Understanding how to use a computer, is like being able to drive. The more complex the computer, the larger / more complex the vehicles (supercomputers, etc. equate to pilots in some cases).
Being able to make the computer do what you want, that's like being a mechanic. There's a range of skill here too, from people who can change the brake pads (most programmers who only touch the one language they've been taught) up to someone who can dismantle and rebuild any vehicle or other motor that comes their way.
Being able to design and build the computer is like being an automobile architect, or highly skilled engineer. At the lower end, you have the kit-car builders, up to the people working for Ford et al.
Learning to code takes you from "user" to someone modifying their system to improve their (or other's) work pattern. It does indeed take you a step up, both in your understanding of the system and the things you can achieve.
However, claiming that "anyone" can learn to code is a misconception, in the same way that "anyone" can learn to repair a car. Of course. If they put a ton of effort in and lots of hard work and want to and have skilled people to learn from.
But those who can learn to code effectively enough to improve or change their career? That's a whole different kettle of fish. Like the guy who progresses from occasionally topping up the oil to someone who can strip down the whole engine to diagnosis the fault and make the car safer or faster or more efficient on the way.
No one skill is a panacea. But another skill never hurts.
Oh that cock who has no idea how to sell or test gadgets and hosts a program where they show them on a screen for a fraction of a second without showing you anything useful or discussing a single down-side?
And who - it appears - has no actual qualifications (besides a pilot licence) listed anywhere that would suggest anything "gadgety" in his background?
Sorry, but he's an author / TV presenter. I've yet to see any qualification beyond that that gives him any say in education or coding at all.
And the number of times I've cringed at things he's said/done on that program, I couldn't count. Last time I saw it, he was screaming like a little girl because some $2000 remote control car he was controlling nearly spun out of control because he "forgot to steer".
Don't even get me started on the crap they recommend on that show. It's basically a 30-minute advert for 50 products and then a "competition" at the end to win them all.
My Samsung phone is three years old and has AMOLED screen - not a problem. Girlfriend has the same phone for the same amount of time... no problem.
And I deliberately disable all screensavers and moving shite on the screen, so it's spends 99% of its powered-on life showing the same icons in the same place.
I don't know what cheap crap you're buying but it's go nothing to do with the underlying tech of AMOLED.
There has never been any evidence that being too close to a screen - or indeed... anything you might see in the ordinary course of a day - is damaging to your eyes. Your eyes have this amazing thing called "focus" and when something's too bright they hurt and make you look away. Apart from UV, pretty much anything else is fine to look at so long as your eyes do not complain themselves.
Also, no your face won't stay like that, you won't go blind, and, no, the bogeyman won't cut your tongue out.
GPOs generally do nothing more than apply local polices which generally do nothing more than force certain registry entries.
If a GPO exists, it's because a registry entry that it can tweak exists. Generally, it takes no more than a Google or a dig through an admx file to find out the registry entry that they correspond to.
Slashdot comment system will munge it but open any ADMX and you see this:
"RIAA chairman and CEO Cary Sherman noted an 'alarming' disparity between the growth in the number of ad-supported streams, and the growth in revenues generated by these."
Genius-fecking-salesman in charge of an entire industry organisation doesn't understand that just showing a company's advert 100 times to the same viewer instead of just once doesn't automatically mean they'll pay 100 times more to run the ad.
Anything "ad-supported" is doomed to die the second people get used to the ads, or get bothered by them.
1% of Steam gamers, given the recent hardware/software survey.
That's 120,000 players playing JUST at this moment, and probably 1.25 million "active" Steam accounts, by the latest stats that Valve release.
You can keep mocking, but in terms of games available to them, it's an upward slide.
I remember when people used to mock Linux for not having a "proper GUI", couldn't join Windows networks, etc. etc. etc. Turns out, it's one of the world's most profusely deployed operating systems, in various guises.
Or just make the user press a button to actually unlock / start their car.
Which seems a fecking good idea anyway.
All this "do things from out of visual range" junk is just asking for trouble when you have to a) touch the door to open it anyway and b) touch the pedals/wheel to drive it anyway.
This is the so-called "keyless" entry system where mere presence of the key-device is considered enough to open the doors and start the car.
All they are doing is extending that "probe" range artificially so the key thinks it's near the car and the car thinks the key (and thus the driver) are near too.
It's one of the incredibly STUPID ideas that I actively removed from the list of options on a new vehicle that I was offered recently, for precisely this reason. If you have the traditional "press a button to open doors" keys, then you're still subject to radio interception attacks (dependent on the complexity of the protocol, it's not hard to imagine it can be secure but that it's not as secure as you might think) but not to simple "passive" authorisation at a distance like this.
The userspace, sure. The kernel? How do you intend to access hardware without using a pointer-type that could (if used incorrectly) crash the kernel? And how are you going to program those drivers etc. BETTER than the Linux people who - if they don't use their pointers correctly - will crash the kernel too.
The userspace can surely benefit from a complete rewrite, but I'm not at all sure what kind of investment in time it would be to rewrite the vast swathes of existing software to be "Redox" compatible, or what would benefit from it. If you're going to do this for security reasons, you can't have unsafe raw pointers, which Rust supports but again "You're on your own, I hope you manage them properly" is the mantra there.
But a kernel? Or even a set of drivers? Love to see how you're going to get close to that, even if you just convert the existing code and abstract out the memory references.
- Not knowing the exact centre of mass of the planet in question to the same accuracy. - Not knowing the altitude, density, etc. making up the planet to the same accuracy. - Not knowing the warp-effects of space and nearby objects (i.e. everything with mass) to the same accuracy.
Which is why we aim it "good enough", and then put 10% more fuel than strictly necessary into it, even if that's at ENORMOUS cost.
Hell, when GPS was launched, the US military still wasn't convinced that Einstein was right so they included an option NOT to compensate for relativity in their calculations. That's how "accurate" we need to be.
Pretty much, worry about the thing to which you can measure least accurately, and then made sure you add on enough backup to compensate for all your estimated error margins - plus a bit more. And then you won't need to worry.
But, yes, I know pi to 32 decimal places. It's a singularly useless skill except to keep your mind elastic. I actually ended up memorising it because I was writing different programs in school that approximated pi and it's hard to know when they are converging quickly or not, and after a while you get to memorise the number you keep referring to.
And yet I can guarantee you will find several studies that tell you that the straight-back position, even in a standard chair, is probably bad for you.
In fact, it's recommended to have a small curve in your back when sitting in even a normal chair, i.e. slouch down slightly.
I only hurt when asked to "correct posture" sit... that's just uncomfortable, and things that hurt often hurt for a reason. Maybe my body is taller/shorter/less weighty or whatever, and that's why it hurts to sit straight (despite DECADES of teachers, parents, employers, telling me to do so), and yet a slight slouch is perfectly comfortable. Maybe yours differs because of others factors.
Maybe, just maybe, there's no one right answer beyond "stop doing whatever hurts for you", and that telling people how to sit, lay, eat, write, or anything else is just people imposing THEIR body response on everyone in the world.
As I speak, I have a 4-inch gap between my butt and the actual back of the chair. It doesn't hurt at all and I can maintain that for hours with zero effort.
On a similar note, I deploy IT in schools and, especially with little kids, NOT ONE PERSON has ever questioned that I put the mice on the right-hand side. Nobody moves them to the left. Ever. Even left-handers. They are free to, I just set them up to the right, and I'm bound by workplace regulations on how much elbow-room must be on both sides so it's not that either. But nobody ever switches hands. Until you point it out. Then even the left-handers find it uncomfortable.
Maybe, unless someone is complaining about it hurting or feeling wrong, there's not a problem to solve. And when they do complain, forcing other people to do something uncomfortable for them for the sake of everyone doing the same thing is just stupid.
Then you're just at Germany's will anyway - different venue, same problem.
And, it's not the encryption that's the problem. It's the source code. They are being told that they have to modify the device so that the encryption can be bypassed. Physical access to a machine is game over, always remember that. There's little Apple could do to stop that, if it is indeed ordered in court.
If the device was properly encrypted, nothing short of the actual passphrase, or the encryption key itself that's normally protected by that passphrase, would open up the data. They would have to observe the device being unlocked, which would require the co-operation of the suspect (who obviously isn't co-operating at the moment).
This is just a passcode bypass, really. Something I do 20-30 times a month on our school iPads, the only difference being they have to let me "supervise" them and keys etc. are stored in our MDM products to give me that kind of access to allow over-the-air passcode resets.
And even if the problem were encryption and some magical "Apple key" that unlocks everything, I think the solution is going to be more like inventing an encryption method that requires the co-operation of any N out of M keyholders. Then put each key into a different jurisdiction so that unless the US, Russia and China all want the same information and subpoena their particular subsidiaries to co-operate, the encryption could be unlocked. And Apple US can say "Look, here's our part of this device's key.... but without the others it's useless. We have co-operated to the full extent of US law, it's not our fault the other parts are in Europe and the Middle-East under the protection of a different company in a different jurisdcition".
But that's moot in this particular case as that's not what's happened.
Because it's obvious, anyone in the know probably already has kit that does this, it's in no way a secret, or new, or otherwise unavailable, and all possible opponents are deploying this already.
But if you make it sound new and exciting, people in the US won't question why they spend more on the military than ANY THING ELSE, EVER, despite not even being at war, and they'll think you're doing things that nobody else has ever done, that sound cool, and so they won't mind frittering money away.
As someone who is driving a fancy "new" car (for which the primary criteria was "no extras, no gadgets, no fancy stuff, cheapest thing they have", and which ended up with touchscreen displays, in-car wifi, electronic parking brake, etc. because - well, that is considered "no extras" nowadays):
The problem is that people (and some manufacturers!) confuse two things:
The electronic systems that control the life-critical elements of the vehicle (brakes, airbags, even driver seat position).
The electronic systems that play your music, your in-dash sat-nav, the software that does voice recognition, etc.
There is no need for the two to be joined. That's the danger.
It's not a problem that your sat-nav might use an Internet connection to pull down traffic and map updates, or even read out your emails. There's also no problem with the entertainment system going online to suck down album covers, or to update its playback software, or to pull in that new feature to support Apple CarPlay streaming or whatever.
The problem is things like your ECU that controls the ABS and brakes being a) anywhere near or connected to the other system, b) being over-the-air updateable.
And steering? Short of REALLY STUPID semi-automated cars (Tesla, etc), your steering shouldn't be able to be computer controlled. There's no need for that unless you want to mollycoddle STUPID AND DANGEROUS drivers who fall asleep at the wheel, to make them even more stupid and dangerous.
Some manufacturer's get this right. Some don't. Even cruise control can be a dangerous item. Honestly, you want the car to continue to accelerate without driver input? No sensor in the world is going to make that a safe thing to do. Yet we've taken that for granted, even on huge trucks, for decades.
But OTA updates of the airbags, steering, brakes, etc. just shouldn't be happening. There is no safe point at which to switch control mid-flow to a different piece of software. Even static and with the engine off, you could open up the brakes if it fails at switchover, and end up rolling down hills.
The trick is to ensure that you get a sensible manufacturer here, not to deny OTA updates of things like sat-navs, entertainment systems, etc. A lot of cars isolate the two systems. Some cars actually have an "entertainment board" separate to the dashboard display, even, and it's not possible to show entertainment data on the dashboard display or car data on the touchscreen entertainment display.
And I would hope that any sensible manufacturer signs their updates and is legally responsible for ANYTHING that happens as a result of hacking and/or bad software updates.
The car I drive has a lever to adjust the driver's seat. There was an option for automatic, electronics, "remember who's driving" adjustment. That's dangerous. I said no.
The car I driver has a manual key-start. In an emergency, I just turn it off. There was an option for remote-start, touch-start, etc. That's dangerous. I said no.
The car I drive has a manual gearbox. In an emergency, I can just neutral it. There was an automatic option. I don't like the fact that in automatic cars, the car can creep forward without the driver doing anything. In a manual, that's much harder to do and much more likely to just stall the car. Even knocking a manual INTO gear is much harder to do.
The car I drive had an option for automatic lane control. NO. Not a chance in hell. Able to fight my steering, even slightly, is not going to happen. But people obviously still buy that option.
The car I drive had all kinds of options and there are even a handful of "standard" features that I consider could be potentially dangerous. And those I don't use. That doesn't mean they couldn't be activated, but it can't go on the Internet. And with the separation between the USB ports, OBD, the entertainment system, the dashboard display, and the control systems, it's so difficult - if not impossible - to cross the gap that I know it's p
Then you've got no excuse at all for not running the numbers.
1000 CPUs is nothing against 10^176. It's 10^3. You could have a billion times more CPUs running for billions of times more time and STILL not come close to evaulating a BILLIONTH of the possible moves even if they were all running at a BILLION GHz. NOT EVEN CLOSE.
1000 CPU's isn't even a rack. It's not even enough to handle a pittance of an Internet service. It's not even comparable to Deep Blue in terms of those numbers. Yet it's beat EVERYONE at a game several orders-of-magnitude numbers of orders-of-magnitude more difficult than Chess. And it can win against virtually everyone else with MUCH LESS than that stated number of processors.
Honestly, I'd expect better from anyone with a vague feel for numbers to look at the powers in the above post and realise what this means.
We have jumped some 10^50 - 10^100 times ahead of current machines (nobody could ever beat a grandmaster of that Dan on a full-size board without handicap EVER BEFORE, and weren't predicted to in our lifetimes even using Moore's Law-like extrapolations of much more powerful supercomputers than 1000 CPUs) by using a different TYPE of system entirely.
Sorry, but I'm a mathematician. Check my comment history, I'm the first to disparage any kind of "AI" (which just means human-programmed heuristic most of the time), especially that which just does brute-force search of possibilities. That's NOT AI. Almost every "game AI" isn't AI. Not even close.
However, in uni, one of my lecturers was studying Go as one of his prime areas of research, and I've seen - and checked - some of the numbers here.
You have no idea what this machine has just done. It's leapt forward some 10-20 years in terms of computer Go-playing capability in one fell swoop. The numbers involved in Go are so huge that brute-force search, even for a limited number of moves, is absolutely impossible in the times given.
And it isn't being given programmed hints, because Go is just too complex a game for that beyond amateur play. There's a handful of hard-and-fast rules of what's a stupid move and what's not and everything else interacts SO MUCH with the rest of the board and future plays that it's almost impossible to even tell who's winning most of the time!
As such, this system, no matter the power behind it, is doing something that dumb, brute-force, play-the-game AI written by world-experts in Go, AI, and game theory wasn't expected to be able to achieve within the next decade. And it primarily gets there because it learns from information fed to it.
At that point, although it's only limited to Go, the engine is proving itself capable of - almost - a kind of intuition, insight and "feel" for the positions rather than anything to do with numbers and scoring and weighting and pre-written rules. Now, that's a vastly overblown explanation, still. The computer isn't "feeling" anything. But whatever it's emulation and use of such, it's leaps-and-bounds ahead of its competitors.
This is why it makes BBC News, Slashdot and every other media outlet. It's not just winning by brute force. It's doing something else. It's spotting patterns in data it's never been exposed to before. It's able to hypothesise and learn from mistakes on board layouts that maybe NO HUMAN HAS EVER SEEN BEFORE OR WILL AGAIN (that's how large some of the numbers of possibilities get!).
Even a pack of cards, with 52! = 8x10^67 potential arrangements of a shuffled deck:
Pales in comparison to the number of possible Go positions (2x10^170) and the ways that you can move from one to another (~ 1 x 10^768). And that's just on a standard 19x19 board (something almost unplayable for a computer just a decade again).
This thing isn't calculating. It's gaining insight from historical observation and applying that to self-similar situations that nobody has ever been able to analyse, nor which it could ever analyse fully in the time given. That's the start of "true" AI. It's only a start, but it's quite seriously ground-breaking in that ability.
And once you start down that route, there's nothing stopping AlphaGo quickly learning every similar game, then dis-similar games, then other games, then other things entirely, using the same kinds of system underneath.
Honestly, there's a reason that game theorists and AI-experts are making a fuss about this.
Most likely. But that's the case with just about any game.
Can you really guarantee to find fair games of anything from tic-tac-toe, to chess, to draughts, to reversi, to Risk, to poker, to anything at all online? Go was pretty much out-there on its on in this regard but ordinary PC Go software has been able to beat amateurs for a few years now. This is orders-of-magnitude in terms of a leap in capability but nothing that would change the situation for the majority of people playing it.
Pretty much the only "games" that can be fair are if you can guarantee it's against a human without any kind of possibility they could be plugging moves into a computer at any point. That's a vanishingly small amount of plays, pretty much limited to strict competitions (and even professional chess competitions have seen people use toilet breaks to illicitly get computer analysis of the board state on their phones!).
What I want is not a computer player that never wins, nor one that wins all the times. Those are EASY to program in comparison to one that CONVINCINGLY challenges you enough that you have to play slightly better each time in order to win, without trouncing you or letting you walk all over it.
That's the REAL hard problem in any kind of game "AI" - the "gamer's Turing Test" - how to lose/win convincingly without people knowing you're a bot.
Try playing a pool game on a computer, for example. They usually go from "whoops, missed a blindingly obvious easy shot" to "four-cushion bounces, jump the ball, curve into the other balls coming back from the cushions, and tap one into the nominated pocket" without anything convincing in between.
Like Left4Dead's "director" - we need to adjust to the player just enough to make it fun but that if they're obviously letting their guard down, we take advantage. Unlike the 80's arcade games that had to be punishingly hard but just easy enough at first for you to want to put money in but not to waste too much time in front of, modern video games need to be easy enough to pick up and get you into and keep you coming back for more (and spending some DLC) without feeling like you're playing a script, trouncing everything, or need to spend a fortune just to stay competitive.
Slashdot Mirror
If dumb genes are killed off, why are there still so many stupid people around?
I don't think it works as easily as you would hope.
You need to add:
- "Illegally" to the first part.
- "Legally" to the second part.
It may not mean anything to you, but some people will pay for that kind of thing if the product is available.
And does it differ from:
Atari: 80 Classic Games in One!
Which I got on Steam several years ago. The store page is long-gone but it's still in my library and substantially the same program.
My analogy is slightly different.
Understanding how to use a computer, is like being able to drive. The more complex the computer, the larger / more complex the vehicles (supercomputers, etc. equate to pilots in some cases).
Being able to make the computer do what you want, that's like being a mechanic. There's a range of skill here too, from people who can change the brake pads (most programmers who only touch the one language they've been taught) up to someone who can dismantle and rebuild any vehicle or other motor that comes their way.
Being able to design and build the computer is like being an automobile architect, or highly skilled engineer. At the lower end, you have the kit-car builders, up to the people working for Ford et al.
Learning to code takes you from "user" to someone modifying their system to improve their (or other's) work pattern. It does indeed take you a step up, both in your understanding of the system and the things you can achieve.
However, claiming that "anyone" can learn to code is a misconception, in the same way that "anyone" can learn to repair a car. Of course. If they put a ton of effort in and lots of hard work and want to and have skilled people to learn from.
But those who can learn to code effectively enough to improve or change their career? That's a whole different kettle of fish. Like the guy who progresses from occasionally topping up the oil to someone who can strip down the whole engine to diagnosis the fault and make the car safer or faster or more efficient on the way.
No one skill is a panacea. But another skill never hurts.
If the ISP or email provider host the domain that your email is at, is it really that much of a problem?
Sure end-to-end is nice, but these guys can accept, redirect and intercept your email in a million other ways anyway.
Personal domains, forwarded emails, etc. - that's another matter entirely. But Google can read anything@gmail.com if they want, etc.
Sigh:
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
He's probably never written a line of code in his life.
Who?
Oh that cock who has no idea how to sell or test gadgets and hosts a program where they show them on a screen for a fraction of a second without showing you anything useful or discussing a single down-side?
And who - it appears - has no actual qualifications (besides a pilot licence) listed anywhere that would suggest anything "gadgety" in his background?
Sorry, but he's an author / TV presenter. I've yet to see any qualification beyond that that gives him any say in education or coding at all.
And the number of times I've cringed at things he's said/done on that program, I couldn't count. Last time I saw it, he was screaming like a little girl because some $2000 remote control car he was controlling nearly spun out of control because he "forgot to steer".
Don't even get me started on the crap they recommend on that show. It's basically a 30-minute advert for 50 products and then a "competition" at the end to win them all.
Really?
My Samsung phone is three years old and has AMOLED screen - not a problem. Girlfriend has the same phone for the same amount of time... no problem.
And I deliberately disable all screensavers and moving shite on the screen, so it's spends 99% of its powered-on life showing the same icons in the same place.
I don't know what cheap crap you're buying but it's go nothing to do with the underlying tech of AMOLED.
Yeah.
What kind of idiots would do that?
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/...
Stop listening to your mother.
There has never been any evidence that being too close to a screen - or indeed... anything you might see in the ordinary course of a day - is damaging to your eyes. Your eyes have this amazing thing called "focus" and when something's too bright they hurt and make you look away. Apart from UV, pretty much anything else is fine to look at so long as your eyes do not complain themselves.
Also, no your face won't stay like that, you won't go blind, and, no, the bogeyman won't cut your tongue out.
GPOs generally do nothing more than apply local polices which generally do nothing more than force certain registry entries.
If a GPO exists, it's because a registry entry that it can tweak exists. Generally, it takes no more than a Google or a dig through an admx file to find out the registry entry that they correspond to.
Slashdot comment system will munge it but open any ADMX and you see this:
ANGLE BRACKET policy name="L_Underlinehyperlinks" class="User" displayName="$(string.L_Underlinehyperlinks)" explainText="$(string.L_UnderlinehyperlinksExplain)" key="Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Access\Internet" valueName="DoNotUnderlineHyperlinks" ANGLE BRACKET
"RIAA chairman and CEO Cary Sherman noted an 'alarming' disparity between the growth in the number of ad-supported streams, and the growth in revenues generated by these."
Genius-fecking-salesman in charge of an entire industry organisation doesn't understand that just showing a company's advert 100 times to the same viewer instead of just once doesn't automatically mean they'll pay 100 times more to run the ad.
Anything "ad-supported" is doomed to die the second people get used to the ads, or get bothered by them.
1% of Steam gamers, given the recent hardware/software survey.
That's 120,000 players playing JUST at this moment, and probably 1.25 million "active" Steam accounts, by the latest stats that Valve release.
You can keep mocking, but in terms of games available to them, it's an upward slide.
I remember when people used to mock Linux for not having a "proper GUI", couldn't join Windows networks, etc. etc. etc. Turns out, it's one of the world's most profusely deployed operating systems, in various guises.
Cock.
SteamOS on Linux is entirely x86 based.
Android is based on ARM and/or x86 with a Java-like app interface. Not even close to similar systems.
Not to mention OpenGL vs OpenGL ES
Or just make the user press a button to actually unlock / start their car.
Which seems a fecking good idea anyway.
All this "do things from out of visual range" junk is just asking for trouble when you have to a) touch the door to open it anyway and b) touch the pedals/wheel to drive it anyway.
This is the so-called "keyless" entry system where mere presence of the key-device is considered enough to open the doors and start the car.
All they are doing is extending that "probe" range artificially so the key thinks it's near the car and the car thinks the key (and thus the driver) are near too.
It's one of the incredibly STUPID ideas that I actively removed from the list of options on a new vehicle that I was offered recently, for precisely this reason. If you have the traditional "press a button to open doors" keys, then you're still subject to radio interception attacks (dependent on the complexity of the protocol, it's not hard to imagine it can be secure but that it's not as secure as you might think) but not to simple "passive" authorisation at a distance like this.
The userspace, sure. The kernel? How do you intend to access hardware without using a pointer-type that could (if used incorrectly) crash the kernel? And how are you going to program those drivers etc. BETTER than the Linux people who - if they don't use their pointers correctly - will crash the kernel too.
The userspace can surely benefit from a complete rewrite, but I'm not at all sure what kind of investment in time it would be to rewrite the vast swathes of existing software to be "Redox" compatible, or what would benefit from it. If you're going to do this for security reasons, you can't have unsafe raw pointers, which Rust supports but again "You're on your own, I hope you manage them properly" is the mantra there.
But a kernel? Or even a set of drivers? Love to see how you're going to get close to that, even if you just convert the existing code and abstract out the memory references.
And moot in the face of:
- Not knowing the exact centre of mass of the planet in question to the same accuracy.
- Not knowing the altitude, density, etc. making up the planet to the same accuracy.
- Not knowing the warp-effects of space and nearby objects (i.e. everything with mass) to the same accuracy.
Which is why we aim it "good enough", and then put 10% more fuel than strictly necessary into it, even if that's at ENORMOUS cost.
Hell, when GPS was launched, the US military still wasn't convinced that Einstein was right so they included an option NOT to compensate for relativity in their calculations. That's how "accurate" we need to be.
Pretty much, worry about the thing to which you can measure least accurately, and then made sure you add on enough backup to compensate for all your estimated error margins - plus a bit more. And then you won't need to worry.
But, yes, I know pi to 32 decimal places. It's a singularly useless skill except to keep your mind elastic. I actually ended up memorising it because I was writing different programs in school that approximated pi and it's hard to know when they are converging quickly or not, and after a while you get to memorise the number you keep referring to.
And yet I can guarantee you will find several studies that tell you that the straight-back position, even in a standard chair, is probably bad for you.
In fact, it's recommended to have a small curve in your back when sitting in even a normal chair, i.e. slouch down slightly.
I only hurt when asked to "correct posture" sit... that's just uncomfortable, and things that hurt often hurt for a reason. Maybe my body is taller/shorter/less weighty or whatever, and that's why it hurts to sit straight (despite DECADES of teachers, parents, employers, telling me to do so), and yet a slight slouch is perfectly comfortable. Maybe yours differs because of others factors.
Maybe, just maybe, there's no one right answer beyond "stop doing whatever hurts for you", and that telling people how to sit, lay, eat, write, or anything else is just people imposing THEIR body response on everyone in the world.
As I speak, I have a 4-inch gap between my butt and the actual back of the chair. It doesn't hurt at all and I can maintain that for hours with zero effort.
On a similar note, I deploy IT in schools and, especially with little kids, NOT ONE PERSON has ever questioned that I put the mice on the right-hand side. Nobody moves them to the left. Ever. Even left-handers. They are free to, I just set them up to the right, and I'm bound by workplace regulations on how much elbow-room must be on both sides so it's not that either. But nobody ever switches hands. Until you point it out. Then even the left-handers find it uncomfortable.
Maybe, unless someone is complaining about it hurting or feeling wrong, there's not a problem to solve. And when they do complain, forcing other people to do something uncomfortable for them for the sake of everyone doing the same thing is just stupid.
Then you're just at Germany's will anyway - different venue, same problem.
And, it's not the encryption that's the problem. It's the source code. They are being told that they have to modify the device so that the encryption can be bypassed. Physical access to a machine is game over, always remember that. There's little Apple could do to stop that, if it is indeed ordered in court.
If the device was properly encrypted, nothing short of the actual passphrase, or the encryption key itself that's normally protected by that passphrase, would open up the data. They would have to observe the device being unlocked, which would require the co-operation of the suspect (who obviously isn't co-operating at the moment).
This is just a passcode bypass, really. Something I do 20-30 times a month on our school iPads, the only difference being they have to let me "supervise" them and keys etc. are stored in our MDM products to give me that kind of access to allow over-the-air passcode resets.
And even if the problem were encryption and some magical "Apple key" that unlocks everything, I think the solution is going to be more like inventing an encryption method that requires the co-operation of any N out of M keyholders. Then put each key into a different jurisdiction so that unless the US, Russia and China all want the same information and subpoena their particular subsidiaries to co-operate, the encryption could be unlocked. And Apple US can say "Look, here's our part of this device's key.... but without the others it's useless. We have co-operated to the full extent of US law, it's not our fault the other parts are in Europe and the Middle-East under the protection of a different company in a different jurisdcition".
But that's moot in this particular case as that's not what's happened.
Because it's obvious, anyone in the know probably already has kit that does this, it's in no way a secret, or new, or otherwise unavailable, and all possible opponents are deploying this already.
But if you make it sound new and exciting, people in the US won't question why they spend more on the military than ANY THING ELSE, EVER, despite not even being at war, and they'll think you're doing things that nobody else has ever done, that sound cool, and so they won't mind frittering money away.
As someone who is driving a fancy "new" car (for which the primary criteria was "no extras, no gadgets, no fancy stuff, cheapest thing they have", and which ended up with touchscreen displays, in-car wifi, electronic parking brake, etc. because - well, that is considered "no extras" nowadays):
The problem is that people (and some manufacturers!) confuse two things:
The electronic systems that control the life-critical elements of the vehicle (brakes, airbags, even driver seat position).
The electronic systems that play your music, your in-dash sat-nav, the software that does voice recognition, etc.
There is no need for the two to be joined. That's the danger.
It's not a problem that your sat-nav might use an Internet connection to pull down traffic and map updates, or even read out your emails. There's also no problem with the entertainment system going online to suck down album covers, or to update its playback software, or to pull in that new feature to support Apple CarPlay streaming or whatever.
The problem is things like your ECU that controls the ABS and brakes being a) anywhere near or connected to the other system, b) being over-the-air updateable.
And steering? Short of REALLY STUPID semi-automated cars (Tesla, etc), your steering shouldn't be able to be computer controlled. There's no need for that unless you want to mollycoddle STUPID AND DANGEROUS drivers who fall asleep at the wheel, to make them even more stupid and dangerous.
Some manufacturer's get this right. Some don't. Even cruise control can be a dangerous item. Honestly, you want the car to continue to accelerate without driver input? No sensor in the world is going to make that a safe thing to do. Yet we've taken that for granted, even on huge trucks, for decades.
But OTA updates of the airbags, steering, brakes, etc. just shouldn't be happening. There is no safe point at which to switch control mid-flow to a different piece of software. Even static and with the engine off, you could open up the brakes if it fails at switchover, and end up rolling down hills.
The trick is to ensure that you get a sensible manufacturer here, not to deny OTA updates of things like sat-navs, entertainment systems, etc. A lot of cars isolate the two systems. Some cars actually have an "entertainment board" separate to the dashboard display, even, and it's not possible to show entertainment data on the dashboard display or car data on the touchscreen entertainment display.
And I would hope that any sensible manufacturer signs their updates and is legally responsible for ANYTHING that happens as a result of hacking and/or bad software updates.
The car I drive has a lever to adjust the driver's seat. There was an option for automatic, electronics, "remember who's driving" adjustment. That's dangerous. I said no.
The car I driver has a manual key-start. In an emergency, I just turn it off. There was an option for remote-start, touch-start, etc. That's dangerous. I said no.
The car I drive has a manual gearbox. In an emergency, I can just neutral it. There was an automatic option. I don't like the fact that in automatic cars, the car can creep forward without the driver doing anything. In a manual, that's much harder to do and much more likely to just stall the car. Even knocking a manual INTO gear is much harder to do.
The car I drive had an option for automatic lane control. NO. Not a chance in hell. Able to fight my steering, even slightly, is not going to happen. But people obviously still buy that option.
The car I drive had all kinds of options and there are even a handful of "standard" features that I consider could be potentially dangerous. And those I don't use. That doesn't mean they couldn't be activated, but it can't go on the Internet. And with the separation between the USB ports, OBD, the entertainment system, the dashboard display, and the control systems, it's so difficult - if not impossible - to cross the gap that I know it's p
Then you've got no excuse at all for not running the numbers.
1000 CPUs is nothing against 10^176. It's 10^3. You could have a billion times more CPUs running for billions of times more time and STILL not come close to evaulating a BILLIONTH of the possible moves even if they were all running at a BILLION GHz. NOT EVEN CLOSE.
1000 CPU's isn't even a rack. It's not even enough to handle a pittance of an Internet service. It's not even comparable to Deep Blue in terms of those numbers. Yet it's beat EVERYONE at a game several orders-of-magnitude numbers of orders-of-magnitude more difficult than Chess. And it can win against virtually everyone else with MUCH LESS than that stated number of processors.
Honestly, I'd expect better from anyone with a vague feel for numbers to look at the powers in the above post and realise what this means.
We have jumped some 10^50 - 10^100 times ahead of current machines (nobody could ever beat a grandmaster of that Dan on a full-size board without handicap EVER BEFORE, and weren't predicted to in our lifetimes even using Moore's Law-like extrapolations of much more powerful supercomputers than 1000 CPUs) by using a different TYPE of system entirely.
Sorry, but I'm a mathematician. Check my comment history, I'm the first to disparage any kind of "AI" (which just means human-programmed heuristic most of the time), especially that which just does brute-force search of possibilities. That's NOT AI. Almost every "game AI" isn't AI. Not even close.
However, in uni, one of my lecturers was studying Go as one of his prime areas of research, and I've seen - and checked - some of the numbers here.
You have no idea what this machine has just done. It's leapt forward some 10-20 years in terms of computer Go-playing capability in one fell swoop. The numbers involved in Go are so huge that brute-force search, even for a limited number of moves, is absolutely impossible in the times given.
And it isn't being given programmed hints, because Go is just too complex a game for that beyond amateur play. There's a handful of hard-and-fast rules of what's a stupid move and what's not and everything else interacts SO MUCH with the rest of the board and future plays that it's almost impossible to even tell who's winning most of the time!
As such, this system, no matter the power behind it, is doing something that dumb, brute-force, play-the-game AI written by world-experts in Go, AI, and game theory wasn't expected to be able to achieve within the next decade. And it primarily gets there because it learns from information fed to it.
At that point, although it's only limited to Go, the engine is proving itself capable of - almost - a kind of intuition, insight and "feel" for the positions rather than anything to do with numbers and scoring and weighting and pre-written rules. Now, that's a vastly overblown explanation, still. The computer isn't "feeling" anything. But whatever it's emulation and use of such, it's leaps-and-bounds ahead of its competitors.
This is why it makes BBC News, Slashdot and every other media outlet. It's not just winning by brute force. It's doing something else. It's spotting patterns in data it's never been exposed to before. It's able to hypothesise and learn from mistakes on board layouts that maybe NO HUMAN HAS EVER SEEN BEFORE OR WILL AGAIN (that's how large some of the numbers of possibilities get!).
Even a pack of cards, with 52! = 8x10^67 potential arrangements of a shuffled deck:
http://www.murderousmaths.co.u...
Pales in comparison to the number of possible Go positions (2x10^170) and the ways that you can move from one to another (~ 1 x 10^768). And that's just on a standard 19x19 board (something almost unplayable for a computer just a decade again).
This thing isn't calculating. It's gaining insight from historical observation and applying that to self-similar situations that nobody has ever been able to analyse, nor which it could ever analyse fully in the time given. That's the start of "true" AI. It's only a start, but it's quite seriously ground-breaking in that ability.
And once you start down that route, there's nothing stopping AlphaGo quickly learning every similar game, then dis-similar games, then other games, then other things entirely, using the same kinds of system underneath.
Honestly, there's a reason that game theorists and AI-experts are making a fuss about this.
Most likely. But that's the case with just about any game.
Can you really guarantee to find fair games of anything from tic-tac-toe, to chess, to draughts, to reversi, to Risk, to poker, to anything at all online? Go was pretty much out-there on its on in this regard but ordinary PC Go software has been able to beat amateurs for a few years now. This is orders-of-magnitude in terms of a leap in capability but nothing that would change the situation for the majority of people playing it.
Pretty much the only "games" that can be fair are if you can guarantee it's against a human without any kind of possibility they could be plugging moves into a computer at any point. That's a vanishingly small amount of plays, pretty much limited to strict competitions (and even professional chess competitions have seen people use toilet breaks to illicitly get computer analysis of the board state on their phones!).
What I want is not a computer player that never wins, nor one that wins all the times. Those are EASY to program in comparison to one that CONVINCINGLY challenges you enough that you have to play slightly better each time in order to win, without trouncing you or letting you walk all over it.
That's the REAL hard problem in any kind of game "AI" - the "gamer's Turing Test" - how to lose/win convincingly without people knowing you're a bot.
Try playing a pool game on a computer, for example. They usually go from "whoops, missed a blindingly obvious easy shot" to "four-cushion bounces, jump the ball, curve into the other balls coming back from the cushions, and tap one into the nominated pocket" without anything convincing in between.
Like Left4Dead's "director" - we need to adjust to the player just enough to make it fun but that if they're obviously letting their guard down, we take advantage. Unlike the 80's arcade games that had to be punishingly hard but just easy enough at first for you to want to put money in but not to waste too much time in front of, modern video games need to be easy enough to pick up and get you into and keep you coming back for more (and spending some DLC) without feeling like you're playing a script, trouncing everything, or need to spend a fortune just to stay competitive.