Teaching Calculus to five year olds is stupid. But that's not really what the article describes. I think a critical distinction implied by the article but not stated is that there's a difference between rigorously teaching a topic to the point of mastery, and exposing children to a topic to make them familiar and comfortable with it.
I've always believed that 50% of time in school should be spent rigorous teaching, and 50% of the time should be spent easing students into more complex topics over time. I think its not productive that a student is not exposed in any way to a topic like statistics, say, and then suddenly they land in the class and have to learn the topic from scratch starting with little or no familiarity with the topic at all. I think the article suggests that rather than spend all of your time practicing arithmetic, it would be more beneficial long-term to start introducing complex topics at a level where the students aren't being asked to demonstrate complete mastery. You aren't going to give a five year old calculus homework. But a five year old exposed to mirror books, say, becomes a seven year old that is familiar with the concept of iteration and can be introduced to the notion of infinite series. That seven year old becomes a ten year old that is comfortable with the concept of summation, even if they aren't masters of the formulas. But when geometry comes along at thirteen, they would be a lot more comfortable with construction, with algorithms, with geometric limits.
Basically, these days most schools teach single-point classes. What you learn in this class has little to do with the next class. Learning geometry doesn't help you learn probability, and neither help you much in learning calculus. Its all learn today, forget tomorrow, dive into the deep end of the pool for the next topic next year. But subjects like algebra and calculus and statistics are based on concepts and ways of thinking that are not intuitive or trivial for most people. Taking the long view, and investing time today to make it easier to learn those topics tomorrow is I think what the article is really talking about, and its a notion I happen to agree with 100%.
You can take this to silly levels. Actually trying to teach calculus to a five year old, or even a ten year old, is ludicrous. 1% might get it, the other 99% will just get confused or frustrated, or worse oversimplify to the point of error just to pass the class and then face even worse hardship when they have to learn it "for real." But introduction, familiarization, and slow incremental acclimation without overzealous forcing is probably the best way to both teach and keep interest in many topics, not just math.
Actually, Astrology is falsifiable, and also falsified. Practitiioners makes predictions that can be tested, and under genuinely controlled testing they generally fail about as often as chance would predict.
To suggest that anyone else is unfit to work in any field requiring security is absurd.
I think he was saying if you're in an environment where you both need to use very strong passwords *and* its not acceptable to write them down in something you carry securely all the time, *then* that suggests you either have to have a very good memory or you're not qualified to operate with those restrictions.
Lord "Justice" Laws might have just as easily said with the same straight face: "We do not know what data they have, but if they happen to have plans for top secrete weapons, and publish it, then they will endanger everyones lives.". So basically what the high court has done is make up a possible threat in order to get the ruling they wanted (or were told to get more likely).
The (UK) government made the assertion in court that the documents Miranda had contained information whose release could endanger lives and Miranda's legal team did not refute that statement. Instead they basically said it was the job of responsible journalists to take steps to ensure that did not happen, conceding that the government had a legitimate reason to believe there was a real threat but claiming that threat should be handled by the journalists themselves.
The problem with this argument, which the court described in its ruling, is that while journalists have a professional responsibility to act responsibly with respect to such potentially dangerous information, they have no actual *legal* responsibility to do so under UK law. Furthermore, Miranda himself was by his own admission not a journalist, and therefore not actually subject to those codes of conduct anyway. What Miranda's defense team seems to be arguing is that even if the government had a legitimate reason to be concerned over the documents Miranda was carrying, the fact that he was "working with journalists" should be enough to convince the government he should be trusted to act safely and responsibly.
Now, this is not me making these statements, and not even the court itself: this is Miranda's legal team making this argument: that the government should by default trust anyone claiming to be working with journalists to handle sensitive and dangerous information properly. Your characterization of the UK government's actions isn't just contradicted by the court ruling, its contradicted by Miranda's lawyers themselves.
This story links to the BBC which also appears to be very uncritical of the UK government press freedom violations these days. A much better news source would be the new real investigative reporting at The Intercept:
Actually, both of those articles claim the UK court ruled that the journalistic activities David Miranda was indirectly involved with "equate" to terrorism. “I’m of course not happy that a court has formally said that I was a legitimate terrorism suspect..." quotes one of those two articles.
The UK court did not rule that way if you read the judgment. In fact, it explicitly states it did not make such a distinction. The court ruled that the law in question doesn't say that the government can detain people it suspects of being terrorists, it actually says the government can detain people who have any connection with such activity to determine if they are or are not involved. The court explicitly ruled that the law was not constructed to detain people who provide "probable cause" in the criminal sense, because the detainment is not specifically targeted at criminals or even suspected criminals directly. Its designed to provide the government with a tool to investigate people who might be, and for whom there doesn't necessarily exist criminally sufficient probable cause for search.
The UK court also ruled that while the statute refers to "terrorist activity" it actually explicitly defines the term for the purposes of the law, irrespective of what people consider "terrorist activity" to be, and the court was required to follow that definition. For the purposes of that statute only, "terrorist activity" is any activity that:
“(1) In this Act ‘terrorism’ means the use or threat of action
where—
(a) the action falls within subsection (2),
(b) the use or threat is designed to influence the
government or an international governmental
organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of
the public, and
(c) the use or threat is made for the purpose of
advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological
cause.
(2) Action falls within this subsection if it—
(a) involves serious violence against a person,
(b) involves serious damage to property,
(c) endangers a person’s life, other than that of the
person committing the action,
(d) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the
public or a section of the public, or
(e) is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously
to disrupt an electronic system.”
Basically, its any act or threat of an act intended to influence a government or governments, involves serious property damage or mortal danger of some specific serious nature, and is intended to advance a political agenda. Notice the law doesn't specifically say you have to threaten to kill someone or kill someone. It actually says you have to act or threaten to act in such a way that death or damage is a consequence of that act. The court itself noted that the law appears extremely broad in its definition, but it wasn't being asked to rule on whether the law was overbroad.
The court ultimately ruled that the government had a legitimate reason to believe that David Miranda was involved with people who were at the time acting or threatening to act in a manner which was designed to influence a government and forward a political agenda, and those acts had the potential to cause death or serious property damage. All those appear true on their face, and thus the law states the detainment was legal. The law doesn't say David Miranda is a terrorist or was involved with terrorist
The US has no interest in saving the environment. Neither is (really) any of the other first world nations. Like Europe, the US will not get the worst of climate change, and in any case, there is no place better prepared to deal with the consequences
That may be true in a literal sense, and a lot of people think this, but what they often fail to acknowledge is that the first world also has the most to lose. The US, for example, is the world's largest food exporter, something most Americans don't fully appreciate. Climate change is going to change things in many places in many difficult to predict ways, but there's no change possible that will improve America's food production situation. As the big winner, it can only get worse.
I think too many people believe that America is in the good position its in because of some innate greatness of the country that won't change, but the truth is that America was also dealt a great hand and any reshuffling of the deck is far more likely to generate a worse position than a better one. The First World were the big winners in the rule-the-planet lottery. If they were smart, they would do everything possible to help the rest of the world maintain that status quo. If they were smart.
In line with Star Trek's "Every species except humans has some ludicrously rigid hardcoded trait" style, that is a Ferengi problem; but I suspect that it'd be a major issue for at least some people and some cultures in a hypothetical post-scarcity environment.
In fact, we don't even need to hypothesize: In situations where supply starts to increase, particularly when it increases to the point where everybody who is remotely anybody can have some for pocket change, you virtually always see the creation of additional 'tiers' of artificially scarce versions. The fact that the creator bothers with this is a revenue maximizing move(and so the same incentive wouldn't exist if there were no scarcity generally, and no reason to bother with this 'revenue' nonsense); but the fact that it works... there's the rub. Everyone can have a high quality reproduction of FuzzyFuzzyFungus' masterpeice 'The Hyphae Horror', for the simple cost of printing; but they'll still pay more for the numbered-limited-to-500 edition, more still for print #1 in that edition. Why? All the prints are identical; any you value the one that possesses 'firstness'?
I suspect that people would love to get away from scarcity in whatever areas they feel are out of their grip right now(whether they are super poor and that is food and shelter, middle class and that is healthcare and college, and so on); but, in our perversity, we seem to still crave the exclusive, the unique, the rare, in whatever nonessentials are relevant.
Its interesting to hypothesize how the Federation, and Earth specifically, managed to reach its post-scarcity model when so many other cultures didn't, and it doesn't seem obvious we in reality are on that same trajectory because of the need for producers to continue to generate high profit margins as you suggest.
And there is a possible way for that to happen that is both plausible and relatively unique to Earth in the Star Trek universe. The Earth, and eventually Federation centered on Earth, we see in Star Trek comes about as a post-nuclear war society with the invention of warp drive. So, simplifying greatly, suppose that in the aftermath of WWIII, with most political AND economic superpowers and powerhouses turned to nuclear ash, a proto-society centered on the invention of warp drive emerges that quickly overtakes everything else on the planet. This society has the advantage of being the only one with direct access to interstellar trade and quickly gains access to space-based resource mining, space based energy production, inexpensive heavy-lift-to-orbit technologies, and rapidly becomes THE energy and resource producer on the planet. And suppose it decides to unify the planet through sheer bribery: join us and get (virtually) free energy, food, housing, and materials. The government of this society wouldn't be motivated by monetary profit, but by the desire to unify the planet under its flag. So instead of corporations constantly looking to maximize revenue, you'd have a government attempting to maximize footprint by making it very easy to get what most of the planet no longer has and it now has mega supplies of. Imagine a global public works project like the one that rebuilt Europe after WWII, but across the entire planet and driven by a government that has a thousand times the resources that the United States had after WWII.
Intriguingly, in Enterprise its mentioned by the Vulcan ambassador late in the series that one of the reasons Vulcan tries to keep Earth on such a short leash is that Vulcan is actually afraid of Earth: Vulcan took about a thousand years to recover from its planetary nuclear war, and their witnessing Earth replicate that feat in less than a century. Perhaps the reason why is because Vulcan had to dig itself out on its own, and its inspiration was philosophical in nature with Surak. On Earth, its inspiration was aided by the Vulcans themselves: they became
Why do you want to take the rules from two of the most screwed-up parts of our economy and apply them to one of the few areas that actually works pretty well?
Its only by the standards invented for the software industry alone that the software industry "works pretty well." By any other standard of quality it scores a zero on a scale of one to ten. We all sit around and agree that software is complex complex complex and its amazing programmers get computers to do anything at all blah blah Turing blah and then we judge software with preschool rules that say you can't hold any failing against software. And of course on that scale it works pretty well. By that standard 12th century medicine worked pretty well, astrology works pretty well, and always betting on black works surprisingly well in Vegas.
In reality, the truth is its impossible for most people to write non-trivial programs without bugs. Just like its impossible for most people to consistently land airplanes without crashing. In air travel, 99.9% of those people are weeded out of pilot programs. In programming, they move on to the next project.
Part of the problem is that the programming profession hasn't had its professional renaissance like the medical profession had in the twentieth century. We don't train programmers to be skilled, efficient, and above all conform to an agreed to set of professional standards. There's no such thing as programmer malpractice. Basically the software development industry is exactly where the medical profession would be if everyone owned a medical text from ancient Greece and treated themselves and their friends based on guesswork and late night infomercials.
That analogy doesn't work. Quack medicine is often worse than no medicine at all (there is evidence that, prior to the 20th century, doctors were as likely to kill the patient as to cure them). In contrast, a buggy and incomplete program may still be better than no program at all.
Most of the time, when code gets screwed up, nobody dies. In those cases where shoddy code actually could put lives at risk (e.g. embedded systems for vehicles, medical equipment, etc.) then there usually is more rigorous quality control, better and more comprehensive testing, and so forth. But if you demand that every piece of code in existence be written to those standards, most people and organizations won't be able to afford having any code written at all.
How is it then that we can afford so much better medical services, so much better air transportation, so much better everything else, but if we want reliable code its going to cost extreme amounts of money? What your thesis above seems to be saying is if only software killed more people, not only would we have better software, but it would be cheaper as well. That's an interesting conjecture to forward.
It's a slippery slope. You really want the government setting up detailed regulations governing software development and how software projects are to be managed?
The government does not dictate which scalpels to use or how much stitches to sew, and yet the medical profession is about a gazillion times more reliable than the software development industry, even though the medical profession is also saddled with performing services on a platform far more unpredictable than any computer system created. Even Windows.
It won't change until we all collectively believe it *can* change, and demand change, and refuse to allow those that refuse to change to work in this industry.
There's no way to change that without adopting Stalinism, where the government owns and runs the corporations.
I see.
It's different with hospitals because lives are on the line and there's specific laws created to deal with the liability involved there.
And even if the stars align and you manage to get an all-star team, the product can *still* suffer bugs due to resource issues, like management shortening a deadline without input from the team, poor or non-existent testing environments, or poor equipment and tools.
Here's the thing. Why do we accept that as just the unavoidable state of software development. If a hospital told you a loved one was injured or killed because they just decided to use experimental drugs or rush the surgeon so he could move on to the next patient, we'd all scream bloody murder. We would not accept that as being reasonable. But we do all the time with software development. And because we accept it, there's no incentive to change it.
It won't change until we all collectively believe it *can* change, and demand change, and refuse to allow those that refuse to change to work in this industry. Until we do, we might have C students treating us in hospitals, but completely random people writing the software that increasingly controls all of our lives.
"Programming without bugs is easy. It's just slow and expensive. so nobody wants it. It's cheaper and easier to write bad code and ship it, absorbing backlash, than to build it right in the first place."
Tell me. I am currently involved in a project that involves parsing text from thousands of pages written by different people. And it's a horrendous task. Even though the pages are somewhat standardized, there are variants of wording, variants of spelling, typographical errors (those are particularly bad to deal with), etc.
Trying to create bug-free methods for parsing those into their constituent parts is a difficult job indeed. I did not realize when I took the job just how NON-conforming all these different pages are. After all, they're in a "standardized" format. Haha.
I'm sticking with the job, though, because if I can pull it off, it might also pay off. But bug-free is just impossible in this case (unless you're IBM, maybe... but even Watson made mistakes). The best I have managed is to get most of them right, and flag the rest as needing human intervention. As long as I can keep the latter to a minimum, it will be okay. But none? Not a chance.
I don't think you understand the difference between writing a program with no bugs, and writing a program capable of performing any task however ill-defined. No one credibly expects the latter. But if your code *correctly* parses the formats it understands and *correctly* flags those it confirms are in different formats, that program is bug-free if that's its intended function. If your program core-dumps in the middle of processing because someone misspelled a word, that's a bug and also avoidable. If you claim it can process all documents even in formats you haven't anticipated and it fails to do so, that's your fault for overpromising, but not a bug.
"Part of the problem is that the programming profession hasn't had its professional renaissance like the medical profession had in the twentieth century."
No, it isn't.
The current state-of-the-art is such that programming is still as much an art as it is a science. If/when it ever gets to the point you can test and certify programmers reliably the same way you do mechanical engineers, WITHOUT stifling innovation in the process, THEN you'll have reached that goal.
Which it will never achieve, so long as its seem as an art and not a science. If you're going to wait around for software development to magically achieve a state of being objectively judged, it will never happen. Its not going to happen voluntarily or organically. It didn't happen that way in the medical profession either.
And honestly, "innovation" in programming is only interesting to me if it produces *reliable* results unobtainable any other way. And those innovations in software development are few and far between on large scales.
In the absence of any keep out signs, (there weren't any), even in France, public items are for free for public consumption.
The only strawman around here is you, and you seem to have most of it in your head.
This guy did nothing wrong. The documents were freely available on the web. There was no security on the site, and no copyright on the documents.
As he states on TFA:
The article has an update posted:
UPDATE: Laurelli ended up admitting in testimony that when he found the documents, he traveled back to the homepage that they stemmed from and found an authentication page. This indicated that the documents were likely supposed to be protected. That admission played a part in his later conviction in the appeals court.
In other words, he admitted to the court that he deliberately attempted to determine if the documents were intended to be publicly accessible or not, and had determined *to his own satisfaction* that they were likely not intended to be made public. That's probably why he was not acquitted on the basis of the documents being public. They were, to an uninitiated person. But Laurelli actually knew what he was doing and admitted to the court that he himself believed the documents were not intended to be publicly accessible. So while he thought they "ought to be" public, he also knew they were not intended to be. So by his own admission, he had the requisite intent to steal them from people who did not want them taken.
It seems the lower court acquitted him because all they knew was he got the documents through a public search, and did the right thing by acquitting him. And the appeals court also did the right thing in upholding that acquittal. What they convicted him of was the different crime of retaining and disseminating those documents *after* he realized they were not intended to be public.
It's a bad analogy because non-software engineers who do really creative work generally do have similar failure rates to software engineers. If you look at builders of original architecture they have to deal with fixing a lot of problems. Petroleum engineers have all sorts of inefficiencies and failures. Bridges that are in any way original are frequently known to fail. Let's stop comparing complex software applications to incredibly standardized roads.
Not even close. Yes, the farther you venture from standard building codes or standardized engineering, the more likely it is that novel designs will have flaws prior engineers did not have to deal with. However, the failure rates outside of software are probably several orders of magnitude less frequent on average, and generally at least an order of magnitude lower in severity.
Yes, occasionally something spectacular happens and you have something like the Tacoma Narrows bridge. But then everyone learns from that disaster, and almost no one anywhere makes that same mistake again. If they do, they often go to jail or face severe penalties. In software, a spectacular crash caused by a particular kind of bug isn't publicly analyzed and the entire software development industry doesn't pass new standards that proscribe avoiding that error in the future. In engineering, the saying goes that code is written in blood. A mistake happens, people die, and building codes are changed to prevent that from happening again. Its often spoken about in engineering circles with a fair amount of derision: people actually have to die before we decide to change the rules. But in software its far worse because NO AMOUNT OF PEOPLE DYING would eliminate a class of bug. Because software is just this crazy complex beyond human comprehension thing we can't make rules about because its all voodoo and chaos theory.
In software it is not possible in practice for someone to write a non-trivial program without any bugs.
To be precise, most people believe its impossible to write a non-trivial program without any bugs. Its a belief most programmers have no interest in refuting, because it eliminates accountability.
In reality, the truth is its impossible for most people to write non-trivial programs without bugs. Just like its impossible for most people to consistently land airplanes without crashing. In air travel, 99.9% of those people are weeded out of pilot programs. In programming, they move on to the next project.
Part of the problem is that the programming profession hasn't had its professional renaissance like the medical profession had in the twentieth century. We don't train programmers to be skilled, efficient, and above all conform to an agreed to set of professional standards. There's no such thing as programmer malpractice. Basically the software development industry is exactly where the medical profession would be if everyone owned a medical text from ancient Greece and treated themselves and their friends based on guesswork and late night infomercials.
What was the rule or regulation or law from Net Neutrality that made what Verizon is doing illegal?
I want someone to be specific because my point is this Verizon action has NOTHING to do with Net Neutrality, and would not be stopped by any Net Neutrality rules that the FCC put forth before they were told to stop.
So I repeat; HOW WOULD VERSION NOT BE ABLE TO DO WHAT THEY ARE DOING?
Had the FCC's Net Neutrality rules been in force today? Verizon would probably be in violation of the no unreasonable discrimination rule (FCC 10-201, Section III.2). Specifically, given the facts as currrently presented, Verizon would be throttling a content provider based solely upon a customer's subscriber class without a valid network management requirement and without sufficient transparency. The FCC rules would have allowed Verizon to sell residential broadband that had less bandwidth than business class customers, but not explicitly notifying the customer that services such as Netflix or AWS hosted content would be bandwidth restricted to far less than the actual bandwidth being provided by the service would have likely been considered unreasonable.
Most Net Neutrality frameworks do not specifically prohibit service providers from charging customers more or less for different overall classes of service, but most including the 2010 FCC framework required them to disclose those differences in clear language to customers. I.e. "if you buy FIOS Verizon, you'll get huge bandwidth to your house but we're not going to allow you to use that bandwidth to stream Netflix to your house, we're going to throttle that traffic down to a lower level of quality than the bandwidth suggests."
So Verizon could theoretically do what they are doing, but only if they told their customers they were going to do it and allowed them to make a choice as to whether to pay for such a service. At the moment, Verizon does not appear to be doing so, no matter what their CS engineer told a single subscriber.
Of course, millions upon millions of people bought Windows. Sometimes the mob is not smart.
Actually, most of the millions upon millions of people who use Windows did not explicitly buy Windows. Sometimes the mob isn't even given a choice.
Its also worth noting that sometimes you can only push the mob so far. Its interesting that many hardware vendors that had previously gone along with Microsoft and changed their entire home PC lineup to be Windows 8 exclusively are now offering Windows 7 preloaded PCs again. There's only one reason to do that, and that's because those vendors believe forcing people to choose between Windows 8 or nothing is causing many people to choose nothing. I'm taking no small pleasure in lumping Windows 8 supporters with New Coke supporters and predicting the same ultimate destiny for both.
One reason companies hire contractors for jobs like this is visibility.
Another reason they hire contractors for jobs like this is to get a fall guy. "The code worked before we hired the contractor, now it doesn't work, obviously the contractor is to blame."
That only works if the contractor is stupid or young and inexperienced. The veteran strategy is to document all the bugs before fixing them. If possible, get them confirmed by the users as part of the documentation. If its part of your job to fix the bugs that documentation ought to be part of your job anyway, and you can't be blamed for bugs that existed before you got there. If its not part of your job, you have leverage: you can be a nice guy and fix them gratis, but with the understanding you didn't have to, or you can file the fixing of those bugs as change orders.
As long as you are not a dick about it, and genuinely appear to want to fix the project and make it work, the documentation trail you leave behind will protect you against being blamed for things not your fault and you'll probably be thanked for going the extra mile.
I mean, every kind of facility that supplies any kind of service has a host of complicated logistics to take care of. What the review doesn't do, is make any claim about how well optimized to the many target variables the ideas in this book are.
What does that gibberish even mean? If by that you mean the review does not make a judgment on how well each individual case study managed the design challenges of their data center designs, I don't see how that's the job of the reviewer. In fact, the whole point of the book seems to be that different skilled designers can approach the same problem in different ways, leading to different but still functional results. For a book reviewer to grade those decisions seems presumptuous at best and ridiculous at worst unless the reviewer possessed superior knowledge to the collective designers interviewed for the book.
What I would want to know before buying such a book is that it contained a diverse set of viewpoints from a diverse set of designers that ultimately generated successful designs. What the reviewer thought about how well "optimized" those designs were would matter not at all to me, unless I recognized the reviewer by name as an expert on data center design. In fact the notion that there exists a singular viewpoint or methodology by which you can judge "optimized" is apparently contradicted by the implicit thesis of the book. And as someone who delves into such design on a much smaller scale, I too have found that "conventional wisdom" is often extremely unwise, and the notion of "optimal design" is almost always very slippery.
I want to read how actual designers confronted actual design problems and resolved them with actual designs that then had to live with those designs implemented in real data centers. Everything else is random and generally worthless color commentary.
Managers that know nothing of programming, may have extensive industry experience.
But a truly 'non-technical' manager brings nothing but lack of understanding to the the table. What use is a TPS report reader?
Sometimes, what a non-technical manager brings to the table is a lack of understanding. The biggest source of failure in software development, among other large IT projects, is consistent and almost institutionalized miscommunication between the producers of the project and its consumers. Most developers are not user-centric when it comes to thinking about the requirements of a software project, and most users are not sufficiently competent to request what they want with technical precision. So you have end users asking for things using jargon they do not really understand, and programmers writing things they think the users want without knowing for certain. These projects *only* succeed if there are people in the middle constantly vetting what's going on and making sure that both sides don't just say they agree on what should happen, but actually understand enough to provide informed consent. And that's hard when both sides don't want to look stupid and thus tend not to ask questions or demand clarification.
The guy who can admit he doesn't understand what the developers are saying but demands they keep explaining it until he does, the guy who is willing to tell the customers that he doesn't know what they are asking for and sits down with them to drop the jargon and have them explain it in their own language, is *enormously* valuable. He is actually the only chance the entire team has to be successful, unless they happen to consistently hire intrinsically lucky people.
Sometimes your own technical staff just happens to have people who can serve this purpose, and don't need non-technical go-betweeens. But such people are far rarer than competent developers themselves. Sometimes, what you need is someone around who reminds you that your customers are as technically ignorant as he is, and if you can't explain it to him your customers can't possibly have understood you either, and conversely makes your customers feel comfortable enough to explain things without believing they should try to exhibit more technical knowledge than they actually have.
An axiom is also a starting point for reasoning (according to my sometimes always almost never correct friend wikipedia... )
So maybe he is arguing this point as his starting point, as per "One fundamental issue is whether or not conscious awareness is simply a by-product of complex intelligent systems."?
Anyway, is it as cut and dry as you thought?
Its entirely possible there are people who take it as an axiom that all sufficiently complex anything is automatically intelligent. However, I don't think that could remotely be considered a generally accepted axiom in the field of AI. That's not the same thing as the much more generally accepted belief that intelligence is an emergent property of complex systems. *Some* complex systems have that property. A lot of them do not, as we currently define intelligence. Furthermore, someone that has been dead for a few seconds has nearly the same complexity as they did when they were alive, but generally speaking we wouldn't assert they were still intelligent. Its clear that the only way to make that assertion true would be to spend a lot of time defining "sufficiently complex" in very convoluted and ad hoc ways.
One way I've heard people attempt this trick is to argue that intelligence itself is complex, and therefore any system that possesses the kind of complexity that defines intelligence is automatically itself intelligent. But peel away the semantics, and all that says is all intelligent systems are intelligent, which is a circular definition.
you believe in science because in modern society it has achieved widespread acceptance, but even today many scientific theories are ridiculed regardless of evidence if they go against the grain of acccepted beliefs (such as "faster than light", "perpetual motion", etc)
The distinguishing characteristic of Science, and what unambiguously distinguishes it from Religion, is that Science is about testing. We trust quantum mechanics because we use it, and it works. You're reading this on a computer that has parts that rely on quantum mechanics being correct, that only works because the predictions of quantum mechanics matched reality.
Also, *ideas* are rarely ridiculed by the scientific community at large. Faster than light travel, for example, has been the subject of serious academic study for as long as relativity itself has existed. What gets ridiculed are the attitudes often found in conjunction with such ideas, like "actually if you repeat something enough, eventually the majority will believe it... which is the basis of science and religion" for example. The notion that there's a big scientific conspiracy to quash novel ideas, when the truth is that while individual scientists are as corrupt and foolish as the general population, the big scientific conspiracy is to quash silly thinking, and erroneous ideas about how all great scientific ideas are "revolutionary" and "overturn" prior knowledge. Science mostly evolves: even the most "revolutionary" ideas of the last century like relativity and quantum mechanics are themselves evolutionary ideas and built upon prior work, and were themselves built upon by many other scientists.
I don't blindingly trust everything Science says, and no working scientists does either. The purpose of working scientists is specifically to advance the field of Science, which specifically *requires* questioning. But yes, I am far less critical about a physics textbook than I am a religious text. And the reason is because the principles in the physics textbook have been tested, repeatedly, uncounted numbers of times. The physics in that textbook consistently and accurately describes how my car accelerates and breaks, how the sun dies my clothes, how electrons in my computer's CPU flow, how GPS satellites work. Time dilation effects of general relativity and quantum electronic effects work precisely as physics theory state they should to make the GPS in my cellphone work. Every time anyone uses turn by turn navigation, they are confirming that relativistic time dilation is real: if GPS didn't account for it, GPS would be generate errors of miles per day.
Those principles are testable, and tested, every day. And tested in new ways every day, not just the same ways. When you find a religious text that makes predictions about how the world works that is as well tested and confirmed as the average college freshman physics textbook, I will read it with equal attention.
It would in fact fit the bill of confirming my statement that there is no such axiom in the field of AI.
First: the quote above stated:
Any sufficiently complex system is, by definition, intelligent.
Your article states:
In general then, the idea is that consciousness is just a by-product of any sufficiently complex brain
Note the article refers to brains, not "any system."
Second, the article also states:
Currently, there is no general consensus as to how to define or measure conscious awareness.
The article states that some people believe consciousness is an inevitable emergent behavior of complex brains, but other people disagree. The viewpoint is not generally accepted, and its not an axiom either way. Axioms are statements that are (as far as anyone knows) intrinsically unprovable but accepted to be true without proof.
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Teaching Calculus to five year olds is stupid. But that's not really what the article describes. I think a critical distinction implied by the article but not stated is that there's a difference between rigorously teaching a topic to the point of mastery, and exposing children to a topic to make them familiar and comfortable with it.
I've always believed that 50% of time in school should be spent rigorous teaching, and 50% of the time should be spent easing students into more complex topics over time. I think its not productive that a student is not exposed in any way to a topic like statistics, say, and then suddenly they land in the class and have to learn the topic from scratch starting with little or no familiarity with the topic at all. I think the article suggests that rather than spend all of your time practicing arithmetic, it would be more beneficial long-term to start introducing complex topics at a level where the students aren't being asked to demonstrate complete mastery. You aren't going to give a five year old calculus homework. But a five year old exposed to mirror books, say, becomes a seven year old that is familiar with the concept of iteration and can be introduced to the notion of infinite series. That seven year old becomes a ten year old that is comfortable with the concept of summation, even if they aren't masters of the formulas. But when geometry comes along at thirteen, they would be a lot more comfortable with construction, with algorithms, with geometric limits.
Basically, these days most schools teach single-point classes. What you learn in this class has little to do with the next class. Learning geometry doesn't help you learn probability, and neither help you much in learning calculus. Its all learn today, forget tomorrow, dive into the deep end of the pool for the next topic next year. But subjects like algebra and calculus and statistics are based on concepts and ways of thinking that are not intuitive or trivial for most people. Taking the long view, and investing time today to make it easier to learn those topics tomorrow is I think what the article is really talking about, and its a notion I happen to agree with 100%.
You can take this to silly levels. Actually trying to teach calculus to a five year old, or even a ten year old, is ludicrous. 1% might get it, the other 99% will just get confused or frustrated, or worse oversimplify to the point of error just to pass the class and then face even worse hardship when they have to learn it "for real." But introduction, familiarization, and slow incremental acclimation without overzealous forcing is probably the best way to both teach and keep interest in many topics, not just math.
Astrology is not falsifiable, astronomy is.
Actually, Astrology is falsifiable, and also falsified. Practitiioners makes predictions that can be tested, and under genuinely controlled testing they generally fail about as often as chance would predict.
To suggest that anyone else is unfit to work in any field requiring security is absurd.
I think he was saying if you're in an environment where you both need to use very strong passwords *and* its not acceptable to write them down in something you carry securely all the time, *then* that suggests you either have to have a very good memory or you're not qualified to operate with those restrictions.
Lord "Justice" Laws might have just as easily said with the same straight face: "We do not know what data they have, but if they happen to have plans for top secrete weapons, and publish it, then they will endanger everyones lives.". So basically what the high court has done is make up a possible threat in order to get the ruling they wanted (or were told to get more likely).
The (UK) government made the assertion in court that the documents Miranda had contained information whose release could endanger lives and Miranda's legal team did not refute that statement. Instead they basically said it was the job of responsible journalists to take steps to ensure that did not happen, conceding that the government had a legitimate reason to believe there was a real threat but claiming that threat should be handled by the journalists themselves.
The problem with this argument, which the court described in its ruling, is that while journalists have a professional responsibility to act responsibly with respect to such potentially dangerous information, they have no actual *legal* responsibility to do so under UK law. Furthermore, Miranda himself was by his own admission not a journalist, and therefore not actually subject to those codes of conduct anyway. What Miranda's defense team seems to be arguing is that even if the government had a legitimate reason to be concerned over the documents Miranda was carrying, the fact that he was "working with journalists" should be enough to convince the government he should be trusted to act safely and responsibly.
Now, this is not me making these statements, and not even the court itself: this is Miranda's legal team making this argument: that the government should by default trust anyone claiming to be working with journalists to handle sensitive and dangerous information properly. Your characterization of the UK government's actions isn't just contradicted by the court ruling, its contradicted by Miranda's lawyers themselves.
This story links to the BBC which also appears to be very uncritical of the UK government press freedom violations these days. A much better news source would be the new real investigative reporting at The Intercept:
On the UK’s Equating of Journalism With Terrorism
UK Court: David Miranda Detention Legal Under Terrorism Law
Actually, both of those articles claim the UK court ruled that the journalistic activities David Miranda was indirectly involved with "equate" to terrorism. “I’m of course not happy that a court has formally said that I was a legitimate terrorism suspect..." quotes one of those two articles.
The UK court did not rule that way if you read the judgment. In fact, it explicitly states it did not make such a distinction. The court ruled that the law in question doesn't say that the government can detain people it suspects of being terrorists, it actually says the government can detain people who have any connection with such activity to determine if they are or are not involved. The court explicitly ruled that the law was not constructed to detain people who provide "probable cause" in the criminal sense, because the detainment is not specifically targeted at criminals or even suspected criminals directly. Its designed to provide the government with a tool to investigate people who might be, and for whom there doesn't necessarily exist criminally sufficient probable cause for search.
The UK court also ruled that while the statute refers to "terrorist activity" it actually explicitly defines the term for the purposes of the law, irrespective of what people consider "terrorist activity" to be, and the court was required to follow that definition. For the purposes of that statute only, "terrorist activity" is any activity that:
“(1) In this Act ‘terrorism’ means the use or threat of action where— (a) the action falls within subsection (2), (b) the use or threat is designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and (c) the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause. (2) Action falls within this subsection if it— (a) involves serious violence against a person, (b) involves serious damage to property, (c) endangers a person’s life, other than that of the person committing the action, (d) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or (e) is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.”
Basically, its any act or threat of an act intended to influence a government or governments, involves serious property damage or mortal danger of some specific serious nature, and is intended to advance a political agenda. Notice the law doesn't specifically say you have to threaten to kill someone or kill someone. It actually says you have to act or threaten to act in such a way that death or damage is a consequence of that act. The court itself noted that the law appears extremely broad in its definition, but it wasn't being asked to rule on whether the law was overbroad.
The court ultimately ruled that the government had a legitimate reason to believe that David Miranda was involved with people who were at the time acting or threatening to act in a manner which was designed to influence a government and forward a political agenda, and those acts had the potential to cause death or serious property damage. All those appear true on their face, and thus the law states the detainment was legal. The law doesn't say David Miranda is a terrorist or was involved with terrorist
The US has no interest in saving the environment. Neither is (really) any of the other first world nations. Like Europe, the US will not get the worst of climate change, and in any case, there is no place better prepared to deal with the consequences
That may be true in a literal sense, and a lot of people think this, but what they often fail to acknowledge is that the first world also has the most to lose. The US, for example, is the world's largest food exporter, something most Americans don't fully appreciate. Climate change is going to change things in many places in many difficult to predict ways, but there's no change possible that will improve America's food production situation. As the big winner, it can only get worse.
I think too many people believe that America is in the good position its in because of some innate greatness of the country that won't change, but the truth is that America was also dealt a great hand and any reshuffling of the deck is far more likely to generate a worse position than a better one. The First World were the big winners in the rule-the-planet lottery. If they were smart, they would do everything possible to help the rest of the world maintain that status quo. If they were smart.
A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.
In line with Star Trek's "Every species except humans has some ludicrously rigid hardcoded trait" style, that is a Ferengi problem; but I suspect that it'd be a major issue for at least some people and some cultures in a hypothetical post-scarcity environment. In fact, we don't even need to hypothesize: In situations where supply starts to increase, particularly when it increases to the point where everybody who is remotely anybody can have some for pocket change, you virtually always see the creation of additional 'tiers' of artificially scarce versions. The fact that the creator bothers with this is a revenue maximizing move(and so the same incentive wouldn't exist if there were no scarcity generally, and no reason to bother with this 'revenue' nonsense); but the fact that it works... there's the rub. Everyone can have a high quality reproduction of FuzzyFuzzyFungus' masterpeice 'The Hyphae Horror', for the simple cost of printing; but they'll still pay more for the numbered-limited-to-500 edition, more still for print #1 in that edition. Why? All the prints are identical; any you value the one that possesses 'firstness'? I suspect that people would love to get away from scarcity in whatever areas they feel are out of their grip right now(whether they are super poor and that is food and shelter, middle class and that is healthcare and college, and so on); but, in our perversity, we seem to still crave the exclusive, the unique, the rare, in whatever nonessentials are relevant.
Its interesting to hypothesize how the Federation, and Earth specifically, managed to reach its post-scarcity model when so many other cultures didn't, and it doesn't seem obvious we in reality are on that same trajectory because of the need for producers to continue to generate high profit margins as you suggest.
And there is a possible way for that to happen that is both plausible and relatively unique to Earth in the Star Trek universe. The Earth, and eventually Federation centered on Earth, we see in Star Trek comes about as a post-nuclear war society with the invention of warp drive. So, simplifying greatly, suppose that in the aftermath of WWIII, with most political AND economic superpowers and powerhouses turned to nuclear ash, a proto-society centered on the invention of warp drive emerges that quickly overtakes everything else on the planet. This society has the advantage of being the only one with direct access to interstellar trade and quickly gains access to space-based resource mining, space based energy production, inexpensive heavy-lift-to-orbit technologies, and rapidly becomes THE energy and resource producer on the planet. And suppose it decides to unify the planet through sheer bribery: join us and get (virtually) free energy, food, housing, and materials. The government of this society wouldn't be motivated by monetary profit, but by the desire to unify the planet under its flag. So instead of corporations constantly looking to maximize revenue, you'd have a government attempting to maximize footprint by making it very easy to get what most of the planet no longer has and it now has mega supplies of. Imagine a global public works project like the one that rebuilt Europe after WWII, but across the entire planet and driven by a government that has a thousand times the resources that the United States had after WWII.
Intriguingly, in Enterprise its mentioned by the Vulcan ambassador late in the series that one of the reasons Vulcan tries to keep Earth on such a short leash is that Vulcan is actually afraid of Earth: Vulcan took about a thousand years to recover from its planetary nuclear war, and their witnessing Earth replicate that feat in less than a century. Perhaps the reason why is because Vulcan had to dig itself out on its own, and its inspiration was philosophical in nature with Surak. On Earth, its inspiration was aided by the Vulcans themselves: they became
Why do you want to take the rules from two of the most screwed-up parts of our economy and apply them to one of the few areas that actually works pretty well?
Its only by the standards invented for the software industry alone that the software industry "works pretty well." By any other standard of quality it scores a zero on a scale of one to ten. We all sit around and agree that software is complex complex complex and its amazing programmers get computers to do anything at all blah blah Turing blah and then we judge software with preschool rules that say you can't hold any failing against software. And of course on that scale it works pretty well. By that standard 12th century medicine worked pretty well, astrology works pretty well, and always betting on black works surprisingly well in Vegas.
In reality, the truth is its impossible for most people to write non-trivial programs without bugs. Just like its impossible for most people to consistently land airplanes without crashing. In air travel, 99.9% of those people are weeded out of pilot programs. In programming, they move on to the next project.
Part of the problem is that the programming profession hasn't had its professional renaissance like the medical profession had in the twentieth century. We don't train programmers to be skilled, efficient, and above all conform to an agreed to set of professional standards. There's no such thing as programmer malpractice. Basically the software development industry is exactly where the medical profession would be if everyone owned a medical text from ancient Greece and treated themselves and their friends based on guesswork and late night infomercials.
That analogy doesn't work. Quack medicine is often worse than no medicine at all (there is evidence that, prior to the 20th century, doctors were as likely to kill the patient as to cure them). In contrast, a buggy and incomplete program may still be better than no program at all.
Most of the time, when code gets screwed up, nobody dies. In those cases where shoddy code actually could put lives at risk (e.g. embedded systems for vehicles, medical equipment, etc.) then there usually is more rigorous quality control, better and more comprehensive testing, and so forth. But if you demand that every piece of code in existence be written to those standards, most people and organizations won't be able to afford having any code written at all.
How is it then that we can afford so much better medical services, so much better air transportation, so much better everything else, but if we want reliable code its going to cost extreme amounts of money? What your thesis above seems to be saying is if only software killed more people, not only would we have better software, but it would be cheaper as well. That's an interesting conjecture to forward.
It's a slippery slope. You really want the government setting up detailed regulations governing software development and how software projects are to be managed?
The government does not dictate which scalpels to use or how much stitches to sew, and yet the medical profession is about a gazillion times more reliable than the software development industry, even though the medical profession is also saddled with performing services on a platform far more unpredictable than any computer system created. Even Windows.
It won't change until we all collectively believe it *can* change, and demand change, and refuse to allow those that refuse to change to work in this industry.
There's no way to change that without adopting Stalinism, where the government owns and runs the corporations.
I see.
It's different with hospitals because lives are on the line and there's specific laws created to deal with the liability involved there.
Stalinistic laws, I suppose.
And even if the stars align and you manage to get an all-star team, the product can *still* suffer bugs due to resource issues, like management shortening a deadline without input from the team, poor or non-existent testing environments, or poor equipment and tools.
Here's the thing. Why do we accept that as just the unavoidable state of software development. If a hospital told you a loved one was injured or killed because they just decided to use experimental drugs or rush the surgeon so he could move on to the next patient, we'd all scream bloody murder. We would not accept that as being reasonable. But we do all the time with software development. And because we accept it, there's no incentive to change it.
It won't change until we all collectively believe it *can* change, and demand change, and refuse to allow those that refuse to change to work in this industry. Until we do, we might have C students treating us in hospitals, but completely random people writing the software that increasingly controls all of our lives.
"Programming without bugs is easy. It's just slow and expensive. so nobody wants it. It's cheaper and easier to write bad code and ship it, absorbing backlash, than to build it right in the first place."
Tell me. I am currently involved in a project that involves parsing text from thousands of pages written by different people. And it's a horrendous task. Even though the pages are somewhat standardized, there are variants of wording, variants of spelling, typographical errors (those are particularly bad to deal with), etc. Trying to create bug-free methods for parsing those into their constituent parts is a difficult job indeed. I did not realize when I took the job just how NON-conforming all these different pages are. After all, they're in a "standardized" format. Haha. I'm sticking with the job, though, because if I can pull it off, it might also pay off. But bug-free is just impossible in this case (unless you're IBM, maybe... but even Watson made mistakes). The best I have managed is to get most of them right, and flag the rest as needing human intervention. As long as I can keep the latter to a minimum, it will be okay. But none? Not a chance.
I don't think you understand the difference between writing a program with no bugs, and writing a program capable of performing any task however ill-defined. No one credibly expects the latter. But if your code *correctly* parses the formats it understands and *correctly* flags those it confirms are in different formats, that program is bug-free if that's its intended function. If your program core-dumps in the middle of processing because someone misspelled a word, that's a bug and also avoidable. If you claim it can process all documents even in formats you haven't anticipated and it fails to do so, that's your fault for overpromising, but not a bug.
"Part of the problem is that the programming profession hasn't had its professional renaissance like the medical profession had in the twentieth century."
No, it isn't. The current state-of-the-art is such that programming is still as much an art as it is a science. If/when it ever gets to the point you can test and certify programmers reliably the same way you do mechanical engineers, WITHOUT stifling innovation in the process, THEN you'll have reached that goal.
Which it will never achieve, so long as its seem as an art and not a science. If you're going to wait around for software development to magically achieve a state of being objectively judged, it will never happen. Its not going to happen voluntarily or organically. It didn't happen that way in the medical profession either.
And honestly, "innovation" in programming is only interesting to me if it produces *reliable* results unobtainable any other way. And those innovations in software development are few and far between on large scales.
In the absence of any keep out signs, (there weren't any), even in France, public items are for free for public consumption.
The only strawman around here is you, and you seem to have most of it in your head. This guy did nothing wrong. The documents were freely available on the web. There was no security on the site, and no copyright on the documents.
As he states on TFA:
The article has an update posted:
UPDATE: Laurelli ended up admitting in testimony that when he found the documents, he traveled back to the homepage that they stemmed from and found an authentication page. This indicated that the documents were likely supposed to be protected. That admission played a part in his later conviction in the appeals court.
In other words, he admitted to the court that he deliberately attempted to determine if the documents were intended to be publicly accessible or not, and had determined *to his own satisfaction* that they were likely not intended to be made public. That's probably why he was not acquitted on the basis of the documents being public. They were, to an uninitiated person. But Laurelli actually knew what he was doing and admitted to the court that he himself believed the documents were not intended to be publicly accessible. So while he thought they "ought to be" public, he also knew they were not intended to be. So by his own admission, he had the requisite intent to steal them from people who did not want them taken.
It seems the lower court acquitted him because all they knew was he got the documents through a public search, and did the right thing by acquitting him. And the appeals court also did the right thing in upholding that acquittal. What they convicted him of was the different crime of retaining and disseminating those documents *after* he realized they were not intended to be public.
It's a bad analogy because non-software engineers who do really creative work generally do have similar failure rates to software engineers. If you look at builders of original architecture they have to deal with fixing a lot of problems. Petroleum engineers have all sorts of inefficiencies and failures. Bridges that are in any way original are frequently known to fail. Let's stop comparing complex software applications to incredibly standardized roads.
Not even close. Yes, the farther you venture from standard building codes or standardized engineering, the more likely it is that novel designs will have flaws prior engineers did not have to deal with. However, the failure rates outside of software are probably several orders of magnitude less frequent on average, and generally at least an order of magnitude lower in severity.
Yes, occasionally something spectacular happens and you have something like the Tacoma Narrows bridge. But then everyone learns from that disaster, and almost no one anywhere makes that same mistake again. If they do, they often go to jail or face severe penalties. In software, a spectacular crash caused by a particular kind of bug isn't publicly analyzed and the entire software development industry doesn't pass new standards that proscribe avoiding that error in the future. In engineering, the saying goes that code is written in blood. A mistake happens, people die, and building codes are changed to prevent that from happening again. Its often spoken about in engineering circles with a fair amount of derision: people actually have to die before we decide to change the rules. But in software its far worse because NO AMOUNT OF PEOPLE DYING would eliminate a class of bug. Because software is just this crazy complex beyond human comprehension thing we can't make rules about because its all voodoo and chaos theory.
In software it is not possible in practice for someone to write a non-trivial program without any bugs.
To be precise, most people believe its impossible to write a non-trivial program without any bugs. Its a belief most programmers have no interest in refuting, because it eliminates accountability.
In reality, the truth is its impossible for most people to write non-trivial programs without bugs. Just like its impossible for most people to consistently land airplanes without crashing. In air travel, 99.9% of those people are weeded out of pilot programs. In programming, they move on to the next project.
Part of the problem is that the programming profession hasn't had its professional renaissance like the medical profession had in the twentieth century. We don't train programmers to be skilled, efficient, and above all conform to an agreed to set of professional standards. There's no such thing as programmer malpractice. Basically the software development industry is exactly where the medical profession would be if everyone owned a medical text from ancient Greece and treated themselves and their friends based on guesswork and late night infomercials.
Because it would be illegal
Why?
What was the rule or regulation or law from Net Neutrality that made what Verizon is doing illegal?
I want someone to be specific because my point is this Verizon action has NOTHING to do with Net Neutrality, and would not be stopped by any Net Neutrality rules that the FCC put forth before they were told to stop.
So I repeat; HOW WOULD VERSION NOT BE ABLE TO DO WHAT THEY ARE DOING?
Had the FCC's Net Neutrality rules been in force today? Verizon would probably be in violation of the no unreasonable discrimination rule (FCC 10-201, Section III.2). Specifically, given the facts as currrently presented, Verizon would be throttling a content provider based solely upon a customer's subscriber class without a valid network management requirement and without sufficient transparency. The FCC rules would have allowed Verizon to sell residential broadband that had less bandwidth than business class customers, but not explicitly notifying the customer that services such as Netflix or AWS hosted content would be bandwidth restricted to far less than the actual bandwidth being provided by the service would have likely been considered unreasonable.
Most Net Neutrality frameworks do not specifically prohibit service providers from charging customers more or less for different overall classes of service, but most including the 2010 FCC framework required them to disclose those differences in clear language to customers. I.e. "if you buy FIOS Verizon, you'll get huge bandwidth to your house but we're not going to allow you to use that bandwidth to stream Netflix to your house, we're going to throttle that traffic down to a lower level of quality than the bandwidth suggests."
So Verizon could theoretically do what they are doing, but only if they told their customers they were going to do it and allowed them to make a choice as to whether to pay for such a service. At the moment, Verizon does not appear to be doing so, no matter what their CS engineer told a single subscriber.
Of course, millions upon millions of people bought Windows. Sometimes the mob is not smart.
Actually, most of the millions upon millions of people who use Windows did not explicitly buy Windows. Sometimes the mob isn't even given a choice.
Its also worth noting that sometimes you can only push the mob so far. Its interesting that many hardware vendors that had previously gone along with Microsoft and changed their entire home PC lineup to be Windows 8 exclusively are now offering Windows 7 preloaded PCs again. There's only one reason to do that, and that's because those vendors believe forcing people to choose between Windows 8 or nothing is causing many people to choose nothing. I'm taking no small pleasure in lumping Windows 8 supporters with New Coke supporters and predicting the same ultimate destiny for both.
One reason companies hire contractors for jobs like this is visibility.
Another reason they hire contractors for jobs like this is to get a fall guy. "The code worked before we hired the contractor, now it doesn't work, obviously the contractor is to blame."
That only works if the contractor is stupid or young and inexperienced. The veteran strategy is to document all the bugs before fixing them. If possible, get them confirmed by the users as part of the documentation. If its part of your job to fix the bugs that documentation ought to be part of your job anyway, and you can't be blamed for bugs that existed before you got there. If its not part of your job, you have leverage: you can be a nice guy and fix them gratis, but with the understanding you didn't have to, or you can file the fixing of those bugs as change orders.
As long as you are not a dick about it, and genuinely appear to want to fix the project and make it work, the documentation trail you leave behind will protect you against being blamed for things not your fault and you'll probably be thanked for going the extra mile.
I mean, every kind of facility that supplies any kind of service has a host of complicated logistics to take care of. What the review doesn't do, is make any claim about how well optimized to the many target variables the ideas in this book are.
What does that gibberish even mean? If by that you mean the review does not make a judgment on how well each individual case study managed the design challenges of their data center designs, I don't see how that's the job of the reviewer. In fact, the whole point of the book seems to be that different skilled designers can approach the same problem in different ways, leading to different but still functional results. For a book reviewer to grade those decisions seems presumptuous at best and ridiculous at worst unless the reviewer possessed superior knowledge to the collective designers interviewed for the book.
What I would want to know before buying such a book is that it contained a diverse set of viewpoints from a diverse set of designers that ultimately generated successful designs. What the reviewer thought about how well "optimized" those designs were would matter not at all to me, unless I recognized the reviewer by name as an expert on data center design. In fact the notion that there exists a singular viewpoint or methodology by which you can judge "optimized" is apparently contradicted by the implicit thesis of the book. And as someone who delves into such design on a much smaller scale, I too have found that "conventional wisdom" is often extremely unwise, and the notion of "optimal design" is almost always very slippery.
I want to read how actual designers confronted actual design problems and resolved them with actual designs that then had to live with those designs implemented in real data centers. Everything else is random and generally worthless color commentary.
Managers that know nothing of programming, may have extensive industry experience.
But a truly 'non-technical' manager brings nothing but lack of understanding to the the table. What use is a TPS report reader?
Sometimes, what a non-technical manager brings to the table is a lack of understanding. The biggest source of failure in software development, among other large IT projects, is consistent and almost institutionalized miscommunication between the producers of the project and its consumers. Most developers are not user-centric when it comes to thinking about the requirements of a software project, and most users are not sufficiently competent to request what they want with technical precision. So you have end users asking for things using jargon they do not really understand, and programmers writing things they think the users want without knowing for certain. These projects *only* succeed if there are people in the middle constantly vetting what's going on and making sure that both sides don't just say they agree on what should happen, but actually understand enough to provide informed consent. And that's hard when both sides don't want to look stupid and thus tend not to ask questions or demand clarification.
The guy who can admit he doesn't understand what the developers are saying but demands they keep explaining it until he does, the guy who is willing to tell the customers that he doesn't know what they are asking for and sits down with them to drop the jargon and have them explain it in their own language, is *enormously* valuable. He is actually the only chance the entire team has to be successful, unless they happen to consistently hire intrinsically lucky people.
Sometimes your own technical staff just happens to have people who can serve this purpose, and don't need non-technical go-betweeens. But such people are far rarer than competent developers themselves. Sometimes, what you need is someone around who reminds you that your customers are as technically ignorant as he is, and if you can't explain it to him your customers can't possibly have understood you either, and conversely makes your customers feel comfortable enough to explain things without believing they should try to exhibit more technical knowledge than they actually have.
Interesting twist!
An axiom is also a starting point for reasoning (according to my sometimes always almost never correct friend wikipedia... )
So maybe he is arguing this point as his starting point, as per "One fundamental issue is whether or not conscious awareness is simply a by-product of complex intelligent systems."?
Anyway, is it as cut and dry as you thought?
Its entirely possible there are people who take it as an axiom that all sufficiently complex anything is automatically intelligent. However, I don't think that could remotely be considered a generally accepted axiom in the field of AI. That's not the same thing as the much more generally accepted belief that intelligence is an emergent property of complex systems. *Some* complex systems have that property. A lot of them do not, as we currently define intelligence. Furthermore, someone that has been dead for a few seconds has nearly the same complexity as they did when they were alive, but generally speaking we wouldn't assert they were still intelligent. Its clear that the only way to make that assertion true would be to spend a lot of time defining "sufficiently complex" in very convoluted and ad hoc ways.
One way I've heard people attempt this trick is to argue that intelligence itself is complex, and therefore any system that possesses the kind of complexity that defines intelligence is automatically itself intelligent. But peel away the semantics, and all that says is all intelligent systems are intelligent, which is a circular definition.
you believe in science because in modern society it has achieved widespread acceptance, but even today many scientific theories are ridiculed regardless of evidence if they go against the grain of acccepted beliefs (such as "faster than light", "perpetual motion", etc)
The distinguishing characteristic of Science, and what unambiguously distinguishes it from Religion, is that Science is about testing. We trust quantum mechanics because we use it, and it works. You're reading this on a computer that has parts that rely on quantum mechanics being correct, that only works because the predictions of quantum mechanics matched reality.
Also, *ideas* are rarely ridiculed by the scientific community at large. Faster than light travel, for example, has been the subject of serious academic study for as long as relativity itself has existed. What gets ridiculed are the attitudes often found in conjunction with such ideas, like "actually if you repeat something enough, eventually the majority will believe it... which is the basis of science and religion" for example. The notion that there's a big scientific conspiracy to quash novel ideas, when the truth is that while individual scientists are as corrupt and foolish as the general population, the big scientific conspiracy is to quash silly thinking, and erroneous ideas about how all great scientific ideas are "revolutionary" and "overturn" prior knowledge. Science mostly evolves: even the most "revolutionary" ideas of the last century like relativity and quantum mechanics are themselves evolutionary ideas and built upon prior work, and were themselves built upon by many other scientists.
I don't blindingly trust everything Science says, and no working scientists does either. The purpose of working scientists is specifically to advance the field of Science, which specifically *requires* questioning. But yes, I am far less critical about a physics textbook than I am a religious text. And the reason is because the principles in the physics textbook have been tested, repeatedly, uncounted numbers of times. The physics in that textbook consistently and accurately describes how my car accelerates and breaks, how the sun dies my clothes, how electrons in my computer's CPU flow, how GPS satellites work. Time dilation effects of general relativity and quantum electronic effects work precisely as physics theory state they should to make the GPS in my cellphone work. Every time anyone uses turn by turn navigation, they are confirming that relativistic time dilation is real: if GPS didn't account for it, GPS would be generate errors of miles per day.
Those principles are testable, and tested, every day. And tested in new ways every day, not just the same ways. When you find a religious text that makes predictions about how the world works that is as well tested and confirmed as the average college freshman physics textbook, I will read it with equal attention.
http://psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/consciousness.html
Would that fit the bill?
It would in fact fit the bill of confirming my statement that there is no such axiom in the field of AI.
First: the quote above stated:
Any sufficiently complex system is, by definition, intelligent.
Your article states:
In general then, the idea is that consciousness is just a by-product of any sufficiently complex brain
Note the article refers to brains, not "any system."
Second, the article also states:
Currently, there is no general consensus as to how to define or measure conscious awareness.
The article states that some people believe consciousness is an inevitable emergent behavior of complex brains, but other people disagree. The viewpoint is not generally accepted, and its not an axiom either way. Axioms are statements that are (as far as anyone knows) intrinsically unprovable but accepted to be true without proof.