Human brains are GREAT at finding answers to complex, long term problems. Very few people are "flailing about", confused by climate change - they have very clear and certain opinions, usually held for totally stupid reasons having more to do with whether the belief resonates with their other beliefs. The "flailing" over climate change is taking place at a societal level, not individual human brains that can't see long term threats.
The article in question is really just a sly way of arguing that climate change deniers' brains are deficient, compared to readers whose superior brains have recognized the evidence for climate change.
Oh, and if you just decided I'm a climate change denier based on that last sentence, you have just proven my point for me - poor evidence, jumped to a conclusion. Recognizing an invalid method of argument does not automatically mean one is opposed to the beliefs of the arguer, though admittedly that is exactly the sort of human behavior I am pointing to.
Something that robotics researchers could immediately apply is technology developed to give robots balance.
Older people and young handicapped people often have to use walkers because they have balance issues.
A wearable device that could detect onset of loss of balance and immediately shift mass a bit to restore it.
Or a device fitted to legs to gently adjust leg positions to continuously maintain balance, recognizing the difference between the inherent imbalances of walking versus walking or standing dynamics that are headed toward a fall.
"I'm still right here at SpaceX, interviewing with you Elon. We only imagined that I'm walking around." "Is there a lot of walking involved in this job? If so, you should know that I came in 2nd in a walkathon." "Standing in a light rail car on an East/West branch of a system with stations every mile." "Still not on Mars, damn it! Hire me and let's get going!" "Pretty much anywhere, if the GPS in my phone malfunctions that badly."
Almond trees, for example, take about 10% of agriculture water, or 8% of all human-used water.
So if you are willing to pay the $ billions to compensate the almond farmers you would bankrupt by stealing their water, you could get about a 40% increase in the 20% share of non-agricultural water, to water your lawn and fill your swimming pool. California has sufficient water to drink and bathe after all - it's the lawns and pools that "suffer" in a drought. So you're really arguing in favor of reducing food production in favor of keeping lawns green and pools filled.
Oh, BTW - agriculture actually gets only about 40% of total human managed water - half of water that could be directed to human use goes to conservation areas. Yep - those water-hogging birds and animals and trees use more water than "big agriculture". Truly shameful of them not to give up some of that to make sure you can go swimming in your home pool, or golfing on soft green grass.
Need to clarify assumptions: Assume humanity has to essentially start over, recapitulating previous stages - tribes, city states, kingdoms/empires, nations, global expansion (if possible). Assume the biosphere recovers fast enough that it is not a barrier to civilization's redevelopment. Assume nearly all technology is forgotten and much of science is lost except some basic concepts - needing to be redeveloped. Assume religion again gains dominance over understanding of the world, but remembers being deeply challenged by science - and so suppresses science and technological change for centuries, while preserving some key bits (like germ theory, maybe surgery) that can be controlled to elevate the status of religion. Assume easy availability of concentrated metals (ruins of cities) accelerates the process of recovering early civilization, but delays development of mining and refining technologies, preventing a return to hard to get fossil fuels and delaying metallurgy and other material science.
Based on this, civilization can at least recover to pre- enlightenment levels. And once more, reform within religion will be key to going beyond that. Possibly this time organized religion will try to retain control over science to suppress the potential harm to religion and control what technologies get released that might threaten a static hierarchical society. Long term, that will fail, but could work for centuries. Technologies might be limited to the powerful, with most people trapped on small farms that barely feed them with little surplus. Not so much a "dark" age of ignorance, as a "slow" age of tightly controlled progress, where stability is paramount, improvement of the lives of the masses a distant last.
What does it say about some solar advocates' faith in the viability of solar power that they feel a need to make solar appear better by reporting utility solar installations in terms of gigawatts (hugely misleading, as a few others have pointed out) rather than gigawatt-hours of energy production?
While it won't account for all canyons, I suspect there could be Mars-specific mechanisms, such as layers of dust/ice/dry ice that build up over the ages and metamorph under pressure into stratified rock. Then something like a meteor strike disrupts the surface, exposing the strata at an edge, allowing the ice to sublimate, weakening the rock structure and allowing accelerated crumbling of the rockface, exposing more icy strata to the same forces of decay - including wind that blows away some of the dust released. This process would release a lot of smaller rock and dust, that sometimes looks like material washed down by moving water.
Set a timer for 24 hours. Until that timer expires, attempt to determine if the code is malicious, or not malicious. If you determine the code is or is not malicious, cease testing the code. If you determine the code is not malicious, or if the timer expires with no decision either way about the code, release the villainess. If you determine the code is malicious and the villainess is still in custody, do not release her, and notify the proper authorities to try her for her crimes. If you determine the code is malicious and the villainess is no longer in custody, notify the authorities to have her found, arrested, and tried.
Habeas Corpus and Innocent Until Proven Guilty.
The authors started with a conclusion they wished to reach, and found pretty much the most absurd possible argument that seemed to justify their desired outcome.
"The current panic around Ebola shows how people are ill-informed about risk. While stressing over Ebola, the media is oblivious to true public health threats like obesity, heart disease, drunk driving, diabetes, and the like."
Nonsense.
The media are focusing on Ebola because it is a relatively *unknown* risk for most, which makes it novel, which makes it news. They have extensively covered all of the other risks, and the public are generally well informed of the risks - or as informed as they are individually capable of being informed without one-on-one tutoring or coaching.
Why not just merge the Start menu and the desktop once and for all, with all the best features of both? Hold down the Windows key to instantly hide all but the desktop.
Basically like clicking in the lower right corner on Win7, but much faster, while bringing in some of the UI features from Win8.
Get rid of the various "hover/slide in from the edge" Win8 conventions - put those options on the desktop.
Make the task bar default visible only on the Desktop (optionally always visible, of course). For touch, keep a transparent Start button hovering in the lower left - hold touch on it if you don't have a Windows key/button to show the desktop. Apps could request true full screen to get rid of the button, of course.
It sounds like this sort of thing takes a scale of resources to accomplish that wouldn't be used idly.
So why are we hearing about a lot of cracks lately that get huge amounts of payment information, but apparently don't lead to massive numbers and dollars of thefts from accounts?
Is someone testing experimental weapons for a future cyber war that would aim to create enough financial chaos to crash our economy? Or conversely, is there a secret government project to deliberately crack corporate financial systems, to scare them into getting more secure?
We've long known what will likely avoid these sorts of problems - create a rotating environment to simulate gravity. While the physics principle is simple, engineering a safe rotating station is probably quite challenging. The sort of thing NASA was created to investigate...
So, it's legal for Americans to spy on the Dutch? Who knew! Next it'll be found perfectly OK for the Dutch government to take kickbacks from American criminals that rob Dutch citizens. Hurrah for the newly authorized power of crime laundering!
If we decide not to allow the public to fly drones around peeping into back yards, the same should apply to the police (without a warrant). The limits on casual/easy police surveillance should be pretty much the same as the limits on the public. The police should be no more than citizens that we have authorized to act in our name.
That said, it may be time to be realistic, that technology is expanding our powers of easy observation beyond historical limits. Create new laws regulating personal and commercial drone camera use, including allowable flight altitudes, linger times, recording and viewing resolutions, etc under various circumstances - with the same standards governing police use without a warrant. Balance new benefits against the loss of a few old privacy benefits. Same goes for things like Google Glass.
The key is to avoid allowing politicians to carve out any special exceptions/powers exclusively for the police - insist that police powers be based on those of the general public.
OK, I missed that it was trying to implement memory-mapped I/O, because I only looked at the "Duff's Device" code. The rest still applies, with apologies for the ranting.
Um - maybe my eyes are just skipping something - but isn't that (Wikipedia) implementation completely 'bugged'? I.e. it seems that it only increments the source "from" pointer, not the destination "to" pointer?
Not to mention that the idea that "tricky" code is "elegant" is pretty much completely backwards. Coding in odd ways just to be tricky, or to minimize lines of source code for the sake of 'compactness', or pretty much any other 'clever coding' goal - tends to create buggy code that is hard to debug and hard for anyone else to understand if they need to modify it. As evidenced by the many good programmers here who looked at that "clever" code and didn't notice that it continuously overwrites the same location in memory...
It was such 'cleverness' that led to the bad reputation of 'goto' from people writing spaghetti code. At least in the early days of programming, programmers had the excuse of slow processors and limited memory and poor compilers, to justify coming to equate 'tricky' with "clever and elegant". Unless you're coding for some ultra-tiny system, such thinking is simply obsolete, and anyone engaging in it ought to be embarrassed at their misguided priorities.
Elegant code is functionally correct, will create a fast/efficient/compact run-time (assuming a decent compiler / interpreter and depending on settings appropriate to the project), and above all must be READABLE and MAINTAINABLE.
Where old-time programmers abused GOTO, modern C++ programmers tend to abuse inheritance and templates, creating code that is often nearly impossible to follow even with the aid of a good development/debugging environment - let alone follow by reading the static source code. And the sad thing is, they think they're engaging in "good programming" even as they create incomprehensible, unmaintainable monstrosities.
One of my personal long standing predictions has been that when we finally get really cheap "good enough" robot muscles, personal robots will take off much like PCs did, even if the muscles have significant problems to be worked around.
I presume that with use these muscles will stretch and lose strength. But that's OK - just pair them with control software that adapts automatically. If the muscles get too weak, replace them. The main question will be how fast they degrade. If they could last in an intermittently active robot for a month, that's probably enough to get started.
Another question is how fast they can cycle without over heating and ruining them. Given the sorts of applications they describe, I suspect there are issues with speed. But one good thing about this development is that anyone can experiment with it in their garage, and many will, and solutions for fast cycling muscles will be found.
Most likely, the NSA would be split along the lines of their three core missions:
- Spy on and sabotage information systems of enemies of the United States to disrupt their operations. - Spy on and sabotage information systems of friendly foreign nations to maintain and enhance US hegemony. - Spy on and sabotage information systems of US citizens, to chill free speech that might threaten the NSA with budget cuts.
Then the first could be downsized as not an essential contributor to their primary goal of maintaining the power of the NSA. Use the freed resources to step up the last, as obviously they've gotten too lax there and it is starting to threaten the primary goal.
To insure that people have access to great entertainment, we insure that the creators of great entertainment are fairly compensated - so we must destroy the greatest means of distributing content ever invented. ------ Or, we could design a system of tagging content that allows it's distribution to be monitored and recorded, making it easy for creators of edited content to incorporate a fair tagging of how much of others' content went into their work. Any new content for which the creator wishes to be paid would be submitted to a registration and review site, to be assigned a registered tag.
Any content for which the creator doesn't want to be paid could be uploaded, and the storage provider would be required to assign it an unregistered tag. If the unregistered content became popular enough, it would be reviewed to determine if it contained the untagged work of other creators - but only to insure fair distribution of fees. ALL content uploaded can be used by anyone. If you don't want everyone to get it, encrypt it.
Money would be collected as fees on internet users, at two levels: Full fee - no restrictions on content consumption, TBD whether paid in proportion to amount of content consumed or flat fee. No fee - all tagged content is stripped except tiny fragments considered "fair use" (such as quotes, links to content, maybe images shrunken to no more than 256x144 pixels, video represented as a single frame from the original, etc).
Instead of focusing on a "new look", why not analyze where Slashdot fails, and see if you can't improve on that?
While it's fine for everyone to have a voice and toss off irreverent irrelevancies - that's kind of at the heart of Slashdot commenting - why not try to build something new that IN ADDITION tries to help commenters move past the classic "all heat, no light" mode of internet discussions?
E..g., for controversial issues, help different sides build their arguments into a few high-contrast positions explaining to the ignorant other sides why their position is correct? With branching and versioning to allow evolution of those positions. Similarly, for the various outrages that fearful governments and greedy corps frequently try to impose, and are reported here, how about creating a means of building consensus positions on useful actions to counter them?
Make Slashdot the vanguard in Open Source consensus building. Something along the lines of liquid democracy instead of simple polling and modding. Maybe throw in something along the lines of building up a topic-focused micro-wiki of useful information, links and ideas centered on the topic.
Slashdot Mirror
Human brains are GREAT at finding answers to complex, long term problems. Very few people are "flailing about", confused by climate change - they have very clear and certain opinions, usually held for totally stupid reasons having more to do with whether the belief resonates with their other beliefs. The "flailing" over climate change is taking place at a societal level, not individual human brains that can't see long term threats.
The article in question is really just a sly way of arguing that climate change deniers' brains are deficient, compared to readers whose superior brains have recognized the evidence for climate change.
Oh, and if you just decided I'm a climate change denier based on that last sentence, you have just proven my point for me - poor evidence, jumped to a conclusion. Recognizing an invalid method of argument does not automatically mean one is opposed to the beliefs of the arguer, though admittedly that is exactly the sort of human behavior I am pointing to.
Something that robotics researchers could immediately apply is technology developed to give robots balance.
Older people and young handicapped people often have to use walkers because they have balance issues.
A wearable device that could detect onset of loss of balance and immediately shift mass a bit to restore it.
Or a device fitted to legs to gently adjust leg positions to continuously maintain balance, recognizing the difference between the inherent imbalances of walking versus walking or standing dynamics that are headed toward a fall.
"I'm still right here at SpaceX, interviewing with you Elon. We only imagined that I'm walking around."
"Is there a lot of walking involved in this job? If so, you should know that I came in 2nd in a walkathon."
"Standing in a light rail car on an East/West branch of a system with stations every mile."
"Still not on Mars, damn it! Hire me and let's get going!"
"Pretty much anywhere, if the GPS in my phone malfunctions that badly."
Almond trees, for example, take about 10% of agriculture water, or 8% of all human-used water.
So if you are willing to pay the $ billions to compensate the almond farmers you would bankrupt by stealing their water, you could get about a 40% increase in the 20% share of non-agricultural water, to water your lawn and fill your swimming pool. California has sufficient water to drink and bathe after all - it's the lawns and pools that "suffer" in a drought. So you're really arguing in favor of reducing food production in favor of keeping lawns green and pools filled.
Oh, BTW - agriculture actually gets only about 40% of total human managed water - half of water that could be directed to human use goes to conservation areas. Yep - those water-hogging birds and animals and trees use more water than "big agriculture". Truly shameful of them not to give up some of that to make sure you can go swimming in your home pool, or golfing on soft green grass.
It's all very fine and scientific to say that H20 is H20 - but I think many distrust that there won't be occasional 'leaks' in the system.
Need to clarify assumptions:
Assume humanity has to essentially start over, recapitulating previous stages - tribes, city states, kingdoms/empires, nations, global expansion (if possible).
Assume the biosphere recovers fast enough that it is not a barrier to civilization's redevelopment.
Assume nearly all technology is forgotten and much of science is lost except some basic concepts - needing to be redeveloped.
Assume religion again gains dominance over understanding of the world, but remembers being deeply challenged by science - and so suppresses science and technological change for centuries, while preserving some key bits (like germ theory, maybe surgery) that can be controlled to elevate the status of religion.
Assume easy availability of concentrated metals (ruins of cities) accelerates the process of recovering early civilization, but delays development of mining and refining technologies, preventing a return to hard to get fossil fuels and delaying metallurgy and other material science.
Based on this, civilization can at least recover to pre- enlightenment levels. And once more, reform within religion will be key to going beyond that. Possibly this time organized religion will try to retain control over science to suppress the potential harm to religion and control what technologies get released that might threaten a static hierarchical society. Long term, that will fail, but could work for centuries. Technologies might be limited to the powerful, with most people trapped on small farms that barely feed them with little surplus. Not so much a "dark" age of ignorance, as a "slow" age of tightly controlled progress, where stability is paramount, improvement of the lives of the masses a distant last.
What does it say about some solar advocates' faith in the viability of solar power that they feel a need to make solar appear better by reporting utility solar installations in terms of gigawatts (hugely misleading, as a few others have pointed out) rather than gigawatt-hours of energy production?
While it won't account for all canyons, I suspect there could be Mars-specific mechanisms, such as layers of dust/ice/dry ice that build up over the ages and metamorph under pressure into stratified rock. Then something like a meteor strike disrupts the surface, exposing the strata at an edge, allowing the ice to sublimate, weakening the rock structure and allowing accelerated crumbling of the rockface, exposing more icy strata to the same forces of decay - including wind that blows away some of the dust released. This process would release a lot of smaller rock and dust, that sometimes looks like material washed down by moving water.
Set a timer for 24 hours. Until that timer expires, attempt to determine if the code is malicious, or not malicious.
If you determine the code is or is not malicious, cease testing the code.
If you determine the code is not malicious, or if the timer expires with no decision either way about the code, release the villainess.
If you determine the code is malicious and the villainess is still in custody, do not release her, and notify the proper authorities to try her for her crimes.
If you determine the code is malicious and the villainess is no longer in custody, notify the authorities to have her found, arrested, and tried.
Habeas Corpus and Innocent Until Proven Guilty.
The authors started with a conclusion they wished to reach, and found pretty much the most absurd possible argument that seemed to justify their desired outcome.
"The current panic around Ebola shows how people are ill-informed about risk. While stressing over Ebola, the media is oblivious to true public health threats like obesity, heart disease, drunk driving, diabetes, and the like."
Nonsense.
The media are focusing on Ebola because it is a relatively *unknown* risk for most, which makes it novel, which makes it news. They have extensively covered all of the other risks, and the public are generally well informed of the risks - or as informed as they are individually capable of being informed without one-on-one tutoring or coaching.
Why not just merge the Start menu and the desktop once and for all, with all the best features of both?
Hold down the Windows key to instantly hide all but the desktop.
Basically like clicking in the lower right corner on Win7, but much faster, while bringing in some of the UI features from Win8.
Get rid of the various "hover/slide in from the edge" Win8 conventions - put those options on the desktop.
Make the task bar default visible only on the Desktop (optionally always visible, of course).
For touch, keep a transparent Start button hovering in the lower left - hold touch on it if you don't have a Windows key/button to show the desktop.
Apps could request true full screen to get rid of the button, of course.
It sounds like this sort of thing takes a scale of resources to accomplish that wouldn't be used idly.
So why are we hearing about a lot of cracks lately that get huge amounts of payment information, but apparently don't lead to massive numbers and dollars of thefts from accounts?
Is someone testing experimental weapons for a future cyber war that would aim to create enough financial chaos to crash our economy?
Or conversely, is there a secret government project to deliberately crack corporate financial systems, to scare them into getting more secure?
We've long known what will likely avoid these sorts of problems - create a rotating environment to simulate gravity.
While the physics principle is simple, engineering a safe rotating station is probably quite challenging.
The sort of thing NASA was created to investigate...
But it'll be perfectly OK if you do it for the Dutch government.
So, it's legal for Americans to spy on the Dutch? Who knew!
Next it'll be found perfectly OK for the Dutch government to take kickbacks from American criminals that rob Dutch citizens.
Hurrah for the newly authorized power of crime laundering!
If we decide not to allow the public to fly drones around peeping into back yards, the same should apply to the police (without a warrant). The limits on casual/easy police surveillance should be pretty much the same as the limits on the public. The police should be no more than citizens that we have authorized to act in our name.
That said, it may be time to be realistic, that technology is expanding our powers of easy observation beyond historical limits. Create new laws regulating personal and commercial drone camera use, including allowable flight altitudes, linger times, recording and viewing resolutions, etc under various circumstances - with the same standards governing police use without a warrant. Balance new benefits against the loss of a few old privacy benefits. Same goes for things like Google Glass.
The key is to avoid allowing politicians to carve out any special exceptions/powers exclusively for the police - insist that police powers be based on those of the general public.
IMO.
OK, I missed that it was trying to implement memory-mapped I/O, because I only looked at the "Duff's Device" code.
The rest still applies, with apologies for the ranting.
Um - maybe my eyes are just skipping something - but isn't that (Wikipedia) implementation completely 'bugged'?
I.e. it seems that it only increments the source "from" pointer, not the destination "to" pointer?
Not to mention that the idea that "tricky" code is "elegant" is pretty much completely backwards. Coding in odd ways just to be tricky, or to minimize lines of source code for the sake of 'compactness', or pretty much any other 'clever coding' goal - tends to create buggy code that is hard to debug and hard for anyone else to understand if they need to modify it. As evidenced by the many good programmers here who looked at that "clever" code and didn't notice that it continuously overwrites the same location in memory...
It was such 'cleverness' that led to the bad reputation of 'goto' from people writing spaghetti code. At least in the early days of programming, programmers had the excuse of slow processors and limited memory and poor compilers, to justify coming to equate 'tricky' with "clever and elegant". Unless you're coding for some ultra-tiny system, such thinking is simply obsolete, and anyone engaging in it ought to be embarrassed at their misguided priorities.
Elegant code is functionally correct, will create a fast/efficient/compact run-time (assuming a decent compiler / interpreter and depending on settings appropriate to the project), and above all must be READABLE and MAINTAINABLE.
Where old-time programmers abused GOTO, modern C++ programmers tend to abuse inheritance and templates, creating code that is often nearly impossible to follow even with the aid of a good development/debugging environment - let alone follow by reading the static source code. And the sad thing is, they think they're engaging in "good programming" even as they create incomprehensible, unmaintainable monstrosities.
Just tell them that the vaccine is fully organic, low sodium, fat free and gluten free.
Also, it's got Electrolytes.
One of my personal long standing predictions has been that when we finally get really cheap "good enough" robot muscles, personal robots will take off much like PCs did, even if the muscles have significant problems to be worked around.
I presume that with use these muscles will stretch and lose strength. But that's OK - just pair them with control software that adapts automatically. If the muscles get too weak, replace them. The main question will be how fast they degrade. If they could last in an intermittently active robot for a month, that's probably enough to get started.
Another question is how fast they can cycle without over heating and ruining them. Given the sorts of applications they describe, I suspect there are issues with speed. But one good thing about this development is that anyone can experiment with it in their garage, and many will, and solutions for fast cycling muscles will be found.
Most likely, the NSA would be split along the lines of their three core missions:
- Spy on and sabotage information systems of enemies of the United States to disrupt their operations.
- Spy on and sabotage information systems of friendly foreign nations to maintain and enhance US hegemony.
- Spy on and sabotage information systems of US citizens, to chill free speech that might threaten the NSA with budget cuts.
Then the first could be downsized as not an essential contributor to their primary goal of maintaining the power of the NSA.
Use the freed resources to step up the last, as obviously they've gotten too lax there and it is starting to threaten the primary goal.
The FAO food price index doesn't appear to be especially "up" right now:
http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsi...
So how does this model work again?
...you nazi libertarian communist illiterate whack-job faux liberal neocon conspirators!
To insure that people have access to great entertainment, we insure that the creators of great entertainment are fairly compensated - so we must destroy the greatest means of distributing content ever invented.
------
Or, we could design a system of tagging content that allows it's distribution to be monitored and recorded, making it easy for creators of edited content to incorporate a fair tagging of how much of others' content went into their work. Any new content for which the creator wishes to be paid would be submitted to a registration and review site, to be assigned a registered tag.
Any content for which the creator doesn't want to be paid could be uploaded, and the storage provider would be required to assign it an unregistered tag. If the unregistered content became popular enough, it would be reviewed to determine if it contained the untagged work of other creators - but only to insure fair distribution of fees. ALL content uploaded can be used by anyone. If you don't want everyone to get it, encrypt it.
Money would be collected as fees on internet users, at two levels: Full fee - no restrictions on content consumption, TBD whether paid in proportion to amount of content consumed or flat fee. No fee - all tagged content is stripped except tiny fragments considered "fair use" (such as quotes, links to content, maybe images shrunken to no more than 256x144 pixels, video represented as a single frame from the original, etc).
Instead of focusing on a "new look", why not analyze where Slashdot fails, and see if you can't improve on that?
While it's fine for everyone to have a voice and toss off irreverent irrelevancies - that's kind of at the heart of Slashdot commenting - why not try to build something new that IN ADDITION tries to help commenters move past the classic "all heat, no light" mode of internet discussions?
E..g., for controversial issues, help different sides build their arguments into a few high-contrast positions explaining to the ignorant other sides why their position is correct? With branching and versioning to allow evolution of those positions. Similarly, for the various outrages that fearful governments and greedy corps frequently try to impose, and are reported here, how about creating a means of building consensus positions on useful actions to counter them?
Make Slashdot the vanguard in Open Source consensus building. Something along the lines of liquid democracy instead of simple polling and modding. Maybe throw in something along the lines of building up a topic-focused micro-wiki of useful information, links and ideas centered on the topic.