so in a way it is better if it isn't published.
2. Thanks to the wonder of Google, he could find out what "NP complete" means in about one minute. So the question is: does he think finding out would be worth one minute of his time? Further, if not, how good a programmer can be become?
3. If you think about it, he can't really judge whether he should know what "NP complete" means until he knows what it means.
"One of the executives, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, said he was stunned by the caliber of the would-be recruits. They are coming from a variety of government intelligence and law enforcement agencies..."
So yet again Mr Trump has come up trumps! He is already delivering on his promise to stimulate the business sector and create jobs. here are large numbers of America's most brilliant minds, being prized out of dead-end, stultifying jobs in a government bureaucracy that performs no useful function (and might, if given its head, kill us all) and made available to the private sector. There they can help corporations expand and employ more people; boost the GDP; and earn far more for themselves and their families.
This is as close to a "no downside" result as any government could ever produce.
Who would have bet on self-driving cars the next 20 years in 2010? And yet, we seem to be on the brink of it.
Who would bet on self-driving cars that work safely and reliably in the next 20 years right now? It's always easy to wheel out some dandy-looking prototype that works fairly well 99% of the time. But that remaining 1% is what hurts you. Given tens of millions of people hurtling about in "self-driving" cars, how many deaths, injuries and other harm does that tiny-sounding 1% represent? http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-...
How about facial recognition systems for airports and other public places that don't produce prohibitive numbers of false psoitives? How about speech recognition systems that get above that hard-to-improve-on 99% accuracy? (Sounds great until you work out that with 500-600 words per page, 99% accuracy means 5-6 errors per page - randomly distributed so you have to proof-read everything you have just so breezily dictated).
"Called DeepCoder, the software can take requirements by the developer, search through a massive database of code snippets and deliver working code in seconds..."
This I have got to see. By the way, I notice that the first thing mentioned is the proposed name. "DeepCoder" - well, with a name like that, how could anything go wrong? After finding that name, I expect the rest of the project was all downhill. So to speak. Erm...
1. "...take requirements by the developer..." Expressed in what form? As random remarks over a cup of coffee - in which case the usual proportion of incorrect, incompatible and misconceived requirements can be expected, along with the standard quota of perhaps 90% of the requirements not being mentioned at all (because no one has thought of them). Or perhaps in some rigorously defined logical format, in which case we might simply call them "pseudocode" or "Model Driven Design" or perhaps "formal methods".
2. "...search through a massive database of code snippets and deliver working code in seconds..." Ah, the long awaited "Frankenstein IDE"! Now you too can have a loving companion or friends stitched together from offcuts of raw liver and other offal. If only it weren't so easy to pass so airily over real difficulties to conjure up images of working code delivered in seconds. I wonder if Microsoft has thought of providing some kind of validation utility to make sure that the "working code" actually implements the requirements?
World wars have a similar effect. Lots of people die, lots of work to be done, few people able to do it, price of labour goes up.
Actually, the total US deaths in WW1 and WW2 combined were about 522,000. Almost insignificant. Only slightly more than the Russian dead in the Battle of Stalingrad alone.
"Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education".
- John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford University, 1914.
Er, not really. As long as the "intelligence" takes the form of algorithms, that means human beings are devising sets of rules for computers to follow. That is not very intelligent - or, at least, the intelligence involved is indirect, remote and attenuated. The people who specify the software's behaviour must communicate what they want clearly, unambiguously, completely and consistently to the programmers, who then have to do the same thing in their code. Finally, the computer does whatever the original specifiers could think of in response to events that they were able to conceive of. A physical analogy would be trying to tie your shoelaces using a pair of 30-foot-long tweezers - only much worse.
The very essence of real intelligence is the ability to recognise patterns immediately and respond to them in creatively flexible - if not always entirely new - ways. The art of making neural networks and the like, which are able to work that way, is in its infancy.
And even when those systems become "production strength", we will face their biggest problem: non-transparency. How far can you trust a superhuman intelligence that not only doesn't explain to you the reasons for its decisions, but is fundamentally unable to do so?
For details, see James Hogan's SF novel "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" (you can skip the fictional part for our purposes here, and just read the lectures on AI). By the way, Hogan was a computer engineer.
Considering we're supposed to be the smartest animal on the planet you'd think we would have learned by now.
A few individuals - a very few - are intelligent, and of those some are creatively intelligent. The species homo sapiens is not intelligent. How can you argue otherwise, when other social animals such as wasps, ants, bees and termites have thriven for over 100 million years, whereas we have existed as a distinct species for maybe 2 million years and in our present, grotesquely mutated, "civilized" form for 10,000 years - and we are on the very brink of self-extermination?
There is no call for anything drastic or spectacular like thermonuclear war. All it will take is another century of "progress".
'Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded--here and there, now and then--are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.”'
- Notebooks of Lazarus Long, from "Time Enough For Love" by R. A. Heinlein
Slashdot Mirror
There is no discernible reason to invest scarce resources in "smart meters" (which are looking more like "dumb meters"). Ordinary old-style meters do an adequate job, and give employment to a lot of meter-readers. (That's a good thing, by the way). They are sufficiently accurate.
The arguments in favour of "smart meters" are ridiculous. Putting meter-readers out of work to save the company a small amount of money is a bad idea. Besides, most customers would be happy to read their own meters and send in the results by Web or phone. I do.
Transmitting people's energy consumption by wireless is completely insane. This is private information that does not need to be broadcast insecurely to anyone with the right black box.
Most normal people already have an excellent idea of how much energy they are using (often this is "too much", as in "I told you to turn off those lights!" or "Do you have any idea how much it costs to leave that running for so long?") If they really want to know in more detail, there are a lot of very nice cheap little meters you can install and read yourself.
Controlling people's energy supply by wireless is beyond insane - it is literally criminal. It's bad enough that energy suppliers would be able to switch off the supply on a whim (or a computer error). But those guys with the black box could do it too.
The only logical motive for installing "smart meters" is for the manufacturers to make loads of money. And that isn't a proper motive at all.
It's not so much a matter of "got in bed with the swamp". To drain the swamp, you have to go there. Once you're there, you get the mosquitoes and crocodiles and tsetse flies and yellow fever and all the rest of it. If you still want to drain the swamp, you have to work under those conditions.
Unfortunately, Washington D.C. is the vilest political and commercial swamp on the planet. It's extremely doubtful if it can be drained, or even slightly ameliorated. One of Jefferson's less-quoted predictions was, "When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe". Luckily for him, he did not foresee a time when the USA would have cities larger than European ones.
The Founding Fathers had a good deal of political foresight, and did their best to protect future generations against the major threats they knew about. It would have been far harder to anticipate the threats arising from population growth, industrialization, and the resulting social changes.
Challenge accepted.
And you therefore lose. You have accepted a challenge to debate an irrelevant, orthogonal issue. Whether it is right to kill Muslims wholesale does not depend on how many gadgets they invent or how many Nobel Prizes they win.
Best not feed the trolls.
Er, how does any of that justify blowing them up?
Their job is to stop Mohammed from blowing up your children.
It's a bit late for that, unless they also have time machines. The best way to prevent "Mohammed from blowing up your children" (and when did that last happen in the USA?) would have been to refrain from blowing up his children. And his wife, and his aunts and uncles and his parents and his friends. And his dog.
Unfortunately that carrier task force sailed decades ago.
Is there an equivalent of Godwin's Law for Israel and the Jews? Because there ought to be.
It's like how when the CIA discovers a Russian General has a secret to hide they never black mail him but immediately notify the Russian Authorities of their vulnerability.
That's logical, because Russia - like the USA - is the CIA's enemy.
The term "Educational Emails" gives the game away. Presumably those emails have no legal status, and are just intended to warn the recipient that someone thinks they have done something wrong.
I would suggest adding them to your spam blacklist.
If anyone wishes to argue that you have broken a law, let them produce evidence. Otherwise, let them shut up and mind their own business.
...[M]anagement seems to be more about avoiding blame than providing solutions.
Which is a far bigger problem than some AWS systems going down for a few hours. If management really is more about avoiding blame than making the organization successful, success will prove very elusive indeed.
And of course if management is working in the wrong way... that too is a management problem.
It's not as easy as people think.
Mind you, there's only one local admin left that knows how to read the chicken bones and tea leaves to run the thing...
Which is because no one in a position of power chose to invest in training more people to replace him. Please don't tell me it's impossible; with enough money and commitment, most things are possible.
What isn't possible is to get a result when you are too stingy to provide the necessary means.
If your cloud hosting partner fucks up, it's breach of contract and not your fault.
That turns out not to be the case. Anything you do as a senior executive is your responsibility, and if it turns out badly for the corporation it's your head on the block.
That's why there used to be a saying, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". The clear implication was that you could well be fired for buying from some other vendor. IBM was unique, both because it swung enough weight to rescue anyone who got into trouble for choosing its products and services, and because it was always best chums with the CEO and his inner circle.
Also, of course, because it had the resources to make things right before anything scandalous happened that could hurt IBM's reputation.
"Hello my name is Mike, I'm a GDE and lead at NY Times, I don't know what np complete means. Should I?"
1. Since he works at the NYT, nothing he does matters. The newspaper's output is harmful or nonsensical, so in a way it is better if it isn't published.
2. Thanks to the wonder of Google, he could find out what "NP complete" means in about one minute. So the question is: does he think finding out would be worth one minute of his time? Further, if not, how good a programmer can be become?
3. If you think about it, he can't really judge whether he should know what "NP complete" means until he knows what it means.
"One of the executives, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, said he was stunned by the caliber of the would-be recruits. They are coming from a variety of government intelligence and law enforcement agencies..."
So yet again Mr Trump has come up trumps! He is already delivering on his promise to stimulate the business sector and create jobs. here are large numbers of America's most brilliant minds, being prized out of dead-end, stultifying jobs in a government bureaucracy that performs no useful function (and might, if given its head, kill us all) and made available to the private sector. There they can help corporations expand and employ more people; boost the GDP; and earn far more for themselves and their families.
This is as close to a "no downside" result as any government could ever produce.
And Brazil. E.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/bus...
Onward towards the goal of excluding all but the most anodyne, boring, middle-of-the-road mush!
Who would have bet on self-driving cars the next 20 years in 2010? And yet, we seem to be on the brink of it.
Who would bet on self-driving cars that work safely and reliably in the next 20 years right now? It's always easy to wheel out some dandy-looking prototype that works fairly well 99% of the time. But that remaining 1% is what hurts you. Given tens of millions of people hurtling about in "self-driving" cars, how many deaths, injuries and other harm does that tiny-sounding 1% represent? http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-...
How about facial recognition systems for airports and other public places that don't produce prohibitive numbers of false psoitives? How about speech recognition systems that get above that hard-to-improve-on 99% accuracy? (Sounds great until you work out that with 500-600 words per page, 99% accuracy means 5-6 errors per page - randomly distributed so you have to proof-read everything you have just so breezily dictated).
"Called DeepCoder, the software can take requirements by the developer, search through a massive database of code snippets and deliver working code in seconds..."
This I have got to see. By the way, I notice that the first thing mentioned is the proposed name. "DeepCoder" - well, with a name like that, how could anything go wrong? After finding that name, I expect the rest of the project was all downhill. So to speak. Erm...
1. "...take requirements by the developer..." Expressed in what form? As random remarks over a cup of coffee - in which case the usual proportion of incorrect, incompatible and misconceived requirements can be expected, along with the standard quota of perhaps 90% of the requirements not being mentioned at all (because no one has thought of them). Or perhaps in some rigorously defined logical format, in which case we might simply call them "pseudocode" or "Model Driven Design" or perhaps "formal methods".
2. "...search through a massive database of code snippets and deliver working code in seconds..." Ah, the long awaited "Frankenstein IDE"! Now you too can have a loving companion or friends stitched together from offcuts of raw liver and other offal. If only it weren't so easy to pass so airily over real difficulties to conjure up images of working code delivered in seconds. I wonder if Microsoft has thought of providing some kind of validation utility to make sure that the "working code" actually implements the requirements?
World wars have a similar effect. Lots of people die, lots of work to be done, few people able to do it, price of labour goes up.
Actually, the total US deaths in WW1 and WW2 combined were about 522,000. Almost insignificant. Only slightly more than the Russian dead in the Battle of Stalingrad alone.
"Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education".
- John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford University, 1914.
Er, not really. As long as the "intelligence" takes the form of algorithms, that means human beings are devising sets of rules for computers to follow. That is not very intelligent - or, at least, the intelligence involved is indirect, remote and attenuated. The people who specify the software's behaviour must communicate what they want clearly, unambiguously, completely and consistently to the programmers, who then have to do the same thing in their code. Finally, the computer does whatever the original specifiers could think of in response to events that they were able to conceive of. A physical analogy would be trying to tie your shoelaces using a pair of 30-foot-long tweezers - only much worse.
The very essence of real intelligence is the ability to recognise patterns immediately and respond to them in creatively flexible - if not always entirely new - ways. The art of making neural networks and the like, which are able to work that way, is in its infancy.
And even when those systems become "production strength", we will face their biggest problem: non-transparency. How far can you trust a superhuman intelligence that not only doesn't explain to you the reasons for its decisions, but is fundamentally unable to do so?
For details, see James Hogan's SF novel "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" (you can skip the fictional part for our purposes here, and just read the lectures on AI). By the way, Hogan was a computer engineer.
Just because Heinlein said this in a novel does not make it right!
True. The fact that it's right makes it right.
Comply and conform.
Fuck off and die.
I will point out that the pollinator all those California growers depend on is the European Honey Bee, a non-native species.
Thanks! I did not know that.
Exactly so. Thank you for pointing out this obvious - but apparently incomprehensible - fact.
Considering we're supposed to be the smartest animal on the planet you'd think we would have learned by now.
A few individuals - a very few - are intelligent, and of those some are creatively intelligent. The species homo sapiens is not intelligent. How can you argue otherwise, when other social animals such as wasps, ants, bees and termites have thriven for over 100 million years, whereas we have existed as a distinct species for maybe 2 million years and in our present, grotesquely mutated, "civilized" form for 10,000 years - and we are on the very brink of self-extermination?
There is no call for anything drastic or spectacular like thermonuclear war. All it will take is another century of "progress".
'Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded--here and there, now and then--are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.”'
- Notebooks of Lazarus Long, from "Time Enough For Love" by R. A. Heinlein