Stuxnet got onto Iranian centrifuges disconnected from the Internet and in locked and secured facilities. The problem is that at some point, someone has to communicate with these systems, so perfect security isn't possible... even just talking to them runs into the "little Bobby tables" problem.
It's a chicken/egg question. Do boys buy most comic books because girls have no interest in such things? Or do boys buy most comic books because the existing books are all marketed to boys? Historically, the answer has been believed to be the first option, but society generally has discovered over the last 50 years that with comic books as with many other things, the answer is the latter option... people make assumptions about what boys and girls want and thus drive the market thereby leaving out many consumers who don't fit the stereotypes.
Not hypocrisy. The law also protects against youth discrimination, but because that is so much rarer, the law goes into much greater detail on what constitutes discrimination against elders. Basically, the law bans all age discrimination in employment -- judge on merit and ability, not on age -- but spells out in detail all the questions you cannot ask during an interview in an effort to try to ferret out someone's age.
I think you miss the point of the question. AC wants to know why we just bombarded a planet with our debris -- scarring another world rather than take the extra fuel to clean up our mess and avoid adding to the craters on Mercury. This is a sentiment I've heard elsewhere -- that the extra science time wasn't worth the environmental cost of dumping our stuff on Mercury.
AC: What you miss is that Mercury is a lifeless rock already marked by tons of craters. One more makes little difference. There wasn't any benefit from the view of anyone working on the project in avoiding impacting Mercury. If this were Mars or someplace that humans might one day live, that would be different.
All the EULAs will just get updated to include a clause saying, "And you give us the right to share." The problem seems to be that if you *can* give permission then you will be coerced into giving permission. That implies that, just like a contract of enforced slavery is illegal in USA even if signed willingly, any agreement that gives permission for sharing is illegal. That would solve the problem of coercion but would wipe out a whole bunch of services that people actually like and want.
I don't have an answer, but I am pretty sure that just barring the data sharing would not actually change anything except the EULAs.
What if you made the default password the date the system was turned on? Sure, it's a simple 8 digit numeric value, but it would be somewhat unique per machine or local bank of machines. Don't ask them for a default password, tell them what it is and make them go change it. Various studies suggest they probably won't.
I think KingOfBash's point is that in the future, there may not be any "licensed drivers", only "licensed passengers". And if you lose that license, there wouldn't be any of those other options that you point toward -- the robots would turn you down for a ride.
Depends. How much do airlines pay in insurance to cover the possibility of disasters? How much would that decrease through automation? How much do they pay in maintenance? How much would that decrease if the plane were always piloted exactly as spec'd? There's many variables that come into play that could easily make this financially viable. I don't know enough about the industry to say whether or not it would actually be.
Which is more tech? A computer or a human brain?
on
Planes Without Pilots
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· Score: 1
Consider the comment at the end of the summary: "If you put more technology in the cockpit, you have more technology that can fail." We just had a human brain fail -- in the computer sense -- in Europe. I sometimes wonder whether we have too much tech in the cockpit right now. A computer that stays focused on the act of flying as fewer mental "moving parts" than a human brain that has a life outside the cockpit.
Sounds like a user interface problem. Users won't get accustomed to it if unsecure sites are mauve text on navy blue background. Or something equally egregious and harder to use.
> I think i know why she isnt a computer programmer
She's a psychologist. That's pretty close to a computer programmer. Psychologists do their work on a biological computer and without the aid of a debugger and without the programmer's greatest tool: the reboot. But in both cases, it is trying to work out where the logical inconsistencies are and apply code patches to get the system to respond correctly to input.
If the cost is supposed to be "some portion of what you have to spend each day", the story mentions net income and the discussion threads talk about net worth, and the downsides of both. What if we simply said, "Show your bank statement, credit card and estimated cash transactions for the last 60 days and we base your fine off of the *expenditures* you have made." Thoughts?
Be fair. Sony and Comcast have both blamed their customers and dallied around in court for quite a while before doing anything, or avoided doing anything in some cases. Lenovo reacted within a day. Lenovo may have taken a fall, but there are circles to Hell, and they aren't in the same class as Sony and Comcast.
> The second major challenge of the software revolution is the concentration of power in small groups.
I have sometimes mused about feasible ways to make this work. In other words, just accept that tech IS going to concentrate power in small groups and just ensure that the small group is people we actually want to have that power. Republics are supposed to do that by giving the elected officials the ultimate authority -- by definition, a small group with lots of power -- but that hasn't worked so well by some measures when tech gets involved.
I don't have any good answers here, but I figure that along with brainstorming ways to prevent the consolidation of power, we might also brainstorm ways to be happy with the results of the consolidation.
Pretty much any country in the world would have treated Turing the same in that era. Most of the world still would. The Brits have no special shame in that category, and they have been doing their level best to set things right. Many other countries still have yet to catch up, not just legally, but culturally.
Without a license statement, I have to assume that your copyright still applies. It is similar to a chain of evidence for legal proceedings -- I have to document that any image I use in my work didn't just come from some place that claimed it was a public domain image but actually can be traced back to the original author and confirmed as public domain. It's a real bitch some days, which is why the Internet is often not helpful at all for image searches and why people still end up paying large sums of money for image libraries that are vetted as "cleared for commercial reuse".
True, but some ice is right at the tipping point. And some trees only bear fruit at some particular tipping point. As the average temperature moves up, more and more species and systems find themselves outside of their personal equilibrium point. So you'll see a chunk of ice melt somewhere. And some trees die off somewhere. And some fish fail to spawn somewhere. And we are talking about a GLOBAL effect, which means a few of those events happen everywhere. At some rate of failure, the system heals itself. At a higher level, we have mass extinctions and it takes thousands of years for species to come back together. We appear to be pushing fast [geologically] toward that higher level. Look at the problems already being created in California and Texas by the ongoing drought. In March, Texas is expected to break the 1950s record of the "drought of record." We are losing whole towns. If this is a consequence of climate change and not just weather cycles, we have a real long term systemic problem. And the science is suggesting that it is climate and not weather that is causing the droughts.
Unfortunately, because of the network effect, it is actually quite important that you fight for your choice. Let's say you like PHP but no one else does... you will quickly find that tools for writing PHP dry up/don't get updated for new OSes. If you like Windows Phone, you're going to need to "sell" your preference to all your friends or eventually you'll have to switch to Android or iOS because if the Windows Phone platform doesn't get enough mindshare, it goes away.
Mindshare matters, and your company can get screwed easily by picking the wrong one and by not defending the one it does pick.
Dan Simmons, author of _Hyperion_ and other novels, was once asked to write a short story set 5000 years in the future. He said in the introduction that he drew his inspiration by asking what was true 5000 years ago that is still true today. His answer? "In 5000 years, someone will still be trying to kill the Jews." In that respect, a "cowboys in space" type of sci-fi like Star Trek was actually very optimistic... it offered hope of a human society that didn't still have those divisions... and in only 400 years!
It can be done. But as Piers Anthony noted, a writer has to be already established to tell the stories the writer wants to tell. "If I want to actually make money, I write a Xanth novel." This was in the commentary for his novel _Firefly_, which, relevant to this thread, includes a disturbingly mature sexual relationship between an adult male and a 5-year-old girl. I don't recommend reading it unless you're really prepared to explore that "what if." It's fairly graphic.
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Stuxnet got onto Iranian centrifuges disconnected from the Internet and in locked and secured facilities. The problem is that at some point, someone has to communicate with these systems, so perfect security isn't possible... even just talking to them runs into the "little Bobby tables" problem.
Excellent idea. Needs to be tweaked somehow to support phones\tablets that don't have (standard) USB ports. But the idea is good.
It's a chicken/egg question. Do boys buy most comic books because girls have no interest in such things? Or do boys buy most comic books because the existing books are all marketed to boys? Historically, the answer has been believed to be the first option, but society generally has discovered over the last 50 years that with comic books as with many other things, the answer is the latter option... people make assumptions about what boys and girls want and thus drive the market thereby leaving out many consumers who don't fit the stereotypes.
Not hypocrisy. The law also protects against youth discrimination, but because that is so much rarer, the law goes into much greater detail on what constitutes discrimination against elders. Basically, the law bans all age discrimination in employment -- judge on merit and ability, not on age -- but spells out in detail all the questions you cannot ask during an interview in an effort to try to ferret out someone's age.
I think you miss the point of the question. AC wants to know why we just bombarded a planet with our debris -- scarring another world rather than take the extra fuel to clean up our mess and avoid adding to the craters on Mercury. This is a sentiment I've heard elsewhere -- that the extra science time wasn't worth the environmental cost of dumping our stuff on Mercury.
AC: What you miss is that Mercury is a lifeless rock already marked by tons of craters. One more makes little difference. There wasn't any benefit from the view of anyone working on the project in avoiding impacting Mercury. If this were Mars or someplace that humans might one day live, that would be different.
All the EULAs will just get updated to include a clause saying, "And you give us the right to share." The problem seems to be that if you *can* give permission then you will be coerced into giving permission. That implies that, just like a contract of enforced slavery is illegal in USA even if signed willingly, any agreement that gives permission for sharing is illegal. That would solve the problem of coercion but would wipe out a whole bunch of services that people actually like and want.
I don't have an answer, but I am pretty sure that just barring the data sharing would not actually change anything except the EULAs.
What if you made the default password the date the system was turned on? Sure, it's a simple 8 digit numeric value, but it would be somewhat unique per machine or local bank of machines. Don't ask them for a default password, tell them what it is and make them go change it. Various studies suggest they probably won't.
His math is fine. It's his civics estimate of US population that's a problem, and he wasn't claiming expertise there.
I think KingOfBash's point is that in the future, there may not be any "licensed drivers", only "licensed passengers". And if you lose that license, there wouldn't be any of those other options that you point toward -- the robots would turn you down for a ride.
Depends. How much do airlines pay in insurance to cover the possibility of disasters? How much would that decrease through automation?
How much do they pay in maintenance? How much would that decrease if the plane were always piloted exactly as spec'd?
There's many variables that come into play that could easily make this financially viable. I don't know enough about the industry to say whether or not it would actually be.
Consider the comment at the end of the summary: "If you put more technology in the cockpit, you have more technology that can fail."
We just had a human brain fail -- in the computer sense -- in Europe. I sometimes wonder whether we have too much tech in the cockpit right now. A computer that stays focused on the act of flying as fewer mental "moving parts" than a human brain that has a life outside the cockpit.
Sounds like a user interface problem. Users won't get accustomed to it if unsecure sites are mauve text on navy blue background. Or something equally egregious and harder to use.
This is why you should treat employees as criminals from their first day on the job. Then there's no difference when the last day comes. :-)
Right?
> I think i know why she isnt a computer programmer
She's a psychologist. That's pretty close to a computer programmer. Psychologists do their work on a biological computer and without the aid of a debugger and without the programmer's greatest tool: the reboot. But in both cases, it is trying to work out where the logical inconsistencies are and apply code patches to get the system to respond correctly to input.
If the cost is supposed to be "some portion of what you have to spend each day", the story mentions net income and the discussion threads talk about net worth, and the downsides of both. What if we simply said, "Show your bank statement, credit card and estimated cash transactions for the last 60 days and we base your fine off of the *expenditures* you have made." Thoughts?
The surgeons in the article imply that they themselves do not consider it successful unless the psychology angle is also a success.
Be fair. Sony and Comcast have both blamed their customers and dallied around in court for quite a while before doing anything, or avoided doing anything in some cases. Lenovo reacted within a day. Lenovo may have taken a fall, but there are circles to Hell, and they aren't in the same class as Sony and Comcast.
> The second major challenge of the software revolution is the concentration of power in small groups.
I have sometimes mused about feasible ways to make this work. In other words, just accept that tech IS going to concentrate power in small groups and just ensure that the small group is people we actually want to have that power. Republics are supposed to do that by giving the elected officials the ultimate authority -- by definition, a small group with lots of power -- but that hasn't worked so well by some measures when tech gets involved.
I don't have any good answers here, but I figure that along with brainstorming ways to prevent the consolidation of power, we might also brainstorm ways to be happy with the results of the consolidation.
Pretty much any country in the world would have treated Turing the same in that era. Most of the world still would. The Brits have no special shame in that category, and they have been doing their level best to set things right. Many other countries still have yet to catch up, not just legally, but culturally.
Without a license statement, I have to assume that your copyright still applies. It is similar to a chain of evidence for legal proceedings -- I have to document that any image I use in my work didn't just come from some place that claimed it was a public domain image but actually can be traced back to the original author and confirmed as public domain. It's a real bitch some days, which is why the Internet is often not helpful at all for image searches and why people still end up paying large sums of money for image libraries that are vetted as "cleared for commercial reuse".
True, but some ice is right at the tipping point. And some trees only bear fruit at some particular tipping point. As the average temperature moves up, more and more species and systems find themselves outside of their personal equilibrium point. So you'll see a chunk of ice melt somewhere. And some trees die off somewhere. And some fish fail to spawn somewhere. And we are talking about a GLOBAL effect, which means a few of those events happen everywhere. At some rate of failure, the system heals itself. At a higher level, we have mass extinctions and it takes thousands of years for species to come back together. We appear to be pushing fast [geologically] toward that higher level. Look at the problems already being created in California and Texas by the ongoing drought. In March, Texas is expected to break the 1950s record of the "drought of record." We are losing whole towns. If this is a consequence of climate change and not just weather cycles, we have a real long term systemic problem. And the science is suggesting that it is climate and not weather that is causing the droughts.
Unfortunately, because of the network effect, it is actually quite important that you fight for your choice. Let's say you like PHP but no one else does... you will quickly find that tools for writing PHP dry up/don't get updated for new OSes. If you like Windows Phone, you're going to need to "sell" your preference to all your friends or eventually you'll have to switch to Android or iOS because if the Windows Phone platform doesn't get enough mindshare, it goes away.
Mindshare matters, and your company can get screwed easily by picking the wrong one and by not defending the one it does pick.
What? Michael Valentine Smith didn't come to challenge Judeo-Christian values! He came to enshrine them! Heck... they even had communion!
Yeah, it was fun pulling certain chains back in high school... :-)
Dan Simmons, author of _Hyperion_ and other novels, was once asked to write a short story set 5000 years in the future. He said in the introduction that he drew his inspiration by asking what was true 5000 years ago that is still true today. His answer? "In 5000 years, someone will still be trying to kill the Jews." In that respect, a "cowboys in space" type of sci-fi like Star Trek was actually very optimistic... it offered hope of a human society that didn't still have those divisions... and in only 400 years!
It can be done. But as Piers Anthony noted, a writer has to be already established to tell the stories the writer wants to tell. "If I want to actually make money, I write a Xanth novel." This was in the commentary for his novel _Firefly_, which, relevant to this thread, includes a disturbingly mature sexual relationship between an adult male and a 5-year-old girl. I don't recommend reading it unless you're really prepared to explore that "what if." It's fairly graphic.