That's all well and good, but if something can't exist that's unobservable; then the assumption must be made that our ability to observe the universe is absolute.
No, the assumption must be made that the universe only consists of observable things.
i.e. that unobservable things do not exist (note: unobservable, not unobserved)
Should we wait to have these discussions until then, or should we be having these discussions now so that we can provide a good framework, some good philosophy, and some well thought out answers to the next generation?
Yes, damn those ancient greeks for not considering the plight of anthropomorphized global warming, or the tragedy of the commons!
If only they had been having these discussions, we would have some well thought out answers!
That's an exaggeration, but not much of one. We know so little about how intelligence works that answers we came up with would likely be laughably wrong.
1) Computers don't have anywhere near the same processing power as the brain. They are many orders of magnitude better than us at one very specific task (moving numbers around). We have no idea to what degree "really fast number shuffling" factors into intelligence.
2) Why would we hook it up to the internet? We could easily provide access to whatever knowledge we felt it needed, but still leave it air gapped.
3) Why would it have an motivations whatsoever regarding humans unless these were programmed in? Our motivations are the result of billions of years of natural selection (things that want to survive are more successful than things that don't). A "created" AI would be motivated by whatever we had built into it.
4) Why would it necessarily be able to replicate? There is no reason to think it would understand any more about it's own intelligence than we understand about ours?
5) Why would be give it the access required to replicate? Unless we gave it permission and access to a text editor / compiler and execute permissions on the code it generated, and access to hardware to run it on, replication would be a problem.
Hollywood stories are all good fun, but stories about AI typically don't stand up to any sort of reasonable analysis. IMO, our first AI's will be like very intelligent friendly dogs, willing obey master in order to get the reward that satisfies whatever "need" we have built into them.
Treating it "poorly" is an interesting question. Is it unethical to "enslave" an AI if it has been designed to get the most satisfaction out of "enslavement"?
Possibly...but just out of curiosity, how often are you directly exposed to the bodily secretions of other people, regardless of whether they are symptomatic or not?
Do people sneeze directly in your face that often?
It's not a matter of "how much of the virus" the person carries....it is a matter of exposure to bodily fluids. Symptomatic people are a higher risk for spreading the disease as the symptoms involve the nasty discharge of numerous fluids.
No: Mandatory quarantine of every healthcare worker who helped with Ebola patients. How many people would that really be? It would cover 100% of the cases brought into the US thus far.
If by 100% you mean 0%. The first case was brought in by Thomas Eric Duncan...he was not a healthcare worker, but had been visiting family.
Two nurses contracted the disease after direct exposure to Thomas Eric Duncan. Quarantine would have done nothing for them; better protocols for handling ebola patients should have been followed.
The doctor in new york contracted the disease while in Africa after direct exposure.
Quarantine would not have prevented ANY of these infections.
as multiple experts have said, if you have too much inconvenience on people (eg mandatory 3 week quarantine - the average person does not want to be without an income for 3 weeks) then people will start lying during questionning.
Also, medical personnel will be much less likely to want to travel to Africa to help out with the disease if the know they face a 3 week quarantine on return. As well, this limits the number of personnel available to help out.
Our best chance at fighting this disease is fighting it in Africa before it spreads. As such travel bans / quarantines on those heading to Africa to help out are very counter-productive.
Right or wrong they felt they had to go to these lengths to protect their business,
There is no right here. FTDI had no business trying to modify any data on these devices.
This story would have been very different had FTDI just disabled the DRIVER software if a counterfeit device been detected. FTDI is under no obligation to provide drivers or driver updates that are guaranteed to work with counterfeit devices.
Yes, people could have easily gotten around this by rolling back the update, but at least it would have brought attention to the fact that the device was counterfeit.
A much more effective (and justifiable IMHO) solution would have been to write the driver so that it: 1) Put up a warning that the device was counterfeit. 2) Worked fine with the counterfeit...for a while 3) Started producing intermittent failures with counterfeit devices after a few weeks 4) Randomly stopped working entirely with counterfeit devices after 3-6 months
FTDI is under no obligation to provide drivers that function properly with counterfeit (or even a clone).
Also, FTDI destroyed *everything* that was fake, not just the winding gear. So for the analogy to be accurate, they'd have to destroy the entire watch (which is actually what they do today).
Although I disagree with what FTDI did, this is a terrible analogy.
FTDI did not "break" anything. They modified counterfeit products so that they would no longer function with FTDI's drivers. The device itself was still fully functional, and could even (fairly easily) be modified back into a non-counterfeit state.
The "watch" equivalent would be as if a Rolex service person was invited into your house (you initiate driver updates) to service your Rolex watch and your Rolex clock. You watch and clock are the latest "smart" devices and time-sync with each other via Wi-Fi.
The service guy notices that your Rolex clock is actually a "Rollexx" knock-off, so he wraps the antenna in tin-foil so the two can no longer communicate.
You are free to take the tinfoil off after the service guy leaves. (ok, it's a little bit harder to reprogram a PID, but given there were "fixes" up yesterday within hours of the story breaking, it's a reasonable analogy).
Here's the catch: all of these quotes are from the interviewer. Jordan has a lot of really nuanced claims here, but it's clear that the interviewer has an agenda of his own.
Yes, this is one of the more shameful examples of the reporter attempting to shove words down the interviewee's mouth, and completely misrepresenting the results.
Take a look at the first sentence: "The overeager adoption of big data is likely to result in catastrophes of analysis comparable to a national epidemic of collapsing bridges"
Then read the interview. At no point does Jordan indicate that the misanalysis of big data will cause a catastrophe comparable to the epidemic of collapsing bridges. Never. What he does (and apparently the reporter is either too stupid or too dishonest to represent), is provide an analogy between building a bridge without scientific principles and not performing proper statistical analysis on big data.
He never makes a comparison between the outcomes of these two events. He basically says: if you build a bridge without scientific principles, it will fall down. If you are not careful in your analysis of big data, your results will be wrong.
The whole article goes on in a very similar manner. Science reporters used to have something called "journalistic integrity". Here we get a click-bait article where a "reporter" has predetermined a topic that will gain lots of hits and is desperately trying to fit the interviewees words into his agenda.
It's a problem of false negatives. I've never been confronted with a UAC warning for which it was appropriate to say no. Never.
Well, then you should take a look at the attached powerpoint presentation! It gives an in-depth analysis of exactly why you should be careful when answering "Yes" to UAC prompts.
The problem is that unless your business IS software
Exactly this.
I've found agile typically a poor solution for building non-trivial internal software for a company.
Issues I've found with in-house pure agile: - regular access to the customer is problematic - need to re-architect during sprints due to unforeseen requirements - inability to produce reliable estimates or determine whether buy/build/make-do is the best option - running over time/budget due to poorly analyzed requirements
The big "win" of agile is supposed to be that it can adapt to changing requirements. I would say more often than not for in-house development the requirements are fairly fixed. Change can occur due to changing regulations, changing business environment, but these changes typically occur slowly and can easily be fit into an existing project plan.
Agile works great in cases when it's a software dev shop that typically has much more control over the features and architecture of what is being built. For in-house development though, I've also found a mix of Agile/Waterfall to work best.
Fair Tax handles this by having a certain "consumption allowance" based on family size.
When I first read about it, I was thinking the same think: This hit's the middle and lower class the most. The more I read about Fair Tax though, the more it makes sense. The issues would be determining a fair consumption allowance, and controlling evasion (the rich can consume many goods in other countries...an option the poor don't have access to).
Wealth accumulation (by and large) is not the big issue with income inequality. The bigger issues are the access to better education, better security, better health care, etc that wealth provides is as it creates a negative feedback loop.
The Flu will still kill more people in Africa this year that Ebola. Keep that in mind.
Really?!? 300,000 people are going to die of the flu in africa this year?!?
From the CDC's estimate of Ebola cases located here, taking the LOW count and assuming a 60% mortality rate (also low).
This is a huge problem for Africa. A much much more serious issue than the flu. It just isn't (too) much of a concern for western society as we have much better access to modern medical facilities and much more money to throw at the problem.
But recognize that the ebola death curve is exponential.
Yes. In third-world countries with poor sanitation, little to no access to modern medical facilities and nearly no education on the identification and handling of ebola victims.
Ebola has been around since the 70s. This is the same virus. Although the impact of this outbreak to west africa will be massive, the overall impact to the rest of the world (especially first-world countries) will be minimal.
Duhh...with unlimited power we can just all run air conditioners!
Energy crisis AND global warming solved! . . . . . . Note: The above is intended as humor, and is not in any means meant to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
You don't further science by NOT doing experiments.
Which is exactly why Rossi is NOT DOING SCIENCE.
He refuses to have anyone else gain access to his device. He refuses to provide technical specifications. He refuses to even give the basic science for how this thing could possibly work.
And he makes up some BS excuse about worrying about someone stealing his idea, all while sitting on (if it were true), would be the most important invention of the past 100 years.
There are a lot of charlatans out there. We don't have time or manpower to go and replicate every experiment that some basement-dwelling idiot says is the answer to unlimited energy, perpetual youth, or life, the universe and everything.
If Rossi wants to be taken seriously, they he can damn well follow the process and let someone replicate his experiment. Otherwise we should move on, there is nothing to see here.
It's a little more complex than that. I believe it's more like this:
Little Johnny Verizon opens a sandwich delivery service. He offers "Guaranteed sandwiches in 10 minutes". This isn't a problem for him, as there are only 5 people ordering sandwiches and he can easily get them all delivered in 10 minutes.
Net d'Flix opens a new sandwich shop. It's really really popular. People start asking Little Johnny to deliever sandwiches from d'Flix. Little Johnny (being a little bit greedy) signs up a bunch of new customers. Unfortunately, d'Flix sandwiches take more time to make, and little Johnny can't guarantee his 10 minute delivery time anymore. At the same time, Little Johnny's brother (Fios Verizon) opened his own sandwich shop. Little Johnny gets a kickback from Fios for every sandwich he delivers, so he REALLY wants people to buy from Fios. Unfortunately, Fios' sandwiches are terrible and can only be ordered in "combo packages" where if you really like pickles, you have to order mustard and lettuce as well.
Little Johnny then has a great idea "I'll just tell d'Flix that I won't deliver their sandwiches in 10 minutes unless they pay more money to hire another delivery guy, plus a little extra for my inconvenience". People will whine about their sandwiches not being fresh, and d'Flix will have to pay up.
Now this entire time, Little Johnny hasn't been meeting his "10 minute delivery guarantee", but he doesn't really care as he's the only sandwich delivery person in town, and people really like their sandwiches.
I agree, but I also think there needs to be a balance between KISS and other principles (e.g. DRY). I've come across developers who use KISS as an excuse to be lazy.
I recently came across some code from a colleague where it was hundreds of lines filling in object properties from data in a spreadsheet. Each property being filled in was coded as a separate line, calling a one of five different routines based on the data type to be parsed.
I asked "why didn't you just add a configuration (or just an array) that lists the fields to be parsed, then use reflection to fill in the properties" (performance was not an issue). His response was it violated KISS as reflection is "complicated".
Yes reflection isn't as simple as direct property access, and yes adding a config parser/loop is a bit more code, but at least: - The code is readable (reading 10 pages of code in a single routine makes my eyes bleed) - Its easier to modify (we had a change where we needed all decimal values to be parsed differently. Suddenly 50 lines of code need to change rather than 1) - It's immediately obvious where the exception cases are (we had a bug due to a typo where 1 of the fields was being parsed incorrectly in certain edge cases. This filtered down to some calculations later on and was quite the pain to find the culprit).
Huh? Colonizing Mars is not science. It's engineering.
Now, peer review is also a good idea in engineering, but so are things like detailed design specifications, planning, prototyping, feasibility studies, etc.
These are areas in which Mars One is severely lacking.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright infringement is not theft.
Stop referring to it as such.
Or the terrorists win.
No, the assumption must be made that the universe only consists of observable things.
i.e. that unobservable things do not exist (note: unobservable, not unobserved)
Why not?
Why must there have been a base? If that base could be uncaused, why couldn't the universe just be uncaused?
Yes, damn those ancient greeks for not considering the plight of anthropomorphized global warming, or the tragedy of the commons!
If only they had been having these discussions, we would have some well thought out answers!
That's an exaggeration, but not much of one. We know so little about how intelligence works that answers we came up with would likely be laughably wrong.
We are a long way from creating an AI.
1) Computers don't have anywhere near the same processing power as the brain. They are many orders of magnitude better than us at one very specific task (moving numbers around). We have no idea to what degree "really fast number shuffling" factors into intelligence.
2) Why would we hook it up to the internet? We could easily provide access to whatever knowledge we felt it needed, but still leave it air gapped.
3) Why would it have an motivations whatsoever regarding humans unless these were programmed in? Our motivations are the result of billions of years of natural selection (things that want to survive are more successful than things that don't). A "created" AI would be motivated by whatever we had built into it.
4) Why would it necessarily be able to replicate? There is no reason to think it would understand any more about it's own intelligence than we understand about ours?
5) Why would be give it the access required to replicate? Unless we gave it permission and access to a text editor / compiler and execute permissions on the code it generated, and access to hardware to run it on, replication would be a problem.
Hollywood stories are all good fun, but stories about AI typically don't stand up to any sort of reasonable analysis. IMO, our first AI's will be like very intelligent friendly dogs, willing obey master in order to get the reward that satisfies whatever "need" we have built into them.
Treating it "poorly" is an interesting question. Is it unethical to "enslave" an AI if it has been designed to get the most satisfaction out of "enslavement"?
Remove power cord from socket.
How exactly is RP International not a credible source?
They are a fairly well-known charity involved in raising money for the research of eye problems & support of the vision impaired.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Possibly...but just out of curiosity, how often are you directly exposed to the bodily secretions of other people, regardless of whether they are symptomatic or not?
Do people sneeze directly in your face that often?
It's not a matter of "how much of the virus" the person carries....it is a matter of exposure to bodily fluids. Symptomatic people are a higher risk for spreading the disease as the symptoms involve the nasty discharge of numerous fluids.
Given that it is a hemorrhagic disease, yes. It is pretty close to a binary flag that controls virus secretion.
If by 100% you mean 0%. The first case was brought in by Thomas Eric Duncan...he was not a healthcare worker, but had been visiting family.
Two nurses contracted the disease after direct exposure to Thomas Eric Duncan. Quarantine would have done nothing for them; better protocols for handling ebola patients should have been followed.
The doctor in new york contracted the disease while in Africa after direct exposure.
Quarantine would not have prevented ANY of these infections.
Also, medical personnel will be much less likely to want to travel to Africa to help out with the disease if the know they face a 3 week quarantine on return. As well, this limits the number of personnel available to help out.
Our best chance at fighting this disease is fighting it in Africa before it spreads. As such travel bans / quarantines on those heading to Africa to help out are very counter-productive.
There is no right here. FTDI had no business trying to modify any data on these devices.
This story would have been very different had FTDI just disabled the DRIVER software if a counterfeit device been detected. FTDI is under no obligation to provide drivers or driver updates that are guaranteed to work with counterfeit devices.
Yes, people could have easily gotten around this by rolling back the update, but at least it would have brought attention to the fact that the device was counterfeit.
A much more effective (and justifiable IMHO) solution would have been to write the driver so that it:
1) Put up a warning that the device was counterfeit.
2) Worked fine with the counterfeit...for a while
3) Started producing intermittent failures with counterfeit devices after a few weeks
4) Randomly stopped working entirely with counterfeit devices after 3-6 months
FTDI is under no obligation to provide drivers that function properly with counterfeit (or even a clone).
Although I disagree with what FTDI did, this is a terrible analogy.
FTDI did not "break" anything. They modified counterfeit products so that they would no longer function with FTDI's drivers. The device itself was still fully functional, and could even (fairly easily) be modified back into a non-counterfeit state.
The "watch" equivalent would be as if a Rolex service person was invited into your house (you initiate driver updates) to service your Rolex watch and your Rolex clock. You watch and clock are the latest "smart" devices and time-sync with each other via Wi-Fi.
The service guy notices that your Rolex clock is actually a "Rollexx" knock-off, so he wraps the antenna in tin-foil so the two can no longer communicate.
You are free to take the tinfoil off after the service guy leaves. (ok, it's a little bit harder to reprogram a PID, but given there were "fixes" up yesterday within hours of the story breaking, it's a reasonable analogy).
Yes, this is one of the more shameful examples of the reporter attempting to shove words down the interviewee's mouth, and completely misrepresenting the results.
Take a look at the first sentence:
"The overeager adoption of big data is likely to result in catastrophes of analysis comparable to a national epidemic of collapsing bridges"
Then read the interview. At no point does Jordan indicate that the misanalysis of big data will cause a catastrophe comparable to the epidemic of collapsing bridges. Never. What he does (and apparently the reporter is either too stupid or too dishonest to represent), is provide an analogy between building a bridge without scientific principles and not performing proper statistical analysis on big data.
He never makes a comparison between the outcomes of these two events. He basically says: if you build a bridge without scientific principles, it will fall down. If you are not careful in your analysis of big data, your results will be wrong.
The whole article goes on in a very similar manner. Science reporters used to have something called "journalistic integrity". Here we get a click-bait article where a "reporter" has predetermined a topic that will gain lots of hits and is desperately trying to fit the interviewees words into his agenda.
Shameful.
Well, then you should take a look at the attached powerpoint presentation! It gives an in-depth analysis of exactly why you should be careful when answering "Yes" to UAC prompts.
Exactly this.
I've found agile typically a poor solution for building non-trivial internal software for a company.
Issues I've found with in-house pure agile:
- regular access to the customer is problematic
- need to re-architect during sprints due to unforeseen requirements
- inability to produce reliable estimates or determine whether buy/build/make-do is the best option
- running over time/budget due to poorly analyzed requirements
The big "win" of agile is supposed to be that it can adapt to changing requirements. I would say more often than not for in-house development the requirements are fairly fixed. Change can occur due to changing regulations, changing business environment, but these changes typically occur slowly and can easily be fit into an existing project plan.
Agile works great in cases when it's a software dev shop that typically has much more control over the features and architecture of what is being built. For in-house development though, I've also found a mix of Agile/Waterfall to work best.
So people never get to retire?
Fair Tax handles this by having a certain "consumption allowance" based on family size.
When I first read about it, I was thinking the same think: This hit's the middle and lower class the most. The more I read about Fair Tax though, the more it makes sense. The issues would be determining a fair consumption allowance, and controlling evasion (the rich can consume many goods in other countries...an option the poor don't have access to).
Wealth accumulation (by and large) is not the big issue with income inequality. The bigger issues are the access to better education, better security, better health care, etc that wealth provides is as it creates a negative feedback loop.
Really?!? 300,000 people are going to die of the flu in africa this year?!?
From the CDC's estimate of Ebola cases located here, taking the LOW count and assuming a 60% mortality rate (also low).
This is a huge problem for Africa. A much much more serious issue than the flu. It just isn't (too) much of a concern for western society as we have much better access to modern medical facilities and much more money to throw at the problem.
Yes. In third-world countries with poor sanitation, little to no access to modern medical facilities and nearly no education on the identification and handling of ebola victims.
Ebola has been around since the 70s. This is the same virus. Although the impact of this outbreak to west africa will be massive, the overall impact to the rest of the world (especially first-world countries) will be minimal.
Stop your fear-mongering. It doesn't help.
Duhh...with unlimited power we can just all run air conditioners!
Energy crisis AND global warming solved!
.
.
.
.
.
.
Note: The above is intended as humor, and is not in any means meant to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
Which is exactly why Rossi is NOT DOING SCIENCE.
He refuses to have anyone else gain access to his device.
He refuses to provide technical specifications.
He refuses to even give the basic science for how this thing could possibly work.
And he makes up some BS excuse about worrying about someone stealing his idea, all while sitting on (if it were true), would be the most important invention of the past 100 years.
There are a lot of charlatans out there. We don't have time or manpower to go and replicate every experiment that some basement-dwelling idiot says is the answer to unlimited energy, perpetual youth, or life, the universe and everything.
If Rossi wants to be taken seriously, they he can damn well follow the process and let someone replicate his experiment. Otherwise we should move on, there is nothing to see here.
It's a little more complex than that. I believe it's more like this:
Little Johnny Verizon opens a sandwich delivery service. He offers "Guaranteed sandwiches in 10 minutes". This isn't a problem for him, as there are only 5 people ordering sandwiches and he can easily get them all delivered in 10 minutes.
Net d'Flix opens a new sandwich shop. It's really really popular. People start asking Little Johnny to deliever sandwiches from d'Flix. Little Johnny (being a little bit greedy) signs up a bunch of new customers. Unfortunately, d'Flix sandwiches take more time to make, and little Johnny can't guarantee his 10 minute delivery time anymore. At the same time, Little Johnny's brother (Fios Verizon) opened his own sandwich shop. Little Johnny gets a kickback from Fios for every sandwich he delivers, so he REALLY wants people to buy from Fios. Unfortunately, Fios' sandwiches are terrible and can only be ordered in "combo packages" where if you really like pickles, you have to order mustard and lettuce as well.
Little Johnny then has a great idea "I'll just tell d'Flix that I won't deliver their sandwiches in 10 minutes unless they pay more money to hire another delivery guy, plus a little extra for my inconvenience". People will whine about their sandwiches not being fresh, and d'Flix will have to pay up.
Now this entire time, Little Johnny hasn't been meeting his "10 minute delivery guarantee", but he doesn't really care as he's the only sandwich delivery person in town, and people really like their sandwiches.
I agree, but I also think there needs to be a balance between KISS and other principles (e.g. DRY). I've come across developers who use KISS as an excuse to be lazy.
I recently came across some code from a colleague where it was hundreds of lines filling in object properties from data in a spreadsheet. Each property being filled in was coded as a separate line, calling a one of five different routines based on the data type to be parsed.
I asked "why didn't you just add a configuration (or just an array) that lists the fields to be parsed, then use reflection to fill in the properties" (performance was not an issue). His response was it violated KISS as reflection is "complicated".
Yes reflection isn't as simple as direct property access, and yes adding a config parser/loop is a bit more code, but at least:
- The code is readable (reading 10 pages of code in a single routine makes my eyes bleed)
- Its easier to modify (we had a change where we needed all decimal values to be parsed differently. Suddenly 50 lines of code need to change rather than 1)
- It's immediately obvious where the exception cases are (we had a bug due to a typo where 1 of the fields was being parsed incorrectly in certain edge cases. This filtered down to some calculations later on and was quite the pain to find the culprit).
As in most programming tasks, balance is key.
Huh? Colonizing Mars is not science. It's engineering.
Now, peer review is also a good idea in engineering, but so are things like detailed design specifications, planning, prototyping, feasibility studies, etc.
These are areas in which Mars One is severely lacking.