I see no evidence that it has. What's more if it *had*, then predicting negative climate change impacts isn't going to change the mind of the denialists; it'll only make their hostility toward scientific research greater.
Having read the article, it seems pretty clear to me that there is more to this than just a bar code, that there's an app with information stored in it. At the very least giving the officer access to the data in this app will require an additional layer of legal ceremony, e.g., "I grant you permission to access my license data, but I do not consent to any access to other data on my phone."
In any case I wonder why we need physical licenses and registrations at all. Why not give the *officer* a smartphone and an app that scan's the license plate, and pulls up your license data when you give him your name and address?
I don't see this as necessarily the case. The back door issue is actually more national security driven. They want to track "bad guys", and of course will end up tracking "potential bad guys", which could be anyone.
But there a lot of concerns here which fall within the purview of legitimate Federal law enforcement. Back when cars became common thieves used to hit banks and drive across state lines to hamper state and local law enforcement. And of course there was piracy -- the real kind with boats. River piracy was common in the US until the mid 1800s, and continued on the Great Lakes until well into the 20th C.
Local authorities are hampered operating across state and especially international borders, which makes cyber-crime a situation that calls for Federal involvement.
Some people just choke in interviews. Worse, other people sound *great* in interviews. What I find is the best guide is references, especially if you can *interview* the references. Just be aware that you have to scale the response you get. If the reference sounds very positive and enthusiastic, the candidate is just OK.
Anyhow, I wouldn't necessarily expect a senior developer to automatically have much experience with public key encryption. Most developers in "hot" fields like mobile apps will have some familiarity with it because of app signing, but you can easily spend twenty years as a developer in certain kinds of contexts without ever having to give much thought to it.
You interview developers with 20+ years of experience? Good for you! I found it so hard to land an interview with 25 years of experience as a lead developer that I decided to leave the field. People just assumed because I was over 50 I wasn't up to date with the latest technologies.
Well, how much would it cost you to operate that incandescent for about four hours a night?
We'll round that up to an even thirty hours a week, since 10 hours of operating a 100 watt lightbulb is, conveniently, 1 kw-hour. On average that would cost you $0.375/week. Over the course of a year you $19.50 for the incandescent, and $2.95 for the LED. So you're about even after a year.
But I agree a year is a long time for someone on the minimum wage to wait for his payback, especially because incandescents burn out all the time. Sure eventually be better off but $20 is a lot to ask from someone who has to work 2 2/3 hours to make that. Fortunately he can buy a four pack of 100 w replacement bulbs for about $12, and get his payback in a lot less time (considering he'll need to buy several incandescents over the next year). Once he's switched over to CFLs he can much better afford to replace them with LEDs as they fail, because he's saving so much on electricity. Of course he may opt to continue with CFLs until LEDs come down a little more.
I think you should look for literature review papers in a reputable scientific journal (ranks high in impact factor among similar journals in the field, or is something you've heard of like JAMA or The Lancet), written by authors who have published extensively on the subject. Google scholar might be a good place to start (e.g., like this).
I'm not saying not to listen to anecdotes and personal experiences, but those things are highly colored by wishful thinking and political animus. You may well find useful and constructive ideas, but you'll also need a counterweight to the heat and noise and boatloads of personal opinion. You need a filter. Until an expert researcher publishing in a reputable journal is forced to take an idea seriously, there is not enough evidence for you to take it seriously either.
Now that I've warned you off personal anecdotes, let me relate a personal anecdote. My sister had an autistic son, back in the day where Bruno f*cking Bettleheim was the worlds foremost "expert" on autism. His theory was that autism was caused by bad moms, what he called "refrigerator mothers" -- narcissistic women who were so self-absorbed they couldn't give their children the emotional nurturing they needed. Fortunately she had a masters degree in social work and had been a practicing social worker for ten years. So she set out to get him all the practical help he needed, including evidence-based social therapy. The result isn't that he's "cured" -- whatever that means. He was not magically turned into different, neurotypical person. He grew up into an autistic man who functions confidently in a world dominated by neurotypical people.
Finally let me address you as a parent. I know things are tougher for parents of autistic kids. Way, way tougher. But also keep in mind that parenting in general is tough. Children have a way of not giving you what you need emotionally and demanding things from you when you're not ready to give them. So while a lot of what you're going through most parents don't go through some of them they do. You've got to believe in your ability to make the right choice, and tolerate and forgive yourself for an occasional mistake. There's a whole culture out there that likes to make parents feel inadequate and anxious, and they especially like to prey upon parents who seem vulnerable. So don't be. Also you don't mention whether you have other kids, but if you do make sure you carve out a little time to focus on them. It won't seem like enough, but if you make the effort it will be.
Well, let's say the question is premature. Before you can ask it, you have to determine whether the question itself is based on false assumptions. This kind of question is tricky because questions you *can* ask meaningfully have the same syntax as questions which are meaningless.
For example, you can ask "What is colder than 0 degrees C?", but you can't ask "What is colder than 0 degrees K?". One question is meaningful and the other is not.
So asking "What happened before the Big Bang?", entails two assumptions, namely (1) the Big Bang happened and (2) the scientific consensus on the Big Bang is fundamentally flawed. If the scientific consensus is correct, then it's like asking, "What's colder than 0 degrees K?" or "What's north of the North Pole?"
Why would jitter matter when you're ripping a CD? It could conceivably matter when you're listening to a CD, but ripping is not a real-time process. It's like downloading a file from the Internet.
I don't think the monetary value was the reason the astronauts kept these things. All the stuff that went to the Moon was essentially treated as disposable. Rather than recertify some gizmo as ready for the next moon shot, NASA simply bought another one. So guys took stuff as mementos of the greatest adventure of their lives rather than have it tossed away or sold for surplus at a tiny fraction of their original cost.
Honestly, if the astronauts *did* take them as a way to augment their salary I *would* have a problem with this, but what they took was essentially worthless. Look at this particular trove; except for the camera it's all just junk. Even the camera is no big deal unless you need to take one to the moon. From a practical standpoint you'd probably be better off springing for a consumer Bell and Howell 16mm than trying to use this thing.
You see stuff this in surplus vendors all the time, optical or mechanical geegaws the military paid tens of thousands of dollars being sold for a few bucks All that money went to meet some oddball requirements that nobody else has.
Well, current costs is a practically meaningless indicator of future economic practicality or environmental sustainability.
Scale is an important factor in determining what is sustainable and economically viable. The cost and impact of nuclear power on a per kwh basis is bound to be astronomical for a *small* nuclear industry. That doesn't tell you anything about the impact of a *large* nuclear industry on a per kwh basis.
Which is not to say that a large nuclear industry would be viable. I'm just pointing out that you can't make that determination based on current costs. On that basis nobody would have invested in photovoltaic or wind power. In fact ten years ago people were making the same kind of arguments that wind and solar would never be economically viable.
Confidence in the future of a technology tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy because of economies of scale. So Fukushima definitely made nuclear a more risky bet. But it's not the actual costs of making the reactors safer, it's the cost of being in an industry that is contracting due to a loss of public and investor confidence. Preventing the Fukushima disaster wouldn't have been expensive at all.
The TV doesn't make me nearly so nervous as smartphones do. My smartphone constantly listens for voice commands, which also means its ripe for exploitation by malware or even government surveillance. I suppose I could switch it off, but for that matter how do we know that a modern smartphone really *is* off? You can't even take the battery out anymore.
What I'd like is a hardware switch which physically disconnects the phone from the battery, possibly with a middle position where the mic was turned off.
Well, I actually remember the era you're talking about -- at least the very tail end of it. When my wife went to graduate school at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Vax operators and technical support staff were mostly women, and were called -- I kid you not -- "Data Dollies".
That should give you a clue as to the relative status of women in tech back in the day. They generally did less well-paid, less prestigious work like keypunching although many a clever keypunch girl became a COBOL or FORTRAN programmer by osmosis. The assumption was that women weren't making a career of technology, they were just working until they could find a husband.
Women in tech (as a whole, individual exceptions noted) were viewed as a stopgap to a shortage of male labor. It started in WW2. One of my friend's moms graduated from Wellesley in WW2 with a degree in math and went to work as an operator on the Harvard Mark 1, and later MIT's whirlwind. When she got married she was expected to retire and did.
It should seem inconceivable now, but when I started work it was still widely believed by men old enough to be middle to senior managers that women couldn't be good at math and technology -- the exceptions before their eyes notwithstanding. And it was still widely assumed that a woman would and should prefer to marry a man with a good career rather than have a career herself.
That's certainly a very interesting conjecture, but it's a little broad for my taste. I should think it more likely that we'll gain some insight, but that these insights will create new questions we can't answer right away.
And of course there should be. But that doesn't diminish the importance of the Turing test.
The Turing test has two huge and closely related advantages (1) it is conceptually simple and (2) it takes no philosophical position on the fundamental nature of "intelligence". That such huge advantages necessarily entails certain disadvantages should come as no surprise to anyone.
The Turing test treats intelligence as a black box, but once you've contrived to pass the test the next logical step is to open up that black box and ask whether it's reasonable to consider what's inside "intelligent" or a tricky gimmick. That's a messy question, and that's *why* something like the Turing test is valuable. It is what social scientists call an "operational definition"; it allows us to explore an idea we haven't quite nailed down yet, which is a reasonable first step toward creating a useful *conceptual* definition. Science builds theories inductively from observations, after all.
If the Turing test were a suitable *conceptual* definition of intelligence than an intelligent agent would never fail it, but we know that can and does happen. We have to assume as well that people can be fooled by something nobody would really call "intelligence". Stage magicians do this all the time by manipulating audience expectations and assumptions.
Think of the Turing test as a screening test. Science is full of such procedures -- simple, cheap tests that aren't definitive but allow us to discard events that are probably not worth putting a lot of effort into.
Learning foreign languages have a tremendous intellectual value too, in my opinion. It is a powerful preparation for wrestling with problems in life, because language dalmost, but not quite, make sense. To master a natural language, you have to open yourself up to it, and you have to delay the reward of understanding and struggle with what *is*.
Computer languages are *contrived* to make sense. To the degree that a programming language doesn't make sense after a little superficial attention it is just a badly designed language.
I have a young relative who's an anti-vaxxer. A lot of my relatives are science fans and natural history geeks, so its putting a lot of stress on the family.
Here's the thing about anti-vaxxers. It's a stupid position but the people who take it aren't necessarily stupid or uneducated. What they are is rabidly anti-authority. "Question Authority" was even a popular left-wing slogan in the 60s and 70s. And it's a good idea, along with believing in your ability to decide for yourself, which is another value my generation worked hard to inculcate in our kids. But like anything else you can go overboard with these things; you need countervailing virtues to work them against. I think where many parents in my generation missed the boat was that we failed to inculcate a respect for the value of rational self-doubt. Constructive self-doubt is something our Depression era parents had by the bucketful, and so many of us saw it as a natural state to be overcome, not a positive virtue to be cultivated.
The places you see the most knee-jerk anti-authority mindset are the places that were historically most full of free-thinkers and radicals. Places where people were taught to respect authority and institutions don't have this particular form of insanity (they have their own forms). So anti-vaxx is blue-state birtherism. But this kind of mindless anti-authorarianism has also increasingly become a feature of modern "conservatism", too. Violently emotional anti-establishment views are a feature of radicalsm whatever flavor that radicalism takes.
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The above is what is known as a straw man argument, i.e. implying that climate change evidence amounts to measuring tree rings in a single place.
Thermometer readings are proxies of temperature.
I see no evidence that it has. What's more if it *had*, then predicting negative climate change impacts isn't going to change the mind of the denialists; it'll only make their hostility toward scientific research greater.
By that argument we should encourage depressed elderly people to commit suicide, then tax their estate.
The problem is that while money is a pretty good proxy for human welfare, it's not a perfect one.
I was figuring .125/kWh for 30 hours/week.
Having read the article, it seems pretty clear to me that there is more to this than just a bar code, that there's an app with information stored in it. At the very least giving the officer access to the data in this app will require an additional layer of legal ceremony, e.g., "I grant you permission to access my license data, but I do not consent to any access to other data on my phone."
In any case I wonder why we need physical licenses and registrations at all. Why not give the *officer* a smartphone and an app that scan's the license plate, and pulls up your license data when you give him your name and address?
... and then carry it in my wallet. Maybe it could have my picture on it to prove it's really mine.
I don't see this as necessarily the case. The back door issue is actually more national security driven. They want to track "bad guys", and of course will end up tracking "potential bad guys", which could be anyone.
But there a lot of concerns here which fall within the purview of legitimate Federal law enforcement. Back when cars became common thieves used to hit banks and drive across state lines to hamper state and local law enforcement. And of course there was piracy -- the real kind with boats. River piracy was common in the US until the mid 1800s, and continued on the Great Lakes until well into the 20th C.
Local authorities are hampered operating across state and especially international borders, which makes cyber-crime a situation that calls for Federal involvement.
Some people just choke in interviews. Worse, other people sound *great* in interviews. What I find is the best guide is references, especially if you can *interview* the references. Just be aware that you have to scale the response you get. If the reference sounds very positive and enthusiastic, the candidate is just OK.
Anyhow, I wouldn't necessarily expect a senior developer to automatically have much experience with public key encryption. Most developers in "hot" fields like mobile apps will have some familiarity with it because of app signing, but you can easily spend twenty years as a developer in certain kinds of contexts without ever having to give much thought to it.
You interview developers with 20+ years of experience? Good for you! I found it so hard to land an interview with 25 years of experience as a lead developer that I decided to leave the field. People just assumed because I was over 50 I wasn't up to date with the latest technologies.
Seriously. Are there really people out there so naive that they think this will pose anything more than a minor inconvenience?
Well, how much would it cost you to operate that incandescent for about four hours a night?
We'll round that up to an even thirty hours a week, since 10 hours of operating a 100 watt lightbulb is, conveniently, 1 kw-hour. On average that would cost you $0.375/week. Over the course of a year you $19.50 for the incandescent, and $2.95 for the LED. So you're about even after a year.
But I agree a year is a long time for someone on the minimum wage to wait for his payback, especially because incandescents burn out all the time. Sure eventually be better off but $20 is a lot to ask from someone who has to work 2 2/3 hours to make that. Fortunately he can buy a four pack of 100 w replacement bulbs for about $12, and get his payback in a lot less time (considering he'll need to buy several incandescents over the next year). Once he's switched over to CFLs he can much better afford to replace them with LEDs as they fail, because he's saving so much on electricity. Of course he may opt to continue with CFLs until LEDs come down a little more.
I think you should look for literature review papers in a reputable scientific journal (ranks high in impact factor among similar journals in the field, or is something you've heard of like JAMA or The Lancet), written by authors who have published extensively on the subject. Google scholar might be a good place to start (e.g., like this).
I'm not saying not to listen to anecdotes and personal experiences, but those things are highly colored by wishful thinking and political animus. You may well find useful and constructive ideas, but you'll also need a counterweight to the heat and noise and boatloads of personal opinion. You need a filter. Until an expert researcher publishing in a reputable journal is forced to take an idea seriously, there is not enough evidence for you to take it seriously either.
Now that I've warned you off personal anecdotes, let me relate a personal anecdote. My sister had an autistic son, back in the day where Bruno f*cking Bettleheim was the worlds foremost "expert" on autism. His theory was that autism was caused by bad moms, what he called "refrigerator mothers" -- narcissistic women who were so self-absorbed they couldn't give their children the emotional nurturing they needed. Fortunately she had a masters degree in social work and had been a practicing social worker for ten years. So she set out to get him all the practical help he needed, including evidence-based social therapy. The result isn't that he's "cured" -- whatever that means. He was not magically turned into different, neurotypical person. He grew up into an autistic man who functions confidently in a world dominated by neurotypical people.
Finally let me address you as a parent. I know things are tougher for parents of autistic kids. Way, way tougher. But also keep in mind that parenting in general is tough. Children have a way of not giving you what you need emotionally and demanding things from you when you're not ready to give them. So while a lot of what you're going through most parents don't go through some of them they do. You've got to believe in your ability to make the right choice, and tolerate and forgive yourself for an occasional mistake. There's a whole culture out there that likes to make parents feel inadequate and anxious, and they especially like to prey upon parents who seem vulnerable. So don't be. Also you don't mention whether you have other kids, but if you do make sure you carve out a little time to focus on them. It won't seem like enough, but if you make the effort it will be.
Dreadful build quality. I had the logic board on mine replaced twice under warranty, only to have it fail again just after the warranty was up.
Well, let's say the question is premature. Before you can ask it, you have to determine whether the question itself is based on false assumptions. This kind of question is tricky because questions you *can* ask meaningfully have the same syntax as questions which are meaningless.
For example, you can ask "What is colder than 0 degrees C?", but you can't ask "What is colder than 0 degrees K?". One question is meaningful and the other is not.
So asking "What happened before the Big Bang?", entails two assumptions, namely (1) the Big Bang happened and (2) the scientific consensus on the Big Bang is fundamentally flawed. If the scientific consensus is correct, then it's like asking, "What's colder than 0 degrees K?" or "What's north of the North Pole?"
Why would jitter matter when you're ripping a CD? It could conceivably matter when you're listening to a CD, but ripping is not a real-time process. It's like downloading a file from the Internet.
I once heard a wine expert say that any idiot can get a great bottle of wine for $200, but getting one for less than $20 takes brains.
I don't think the monetary value was the reason the astronauts kept these things. All the stuff that went to the Moon was essentially treated as disposable. Rather than recertify some gizmo as ready for the next moon shot, NASA simply bought another one. So guys took stuff as mementos of the greatest adventure of their lives rather than have it tossed away or sold for surplus at a tiny fraction of their original cost.
Honestly, if the astronauts *did* take them as a way to augment their salary I *would* have a problem with this, but what they took was essentially worthless. Look at this particular trove; except for the camera it's all just junk. Even the camera is no big deal unless you need to take one to the moon. From a practical standpoint you'd probably be better off springing for a consumer Bell and Howell 16mm than trying to use this thing.
You see stuff this in surplus vendors all the time, optical or mechanical geegaws the military paid tens of thousands of dollars being sold for a few bucks All that money went to meet some oddball requirements that nobody else has.
Well, current costs is a practically meaningless indicator of future economic practicality or environmental sustainability.
Scale is an important factor in determining what is sustainable and economically viable. The cost and impact of nuclear power on a per kwh basis is bound to be astronomical for a *small* nuclear industry. That doesn't tell you anything about the impact of a *large* nuclear industry on a per kwh basis.
Which is not to say that a large nuclear industry would be viable. I'm just pointing out that you can't make that determination based on current costs. On that basis nobody would have invested in photovoltaic or wind power. In fact ten years ago people were making the same kind of arguments that wind and solar would never be economically viable.
Confidence in the future of a technology tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy because of economies of scale. So Fukushima definitely made nuclear a more risky bet. But it's not the actual costs of making the reactors safer, it's the cost of being in an industry that is contracting due to a loss of public and investor confidence. Preventing the Fukushima disaster wouldn't have been expensive at all.
The TV doesn't make me nearly so nervous as smartphones do. My smartphone constantly listens for voice commands, which also means its ripe for exploitation by malware or even government surveillance. I suppose I could switch it off, but for that matter how do we know that a modern smartphone really *is* off? You can't even take the battery out anymore.
What I'd like is a hardware switch which physically disconnects the phone from the battery, possibly with a middle position where the mic was turned off.
Well, I actually remember the era you're talking about -- at least the very tail end of it. When my wife went to graduate school at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Vax operators and technical support staff were mostly women, and were called -- I kid you not -- "Data Dollies".
That should give you a clue as to the relative status of women in tech back in the day. They generally did less well-paid, less prestigious work like keypunching although many a clever keypunch girl became a COBOL or FORTRAN programmer by osmosis. The assumption was that women weren't making a career of technology, they were just working until they could find a husband.
Women in tech (as a whole, individual exceptions noted) were viewed as a stopgap to a shortage of male labor. It started in WW2. One of my friend's moms graduated from Wellesley in WW2 with a degree in math and went to work as an operator on the Harvard Mark 1, and later MIT's whirlwind. When she got married she was expected to retire and did.
It should seem inconceivable now, but when I started work it was still widely believed by men old enough to be middle to senior managers that women couldn't be good at math and technology -- the exceptions before their eyes notwithstanding. And it was still widely assumed that a woman would and should prefer to marry a man with a good career rather than have a career herself.
That's certainly a very interesting conjecture, but it's a little broad for my taste. I should think it more likely that we'll gain some insight, but that these insights will create new questions we can't answer right away.
where the more you know, the harder it is to answer.
And of course there should be. But that doesn't diminish the importance of the Turing test.
The Turing test has two huge and closely related advantages (1) it is conceptually simple and (2) it takes no philosophical position on the fundamental nature of "intelligence". That such huge advantages necessarily entails certain disadvantages should come as no surprise to anyone.
The Turing test treats intelligence as a black box, but once you've contrived to pass the test the next logical step is to open up that black box and ask whether it's reasonable to consider what's inside "intelligent" or a tricky gimmick. That's a messy question, and that's *why* something like the Turing test is valuable. It is what social scientists call an "operational definition"; it allows us to explore an idea we haven't quite nailed down yet, which is a reasonable first step toward creating a useful *conceptual* definition. Science builds theories inductively from observations, after all.
If the Turing test were a suitable *conceptual* definition of intelligence than an intelligent agent would never fail it, but we know that can and does happen. We have to assume as well that people can be fooled by something nobody would really call "intelligence". Stage magicians do this all the time by manipulating audience expectations and assumptions.
Think of the Turing test as a screening test. Science is full of such procedures -- simple, cheap tests that aren't definitive but allow us to discard events that are probably not worth putting a lot of effort into.
Learning foreign languages have a tremendous intellectual value too, in my opinion. It is a powerful preparation for wrestling with problems in life, because language dalmost, but not quite, make sense. To master a natural language, you have to open yourself up to it, and you have to delay the reward of understanding and struggle with what *is*.
Computer languages are *contrived* to make sense. To the degree that a programming language doesn't make sense after a little superficial attention it is just a badly designed language.
I have a young relative who's an anti-vaxxer. A lot of my relatives are science fans and natural history geeks, so its putting a lot of stress on the family.
Here's the thing about anti-vaxxers. It's a stupid position but the people who take it aren't necessarily stupid or uneducated. What they are is rabidly anti-authority. "Question Authority" was even a popular left-wing slogan in the 60s and 70s. And it's a good idea, along with believing in your ability to decide for yourself, which is another value my generation worked hard to inculcate in our kids. But like anything else you can go overboard with these things; you need countervailing virtues to work them against. I think where many parents in my generation missed the boat was that we failed to inculcate a respect for the value of rational self-doubt. Constructive self-doubt is something our Depression era parents had by the bucketful, and so many of us saw it as a natural state to be overcome, not a positive virtue to be cultivated.
The places you see the most knee-jerk anti-authority mindset are the places that were historically most full of free-thinkers and radicals. Places where people were taught to respect authority and institutions don't have this particular form of insanity (they have their own forms). So anti-vaxx is blue-state birtherism. But this kind of mindless anti-authorarianism has also increasingly become a feature of modern "conservatism", too. Violently emotional anti-establishment views are a feature of radicalsm whatever flavor that radicalism takes.