Let's say DARPA gets their brain implant to work, or that those who have experimented with implants devise one that allows such information to be conveyed. Even a medical expert won't be able to categorize such systems.
The only viable method is to examine understanding and not memorization. If understanding is examined, all the notes in the world won't help.
First, I am STILL waiting for an apology from those Slashdotters who insisted at the time there was no meltdown.
Second, we've known for a long time that there was a high level of incompetence resulting in excessive exposure to radiation. I'm not sure what new information is being included here.
Third, I am much more concerned about the reported design flaw in ALL U.S. reactors that could result in meltdowns. Fukushima, although tragic, is in the past. We should learn from it by studying it closely, but there's really no point in rehashing the lessons already learned. Except amongst the nuclear inspectors and nuclear plant operators who have NOT learned those lessons. There, you're more than welcome to rehash all you like.
Nuclear fission is an intermediate technology that will be required to deliver power until fusion is developed. Provided there is sufficient funding, fusion should be mastered within a decade and go commercial within two. However, that's twenty years in which we can afford NO fossil fuel power plants whatsoever. Given that U.S. reactors are of a critically unsafe design, those should all be replaced. At this point, about fifty additional fission plants will be required in the US to bridge the gap. Construction should be started yesterday. Failing that, actually fault-tolerant fail-safe designs should be drawn up ASAP and work started on them.
Absolutely, on all points. I'd perhaps add one other - we've got potentially good diagnostics, but they're not used for this, they're rare and they're horribly expensive. (Problem is, it's longer and less clear than yours.)
An example. Hospital MRI scanners are around 2 to 2.5 T, which gives sufficient resolution to see severe injuries and malformations but not much more. Medical scanners can go up to 7.3 T and research scanners actively used go up to 9.1 T. At this upper end, blurred sections of the brain are almost crystal clear. You can see not quite to the neuron level but fairly close. Subtle issues can be detected. It's more than good enough to find out if there's a problem with mirror cells, bandwidth issues (too much or too little) and similar fine-scale deformities. The best scanner that can be built that can take a human head is around 13 T. It's unclear what this would show, I've not been able to find any info on it
I wouldn't ask psychiatrists and neurosurgeons to have an underground bunker with dozens of such devices armed with top technicians at the ready, although if one of them is the sole winner of the US Powerball at its current 1.2 billion dollar level, it would be nice if some of it was spent on such things. However, MRI as a diagnostic tool is strongly discouraged, apparently, which seems to defeat its value as a means of rapidly identifying and classifying evidence you can't otherwise get to.
I counted the total number of scanning technologies (excluding minor variants) and came up with 33 different diagnostic tools that could be used at the level of the brain. Of those, I have only known two of those to be used in practice (EEG and MRI), never even remotely close to the levels of sensitivity needed to analyze the problem unless, as I said, there's a problem at the grossest of levels. EEG, for example, is performed with as few leads as possible and the digital outputs I've seen look like the ADC is cheap and low resolution. Nor have I ever been impressed by the shielding used in the rooms (the brain is not a strong source, so external signals matter a lot). I've read papers where MEG is used, but it seems to be almost exclusively research with very, very few hospitals actually using it.
This doesn't contradict your statement that there are no good diagnostic tools, partly because nobody has the faintest idea if these tools would be any good in diagnostics (as it's forbidden by the great overlords), how you'd read the data (if it's not actually used then nobody can understand the output at all, and if it's used but never for diagnostics in mental illness then there's no means of understanding what the output means in this context).
That's just the bog standard medical gear, though. Whilst it should be useful (your experience shapes your brain, your brain shapes your experience and this recursion should mean that you can identify traits of one from the other), there will be other tests. In fact, there are. There are hundreds of questions that make up the official test for autism spectrum disorders, but I've only heard of (and then second-hand) one doctor actually running through them. Most glance at the DSM (which is worse than useless and the criteria listed in it are largely rejected by both the checklist and those definitely in this category) and that's it. The checklist is probably not optimal and is probably incorrect much of the time as autism has a very wide range of causes (both known and suspected) and congealed categories of unrelated conditions won't work with any single checklist. Researchers hotly dispute even when it can be diagnosed and at what age it first appears. That's clearly not very helpful.
But that's positively enlightened compared to something like "Borderline Personality Disorder" (a label given to anyone who doesn't fit any billable category and is generally considered not worth wasting time on by the medical and psychiatric professions). Here, there really isn't an actual diagnosis as such, just an identification that there's a problem
It can't be philosophy as it is currently being experimentally tested. And, apparently, has been tested in the past.
Also, there are two branches of philosophy. The only branch of any consequence gave rise to formal logic, the systematic proof of a good chunk of mathematics, constructivism, Bayesian statistics, and so on. In other words, it's more rigorous than hard science, not less. In this branch, any statement determined to be true must be true under any circumstances, even if fundamental constants turn out to be neither fundamental nor constant, even if other universes exist with other physics within them. Doesn't matter. Science can discover what it likes, the statements must still hold and not differ by one iota.
The other branch is never used, even by philosophers. They'll publish stuff under it from time to time, but that's about it.
If you can't tell 1 from 0, then it's no wonder you have trouble with this stuff.
Partly because so little is known about the brain/mind. With something like a heart attack or a murder, there's a fairly clear sequence of cause-effect relationships that start with an known and end with a known. With mental illness, the genetics are obscure and too complex to fathom out by any conventional methods. Genetics aren't, however, the only contributing factor. Epigenetics, chemical signals, environment (including stimuli) right the way through life, it's a nightmare.
There are already 1,100 genes - not SNPs, genes - linked to the brain and 23&Me typically links about 50 SNPs of interest to each gene. That's 55,000 possible mutations, which gives you 2^55000 (10^16500) different combinations. In comparison, there are only 7x10^9 people alive on the planet (which means you can't get good resolution data on how variables interact, even if you studied everyone alive today) and about 10^100 atoms in the universe (which means that you'd nowhere to store sufficient data even if you could obtain it). That's just the genetic contribution, nothing else. What the everything else is, and how it relates, is only known in vague details. That's why news stories on yet another breakthrough are commonplace.
To make things worse, culture hasn't yet caught up to the idea there even is a theory of mind. It's still in some sort of Die Hard - Neolithic stage. Medicine isn't much better, the DSM manual has absolutely bugger all to do with what conditions and illnesses exist, it's about what tag the insurance should be billed under. The American psychiatric association is too busy digging its way out of the threat of criminal charges over direct assistance and fraudulent financial dealings to worry about anyone who is actually sick. The NHS can't afford anything more complex than a door-stop, right now, so don't expect Britain to haul anyone out of this mess. (Britain actually has a fairly good reputation on theoretical and practical psychiatric and neurological treatments, or at least it used to. Now, it's about on equal footing to Zimbabwe.) Australia has a Centre of the Mind, but it looks like it's a long way from getting anywhere - if it does at all. Some of its research seems iffy.
So there's no useful categorization, no meaningful theory, no known mechanics, superficial treatments for only certain diagnoses with rather suspect evidence to back them, no systematic approach towards system analysis, triage or debugging. Not even a definition of what a bug is.
The information in this post plus the fact that I've been here a long time aught to allow anyone here to identify (in very superficial terms) one out of the eight diagnoses I endure. Won't help you, won't help me. Those diagnoses aren't useful if you do want to help anyone, because each is subject to an overlapping combinatorial explosion. No, if you want to be helpful, there are citizen science projects for exploring the brain that will benefit the experts and there are probably insights the deep enthusiasts can contribute somehow by exploring databases and literature from perspectives that aren't obvious to researchers.
When it comes to interacting - understand, respect and listen. Oh, and don't fetishize any principle other than first doing no harm. Every other ethic, philosophy or cultural belief should be expendable if it contradicts that. Consider it a mandatory access control.
See the Free Will Theorum and proof, then find the error in that proof. Talk won't cut it, either your claim is correct and the proof is flawed, or the proof is correct and your argument is flawed.
I am a mathematical realist, not a physicalist, but accept that physical reality is all that exists at the classical and quantum levels. There isn't any need for anything else, there is nothing else that needs to be described. But let's say you reject that line. Makes no difference, the brain is Turing Complete and there is nothing in consciousness that cannot be explained outside of Turing logic.
You might not accept that either. Again, makes no odds. Any change to the brain changes the personality, any change to personality changes the brain. They are tightly interdependent. The only externals are hormones and control signals sent by the microflora. The brain itself is governed by two sets of genes, one set containing one thousand genes, the other containing a hundred. Genes are moderated by epigenetic proteins that provide control signals and interpretation. This provides something in the order of 2^11000 different neurological setups (genes have many nucleotides), although there are likely unknown genes that push the number much higher.
I see no cause for this idea of external stuff. Until you can show a convincing reason to require it, it is not religion but a refusal to multiply entities unnecessarily that makes me say that if it's not needed, it's because it's not there.
Then so do subatomic particles. You don't need AI if that's all you want. If subatomic particles do not have free will, then neither do humans. This second option allows physics to be Turing Complete and is much more agreeable.
If computers develop sufficient power for intelligence to be an emergent phenomenon, they are sufficiently powerful to be linked by brain interface for the combination to also have intelligence as an emergent phenomenon. The old you would cease to exist, but that's just as true every time a neuron is generated or dies. "You" are a highly transient virtual phenomenon. A sense of continuity exists only because you have memories and yet no frame of reference outside your current self.
(It's why countries with inadequate mental health care have suspiciously low rates of diagnosis. Self-assessment is impossible as you, relative to you, will always fit your concept of normal.)
I'm much less concerned by strong AI than by weak AI. This is the sort used to gamble on the stock markets, analyse signal intelligence, etc. In other words, this is the sort that frequently gets things wrong and adjusts itself to make things worse. Weak AI is cheap, easy, incapable of sanity checking, incapable of detecting fallacies and incapable of distinguishing correlation and causation.
Weather forecasts are not particularly precise or accurate, but they've got a success rate that far outstrips that of Weak AI. This is because weather forecasts involve running hundreds of millions of scenarios that fit known data across vast numbers of differing models, then looking for stuff that's highly resistant to change, that will probably happen no matter what, and what on average happens alongside it. These are then filtered further by human meteorologists (some solutions just aren't going to happen). This is an incredibly processed, analytical, approach. The correctness is adequate, but nobody would bet the bank on high precision.
The automated trading computers have a single model, a single set of data, no human filtering and no scrutiny. Because of the way derivatives trading works, they can gamble far more money than they actually have. In 2007, such computers were gambling an estimated ten times the net worth of the planet by borrowing against predicted future earnings of other bets, many of which themselves were paid for by borrowing against other predicted future earnings.
These are the machines that effectively run the globe and their typical accuracy level is around 30%. Better than many politicians, agreed, but not really adequate if you want a robust, fault-tolerant society. These machines have nearly obliterated global society on at least two occasions and, if given enough attempts, will eventually succeed.
These you should worry about.
The whole brain simulator? Not so much. Humans have advantages over computers, just as computers have advantages over machines. You'll see hybridization and/or format conversion, but you won't see the sci-fi horror of computers seeing people as pets (think that was an Asimov short story), threats counter to programming (Colossus, 2010's interpretation of 2001, or similar) or vermin to be exterminated (The Matrix' Agent Smith).
The modern human brain has less capacity than the Neanderthal brain, overall and in many of the senses in particular. You can physically enlarge parts of your brain, up to about 20%, through highly intensive learning, but there's only so much space and only so much inter-regional bandwidth. This means that no human can ever achieve their potential, only a small portion of it. Even with smart drugs. There are senses that have atrophied to the point that they can never be trained or developed beyond an incredibly primitive level. Even if that could be fixed with genetic engineering, there's still neither space nor bandwidth to support it.
You always start with the end you want to achieve. You can't get somewhere without knowing where it is, you can't even heuristically reach a goal without some measure of deviance.
The FAA is notoriously bad at this, always has been. The NTSB has lambasted them multiple times for failures in devising and enforcing regulations. The FAA was also solely responsible for air traffic controllers having no choice but to sleep on duty (not sure that issue was ever fixed).
I'm not impressed with the NTSB either, but at least they make some sort of effort.
The whole aviation safety and regulatory system needs to be replaced - not just to get drone regulations up to speed, but to eliminate corruption and replace it with sound judgement.
It resulted in lawsuits, such as DRDOS, being extended over decades, and many potentially exciting businesses being driven into bankruptcy.
To this day, it results in WINE incompatibilities where none should exist. This is a genuine problem.
Far as Windows 3.11 is concerned, lots of systems you really don't want failing (such as control systems for hydroelectric dams and nuclear reactors) use ancient versions of operating systems (NT 3.x, for example) because it's too dangerous to reimplement the control software. The consequences of an error are too great and modern operating systems are too complex to be made reliable enough.
These systems rely on legacy hardware, much of which is no longer made. They rely on no novel fault conditions arising. Because they're increasingly on the public internet, this cannot possibly be guaranteed. Without maintenance, without the prospect of anyone even knowing how to handle error conditions, these are ticking time bombs.
So, yes, the world is less safe and less satisfactory because of abandoned lines for which no source exists and for which workarounds are more dangerous than just allowing a catastrophic failure to arise.
That's why Microsoft has so much abandonware and so many defunct branches of software. Same with Apple. Difference is, anyone can revive those OpenSSL branches, whereas Microsoft destroys source code that could be subject to future lawsuits.
The obvious (to me) solution is to make prior versions of OpenSSL compatibility wrappers for the current version. Thus, the new code is used (and is therefore more secure) but the old interface exists for applications outside the control of users.
People shouldn't need to be tied to any physical address. A virtual address should function perfectly well. This can be in the sense of a nomadic tribe, the homeless/dispossessed (of which there are far too many right now) but it can also be in the sense of the Donald Coxeters of the world, people who simply don't have conventional lifestyles.
(For those unfamiliar with Donald Coxeter, I strongly recommend learning some maths. Any maths will do.)
So what you need is a virtual address that can map EITHER to a physical location, OR a logical location (such as a tribe), OR a transient address (see the 1996 specification for IPv6), OR an Internet address. Since you want to leave room for expansion, I recommend using at least three bits to specify the address scheme.
IPv6 isn't long enough for this, although the concept is correct. The concept is that you have a prefix that tells you what you're doing, a routing segment that tells you where you're going, and a suffix that is absolutely guaranteed unique and allows you to transition to absolutely anywhere in any form without losing anything along the way.
You can't route parcels over the Internet, you can't route multicast packets by mail, so clearly you need a protocol type in there as well. There are something like eight packet-based protocols. If we leave room to expansion, you need four bits to identify the type of packet, two to identify mode (unicast, multicast, anycast, plus one spare) and four bits to identify layer 1 constraints (what you can't send over).
That's 13 bits to define the characteristics of an address. That's three bits reserved for future use to round it to 16 bits, or two bytes.
Because this scheme is independent of user and is just as valid for probes in the Kepler Belt as for people on Earth, we're going to need a more sophisticated prefix. It's hierarchical, so all routing is as local as possible. Which is great, if you can be certain of never having more than 256 downstream next hops and one upstream hop. Not really viable if part of the intermediate system (people on aircraft, trains, other planets) is ad-hoc, because you simply don't know the topology. (Yes, I'm assuming here that Joe Bloggs' laptop on a 767 can become a relay point for any packet from any source to any destination, if that offers the best routing metric for that packet.)
You need a routing strategy that guarantees that two unique endpoints can communicate over any/all multipath lines of communication by best method possible per packet. Here, IPv6' hierarchy is not so good. It assumes one path from start to end, even though the path can change without notice. Packets midstream are supposed to be redirected.
For computers, that's tolerable. For postal mail, not so much. For postal mail to a mobile endpoint, it's too expensive and risks routing loops. For anything else, it's a disaster.
The good news is that people have dealt with weird network topologies in computing and graph theory for a long time now. The bad news is the computer geeks doing this aren't interested in ad-hoc (not much call for it in supercomputing or anywhere else butterfly networks and hypercubes are used) and mathematicians aren't any further along than static coloured Petri nets. Dynamic networks aren't yet at the bleeding edge of technology.
Not to worry, if we layer an ad-hoc routing strategy below the main routing strategy, we can create a simulation of a fixed network even though the layer underneath isn't fixed and the nodes don't correspond 1:1.
However, this means we need to specify virtual waypoints on our virtually fixed network, where the waypoints are connected via the IPv6-like scheme but labelled by means of a unique, fixed designation the ad-hoc layer can use to find where to send stuff.
This assumes that your next hop wants to have a particular property, that of being able to send on to another stage that has the next designated property, and that exactly where it goes is unimportant. So it's now more of a fuzzy hierarchy
Kernel bypass plus zero copy are, of course, old-hat. Worked on such stuff at Lightfleet, back when it did this stuff called work. Infiniband and the RDMA Consortium had been working on it for longer yet.
What sort of performance increase can you achieve?
Well, Ethernet latencies tend to run into milliseconds for just the stack. Tens, if not hundreds, of milliseconds for anything real. Infiniband can achieve eight microsecond latencies. SPI can get down to two milliseconds.
So you can certainly achieve the sorts of latency improvements quoted. It's hard work, especially when operating purely in software, but it can actually be done. It's about bloody time, too. This stuff should have been standard in 2005, not 2015! Bloody slowpokes. Back in my day, we had to shovel our own packets! In the snow! Uphill! Both ways!
It is important that transactions not go through any kind of centralized system, but this sort of attack shows that you can't simply make the entire network a virtual centralized system. We need a replacement system that eliminates the need for a single physical or virtual store.
Second, 400+ new shows is somewhere between half to a third of a new show per channel per season, on average. That suggests that if there's too much new material, there are far, far too many channels. In fact, that might be the best solution. Shut down nine in every ten channels. Then you can have exactly the same amount of new material with less channel surfing. People will stay on channel because they'll like the next program as well.
The British did perfectly well on four channels. In fact, they mostly did perfectly well on three channels. America is, of course, bigger. They might need fifteen to cater to all the various needs. You don't need several thousand (including local). All it does is dilute the good stuff with a lot of crap.
Maybe. My thought has always been that if fusion is close enough to get ballpark figures, we can build the necessary infrastructure and much of the housing in parallel with fusion development. Because the energy distribution will impose novel demands on the grid, it's going to require a major rethink on communications protocols, over-generation procedures, action plans on what to do if lines are taken out.
With fusion, especially, it's expensive at best to learn after the fact. Much better to get all the learning done in the decade until working fusion.
With all that in place, the ramp time until fusion is fully online at a sensible price will be greatly reduced.
Parallelize, don't serialize. Only shredded wheat should be cerealized.
By trying to not say too much, the advisories are inherently vague and therefore can be interpreted as insignificant or a dire emergency depending on the day.
That's not useful to anyone.
Because the NSA and GCHQ have effectively eliminated all network security, thanks to their backdoors in things like Cisco devices, it should be automatically assumed that all the bad guys capable of exploiting the issue already have all the information they need and the bad guys not capable of exploiting the issue aren't an issue whether informed or not.
Advisories should therefore declare everything. Absolutely everything. And it should be made clear in those advisories that this is being done because the risks created by the backdoors exceed the risks created by the additional information.
The added information will aid in debugging, clearing up the issue faster and validating that no regressions have taken place.
Now that they can extract pure silicon 28 with a simple linear accelerator (which should have been obvious), it should be possible to use much larger dies without running into imperfection problems. That doesn't keep to Moore's Law, admittedly, but it does mean you can halve the space that double the transistors would take, since you're eliminating a lot of packaging. Over the space of the motherboard, it would more than work out, especially if they moved to wafer-scale integration. Want to know how many cores they put onto a wafer using regular dies? Instead of chopping the wafer up, you throw on interconnects Transputer-style.
Graphene is troublesome, yes, but there's lots of places you need regular conductors. If you replace copper interconnects and the gold links to the pins, you should be able to reduce the heat generated and therefore increase the speed you can run the chips. Graphene might also help with 3D chip technology, as you're going to be generating less heat between the layers. That would let you double the number of transistors per unit area occupied, even if not per unit area utilized.
Gallium Arsenide is still an option. If you can sort pure isotopes then it may be possible to overcome many of the limitations that have existed so far on the technology. It has been nasty to utilize, due to pollution, but we're well into the age where you can just convert the pollution into plasma and again separate out what's in it. It might be a little expensive, but the cost of cleanup will always be more and you can sell the results from the separation. It's much harder to sell polluted mud.
In the end, because people want compute power rather than a specific transistor count, Processor-in-Memory is always an option, simply move logic into RAM and avoid having to perform those functions by going through support chips, a bus and all the layers of a CPU in order to get carried out. DDR4 is nice and all that, but main memory is still a slow part of the system and the caches on the CPU are easily flooded due to code always expanding to the space available. There is also far too much work going on in managing memory. The current Linux memory manager is probably one of the best around. Take that and all the memory support chips, put it on an oversized ASIC and give it some cache. The POWER8 processor has 96 megabytes of L3 cache. I hate odd amounts and the memory logic won't be nearly as complex as the POWER8's, so let's increase it to 128 megabytes. Since the cache will be running at close to the speed of the CPU, exhaustion and stalling won't be nearly so common.
Actually, the best thing would be for the IMF (since it's not doing anything useful with its money) to buy millions of POWER8 and MIPS64 processors, offering them for free to geeks individually on on daughter boards that can be plugged in as expansion cards. At worst, it would make life very interesting.
Multiple IPs was one solution, but the other was much simpler.
The real address of the computer was its MAC, the prefix simply said how to get there. In the event of a failover, the client's computer would be notified the old prefix was now transitory and a new prefix was to be used for new connections.
At the last common router, the router would simply swap the transitory prefix for the new prefix. The packet would then go by the new path.
The server would multi-home for all prefixes it was assigned.
At both ends, the stack would handle all the detail, the applications never needed to know a thing. That's why nobody cared much about remembering IP addresses, because those weren't important except to the stack. You remembered the name and the address took care of itself.
One of the benefits was that this worked when switching ISPs. If you changed your provider, you could do so with no loss of connections and no loss of packets.
But the same was true of clients, as well. You could start a telnet session at home, move to a cyber cafe and finish up in a pub, all without breaking the connection, even if all three locations had different ISPs.
This would be great for students or staff at a university. And for the university. You don't need the network to be flat, you can remain on your Internet video session as your laptop leaps from access point to access point.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux uses AT&T-defined interfaces. I do NOT want that court case revived.
Let's say DARPA gets their brain implant to work, or that those who have experimented with implants devise one that allows such information to be conveyed. Even a medical expert won't be able to categorize such systems.
The only viable method is to examine understanding and not memorization. If understanding is examined, all the notes in the world won't help.
This explains the "50 mSv" claim. It's actually not quite what is represented by the industry.
https://hps.org/publicinformat...
https://hps.org/publicinformat...
First, I am STILL waiting for an apology from those Slashdotters who insisted at the time there was no meltdown.
Second, we've known for a long time that there was a high level of incompetence resulting in excessive exposure to radiation. I'm not sure what new information is being included here.
Third, I am much more concerned about the reported design flaw in ALL U.S. reactors that could result in meltdowns. Fukushima, although tragic, is in the past. We should learn from it by studying it closely, but there's really no point in rehashing the lessons already learned. Except amongst the nuclear inspectors and nuclear plant operators who have NOT learned those lessons. There, you're more than welcome to rehash all you like.
Nuclear fission is an intermediate technology that will be required to deliver power until fusion is developed. Provided there is sufficient funding, fusion should be mastered within a decade and go commercial within two. However, that's twenty years in which we can afford NO fossil fuel power plants whatsoever. Given that U.S. reactors are of a critically unsafe design, those should all be replaced. At this point, about fifty additional fission plants will be required in the US to bridge the gap. Construction should be started yesterday. Failing that, actually fault-tolerant fail-safe designs should be drawn up ASAP and work started on them.
Absolutely, on all points. I'd perhaps add one other - we've got potentially good diagnostics, but they're not used for this, they're rare and they're horribly expensive. (Problem is, it's longer and less clear than yours.)
An example. Hospital MRI scanners are around 2 to 2.5 T, which gives sufficient resolution to see severe injuries and malformations but not much more. Medical scanners can go up to 7.3 T and research scanners actively used go up to 9.1 T. At this upper end, blurred sections of the brain are almost crystal clear. You can see not quite to the neuron level but fairly close. Subtle issues can be detected. It's more than good enough to find out if there's a problem with mirror cells, bandwidth issues (too much or too little) and similar fine-scale deformities. The best scanner that can be built that can take a human head is around 13 T. It's unclear what this would show, I've not been able to find any info on it
I wouldn't ask psychiatrists and neurosurgeons to have an underground bunker with dozens of such devices armed with top technicians at the ready, although if one of them is the sole winner of the US Powerball at its current 1.2 billion dollar level, it would be nice if some of it was spent on such things. However, MRI as a diagnostic tool is strongly discouraged, apparently, which seems to defeat its value as a means of rapidly identifying and classifying evidence you can't otherwise get to.
I counted the total number of scanning technologies (excluding minor variants) and came up with 33 different diagnostic tools that could be used at the level of the brain. Of those, I have only known two of those to be used in practice (EEG and MRI), never even remotely close to the levels of sensitivity needed to analyze the problem unless, as I said, there's a problem at the grossest of levels. EEG, for example, is performed with as few leads as possible and the digital outputs I've seen look like the ADC is cheap and low resolution. Nor have I ever been impressed by the shielding used in the rooms (the brain is not a strong source, so external signals matter a lot). I've read papers where MEG is used, but it seems to be almost exclusively research with very, very few hospitals actually using it.
This doesn't contradict your statement that there are no good diagnostic tools, partly because nobody has the faintest idea if these tools would be any good in diagnostics (as it's forbidden by the great overlords), how you'd read the data (if it's not actually used then nobody can understand the output at all, and if it's used but never for diagnostics in mental illness then there's no means of understanding what the output means in this context).
That's just the bog standard medical gear, though. Whilst it should be useful (your experience shapes your brain, your brain shapes your experience and this recursion should mean that you can identify traits of one from the other), there will be other tests. In fact, there are. There are hundreds of questions that make up the official test for autism spectrum disorders, but I've only heard of (and then second-hand) one doctor actually running through them. Most glance at the DSM (which is worse than useless and the criteria listed in it are largely rejected by both the checklist and those definitely in this category) and that's it. The checklist is probably not optimal and is probably incorrect much of the time as autism has a very wide range of causes (both known and suspected) and congealed categories of unrelated conditions won't work with any single checklist. Researchers hotly dispute even when it can be diagnosed and at what age it first appears. That's clearly not very helpful.
But that's positively enlightened compared to something like "Borderline Personality Disorder" (a label given to anyone who doesn't fit any billable category and is generally considered not worth wasting time on by the medical and psychiatric professions). Here, there really isn't an actual diagnosis as such, just an identification that there's a problem
It can't be philosophy as it is currently being experimentally tested. And, apparently, has been tested in the past.
Also, there are two branches of philosophy. The only branch of any consequence gave rise to formal logic, the systematic proof of a good chunk of mathematics, constructivism, Bayesian statistics, and so on. In other words, it's more rigorous than hard science, not less. In this branch, any statement determined to be true must be true under any circumstances, even if fundamental constants turn out to be neither fundamental nor constant, even if other universes exist with other physics within them. Doesn't matter. Science can discover what it likes, the statements must still hold and not differ by one iota.
The other branch is never used, even by philosophers. They'll publish stuff under it from time to time, but that's about it.
If you can't tell 1 from 0, then it's no wonder you have trouble with this stuff.
Partly because so little is known about the brain/mind. With something like a heart attack or a murder, there's a fairly clear sequence of cause-effect relationships that start with an known and end with a known. With mental illness, the genetics are obscure and too complex to fathom out by any conventional methods. Genetics aren't, however, the only contributing factor. Epigenetics, chemical signals, environment (including stimuli) right the way through life, it's a nightmare.
There are already 1,100 genes - not SNPs, genes - linked to the brain and 23&Me typically links about 50 SNPs of interest to each gene. That's 55,000 possible mutations, which gives you 2^55000 (10^16500) different combinations. In comparison, there are only 7x10^9 people alive on the planet (which means you can't get good resolution data on how variables interact, even if you studied everyone alive today) and about 10^100 atoms in the universe (which means that you'd nowhere to store sufficient data even if you could obtain it). That's just the genetic contribution, nothing else. What the everything else is, and how it relates, is only known in vague details. That's why news stories on yet another breakthrough are commonplace.
To make things worse, culture hasn't yet caught up to the idea there even is a theory of mind. It's still in some sort of Die Hard - Neolithic stage. Medicine isn't much better, the DSM manual has absolutely bugger all to do with what conditions and illnesses exist, it's about what tag the insurance should be billed under. The American psychiatric association is too busy digging its way out of the threat of criminal charges over direct assistance and fraudulent financial dealings to worry about anyone who is actually sick. The NHS can't afford anything more complex than a door-stop, right now, so don't expect Britain to haul anyone out of this mess. (Britain actually has a fairly good reputation on theoretical and practical psychiatric and neurological treatments, or at least it used to. Now, it's about on equal footing to Zimbabwe.) Australia has a Centre of the Mind, but it looks like it's a long way from getting anywhere - if it does at all. Some of its research seems iffy.
So there's no useful categorization, no meaningful theory, no known mechanics, superficial treatments for only certain diagnoses with rather suspect evidence to back them, no systematic approach towards system analysis, triage or debugging. Not even a definition of what a bug is.
The information in this post plus the fact that I've been here a long time aught to allow anyone here to identify (in very superficial terms) one out of the eight diagnoses I endure. Won't help you, won't help me. Those diagnoses aren't useful if you do want to help anyone, because each is subject to an overlapping combinatorial explosion. No, if you want to be helpful, there are citizen science projects for exploring the brain that will benefit the experts and there are probably insights the deep enthusiasts can contribute somehow by exploring databases and literature from perspectives that aren't obvious to researchers.
When it comes to interacting - understand, respect and listen. Oh, and don't fetishize any principle other than first doing no harm. Every other ethic, philosophy or cultural belief should be expendable if it contradicts that. Consider it a mandatory access control.
See the Free Will Theorum and proof, then find the error in that proof. Talk won't cut it, either your claim is correct and the proof is flawed, or the proof is correct and your argument is flawed.
I am a mathematical realist, not a physicalist, but accept that physical reality is all that exists at the classical and quantum levels. There isn't any need for anything else, there is nothing else that needs to be described. But let's say you reject that line. Makes no difference, the brain is Turing Complete and there is nothing in consciousness that cannot be explained outside of Turing logic.
You might not accept that either. Again, makes no odds. Any change to the brain changes the personality, any change to personality changes the brain. They are tightly interdependent. The only externals are hormones and control signals sent by the microflora. The brain itself is governed by two sets of genes, one set containing one thousand genes, the other containing a hundred. Genes are moderated by epigenetic proteins that provide control signals and interpretation. This provides something in the order of 2^11000 different neurological setups (genes have many nucleotides), although there are likely unknown genes that push the number much higher.
I see no cause for this idea of external stuff. Until you can show a convincing reason to require it, it is not religion but a refusal to multiply entities unnecessarily that makes me say that if it's not needed, it's because it's not there.
Then so do subatomic particles. You don't need AI if that's all you want. If subatomic particles do not have free will, then neither do humans. This second option allows physics to be Turing Complete and is much more agreeable.
If computers develop sufficient power for intelligence to be an emergent phenomenon, they are sufficiently powerful to be linked by brain interface for the combination to also have intelligence as an emergent phenomenon. The old you would cease to exist, but that's just as true every time a neuron is generated or dies. "You" are a highly transient virtual phenomenon. A sense of continuity exists only because you have memories and yet no frame of reference outside your current self.
(It's why countries with inadequate mental health care have suspiciously low rates of diagnosis. Self-assessment is impossible as you, relative to you, will always fit your concept of normal.)
I'm much less concerned by strong AI than by weak AI. This is the sort used to gamble on the stock markets, analyse signal intelligence, etc. In other words, this is the sort that frequently gets things wrong and adjusts itself to make things worse. Weak AI is cheap, easy, incapable of sanity checking, incapable of detecting fallacies and incapable of distinguishing correlation and causation.
Weather forecasts are not particularly precise or accurate, but they've got a success rate that far outstrips that of Weak AI. This is because weather forecasts involve running hundreds of millions of scenarios that fit known data across vast numbers of differing models, then looking for stuff that's highly resistant to change, that will probably happen no matter what, and what on average happens alongside it. These are then filtered further by human meteorologists (some solutions just aren't going to happen). This is an incredibly processed, analytical, approach. The correctness is adequate, but nobody would bet the bank on high precision.
The automated trading computers have a single model, a single set of data, no human filtering and no scrutiny. Because of the way derivatives trading works, they can gamble far more money than they actually have. In 2007, such computers were gambling an estimated ten times the net worth of the planet by borrowing against predicted future earnings of other bets, many of which themselves were paid for by borrowing against other predicted future earnings.
These are the machines that effectively run the globe and their typical accuracy level is around 30%. Better than many politicians, agreed, but not really adequate if you want a robust, fault-tolerant society. These machines have nearly obliterated global society on at least two occasions and, if given enough attempts, will eventually succeed.
These you should worry about.
The whole brain simulator? Not so much. Humans have advantages over computers, just as computers have advantages over machines. You'll see hybridization and/or format conversion, but you won't see the sci-fi horror of computers seeing people as pets (think that was an Asimov short story), threats counter to programming (Colossus, 2010's interpretation of 2001, or similar) or vermin to be exterminated (The Matrix' Agent Smith).
The modern human brain has less capacity than the Neanderthal brain, overall and in many of the senses in particular. You can physically enlarge parts of your brain, up to about 20%, through highly intensive learning, but there's only so much space and only so much inter-regional bandwidth. This means that no human can ever achieve their potential, only a small portion of it. Even with smart drugs. There are senses that have atrophied to the point that they can never be trained or developed beyond an incredibly primitive level. Even if that could be fixed with genetic engineering, there's still neither space nor bandwidth to support it.
You always start with the end you want to achieve. You can't get somewhere without knowing where it is, you can't even heuristically reach a goal without some measure of deviance.
The FAA is notoriously bad at this, always has been. The NTSB has lambasted them multiple times for failures in devising and enforcing regulations. The FAA was also solely responsible for air traffic controllers having no choice but to sleep on duty (not sure that issue was ever fixed).
I'm not impressed with the NTSB either, but at least they make some sort of effort.
The whole aviation safety and regulatory system needs to be replaced - not just to get drone regulations up to speed, but to eliminate corruption and replace it with sound judgement.
It resulted in lawsuits, such as DRDOS, being extended over decades, and many potentially exciting businesses being driven into bankruptcy.
To this day, it results in WINE incompatibilities where none should exist. This is a genuine problem.
Far as Windows 3.11 is concerned, lots of systems you really don't want failing (such as control systems for hydroelectric dams and nuclear reactors) use ancient versions of operating systems (NT 3.x, for example) because it's too dangerous to reimplement the control software. The consequences of an error are too great and modern operating systems are too complex to be made reliable enough.
These systems rely on legacy hardware, much of which is no longer made. They rely on no novel fault conditions arising. Because they're increasingly on the public internet, this cannot possibly be guaranteed. Without maintenance, without the prospect of anyone even knowing how to handle error conditions, these are ticking time bombs.
So, yes, the world is less safe and less satisfactory because of abandoned lines for which no source exists and for which workarounds are more dangerous than just allowing a catastrophic failure to arise.
That's why Microsoft has so much abandonware and so many defunct branches of software. Same with Apple. Difference is, anyone can revive those OpenSSL branches, whereas Microsoft destroys source code that could be subject to future lawsuits.
I'd have thought they'd be using LibreSSL, the fork OpenBSD developers made of OpenSSL.
The obvious (to me) solution is to make prior versions of OpenSSL compatibility wrappers for the current version. Thus, the new code is used (and is therefore more secure) but the old interface exists for applications outside the control of users.
People shouldn't need to be tied to any physical address. A virtual address should function perfectly well. This can be in the sense of a nomadic tribe, the homeless/dispossessed (of which there are far too many right now) but it can also be in the sense of the Donald Coxeters of the world, people who simply don't have conventional lifestyles.
(For those unfamiliar with Donald Coxeter, I strongly recommend learning some maths. Any maths will do.)
So what you need is a virtual address that can map EITHER to a physical location, OR a logical location (such as a tribe), OR a transient address (see the 1996 specification for IPv6), OR an Internet address. Since you want to leave room for expansion, I recommend using at least three bits to specify the address scheme.
IPv6 isn't long enough for this, although the concept is correct. The concept is that you have a prefix that tells you what you're doing, a routing segment that tells you where you're going, and a suffix that is absolutely guaranteed unique and allows you to transition to absolutely anywhere in any form without losing anything along the way.
You can't route parcels over the Internet, you can't route multicast packets by mail, so clearly you need a protocol type in there as well. There are something like eight packet-based protocols. If we leave room to expansion, you need four bits to identify the type of packet, two to identify mode (unicast, multicast, anycast, plus one spare) and four bits to identify layer 1 constraints (what you can't send over).
That's 13 bits to define the characteristics of an address. That's three bits reserved for future use to round it to 16 bits, or two bytes.
Because this scheme is independent of user and is just as valid for probes in the Kepler Belt as for people on Earth, we're going to need a more sophisticated prefix. It's hierarchical, so all routing is as local as possible. Which is great, if you can be certain of never having more than 256 downstream next hops and one upstream hop. Not really viable if part of the intermediate system (people on aircraft, trains, other planets) is ad-hoc, because you simply don't know the topology. (Yes, I'm assuming here that Joe Bloggs' laptop on a 767 can become a relay point for any packet from any source to any destination, if that offers the best routing metric for that packet.)
You need a routing strategy that guarantees that two unique endpoints can communicate over any/all multipath lines of communication by best method possible per packet. Here, IPv6' hierarchy is not so good. It assumes one path from start to end, even though the path can change without notice. Packets midstream are supposed to be redirected.
For computers, that's tolerable. For postal mail, not so much. For postal mail to a mobile endpoint, it's too expensive and risks routing loops. For anything else, it's a disaster.
The good news is that people have dealt with weird network topologies in computing and graph theory for a long time now. The bad news is the computer geeks doing this aren't interested in ad-hoc (not much call for it in supercomputing or anywhere else butterfly networks and hypercubes are used) and mathematicians aren't any further along than static coloured Petri nets. Dynamic networks aren't yet at the bleeding edge of technology.
Not to worry, if we layer an ad-hoc routing strategy below the main routing strategy, we can create a simulation of a fixed network even though the layer underneath isn't fixed and the nodes don't correspond 1:1.
However, this means we need to specify virtual waypoints on our virtually fixed network, where the waypoints are connected via the IPv6-like scheme but labelled by means of a unique, fixed designation the ad-hoc layer can use to find where to send stuff.
This assumes that your next hop wants to have a particular property, that of being able to send on to another stage that has the next designated property, and that exactly where it goes is unimportant. So it's now more of a fuzzy hierarchy
Typically, venomous creatures are immune to a wide range of toxins.
Kernel bypass plus zero copy are, of course, old-hat. Worked on such stuff at Lightfleet, back when it did this stuff called work. Infiniband and the RDMA Consortium had been working on it for longer yet.
What sort of performance increase can you achieve?
Well, Ethernet latencies tend to run into milliseconds for just the stack. Tens, if not hundreds, of milliseconds for anything real. Infiniband can achieve eight microsecond latencies. SPI can get down to two milliseconds.
So you can certainly achieve the sorts of latency improvements quoted. It's hard work, especially when operating purely in software, but it can actually be done. It's about bloody time, too. This stuff should have been standard in 2005, not 2015! Bloody slowpokes. Back in my day, we had to shovel our own packets! In the snow! Uphill! Both ways!
It is important that transactions not go through any kind of centralized system, but this sort of attack shows that you can't simply make the entire network a virtual centralized system. We need a replacement system that eliminates the need for a single physical or virtual store.
First, they could always use blipverts.
Second, 400+ new shows is somewhere between half to a third of a new show per channel per season, on average. That suggests that if there's too much new material, there are far, far too many channels. In fact, that might be the best solution. Shut down nine in every ten channels. Then you can have exactly the same amount of new material with less channel surfing. People will stay on channel because they'll like the next program as well.
The British did perfectly well on four channels. In fact, they mostly did perfectly well on three channels. America is, of course, bigger. They might need fifteen to cater to all the various needs. You don't need several thousand (including local). All it does is dilute the good stuff with a lot of crap.
Maybe. My thought has always been that if fusion is close enough to get ballpark figures, we can build the necessary infrastructure and much of the housing in parallel with fusion development. Because the energy distribution will impose novel demands on the grid, it's going to require a major rethink on communications protocols, over-generation procedures, action plans on what to do if lines are taken out.
With fusion, especially, it's expensive at best to learn after the fact. Much better to get all the learning done in the decade until working fusion.
With all that in place, the ramp time until fusion is fully online at a sensible price will be greatly reduced.
Parallelize, don't serialize. Only shredded wheat should be cerealized.
By trying to not say too much, the advisories are inherently vague and therefore can be interpreted as insignificant or a dire emergency depending on the day.
That's not useful to anyone.
Because the NSA and GCHQ have effectively eliminated all network security, thanks to their backdoors in things like Cisco devices, it should be automatically assumed that all the bad guys capable of exploiting the issue already have all the information they need and the bad guys not capable of exploiting the issue aren't an issue whether informed or not.
Advisories should therefore declare everything. Absolutely everything. And it should be made clear in those advisories that this is being done because the risks created by the backdoors exceed the risks created by the additional information.
The added information will aid in debugging, clearing up the issue faster and validating that no regressions have taken place.
Now that they can extract pure silicon 28 with a simple linear accelerator (which should have been obvious), it should be possible to use much larger dies without running into imperfection problems. That doesn't keep to Moore's Law, admittedly, but it does mean you can halve the space that double the transistors would take, since you're eliminating a lot of packaging. Over the space of the motherboard, it would more than work out, especially if they moved to wafer-scale integration. Want to know how many cores they put onto a wafer using regular dies? Instead of chopping the wafer up, you throw on interconnects Transputer-style.
Graphene is troublesome, yes, but there's lots of places you need regular conductors. If you replace copper interconnects and the gold links to the pins, you should be able to reduce the heat generated and therefore increase the speed you can run the chips. Graphene might also help with 3D chip technology, as you're going to be generating less heat between the layers. That would let you double the number of transistors per unit area occupied, even if not per unit area utilized.
Gallium Arsenide is still an option. If you can sort pure isotopes then it may be possible to overcome many of the limitations that have existed so far on the technology. It has been nasty to utilize, due to pollution, but we're well into the age where you can just convert the pollution into plasma and again separate out what's in it. It might be a little expensive, but the cost of cleanup will always be more and you can sell the results from the separation. It's much harder to sell polluted mud.
In the end, because people want compute power rather than a specific transistor count, Processor-in-Memory is always an option, simply move logic into RAM and avoid having to perform those functions by going through support chips, a bus and all the layers of a CPU in order to get carried out. DDR4 is nice and all that, but main memory is still a slow part of the system and the caches on the CPU are easily flooded due to code always expanding to the space available. There is also far too much work going on in managing memory. The current Linux memory manager is probably one of the best around. Take that and all the memory support chips, put it on an oversized ASIC and give it some cache. The POWER8 processor has 96 megabytes of L3 cache. I hate odd amounts and the memory logic won't be nearly as complex as the POWER8's, so let's increase it to 128 megabytes. Since the cache will be running at close to the speed of the CPU, exhaustion and stalling won't be nearly so common.
Actually, the best thing would be for the IMF (since it's not doing anything useful with its money) to buy millions of POWER8 and MIPS64 processors, offering them for free to geeks individually on on daughter boards that can be plugged in as expansion cards. At worst, it would make life very interesting.
Multiple IPs was one solution, but the other was much simpler.
The real address of the computer was its MAC, the prefix simply said how to get there. In the event of a failover, the client's computer would be notified the old prefix was now transitory and a new prefix was to be used for new connections.
At the last common router, the router would simply swap the transitory prefix for the new prefix. The packet would then go by the new path.
The server would multi-home for all prefixes it was assigned.
At both ends, the stack would handle all the detail, the applications never needed to know a thing. That's why nobody cared much about remembering IP addresses, because those weren't important except to the stack. You remembered the name and the address took care of itself.
One of the benefits was that this worked when switching ISPs. If you changed your provider, you could do so with no loss of connections and no loss of packets.
But the same was true of clients, as well. You could start a telnet session at home, move to a cyber cafe and finish up in a pub, all without breaking the connection, even if all three locations had different ISPs.
This would be great for students or staff at a university. And for the university. You don't need the network to be flat, you can remain on your Internet video session as your laptop leaps from access point to access point.
Windows has had IPv6 stacks since Windows 95 and Microsoft even started supplying them as of 98.