Nothing is a deal breaker for Trump fans. Trump could rape the father of one of his supporters and the supporter would cheer. Or at least blame Hillary.
This is the question I've been asking every vociferous political activist I can find: What would your candidate have to either do or advocate to lose your support. It's a stumper for almost everyone. The truth is whether you are for Trump, Clinton, Johnson, or Stein, you are virtually guaranteed to have no idea where your line in the sand is. I find this both deeply disturbing and, I guess, unsurprising given how little we humans actually think about our opinions.
if it hadn't been for the emergency stop.... Hey, kids THERE WAS AN EMERGENCY STOP BUTTON!
There's (almost) always an e-stop. But my the time you can reach it someone is probably already as injured as they were going to get. I've been working in industrial automation for more than 20 years and I have prevented an impending injury with an e-stop precisely once. Even then it was because I had specifically told that person not to be where they were and I was moving to the e-stop at the moment the machine ran away (because someone shorted out a motor controller feedback circuit). Even then in the time it took me to react and respond the machine moved almost 10 feet (straight at his face). Missed him by less than two inches (because he flinched).
E-stops have two purposes: 1) locking out the system while you will be in a dangerous interference location, and 2) releasing the machine so you can extract the mangled remains. In this case it appears to have been the latter. Fortunately it was his leg not his torso or head.
No, they want him to do what most businesses do: plan for only what you know you can already do. Also, focus only on short term profits...because if you can't explain how you'll make a profit it definitely isn't worth doing. Don't you know this is how innovation works?
Yes, your description is exactly the reason, but my point is that Facebook really has no room to complain about a lack of engagement when they've filled my feed with things I can't engage with. Give me a way to filter out the people who've declared they don't want me intruding on their echo chamber anyway.
Disclaimer: The above is almost certainly a simplification. There's rather more important things to worry about than an inability to comment on a random Facebook post.
Pshaw! Nothing is more important than telling someone you don't know that they are wrong, especially online.
In the last two years there's been a steady increase in the prevalence of what I call voyeur posts. Items I can see but I can't either like (emote?) or comment on. I don't really care why that is, I'm much more interested in filtering it from my social media feed. There's no way to do that. So, Facebook, if you would like to increase my ability to "interact and post more" make it so my news feed is filled with things that I can, you know, interact with.
something he was authorized to do. In fact it was his job.
Not after he was let go from the company.
It's incredibly easy to remove or restrict a login account that has any kind of password. It is *universal* policy to do this when employees should no longer have access to specific accounts. Were I a judge I think I'd have to at least consider whether KTXL made a good faith effort to secure their system, and whether that lack of effort should mitigate the punishment handed down. When consent can clearly, easily, and unequivocably be retracted does the fact that said consent wasn't retracted imply consent? despite other factors?
As with so many things in the law, it falls back on the violator's intent to do harm, which was, in this case, clearly established. If he'd done the exact same thing with the intent to correct an error in their publication I doubt he'd be going to jail, and possibly he'd avoid the felony record.
Coming from a lifetime of bad calls in every sporting league ever, I'd encourage everyone to realize that the call made on the field of play is the only call that matters. It's a game, but not only that, it's a game you agreed to play under the appointed judges. Don't like the calls? Change the agreement you play under. Until then quit your whining and play ball.
Well, there are *lots* of competing definitions of AI, so I guess you'd have to provide your definition before we can discuss.
One definition that doesn't agree with you: The ability of a computer or other machine to perform actions thought to require intelligence.
If you had asked someone in the 1970's whether driving a car (correctly) require intelligence, I'm betting they would have said yes. Thus, the self driving car is an artificial intelligence by that definition. From another angle, this is an expert system, which Computer Science has taught in Artificial Intelligence classes since well before this century.
I think you are talking about something now called AGI: Artificial General Intelligence. This program is definitely not AGI, by any definition.
Are there any non-human religions? No? Well, then let's just go ahead a make that next shaky step up the inference chain: Humans, not just religious ones, are the root of all evil. Of course, being human is corralated to lots of other interesting features. So I'm just going to go with the one I think is most likely:
Right. In my career I've been taught one language (Pascal) and been tossed face-first into 4 other languages: C/C++, C#, Lisp, and Python. Language learning happens in phases: - I can learn the syntax, reserved words, flow control, and basic structure of a language in 3-4 days. At that point I'd be able to take a small block of simple code and figure out what it's doing. I could write very simple programs to do pretty pointless things. - Given another week or so I could learn enough of the support libraries to have some exposure to basic things like file access, network APIs, thread and process creation, database access, etc to understand what more general code is supposed to be doing. So about two weeks in I could start contributing to real work by finding and patching certain types of bugs, adding simple feature extensions, or building useful test cases. - Given another 2-4 weeks of work I might be knowledgeable enough to create moderately complex subsystems, debug most single factor bugs, or begin commenting on any architectural problems. - I won't know enough to make architectural changes for another month or more.
In the end, I wouldn't trust myself to make big changes on less than three months familiarity with a language. With some projects I'd want that much time just on that project's codebase, *after* the three months getting familiar with the language. At that point I've probably learned enough to know what it is I don't yet understand.
Make an objective scientific argument in favor of the survival of the human animal as a species. For bonus points, make sure that you do not co-incidentally argue for the preservation of all species on the planet.
All existence is subjective. I think therefore I reach. I don't really care about objectivity, because I'm not objective.
But, if I were to try, I guess I'd base it on the existence of self awareness. Science cannot exist without the self-aware mind to posit, observe, and reflect. For there to be a science or logic within which this argument can be judged valid or invalid there must, therefore exist that mind. Given that you find value in scientific objectivism, you by extension hold value in the self aware mind.
I doubt that's acceptable, as you'll probably call it circular, but, as I said initially...I'm not objective when it comes to my own existence.
I agree, in the long term, but it's not a one step process. You throw people an resources at the problem, expecting to lose some in your ignorance. But humans are explorers. We (well, some of us) have curiosity and drive to do novel things, so there will be people willing to be the first at great personal risk. Leaving the water was risk/reward, climbing that first tree was risk/reward, climbing out of the trees was risk/reward, sailing around the world was risk/reward, going to the moon was risk/reward. We've just got to realize that both sitting on our ass doing nothing and venturing to mars are also risk/reward choices.
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." -Lao Tzu
There's a great West Wing episode which discusses why we should, but somehow I think that wouldn't gain me much here. Discussions of the nature of man, and the establishment of wonder being particularly squishy in hard science terms.
Instead I'd point out that all safety critical systems are engineered around the notion of redundancy. Shit happens, and when it does, things break down. When that unexpected thing happens to our Earth-bound ecology, what, exactly, is our safety strategy? Hide in a hole? For how long? What if it's biological? What happens if someone accidently creates Card's molecular disruption device. We can't reasonably colonize another star system (yet) but we aren't *that* far from being able to establish some very worthwhile planetary redundancy. It's worth it because we are stuck on this rock that I think we should rename 'The Single Point of Failure'.
It seems like the obvious question, from a geek activists point of view, is: Why are the firmware components in our cars not open source? I should be able to compile and validate the loaded firmware so I (or, you know, someone who actually cares) can verify the security, legality, and safety of it's operation. It isn't even required that I be able to re-load the firmware, just that I be able to validate it.
We've got a pretty bad record so far at attempting to intercept objects moving at delta Vs approaching orbital velocities (which 10km/s is definitely that). That's using a guided projectile to attempt the intercept, and counting intercept as close enough to damage via explosive charge. Based on that I can't see us firing a tethered harpoon containing no guidance or propulsion engines, and having any expectation at all of hitting something moving that fast. And that's not even considering the question of actually attaching to the object.
While I agree that there's bias in the reporting here, in all cases the driver of the "autonomous" car has not been cited as at fault. Thus they are certainly within the definition to say the software wasn't at fault. I am with you in one respect: All of the data should be made public on every incident, and on any close calls where actions of any outside agent (the driver of the "autonomous car" or one in a nearby car) prevented an incident. Unfortunately it's not in Google's interest to do so, and there are no laws mandating it, so it probably won't happen.
So is Google going to pay my speeding ticket when a cop pulls over my autonomous automobile for speeding?
Almost certainly. Though they will bring in several well-respected highway safety engineers to testify that following the flow of traffic is significantly safer than following the posted speed limit. Enough jurisdictions will lose money arguing these cases that there won't be money to be made by writing the tickets. Absent both the financial and safety benefits the police will stop issuing the citations.
Both the 6 and the B keys belong on both sides of a split keyboard. It couldn't possibly cost more than another $1 and we can get back to fighting over real significant, intractable problems, like the Oxford comma.
1) no recursion. Except perhaps forms of tail recursion known to exit in bounded time. But you definitely have to ask yourself why you are doing something that could either be unrolled into a loop or has some kind of exponential growth potential.
2) Local variables are fine so long as the analysis is done to guarantee the maximum stack requirement is pre-committed. I mean, realistically the return pointer is a stack variable, so just calling a function that returns would violate the "no local variables" rule. I wouldn't allow dynamically sized items, because then bugs might cause stack overflows...
3) I agree that malloc and free are forbidden *during real-time operation*. However, in some situations you use dynamic allocation if you can pre-allocate all necessary elements prior to entering operational states. This really depends on whether your system *has* a pre-operational state,
Professionals make mistakes. Garbage collection is a useful tool to make it more difficult to screw up.
I get this. And as a software engineer I fully agree. However, in practical terms, there shouldn't be any dynamic memory management happening at all.
It's a real-time system. It *must* interact, on time, with all the planes that are in it's domain. That should be a bounded, predictable load, or there's no way to guarantee responsiveness. Given that, an analysis should have been done on the maximum number of elements the system supported. Those elements should have been preallocated (into a pool if you want to treat them "dynamically") before actual operation began. If/When the pool allocator ran out of items it should do two things: allocate (dynamically) more, and scream bloody murder to everyone who would listen regarding the unexpected allocation.
This is (one of) the reason(s) I generally haven't liked garbage collected languages for real time systems. There's rarely ever a way to guard against unexpected allocations, because *every* allocation is blind.
I'm a software engineer who focuses on automating manufacturing equipment. I've been hearing bad stories about Amazon for at least ten years now. About a year ago I got a call from a head-hunter about a job opening dealing with autonomous warehousing and order fulfillment that sounded like a dream job. Five minutes on the phone got me the name of the company (Kiva Systems) and two minutes of google told me they were being purchased by Amazon.
Nope. Hard stop. I don't even need to know how much they are offering. I love what I do, and I won't willing work for someone who risks making me hate it. Go ruin someone else's psyche. I'd be *really* interested to know how many people there are just like me.
There are continuous claims that voting is ineffective because "my vote doesn't count" when it is because someone is voting for a losing candidate...
As a person squarely in the "my vote doesn't count" category, I feel compelled to say that it isn't that the candidate I'd vote for can't win, it's that no one I'd want vote for could ever possibly win. There is no possible way for me to vote in any way that both A) represents my beliefs and B) adds support to the least bad alternative. It really has nothing to do with diluting my vote. My vote would never be in the top five parties in the USA, much less the top two. I'll never be represented any way other than badly. Mostly that's ok because I just don't care that much.
...why should we dilute the vote even further by letting everyone who walks into the polling place vote? Why SHOULDN'T voting be reserved for citizens?
If the government let them in, they should have a voice. They are subject to the penalties and restrictions but not the benefits? That is treating them as second class humans, which I'm pretty vocally opposed to. Illegals are more complex, but given how little we actually spend enforcing those rules (in 2013 we deported less than 5% of the estimated illegal population) we seem complicit in their presence here. Given that I find it hard to argue they shouldn't be afforded representation on the same grounds. In my mind representative governance is a human right, rather than a right granted by citizenship.
But I'm pretty well not in the majority...so there's that.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing is a deal breaker for Trump fans. Trump could rape the father of one of his supporters and the supporter would cheer. Or at least blame Hillary.
This is the question I've been asking every vociferous political activist I can find: What would your candidate have to either do or advocate to lose your support. It's a stumper for almost everyone. The truth is whether you are for Trump, Clinton, Johnson, or Stein, you are virtually guaranteed to have no idea where your line in the sand is. I find this both deeply disturbing and, I guess, unsurprising given how little we humans actually think about our opinions.
if it hadn't been for the emergency stop.... Hey, kids THERE WAS AN EMERGENCY STOP BUTTON!
There's (almost) always an e-stop. But my the time you can reach it someone is probably already as injured as they were going to get. I've been working in industrial automation for more than 20 years and I have prevented an impending injury with an e-stop precisely once. Even then it was because I had specifically told that person not to be where they were and I was moving to the e-stop at the moment the machine ran away (because someone shorted out a motor controller feedback circuit). Even then in the time it took me to react and respond the machine moved almost 10 feet (straight at his face). Missed him by less than two inches (because he flinched).
E-stops have two purposes: 1) locking out the system while you will be in a dangerous interference location, and 2) releasing the machine so you can extract the mangled remains. In this case it appears to have been the latter. Fortunately it was his leg not his torso or head.
No, they want him to do what most businesses do: plan for only what you know you can already do. Also, focus only on short term profits...because if you can't explain how you'll make a profit it definitely isn't worth doing. Don't you know this is how innovation works?
Yes, your description is exactly the reason, but my point is that Facebook really has no room to complain about a lack of engagement when they've filled my feed with things I can't engage with. Give me a way to filter out the people who've declared they don't want me intruding on their echo chamber anyway.
Disclaimer: The above is almost certainly a simplification. There's rather more important things to worry about than an inability to comment on a random Facebook post.
Pshaw! Nothing is more important than telling someone you don't know that they are wrong, especially online.
In the last two years there's been a steady increase in the prevalence of what I call voyeur posts. Items I can see but I can't either like (emote?) or comment on. I don't really care why that is, I'm much more interested in filtering it from my social media feed. There's no way to do that. So, Facebook, if you would like to increase my ability to "interact and post more" make it so my news feed is filled with things that I can, you know, interact with.
*grumble*grumble*humperdinck-a-mumble*young*whippersnappers*grumble*off*my*lawn*
When do you hold Services?
I'd guess it centers around the "devout young maidens with whom I celebrate in connubial bliss every day".
something he was authorized to do. In fact it was his job.
Not after he was let go from the company.
It's incredibly easy to remove or restrict a login account that has any kind of password. It is *universal* policy to do this when employees should no longer have access to specific accounts. Were I a judge I think I'd have to at least consider whether KTXL made a good faith effort to secure their system, and whether that lack of effort should mitigate the punishment handed down. When consent can clearly, easily, and unequivocably be retracted does the fact that said consent wasn't retracted imply consent? despite other factors?
As with so many things in the law, it falls back on the violator's intent to do harm, which was, in this case, clearly established. If he'd done the exact same thing with the intent to correct an error in their publication I doubt he'd be going to jail, and possibly he'd avoid the felony record.
I knew we shouldn't have signed that contract that says we have to eat a dick during every TV break!
May I recommend the Bachelorette Party Weenie Bites as a temporary work-around while you re-negotiate. :)
Coming from a lifetime of bad calls in every sporting league ever, I'd encourage everyone to realize that the call made on the field of play is the only call that matters. It's a game, but not only that, it's a game you agreed to play under the appointed judges. Don't like the calls? Change the agreement you play under. Until then quit your whining and play ball.
Well, there are *lots* of competing definitions of AI, so I guess you'd have to provide your definition before we can discuss.
One definition that doesn't agree with you: The ability of a computer or other machine to perform actions thought to require intelligence.
If you had asked someone in the 1970's whether driving a car (correctly) require intelligence, I'm betting they would have said yes. Thus, the self driving car is an artificial intelligence by that definition. From another angle, this is an expert system, which Computer Science has taught in Artificial Intelligence classes since well before this century.
I think you are talking about something now called AGI: Artificial General Intelligence. This program is definitely not AGI, by any definition.
I know of no such certification program in the USA. If one exists I'd love to know about it.
Are there any non-human religions? No? Well, then let's just go ahead a make that next shaky step up the inference chain: Humans, not just religious ones, are the root of all evil. Of course, being human is corralated to lots of other interesting features. So I'm just going to go with the one I think is most likely:
Self-awareness if the root of all evil.
Right. In my career I've been taught one language (Pascal) and been tossed face-first into 4 other languages: C/C++, C#, Lisp, and Python. Language learning happens in phases:
- I can learn the syntax, reserved words, flow control, and basic structure of a language in 3-4 days. At that point I'd be able to take a small block of simple code and figure out what it's doing. I could write very simple programs to do pretty pointless things.
- Given another week or so I could learn enough of the support libraries to have some exposure to basic things like file access, network APIs, thread and process creation, database access, etc to understand what more general code is supposed to be doing. So about two weeks in I could start contributing to real work by finding and patching certain types of bugs, adding simple feature extensions, or building useful test cases.
- Given another 2-4 weeks of work I might be knowledgeable enough to create moderately complex subsystems, debug most single factor bugs, or begin commenting on any architectural problems.
- I won't know enough to make architectural changes for another month or more.
In the end, I wouldn't trust myself to make big changes on less than three months familiarity with a language. With some projects I'd want that much time just on that project's codebase, *after* the three months getting familiar with the language. At that point I've probably learned enough to know what it is I don't yet understand.
Make an objective scientific argument in favor of the survival of the human animal as a species.
For bonus points, make sure that you do not co-incidentally argue for the preservation of all species on the planet.
All existence is subjective. I think therefore I reach. I don't really care about objectivity, because I'm not objective.
But, if I were to try, I guess I'd base it on the existence of self awareness. Science cannot exist without the self-aware mind to posit, observe, and reflect. For there to be a science or logic within which this argument can be judged valid or invalid there must, therefore exist that mind. Given that you find value in scientific objectivism, you by extension hold value in the self aware mind.
I doubt that's acceptable, as you'll probably call it circular, but, as I said initially...I'm not objective when it comes to my own existence.
I agree, in the long term, but it's not a one step process. You throw people an resources at the problem, expecting to lose some in your ignorance. But humans are explorers. We (well, some of us) have curiosity and drive to do novel things, so there will be people willing to be the first at great personal risk. Leaving the water was risk/reward, climbing that first tree was risk/reward, climbing out of the trees was risk/reward, sailing around the world was risk/reward, going to the moon was risk/reward. We've just got to realize that both sitting on our ass doing nothing and venturing to mars are also risk/reward choices.
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." -Lao Tzu
There's a great West Wing episode which discusses why we should, but somehow I think that wouldn't gain me much here. Discussions of the nature of man, and the establishment of wonder being particularly squishy in hard science terms.
Instead I'd point out that all safety critical systems are engineered around the notion of redundancy. Shit happens, and when it does, things break down. When that unexpected thing happens to our Earth-bound ecology, what, exactly, is our safety strategy? Hide in a hole? For how long? What if it's biological? What happens if someone accidently creates Card's molecular disruption device. We can't reasonably colonize another star system (yet) but we aren't *that* far from being able to establish some very worthwhile planetary redundancy. It's worth it because we are stuck on this rock that I think we should rename 'The Single Point of Failure'.
It seems like the obvious question, from a geek activists point of view, is: Why are the firmware components in our cars not open source? I should be able to compile and validate the loaded firmware so I (or, you know, someone who actually cares) can verify the security, legality, and safety of it's operation. It isn't even required that I be able to re-load the firmware, just that I be able to validate it.
We've got a pretty bad record so far at attempting to intercept objects moving at delta Vs approaching orbital velocities (which 10km/s is definitely that). That's using a guided projectile to attempt the intercept, and counting intercept as close enough to damage via explosive charge. Based on that I can't see us firing a tethered harpoon containing no guidance or propulsion engines, and having any expectation at all of hitting something moving that fast. And that's not even considering the question of actually attaching to the object.
While I agree that there's bias in the reporting here, in all cases the driver of the "autonomous" car has not been cited as at fault. Thus they are certainly within the definition to say the software wasn't at fault. I am with you in one respect: All of the data should be made public on every incident, and on any close calls where actions of any outside agent (the driver of the "autonomous car" or one in a nearby car) prevented an incident. Unfortunately it's not in Google's interest to do so, and there are no laws mandating it, so it probably won't happen.
So is Google going to pay my speeding ticket when a cop pulls over my autonomous automobile for speeding?
Almost certainly. Though they will bring in several well-respected highway safety engineers to testify that following the flow of traffic is significantly safer than following the posted speed limit. Enough jurisdictions will lose money arguing these cases that there won't be money to be made by writing the tickets. Absent both the financial and safety benefits the police will stop issuing the citations.
Both the 6 and the B keys belong on both sides of a split keyboard. It couldn't possibly cost more than another $1 and we can get back to fighting over real significant, intractable problems, like the Oxford comma.
Mostly I'd agree, but there are a few exceptions:
1) no recursion. Except perhaps forms of tail recursion known to exit in bounded time. But you definitely have to ask yourself why you are doing something that could either be unrolled into a loop or has some kind of exponential growth potential.
2) Local variables are fine so long as the analysis is done to guarantee the maximum stack requirement is pre-committed. I mean, realistically the return pointer is a stack variable, so just calling a function that returns would violate the "no local variables" rule. I wouldn't allow dynamically sized items, because then bugs might cause stack overflows...
3) I agree that malloc and free are forbidden *during real-time operation*. However, in some situations you use dynamic allocation if you can pre-allocate all necessary elements prior to entering operational states. This really depends on whether your system *has* a pre-operational state,
Professionals make mistakes. Garbage collection is a useful tool to make it more difficult to screw up.
I get this. And as a software engineer I fully agree. However, in practical terms, there shouldn't be any dynamic memory management happening at all.
It's a real-time system. It *must* interact, on time, with all the planes that are in it's domain. That should be a bounded, predictable load, or there's no way to guarantee responsiveness. Given that, an analysis should have been done on the maximum number of elements the system supported. Those elements should have been preallocated (into a pool if you want to treat them "dynamically") before actual operation began. If/When the pool allocator ran out of items it should do two things: allocate (dynamically) more, and scream bloody murder to everyone who would listen regarding the unexpected allocation.
This is (one of) the reason(s) I generally haven't liked garbage collected languages for real time systems. There's rarely ever a way to guard against unexpected allocations, because *every* allocation is blind.
I'm a software engineer who focuses on automating manufacturing equipment. I've been hearing bad stories about Amazon for at least ten years now. About a year ago I got a call from a head-hunter about a job opening dealing with autonomous warehousing and order fulfillment that sounded like a dream job. Five minutes on the phone got me the name of the company (Kiva Systems) and two minutes of google told me they were being purchased by Amazon.
Nope. Hard stop. I don't even need to know how much they are offering. I love what I do, and I won't willing work for someone who risks making me hate it. Go ruin someone else's psyche. I'd be *really* interested to know how many people there are just like me.
There are continuous claims that voting is ineffective because "my vote doesn't count" when it is because someone is voting for a losing candidate...
As a person squarely in the "my vote doesn't count" category, I feel compelled to say that it isn't that the candidate I'd vote for can't win, it's that no one I'd want vote for could ever possibly win. There is no possible way for me to vote in any way that both A) represents my beliefs and B) adds support to the least bad alternative. It really has nothing to do with diluting my vote. My vote would never be in the top five parties in the USA, much less the top two. I'll never be represented any way other than badly. Mostly that's ok because I just don't care that much.
...why should we dilute the vote even further by letting everyone who walks into the polling place vote? Why SHOULDN'T voting be reserved for citizens?
If the government let them in, they should have a voice. They are subject to the penalties and restrictions but not the benefits? That is treating them as second class humans, which I'm pretty vocally opposed to. Illegals are more complex, but given how little we actually spend enforcing those rules (in 2013 we deported less than 5% of the estimated illegal population) we seem complicit in their presence here. Given that I find it hard to argue they shouldn't be afforded representation on the same grounds. In my mind representative governance is a human right, rather than a right granted by citizenship.
But I'm pretty well not in the majority...so there's that.