LOL, You're assuming they would be at the code level and not the silicon level...
That doesn't really change the analysis, except to make even less likely -- if such backdoors exist -- that some Israeli company would be in on the secret.
You might be surprised to learn that there was an internet for several decades before the advertisers showed up, and that it had a dramatically higher signal to noise ratio then. I know, because I was there.
So was I, and it sucked compared to what we have today.
Sure, the signal to noise ratio was higher, but there was hardly anything there. Today, huge swaths of the entirety of human knowledge is available online. Virtually anything you want to know about anything is available. Your memories are rose-tinted, but if you actually were to go back, you'd find it limiting and frustrating.
The DMA controller is managed by the main CPU. It would be a security nightmare if any peripheral could initiate its own DMA transfers to any part of physical memory at any time.
Haven't you seen the demos where any system can be hacked, regardless of OS, simply by plugging a device into a firewire port and then manipulating the data in RAM directly?
That only works if the DMA controller is configured to allow it. Prior to the discovery of DMA attacks, OSes did configure their controllers to allow Firewire and other OHCI 1394 devices unlimited access. I think that's been fixed in Linux for some time, and Windows now has some mitigation as well. Android devices don't generally have that sort of hardware, and aren't supposed to allow any peripherals unlimited DMA access even if they do.
The baseband CPU has full memory access on most modern cell-phone SOCs.
Really? Though I don't know that much about that area, that surprising to me. It would require the baseband CPU to have access to the MMU, and the MMU to have some means of coordinating requests from multiple sources. That seems like a lot of complexity for relatively little gain.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that it's not obvious why it would be architected that way, which makes me skeptical.
Oops, sorry about the extraneous footnote marker, the "[1]". I had added it intending to mention something about the Pixel C that isn't really relevant, but is kind of cool, but then decided not to bother, because it's not really relevant. The irrelevant but cool thing I was going to add was that the Pixel C is the only device I'm aware of that allows the user to install their own TEE software.
There are only a handful of companies making phone chip sets. It would be easy for the NSA to pay off enough people to install backdoor hardware in the designs, to allow remote access. Such access would bypass the phone software completely, and be very hard to detect.
Thinking about this in the context of Android (since that's what I know -- though I don't know as much as I should about the radio subsystems), it is conceivable that there are back doors in the radio (Wifi and cellular; they're different, and separate) chipset firmware. The radio chipsets don't have any access to device storage, though, so without some additional steps this could only be used to get data flowing through the relevant radio. Exfiltrating the data obtained would presumably have to be done via the same radio. In the case of Wifi this would be pretty easy to detect by anyone monitoring Wifi transmissions, or examining the data flowing through the Wifi router. If the data were encrypted it might not be possible to tell what the unexplained data was, but its presence and destination could easily be observed.
If the drivers that talk to the radio firmware modules are also backdoored, then the drivers could be used to take control of the Linux kernel, and thereby take control of the entire Android system. Stuff protected by the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) wouldn't be affected, but TEE software also comes from a small set of vendors, and most comes in binary form only. The exception is Google's "Trusty" OS, which open source, but is used (thus far) only on the Nexus 9 [1]. So if the NSA could get backdoors into the radio firmware, it could probably get them into the TEEs as well. Except on Nexus 9.
However, assuming such firmware backdoors exist, it seems like they would be closely guarded secrets of the agencies that arranged for them to be installed, not something they'd share with some Israeli company, and absolutely not something they'd want embedded in a commercial product where it could discovered easily, just by watching what it transmits.
For that matter, I'm skeptical that such back doors exist. Many people have reverse engineered the common baseband and Wifi chipset firmware modules, and no such backdoors have been found, which means that if they're there, they're pretty well-concealed. If anything, I'd bet that rather than full-blown back doors, there are merely subtle security vulnerabilities which can be exploited and then chained with other exploits to pwn the device. Again, though, I'm skeptical that this one Israeli company has such powerful knowledge and extremely skeptical that they'd put it in a commercial product where knowledge of it could be easily discovered.
Nope. Wine isn't an emulator, it's a Windows compatibility layer.
As https://www.winehq.org/about/ puts it: "Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, Mac OSX, & BSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop."
and Google doesn't provide any data to government that it's not legally compelled to provide.
Which under the third party exception is all of it. You are technically correct which is the best kind of correct.
Well, being technically correct is certainly better than being flat wrong, which is what you are.
The third party exception is completely irrelevant here. That applies not to what government agencies can legally compel companies and individuals to provide, but to what espionage-derived data the NSA may acquire. The NSA is technically not allowed to spy on Americans but if they can get the data from a third party who willingly provides it, they're legally in the clear. Google does not willingly provide data. Foreign powers may be successfully spying on Google and turning that data over to US government agencies. We can't know, although Google does everything possible to prevent such espionage.
So, barring successful deep penetration of Google by, say, GCHQ, the FBI is restricted to what they can compel from Google via legal channels: NSLs, warrants and subpoenas. All of these vehicles have restrictions on the type and scope of data that can be obtained, and all allow the recipient to challenge their compliance with the law. Google does challenge requests that don't meet the relevant legal standards. Those that do, of course, or those where the courts reject the challenges, must be complied with.
You should learn something about emergent properties. They're extremely common. In fact, nearly all phenomena we perceive are emergent properties of underlying processes that are rather different from what we see. In some cases the emergent properties are much simpler than what's really going on underneath, in other cases they're vastly more complex. To provoke some thinking about higher-level emergent properties, I recommend that you read Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach". It's an old book, and decidedly overly optimistic about AI in some areas, but very thought provoking.
Anyway, your argument is, basically, "I don't buy that this common thing is happening in this more complex case that I don't understand, so I'm going to throw science out the window and assume magic."
Note that I'm not actually saying you're wrong. We don't know. We don't understand intelligence, or consciousness. It is possible that thought is the stuff of which the universe is made, rather than vice versa. But that's a pretty radical departure from what we do understand, and there's no clear rationale for going that way. I mean, the clearest argument you have stated thus far is summed up in your sentence "Do you know how much that smells like classic bullshit?" (I added the question mark, since you forgot it). You claim it smells like bullshit, and then rant about how you're a non-conformist... but offer nothing to refute the simpler, more straightforward interpretation.
My bet is that research and experimentation like the above will move us incrementally toward actually understanding how our brains work, and interaction between that work and work on building ever more sophisticated (and effective![1]) "thinking" machines will eventually lead us to figure out how to build machines that rival or even surpass our own abilities. We won't build strong AI by accident, though; we'll build it by developing sophisticated theories of intelligence and applying them. Along the way I expect we'll learn some things about the hard limits of such computation, which will prove to apply to our brains just as much as they apply to anything we can build. I suspect that one of the things we'll learn is that fuzziness is a necessary attribute for computational universality, and that when we build really smart machines we'll also have constructed machines that make many of the same kinds of thinking errors that we do.
Those are just my guesses, though. I'm in no way claiming to have some special insight.
[1] If you doubt the effectiveness of the work that's been done, you haven't paid attention to the phenomenal advances in the last few years in areas like voice recognition, natural language processing and image recognition.
As an aside, here's my answer to solipsism. It's almost certainly not novel, though it is original:
If I'm all that exists, damn I'm smart.
But, weirdly, I always attribute my deepest and most interesting thoughts to other parts of myself, which I call other people. I mean, I think I'm reading a book on statistical inference, or poetry, or listening to music, and there's all this enormous complexity and elegance which I don't understand and doesn't fit together... until I work hard to understand it, then it does. So if I'm all that exists, I somehow invented, say, non-Euclidean geometry, linear cryptanalysis, Bayesian inference, number theory, General Relativity, and a thousand other deep, sophisticated and -- most importantly for this argument -- intricate yet self-consistent ideas, but then convinced the one part of myself that I recognize as me that I don't know them and have to learn them. And then in the process of "learning" I go through a series of misunderstandings, where stuff I imagine I'm reading doesn't quite make sense, until I do get it, at which point everything falls neatly into place. Perfectly into place, actually. So perfectly that it's clear I had to have worked it all out in advance.
If I'm all there is, I'm some bizarre sort of split personality, and some of my other personalities are crazy smart. Heck, it's not even unlikely that one of my other much-smarter-than-me personalities will reply to this post and explain why it doesn't make sense, providing yet another iteration of me explaining what I already worked out to myself.
My conclusion is: The existence of the massive body of intellectual work apparently produced by other people demonstrates to me that other people do, in fact, exist, because I'm demonstrably not smart enough to have done it all. Unless I'm insane.
there is no reason to believe that consciousness or experience falls out of machines, no matter how wet or complex they are
And there is no reason not to believe that our experience of consciousness arises out of anything more than the complex interactions of our neural structure. If you had any evidence that there is something other than matter involved, you would have stated it. In the absence of non-material causes, I'll stick with the Occam's razor assumption and not require the invention of new non-physical constructs.
all of the robot crashes have been minor fender benders
Note that, for example, Google's cars are never going faster than 25 mph. So it's a little disingenuous to say they only get into fender benders when a human in the same situation would likely not have anything more than a minor fender bender either, even if they were very bad at driving.
Only some of the Google cars are limited to 25 mph, the newer, custom-designed ones with the cutesy appearance and removable steering wheel. Google began development with, and still continues developing on and testing with, normal vehicles that operate at up to freeway speeds, though those must have a human ready to take control at any moment (by law; not that they really need that). Most of the miles racked up by Google's vehicles have been by the faster ones.
1/5 is converted to energy, the rest is radiated into the surrounding area just like pavement does, albeit a little less than asphalt.
Apparently when compared to sand or dirt, less heat is radiated by PV panels.
Vegetation, absorbs light and emits heat as well, but it also cools the area via evaporative cooling.
Are you very certain about that? Plants can only cool evaporatively using water that is already present. I suppose they may pull some water back up that would otherwise have drained down through the soil, but on the other hand the photosynthesis process consumes water, locking it up in hydrocarbon chains. You're guessing that they provide a net cooling effect that wouldn't be present with non-living material of similar albedo.
But honestly the best way to make power is hydroelectric, always has been.
Though as a boater I happen to love the sort of environmental damage that hydro does, it does a LOT. Niagara is a special case, not available in most areas. In most places you have to build dams and flood valleys to make hydroelectric power. Even in cases where you can use existing bodies of water the change to the flow rates often does a lot of damage downstream.
IMO that's all worth it to make more bodies of water for recreation, oh, and to generate power. But there are a lot of opponents of hydro power for very good reasons.
The best solution is to distribute your power generation among all the ways of making power.
Well, not all the ways. We can remove fossil fuels from the mix. But all the rest... nuclear, hydro, geothermal, solar, wind, wave, etc.
3-16 weeks? Cattle will be slaughtered at around 3 years age. Are you thinking of chickens?
Feedlot cattle are typically slaughtered at about 12 months. Grass-fed cattle are usually slaughtered at about 18 months. The additional time is because they fatten more slowly. Calves are slaughtered between three and 16 weeks of age, for veal, but that makes their meat much more expensive than that of older cattle. You can be pretty certain that the steak you buy in a grocery store lived about a year.
Just between us girls, you do realize that you contradicted yourself in your response, right?
No, I didn't.
Early in your response, you mention that the NRA is consistent with "training, responsibility, and safety"
Yep.
and then later say that their role (yes, through their "political wing", but that's hair-splitting, IMO. If you, as an organization support something, your "political wing" expresses it.) is to be a "rabid dog" defender of gun rights.
This is wrong on two counts: First, because you're assuming without support that rabid dog defense of gun rights is irresponsible. Second because it is *not* hair-splitting to claim that the organization is focused on training, responsibility and safety given that the bulk of the organization and its funding goes toward those ends.
I would submit, sir, that if the NRA was *truly* concerned with "training, responsibility and safety" that they would - independent of any law or regulation - require any gun dealer who sports their logo to require that the dealer prove to their (NRA's) standards that the person ready to walk out with their very first AR-15 have some basic knowledge, understanding and competence with the thing.
Why should the NRA be responsible for policing this? The NRA makes educational resources available, including providing pamphlets for gun makers and dealers to distribute. Requiring formal education (or even just testing), merely adds an additional obstacle to gun ownership. I'm all in favor of training, the more the better, but I agree with the NRA that it's up to personal responsibility, not something that should be mandated.
All you you have to do is visit any gun store (or Walmart) and watch the average yo-yo buy one as their very first gun, waving it around, doing their Rambo impersonation, etc. It's a bad situation, I think.
Is it really? Do you have evidence to support your claim that it's a bad situation? The sort of problem you're assuming seems to be one of accidental gun deaths and injuries, which are actually very low (<600 per year, in a nation of >300M people and >300M guns), and declining steadily. The gun problem in the US is one of suicide and intentional homicide, neither of which are the result of "yo-yos" buying their first AR-15.
My perspective on this question -- as a certified pistol, rifle and shotgun instructor -- is that people take guns pretty seriously, and seek out training and education. Perhaps my perspective is skewed, because obviously the people who come to me are obviously the responsible ones, but in my personal and family life I also don't see a lot of clueless people buying guns and "waving them around". And the CDC accidental death statistics bear out my perspective.
Till then, their just shills for the gun makers who love it whenever something terrible happens cause their sales go through the roof.
Thank the anti-gun lobbies for the massive surges in gun sales after terrible shootings. Its their calls for restrictions that cause Americans to buy guns in droves. Also, it's worth pointing out that nearly 3/4 of the NRA's funding comes from individuals, not gun makers. This figure is slightly skewed by the gun dealers who include a "free" NRA membership with each gun sale, but (1) there aren't that many of those and (2) that's only a one-year membership. Contrary to anti-gun propaganda, the NRA isn't a front for the gun makers.
(And, BTW, make it damned difficult and expensive to buy ammo these days!.357 Magnums and.45 ACPs are bad enough, but.22s are impossible to find.)
I still don't understand why the factories haven't ramped up production of.22LR. For the first two or three years, okay, they were probably concerned that the shortage was temporary and did
From what I can find (just the abstract and the letter linked by drinkypoo), the study referenced in the article assumes the heat island effect, then evaluates its effect on tortoises, it doesn't actually attempt to model heat absorption to determine whether the heat island effect would occur. The referenced papers on heat island effects are all about urban heat islands, caused by paving.
So, it appears to me that the author, biologist Barry Sinervo, just assumed that solar farms covered in PV panels would produce urban heat islands similar to urban regions covered in black pavement, and then calculated what would happen to tortoises if they were exposed to the same level of heating as if big chunks of the desert were paved. The study I cited (written by atmospheric and climate scientists) did model the differential heat absorption effects, and found that large solar farms will cause localized cooling, not heating.
So, ignoring epithets like "bleeding heart" and focusing just on the science, it appears to me that Sinervo's assumption of heat islands was unsupported and wrong, though I can see his rationale if one forgets about the energy converted to electricity.
CThe last thing I'd want is to get Internet access through the government. If you think service via private companies is bad, just wait until you try getting service via the government!
Power: Check.
Water: Check.
Gas: Check.
I'm not at all opposed to municipal broadband, but I don't think I've ever bought power, water or gas from the government. Are you sure you do? Everywhere I've lived they're private companies... though regulated because they're natural monopolies.
I don't see how that's in any way inconsistent with training, responsibility or safety. It's merely a strong expression of unwillingness to be illegally disarmed.
when Reagan proposed banning cop-killer bullets, he was supported by the NRA. Today? Don't make me laugh.
So... in your mind the NRA must support bans to espouse responsibility? The NRA was wrong then, and knew it was wrong, because there is no such thing as "cop-killer bullets". But back then they thought they should go along to get along. After a couple of decades of that resulted in increasingly ridiculous gun control laws they realized that no, it does not make sense to accept pointless and ridiculous restrictions in order to appease those who are afraid of guns, because they'll never stay appeased, not until guns are banned and confiscated.
No, the proper job of the NRA's political wing[1] is to do for the second amendment what the ACLU does for most of the rest of the Bill of Rights, to defend it tooth and nail. Where there are actual, reasonable restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms, restrictions that most people approve of and which meet the "strict scrutiny"[2] standard of judicial review, then those restrictions will be passed over the objections of the NRA and upheld by courts in the face of contrary arguments put forth by the NRA.
Preservation of liberty requires the existence of rabid dog defenders like the NRA and ACLU, and they should fight any restriction of core rights, right up to the point where it's determined that the restrictions are constitutional, even if that means lobbying and litigating apparently-silly points, like whether felons should be allowed to have guns (which the NRA really needs to file a suit about) or whether a county courthouse can have a display of the ten commandments.
[1] Note that the political wing of the NRA is actually a small part of the organization. The bulk of the NRA is focused on safety standards and training, especially of training and certifying instructors.
[2] The Supreme Court has not established an official standard of review for second amendment cases, but it's hard to see why it would be anything less than strict scrutiny, the standard applied to all of the other non-procedural rights in the Bill of Rights.
No but a blackbody absorbs more than something green or brown.
This study found that covering deserts with solar farms would reduce the absorbed heat enough to create regional cooling. Plants are darker in color than dry dirt, usually, but like solar panels they also convert incoming radiant energy into a different form. They're far less efficient at this than PV panels are, though, so it's unclear whether their reduced efficiency but lighter color results in more or less heat absorption.
One interesting thing to note about the study's conclusion about deserts, though, is that arguably the "know-nothings" complaining about solar panels "sucking up the sun" are right, in the sense that the solar energy they convert to electricity is not converted to heat, which can result in cooling. It's possible that they've even noticed this effect directly, since the town is surrounded on three sides by large solar farms.
Something has going seriously wrong when a well respected professor of law begins saying that there are dangerous ideas, and that ideas can be the direct cause of terrorism.
Exactly. The only way mere ideas can be that dangerous is if they can be anchored to real problems which are powerful enough to convince people that extreme violence is the only available solution. If the US has done or is doing things that create that much anger in people then the real problem isn't the ideas, it's the actions which motivate the anger.
Personally, I don't think this is the case. I have no doubt that Muslims have cause for anger at the US, some of it related to a collision of fairly incompatible cultures, most of it related to US actions abroad, but I don't think there is enough cause to make this a problem outside of isolated nutcases who are in search of some reason to kill themselves and a lot of others.
The professor's proposal would actually be good in that it could very well identify those nutcases and remove them from circulation before they become a problem. But should we ever get to a situation where we have sufficiently large and deep problems that certain ideas become dangerous on a large scale, then we have a situation in which those "dangerous" ideas are incredibly important and must be spread! And that's without even getting into the ways in which such a system could -- and would -- be misused.
Yeah, this sort of limitation on free speech might well increase our safety in trivially-small[1] ways in the short term. But in the long run it's the most dangerous idea of them all.
We're not saying you have to be born here, but you have to be a citizen here to work here.
ROTFLMAO. That's effectively the same as saying you have to be born here, especially without H-1Bs and similar.
Before you can become a citizen you have to get a work visa, and that's all but impossible for most of the world. For example, my wife has a good friend from Italy who wanted to come to the US. We offered to sponsor her, even support her if needed. We spent three years and thousands of dollars before we gave up. Her *only* option was to (a) return to her home country (Nigeria) and submit an application for the immigration lottery, for which she'd have a roughly one in two hundred chance of winning[1].
The congressional staffer who was trying to help us got so frustrated that he eventually suggested that maybe she should just come on a tourist visa and overstay. Seriously!
Allowing H-1B's to skip the immigration line that fruit pickers have to go through is discrimination.
It varies depending on country of origin, but for most of the world that "line" is over 100 years long. See, there isn't really a "line", there's a lottery, and the odds of getting picked in any given year are pretty low. If you are persistent and try again every year you'll eventually get in with reasonable probability... or, more likely, your grandchild will because you'll be dead.
Also, you should consider that many H-1B employers would still hire these people if it couldn't bring them to the US. Without H-1Bs, my employer, Google, would just set up more overseas engineering offices. If the H-1B program didn't exist and instead they could all just get regular work visas (or green cards), Google would likely set up fewer overseas offices and bring more foreign workers here -- and that would be a good thing.
The US leadership in technology derives primarily from the fact that we've got a high standard of living and a great deal of freedom, and those characteristics attract the best and brightest of the world to come here. For about three generations now we've successfully drained a large portion of the world's brainpower and concentrated it here. That's not something we want to stop doing, in fact it's something we need to accelerate if we're going to stay ahead. If you don't want unlimited immigration, you should absolutely want to bring the smart, educated, valuable people here ahead of the "fruit pickers".
[1] In her case she would have had a zero chance of winning the lottery, because as soon as her family realized she was back in Nigeria her brothers would have murdered her. I don't know the details but she had somehow dishonored the family by getting involved with a boy she wasn't supposed to and they needed to kill her to recover their honor. That's why she fled to Italy in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL, You're assuming they would be at the code level and not the silicon level...
That doesn't really change the analysis, except to make even less likely -- if such backdoors exist -- that some Israeli company would be in on the secret.
You might be surprised to learn that there was an internet for several decades before the advertisers showed up, and that it had a dramatically higher signal to noise ratio then. I know, because I was there.
So was I, and it sucked compared to what we have today.
Sure, the signal to noise ratio was higher, but there was hardly anything there. Today, huge swaths of the entirety of human knowledge is available online. Virtually anything you want to know about anything is available. Your memories are rose-tinted, but if you actually were to go back, you'd find it limiting and frustrating.
We really need a billion dollar class action lawsuit to bring a big company down one of these days for putting a backdoor in something.
Well, we'd need to find one, first.
Have you ever heard of DMA?
The DMA controller is managed by the main CPU. It would be a security nightmare if any peripheral could initiate its own DMA transfers to any part of physical memory at any time.
Haven't you seen the demos where any system can be hacked, regardless of OS, simply by plugging a device into a firewire port and then manipulating the data in RAM directly?
That only works if the DMA controller is configured to allow it. Prior to the discovery of DMA attacks, OSes did configure their controllers to allow Firewire and other OHCI 1394 devices unlimited access. I think that's been fixed in Linux for some time, and Windows now has some mitigation as well. Android devices don't generally have that sort of hardware, and aren't supposed to allow any peripherals unlimited DMA access even if they do.
The baseband CPU has full memory access on most modern cell-phone SOCs.
Really? Though I don't know that much about that area, that surprising to me. It would require the baseband CPU to have access to the MMU, and the MMU to have some means of coordinating requests from multiple sources. That seems like a lot of complexity for relatively little gain.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that it's not obvious why it would be architected that way, which makes me skeptical.
Oops, sorry about the extraneous footnote marker, the "[1]". I had added it intending to mention something about the Pixel C that isn't really relevant, but is kind of cool, but then decided not to bother, because it's not really relevant. The irrelevant but cool thing I was going to add was that the Pixel C is the only device I'm aware of that allows the user to install their own TEE software.
There are only a handful of companies making phone chip sets. It would be easy for the NSA to pay off enough people to install backdoor hardware in the designs, to allow remote access. Such access would bypass the phone software completely, and be very hard to detect.
Thinking about this in the context of Android (since that's what I know -- though I don't know as much as I should about the radio subsystems), it is conceivable that there are back doors in the radio (Wifi and cellular; they're different, and separate) chipset firmware. The radio chipsets don't have any access to device storage, though, so without some additional steps this could only be used to get data flowing through the relevant radio. Exfiltrating the data obtained would presumably have to be done via the same radio. In the case of Wifi this would be pretty easy to detect by anyone monitoring Wifi transmissions, or examining the data flowing through the Wifi router. If the data were encrypted it might not be possible to tell what the unexplained data was, but its presence and destination could easily be observed.
If the drivers that talk to the radio firmware modules are also backdoored, then the drivers could be used to take control of the Linux kernel, and thereby take control of the entire Android system. Stuff protected by the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) wouldn't be affected, but TEE software also comes from a small set of vendors, and most comes in binary form only. The exception is Google's "Trusty" OS, which open source, but is used (thus far) only on the Nexus 9 [1]. So if the NSA could get backdoors into the radio firmware, it could probably get them into the TEEs as well. Except on Nexus 9.
However, assuming such firmware backdoors exist, it seems like they would be closely guarded secrets of the agencies that arranged for them to be installed, not something they'd share with some Israeli company, and absolutely not something they'd want embedded in a commercial product where it could discovered easily, just by watching what it transmits.
For that matter, I'm skeptical that such back doors exist. Many people have reverse engineered the common baseband and Wifi chipset firmware modules, and no such backdoors have been found, which means that if they're there, they're pretty well-concealed. If anything, I'd bet that rather than full-blown back doors, there are merely subtle security vulnerabilities which can be exploited and then chained with other exploits to pwn the device. Again, though, I'm skeptical that this one Israeli company has such powerful knowledge and extremely skeptical that they'd put it in a commercial product where knowledge of it could be easily discovered.
WINdows Emulator
Nope. Wine isn't an emulator, it's a Windows compatibility layer.
As https://www.winehq.org/about/ puts it: "Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, Mac OSX, & BSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop."
Which under the third party exception is all of it. You are technically correct which is the best kind of correct.
Well, being technically correct is certainly better than being flat wrong, which is what you are.
The third party exception is completely irrelevant here. That applies not to what government agencies can legally compel companies and individuals to provide, but to what espionage-derived data the NSA may acquire. The NSA is technically not allowed to spy on Americans but if they can get the data from a third party who willingly provides it, they're legally in the clear. Google does not willingly provide data. Foreign powers may be successfully spying on Google and turning that data over to US government agencies. We can't know, although Google does everything possible to prevent such espionage.
So, barring successful deep penetration of Google by, say, GCHQ, the FBI is restricted to what they can compel from Google via legal channels: NSLs, warrants and subpoenas. All of these vehicles have restrictions on the type and scope of data that can be obtained, and all allow the recipient to challenge their compliance with the law. Google does challenge requests that don't meet the relevant legal standards. Those that do, of course, or those where the courts reject the challenges, must be complied with.
You should learn something about emergent properties. They're extremely common. In fact, nearly all phenomena we perceive are emergent properties of underlying processes that are rather different from what we see. In some cases the emergent properties are much simpler than what's really going on underneath, in other cases they're vastly more complex. To provoke some thinking about higher-level emergent properties, I recommend that you read Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach". It's an old book, and decidedly overly optimistic about AI in some areas, but very thought provoking.
Anyway, your argument is, basically, "I don't buy that this common thing is happening in this more complex case that I don't understand, so I'm going to throw science out the window and assume magic."
Note that I'm not actually saying you're wrong. We don't know. We don't understand intelligence, or consciousness. It is possible that thought is the stuff of which the universe is made, rather than vice versa. But that's a pretty radical departure from what we do understand, and there's no clear rationale for going that way. I mean, the clearest argument you have stated thus far is summed up in your sentence "Do you know how much that smells like classic bullshit?" (I added the question mark, since you forgot it). You claim it smells like bullshit, and then rant about how you're a non-conformist... but offer nothing to refute the simpler, more straightforward interpretation.
My bet is that research and experimentation like the above will move us incrementally toward actually understanding how our brains work, and interaction between that work and work on building ever more sophisticated (and effective![1]) "thinking" machines will eventually lead us to figure out how to build machines that rival or even surpass our own abilities. We won't build strong AI by accident, though; we'll build it by developing sophisticated theories of intelligence and applying them. Along the way I expect we'll learn some things about the hard limits of such computation, which will prove to apply to our brains just as much as they apply to anything we can build. I suspect that one of the things we'll learn is that fuzziness is a necessary attribute for computational universality, and that when we build really smart machines we'll also have constructed machines that make many of the same kinds of thinking errors that we do.
Those are just my guesses, though. I'm in no way claiming to have some special insight.
[1] If you doubt the effectiveness of the work that's been done, you haven't paid attention to the phenomenal advances in the last few years in areas like voice recognition, natural language processing and image recognition.
Excellent response.
As an aside, here's my answer to solipsism. It's almost certainly not novel, though it is original:
If I'm all that exists, damn I'm smart.
But, weirdly, I always attribute my deepest and most interesting thoughts to other parts of myself, which I call other people. I mean, I think I'm reading a book on statistical inference, or poetry, or listening to music, and there's all this enormous complexity and elegance which I don't understand and doesn't fit together... until I work hard to understand it, then it does. So if I'm all that exists, I somehow invented, say, non-Euclidean geometry, linear cryptanalysis, Bayesian inference, number theory, General Relativity, and a thousand other deep, sophisticated and -- most importantly for this argument -- intricate yet self-consistent ideas, but then convinced the one part of myself that I recognize as me that I don't know them and have to learn them. And then in the process of "learning" I go through a series of misunderstandings, where stuff I imagine I'm reading doesn't quite make sense, until I do get it, at which point everything falls neatly into place. Perfectly into place, actually. So perfectly that it's clear I had to have worked it all out in advance.
If I'm all there is, I'm some bizarre sort of split personality, and some of my other personalities are crazy smart. Heck, it's not even unlikely that one of my other much-smarter-than-me personalities will reply to this post and explain why it doesn't make sense, providing yet another iteration of me explaining what I already worked out to myself.
My conclusion is: The existence of the massive body of intellectual work apparently produced by other people demonstrates to me that other people do, in fact, exist, because I'm demonstrably not smart enough to have done it all. Unless I'm insane.
there is no reason to believe that consciousness or experience falls out of machines, no matter how wet or complex they are
And there is no reason not to believe that our experience of consciousness arises out of anything more than the complex interactions of our neural structure. If you had any evidence that there is something other than matter involved, you would have stated it. In the absence of non-material causes, I'll stick with the Occam's razor assumption and not require the invention of new non-physical constructs.
Your post is just mysticism dressed up as reason.
all of the robot crashes have been minor fender benders
Note that, for example, Google's cars are never going faster than 25 mph. So it's a little disingenuous to say they only get into fender benders when a human in the same situation would likely not have anything more than a minor fender bender either, even if they were very bad at driving.
Only some of the Google cars are limited to 25 mph, the newer, custom-designed ones with the cutesy appearance and removable steering wheel. Google began development with, and still continues developing on and testing with, normal vehicles that operate at up to freeway speeds, though those must have a human ready to take control at any moment (by law; not that they really need that). Most of the miles racked up by Google's vehicles have been by the faster ones.
1/5 is converted to energy, the rest is radiated into the surrounding area just like pavement does, albeit a little less than asphalt.
Apparently when compared to sand or dirt, less heat is radiated by PV panels.
Vegetation, absorbs light and emits heat as well, but it also cools the area via evaporative cooling.
Are you very certain about that? Plants can only cool evaporatively using water that is already present. I suppose they may pull some water back up that would otherwise have drained down through the soil, but on the other hand the photosynthesis process consumes water, locking it up in hydrocarbon chains. You're guessing that they provide a net cooling effect that wouldn't be present with non-living material of similar albedo.
But honestly the best way to make power is hydroelectric, always has been.
Though as a boater I happen to love the sort of environmental damage that hydro does, it does a LOT. Niagara is a special case, not available in most areas. In most places you have to build dams and flood valleys to make hydroelectric power. Even in cases where you can use existing bodies of water the change to the flow rates often does a lot of damage downstream.
IMO that's all worth it to make more bodies of water for recreation, oh, and to generate power. But there are a lot of opponents of hydro power for very good reasons.
The best solution is to distribute your power generation among all the ways of making power.
Well, not all the ways. We can remove fossil fuels from the mix. But all the rest... nuclear, hydro, geothermal, solar, wind, wave, etc.
Damnit, I clicked the article. Now Slashdot editors will think we enjoy Bennett's posts because they get a lot of clicks.
Dammit, you commented on the article. Now Slashdot editors will think we enjoy Bennett's posts because they generate a lot of comments.
Double damnit, now I commented on the article, too!
3-16 weeks? Cattle will be slaughtered at around 3 years age. Are you thinking of chickens?
Feedlot cattle are typically slaughtered at about 12 months. Grass-fed cattle are usually slaughtered at about 18 months. The additional time is because they fatten more slowly. Calves are slaughtered between three and 16 weeks of age, for veal, but that makes their meat much more expensive than that of older cattle. You can be pretty certain that the steak you buy in a grocery store lived about a year.
Just between us girls, you do realize that you contradicted yourself in your response, right?
No, I didn't.
Early in your response, you mention that the NRA is consistent with "training, responsibility, and safety"
Yep.
and then later say that their role (yes, through their "political wing", but that's hair-splitting, IMO. If you, as an organization support something, your "political wing" expresses it.) is to be a "rabid dog" defender of gun rights.
This is wrong on two counts: First, because you're assuming without support that rabid dog defense of gun rights is irresponsible. Second because it is *not* hair-splitting to claim that the organization is focused on training, responsibility and safety given that the bulk of the organization and its funding goes toward those ends.
I would submit, sir, that if the NRA was *truly* concerned with "training, responsibility and safety" that they would - independent of any law or regulation - require any gun dealer who sports their logo to require that the dealer prove to their (NRA's) standards that the person ready to walk out with their very first AR-15 have some basic knowledge, understanding and competence with the thing.
Why should the NRA be responsible for policing this? The NRA makes educational resources available, including providing pamphlets for gun makers and dealers to distribute. Requiring formal education (or even just testing), merely adds an additional obstacle to gun ownership. I'm all in favor of training, the more the better, but I agree with the NRA that it's up to personal responsibility, not something that should be mandated.
All you you have to do is visit any gun store (or Walmart) and watch the average yo-yo buy one as their very first gun, waving it around, doing their Rambo impersonation, etc. It's a bad situation, I think.
Is it really? Do you have evidence to support your claim that it's a bad situation? The sort of problem you're assuming seems to be one of accidental gun deaths and injuries, which are actually very low (<600 per year, in a nation of >300M people and >300M guns), and declining steadily. The gun problem in the US is one of suicide and intentional homicide, neither of which are the result of "yo-yos" buying their first AR-15.
My perspective on this question -- as a certified pistol, rifle and shotgun instructor -- is that people take guns pretty seriously, and seek out training and education. Perhaps my perspective is skewed, because obviously the people who come to me are obviously the responsible ones, but in my personal and family life I also don't see a lot of clueless people buying guns and "waving them around". And the CDC accidental death statistics bear out my perspective.
Till then, their just shills for the gun makers who love it whenever something terrible happens cause their sales go through the roof.
Thank the anti-gun lobbies for the massive surges in gun sales after terrible shootings. Its their calls for restrictions that cause Americans to buy guns in droves. Also, it's worth pointing out that nearly 3/4 of the NRA's funding comes from individuals, not gun makers. This figure is slightly skewed by the gun dealers who include a "free" NRA membership with each gun sale, but (1) there aren't that many of those and (2) that's only a one-year membership. Contrary to anti-gun propaganda, the NRA isn't a front for the gun makers.
(And, BTW, make it damned difficult and expensive to buy ammo these days! .357 Magnums and .45 ACPs are bad enough, but .22s are impossible to find.)
I still don't understand why the factories haven't ramped up production of .22LR. For the first two or three years, okay, they were probably concerned that the shortage was temporary and did
Sigh, bleeding heart study stating the opposite http://www.kcet.org/news/redef...
From what I can find (just the abstract and the letter linked by drinkypoo), the study referenced in the article assumes the heat island effect, then evaluates its effect on tortoises, it doesn't actually attempt to model heat absorption to determine whether the heat island effect would occur. The referenced papers on heat island effects are all about urban heat islands, caused by paving.
So, it appears to me that the author, biologist Barry Sinervo, just assumed that solar farms covered in PV panels would produce urban heat islands similar to urban regions covered in black pavement, and then calculated what would happen to tortoises if they were exposed to the same level of heating as if big chunks of the desert were paved. The study I cited (written by atmospheric and climate scientists) did model the differential heat absorption effects, and found that large solar farms will cause localized cooling, not heating.
So, ignoring epithets like "bleeding heart" and focusing just on the science, it appears to me that Sinervo's assumption of heat islands was unsupported and wrong, though I can see his rationale if one forgets about the energy converted to electricity.
CThe last thing I'd want is to get Internet access through the government. If you think service via private companies is bad, just wait until you try getting service via the government!
Power: Check. Water: Check. Gas: Check.
I'm not at all opposed to municipal broadband, but I don't think I've ever bought power, water or gas from the government. Are you sure you do? Everywhere I've lived they're private companies... though regulated because they're natural monopolies.
Like "From my cold, dead hands", right?
I don't see how that's in any way inconsistent with training, responsibility or safety. It's merely a strong expression of unwillingness to be illegally disarmed.
when Reagan proposed banning cop-killer bullets, he was supported by the NRA. Today? Don't make me laugh.
So... in your mind the NRA must support bans to espouse responsibility? The NRA was wrong then, and knew it was wrong, because there is no such thing as "cop-killer bullets". But back then they thought they should go along to get along. After a couple of decades of that resulted in increasingly ridiculous gun control laws they realized that no, it does not make sense to accept pointless and ridiculous restrictions in order to appease those who are afraid of guns, because they'll never stay appeased, not until guns are banned and confiscated.
No, the proper job of the NRA's political wing[1] is to do for the second amendment what the ACLU does for most of the rest of the Bill of Rights, to defend it tooth and nail. Where there are actual, reasonable restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms, restrictions that most people approve of and which meet the "strict scrutiny"[2] standard of judicial review, then those restrictions will be passed over the objections of the NRA and upheld by courts in the face of contrary arguments put forth by the NRA.
Preservation of liberty requires the existence of rabid dog defenders like the NRA and ACLU, and they should fight any restriction of core rights, right up to the point where it's determined that the restrictions are constitutional, even if that means lobbying and litigating apparently-silly points, like whether felons should be allowed to have guns (which the NRA really needs to file a suit about) or whether a county courthouse can have a display of the ten commandments.
[1] Note that the political wing of the NRA is actually a small part of the organization. The bulk of the NRA is focused on safety standards and training, especially of training and certifying instructors.
[2] The Supreme Court has not established an official standard of review for second amendment cases, but it's hard to see why it would be anything less than strict scrutiny, the standard applied to all of the other non-procedural rights in the Bill of Rights.
No but a blackbody absorbs more than something green or brown.
This study found that covering deserts with solar farms would reduce the absorbed heat enough to create regional cooling. Plants are darker in color than dry dirt, usually, but like solar panels they also convert incoming radiant energy into a different form. They're far less efficient at this than PV panels are, though, so it's unclear whether their reduced efficiency but lighter color results in more or less heat absorption.
One interesting thing to note about the study's conclusion about deserts, though, is that arguably the "know-nothings" complaining about solar panels "sucking up the sun" are right, in the sense that the solar energy they convert to electricity is not converted to heat, which can result in cooling. It's possible that they've even noticed this effect directly, since the town is surrounded on three sides by large solar farms.
Today, I am appalled at the level of "Gun Worship" with nary a thought for responsibility or safety.
Where are you seeing that? It's not from the NRA, which is as much about training, responsibility and safety as ever.
Something has going seriously wrong when a well respected professor of law begins saying that there are dangerous ideas, and that ideas can be the direct cause of terrorism.
Exactly. The only way mere ideas can be that dangerous is if they can be anchored to real problems which are powerful enough to convince people that extreme violence is the only available solution. If the US has done or is doing things that create that much anger in people then the real problem isn't the ideas, it's the actions which motivate the anger.
Personally, I don't think this is the case. I have no doubt that Muslims have cause for anger at the US, some of it related to a collision of fairly incompatible cultures, most of it related to US actions abroad, but I don't think there is enough cause to make this a problem outside of isolated nutcases who are in search of some reason to kill themselves and a lot of others.
The professor's proposal would actually be good in that it could very well identify those nutcases and remove them from circulation before they become a problem. But should we ever get to a situation where we have sufficiently large and deep problems that certain ideas become dangerous on a large scale, then we have a situation in which those "dangerous" ideas are incredibly important and must be spread! And that's without even getting into the ways in which such a system could -- and would -- be misused.
Yeah, this sort of limitation on free speech might well increase our safety in trivially-small[1] ways in the short term. But in the long run it's the most dangerous idea of them all.
We're not saying you have to be born here, but you have to be a citizen here to work here.
ROTFLMAO. That's effectively the same as saying you have to be born here, especially without H-1Bs and similar.
Before you can become a citizen you have to get a work visa, and that's all but impossible for most of the world. For example, my wife has a good friend from Italy who wanted to come to the US. We offered to sponsor her, even support her if needed. We spent three years and thousands of dollars before we gave up. Her *only* option was to (a) return to her home country (Nigeria) and submit an application for the immigration lottery, for which she'd have a roughly one in two hundred chance of winning[1].
The congressional staffer who was trying to help us got so frustrated that he eventually suggested that maybe she should just come on a tourist visa and overstay. Seriously!
Allowing H-1B's to skip the immigration line that fruit pickers have to go through is discrimination.
It varies depending on country of origin, but for most of the world that "line" is over 100 years long. See, there isn't really a "line", there's a lottery, and the odds of getting picked in any given year are pretty low. If you are persistent and try again every year you'll eventually get in with reasonable probability... or, more likely, your grandchild will because you'll be dead.
Also, you should consider that many H-1B employers would still hire these people if it couldn't bring them to the US. Without H-1Bs, my employer, Google, would just set up more overseas engineering offices. If the H-1B program didn't exist and instead they could all just get regular work visas (or green cards), Google would likely set up fewer overseas offices and bring more foreign workers here -- and that would be a good thing.
The US leadership in technology derives primarily from the fact that we've got a high standard of living and a great deal of freedom, and those characteristics attract the best and brightest of the world to come here. For about three generations now we've successfully drained a large portion of the world's brainpower and concentrated it here. That's not something we want to stop doing, in fact it's something we need to accelerate if we're going to stay ahead. If you don't want unlimited immigration, you should absolutely want to bring the smart, educated, valuable people here ahead of the "fruit pickers".
[1] In her case she would have had a zero chance of winning the lottery, because as soon as her family realized she was back in Nigeria her brothers would have murdered her. I don't know the details but she had somehow dishonored the family by getting involved with a boy she wasn't supposed to and they needed to kill her to recover their honor. That's why she fled to Italy in the first place.
Right, I was just saying that your "so rare as to be nonexistent" is just perception, not reality. They exist, they just don't call.