"We consider the safety and security of our people whenever there are circumstances or events that could increase the risk of a disturbance or some form of workplace violence," said Bill Masterson, a Hertz spokesman.
Translation:
"We wanna make sure no one hunts us down and blows our fucking heads off when they find out we've outsourced all their jobs," said Bill Masterson, a Hertz spokesman.
We may or may not ever have true AI, but a sufficiently advanced expert system would be able to fulfill most of the things people imagine they'd 'need' from an actual AI. (And I mean a very, very advanced expert system, probably a couple of decades away from where we are now. Throw a few hundred million dollars at the problem and I bet we'd make some serious progress towards it.)
But as for a true AI, I suspect it will happen eventually...the trick will be in recognizing and/or determining that it is truly "self-aware" (whatever that actually means).
Simple Turing tests may not suffice. Even though some of the current chatbot-type systems can converse passably for a little while, none can hold a genuinely sensible discussion on any abstract topic without stumbling and giving itself away rather quickly. I bet almost most people here could suss one out in fairly short order.
Wait another decade or two, however, and I suspect we'll see some expert systems that will be difficult to distinguish from a human operator, and in some fields, far more competent.
"...And then it mutated and ate all the plastic in the world," said Og, as he threw another stick on the fire, huddling in the ash gray wasteland that used to be New York.
"The scientists said it was 'totally safe' and 'nothing could go wrong'," Og continued, "but you kids don't remember that because that was back when we had electricity and people talked into little boxes they carried in their pockets."
The children all laughed at Og, he always told the biggest lies because he was so old (almost 30!) and so his stories could not be believed.
"What's a 'sy-en-tiss'?" whispered Janey.
"They were the people that knew stuff and made the world run." Og said.
The children laughed again, "No one makes the word run, silly!" they hooted.
Amazon still stores them somewhere. Risk transfer is a good strategy; but somewhere down the line, someone faces these problems.
That's right, but it sure as shit ain't gonna be me.:)
Amazon probably has enough money and enough clever people (hopefully) to do a good job of securing credit card details, but I'm smart enough to know that I don't.
I'm not smarter and better funded than a million hackers, and I fucking know it. That's why I let someone who's better at doing it do it for me.
There was a time I would have believed you but not any more.
Your belief isn't required for technology to advance beyond your wildest dreams. I remember when Kennedy said that the US was going to go to he Moon...and there were a lot of people who laughed and laughed....but a decade later we were in fact walking on the Moon.
In 1930 the idea of flying in a chair at 36,000 feet at 600mph was utterly ridiculous and no one really believed it would ever actually happen.
For thousands of years it was impossible for a human being to go up a hill at say, 40mph, now we don't even think about it.
-
I now know some of the limitations of the technology we have available to us and how quickly we are approaching physical limits.
And this is where you're stumbling. You've grown up with the technology of your time and so you (naturally) consider the current foreseeable limits to be "hard limits" with no possibility of going beyond them. Wait until atomic-level memory is commonplace, where a SIM-sized bit of quartz or silicon can hold a million times the data in the Library Of Congress. It'll happen eventually, it's pretty much inevitable.
-
Perhaps in theory the AI processor could fit in the size of a wristwatch but it would be in a case the size of a refrigerator for the cooling systems, power supplies, and I/O interfaces.
With current technology, you are correct. But there is nothing to say that a solution involving a very, very low-power memory won't be found. I'd bet my life it will come to pass, someday.
"X-rays will prove to be a hoax." - Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1883.
"A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere." - The New York Times, 1936.
"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." -Albert Einstein, 1932
"We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy." -Simon Newcomb, Canadian-born American astronomer, 1888.
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." - Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.
ALL of these people were absolutely correct given the technology of their times.
The first commercially available transistor was about the size of a pencil eraser. Now a 45-nanometer Penryn chip from Intel holds 820 million of them. You almost certainly have hundreds of millions of transistors in your pocket right now, if not more. Do they need a suitcase-sized cooling unit?
Are there physical limits? Of course there are, but we haven't begun to come anywhere near close to actually hitting them. We just don't have the technology to overcome them yet. Come back in 50 years and see what's up, I bet you'll be pleasantly surprised.:)
I don't know about Seattle or Vancouver, but what I've seen from Portlan (my son lives there) it isn't that bad.
Seattle is rapidly approaching a tipping point, especially anywhere near the city. You've got to go quite a ways out before you can find affordable housing (depending on your definition of "affordable", of course).
Seattle, Redmond, Kirkland, Bellevue, Totem Lake, etc are all now extremely expensive places to live compared with just 10 or 15 years ago.
You can live somewhere. Just not in a $5000/month apartment in SF. It doesn't contradict anything. Moronic.
Exactly. The fact is that economics often dictates where someone can live.
I have no "right" to live in an area that I can't afford.
Yes, I know some people are being forced out by the predatory pricing schemes that some landlords engage in, but that is reality. That's one of the downsides of a "free market"- some people will inevitably get priced out of things they want or need. I don't like it, but it is what it is.
You store CCNs so you can re-bill people when you get hacked.
The best strategy is simply not to store them, ever. Let the card gateway store them (Authorize.net, PayPal, Amazon, etc) so if anything happens, it's not on your shoulders. I've run sites that accept credit cards for ~15 years, but I never, EVER store the numbers on my servers.
Apparently the company was using the same root password for all its servers, and had stored credit card details in plain text.
What a brilliant strategy- standardizing on server passwords!
Storing credit card details in plain text is a super-duper PCI compliance no-no, however, and I'm truly amazed they had the balls to do this when they MUST have known better. This is one of the most serious violations when storing credit card data, and to have a security-industry company doing it is kind of mind-boggling.
Impossible. It won't be a single program. It won't run on a single machine. It will require multiple racks of a high-powered data center.
Ha ha, you're funny! This is more or less the exact same thing they said about computers in general only a few short decades ago.
In 10 or 20 years I wouldn't be a bit surprised if a powerful AI was able to easily fit into a toaster-sized box, or phone-sized, or watch-sized.
Seriously, your average musical greeting card or child's toy has more processing power and memory than the entire Department of Defense had in ~1950. Your phone probably has a million times as much, if not more.
-
An anonymous hacker won't have near the resources needed just to boot the thing up.
And no one will ever own a gigabyte of RAM or a terabyte of hard drive space. Never ever!
I've not tried Debian or Scientific OS, but I can certainly recommend Linux Mint. After about 8 or 9 installs on various desktops and laptops, so far it's been 100% every time. No problems at all, everything works perfectly as near as I can tell. Sound, video, wifi, CD/DVD players, mice, everything.
I can't speak for everyone but for me it's been easy to install and it just works, no fiddling or messing about required.
Why can't they put a description in Windows Update instead of making us look up KBxxxx? It takes forever to click on them and see what each one claims to do.
Because if you knew what it was, you might not install it.
I never got any update notice, but then I've done some things to block the Win 10 updates.
But keep pushing Microsoft- I've got Linux Mint already installed on my laptop (dual boot) and it won't take but about 15 minutes to install it on my desktop too.
The first time I see anything related to Windows 10 on my PC, you're toast. Any conversion, any forced "upgrade", anything like that...and that'll be the last time I run Windows on my PC.
It'll take ~10 minutes to backup and offload my most recent data and 15 minutes to load Mint, and we'll be done. Get it through your heads- I like Win 7, I do NOT want Windows 10, period.
So yeah, just keep pushing and you'll push me right off your OS.
Slashdot Mirror
At only 300 Hertz this doesn't seem to be happening with high frequency.
Lol, for most people this will be a "whoosh", but props for trying. :) If I had mod points they'd be yours.
"We consider the safety and security of our people whenever there are circumstances or events that could increase the risk of a disturbance or some form of workplace violence," said Bill Masterson, a Hertz spokesman.
Translation:
"We wanna make sure no one hunts us down and blows our fucking heads off when they find out we've outsourced all their jobs," said Bill Masterson, a Hertz spokesman.
"We know now that we don't need any big new breakthroughs to get to true AI."
This is so wrong that it's hard to know where to start.
We may or may not ever have true AI, but a sufficiently advanced expert system would be able to fulfill most of the things people imagine they'd 'need' from an actual AI. (And I mean a very, very advanced expert system, probably a couple of decades away from where we are now. Throw a few hundred million dollars at the problem and I bet we'd make some serious progress towards it.)
But as for a true AI, I suspect it will happen eventually...the trick will be in recognizing and/or determining that it is truly "self-aware" (whatever that actually means).
Simple Turing tests may not suffice. Even though some of the current chatbot-type systems can converse passably for a little while, none can hold a genuinely sensible discussion on any abstract topic without stumbling and giving itself away rather quickly. I bet almost most people here could suss one out in fairly short order.
Wait another decade or two, however, and I suspect we'll see some expert systems that will be difficult to distinguish from a human operator, and in some fields, far more competent.
"...And then it mutated and ate all the plastic in the world," said Og, as he threw another stick on the fire, huddling in the ash gray wasteland that used to be New York.
"The scientists said it was 'totally safe' and 'nothing could go wrong'," Og continued, "but you kids don't remember that because that was back when we had electricity and people talked into little boxes they carried in their pockets."
The children all laughed at Og, he always told the biggest lies because he was so old (almost 30!) and so his stories could not be believed.
"What's a 'sy-en-tiss'?" whispered Janey.
"They were the people that knew stuff and made the world run." Og said.
The children laughed again, "No one makes the word run, silly!" they hooted.
Want a job in the gaming industry?
Hell no.
(And because my parents were married, I can't be in Marketing either.)
Amazon still stores them somewhere. Risk transfer is a good strategy; but somewhere down the line, someone faces these problems.
That's right, but it sure as shit ain't gonna be me. :)
Amazon probably has enough money and enough clever people (hopefully) to do a good job of securing credit card details, but I'm smart enough to know that I don't.
I'm not smarter and better funded than a million hackers, and I fucking know it. That's why I let someone who's better at doing it do it for me.
There was a time I would have believed you but not any more.
Your belief isn't required for technology to advance beyond your wildest dreams. I remember when Kennedy said that the US was going to go to he Moon...and there were a lot of people who laughed and laughed....but a decade later we were in fact walking on the Moon.
In 1930 the idea of flying in a chair at 36,000 feet at 600mph was utterly ridiculous and no one really believed it would ever actually happen.
For thousands of years it was impossible for a human being to go up a hill at say, 40mph, now we don't even think about it.
-
I now know some of the limitations of the technology we have available to us and how quickly we are approaching physical limits.
And this is where you're stumbling. You've grown up with the technology of your time and so you (naturally) consider the current foreseeable limits to be "hard limits" with no possibility of going beyond them. Wait until atomic-level memory is commonplace, where a SIM-sized bit of quartz or silicon can hold a million times the data in the Library Of Congress. It'll happen eventually, it's pretty much inevitable.
-
Perhaps in theory the AI processor could fit in the size of a wristwatch but it would be in a case the size of a refrigerator for the cooling systems, power supplies, and I/O interfaces.
With current technology, you are correct. But there is nothing to say that a solution involving a very, very low-power memory won't be found. I'd bet my life it will come to pass, someday.
"X-rays will prove to be a hoax." - Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1883.
"A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere." - The New York Times, 1936.
"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." -Albert Einstein, 1932
"We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy." -Simon Newcomb, Canadian-born American astronomer, 1888.
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." - Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.
ALL of these people were absolutely correct given the technology of their times.
The first commercially available transistor was about the size of a pencil eraser. Now a 45-nanometer Penryn chip from Intel holds 820 million of them. You almost certainly have hundreds of millions of transistors in your pocket right now, if not more. Do they need a suitcase-sized cooling unit?
Are there physical limits? Of course there are, but we haven't begun to come anywhere near close to actually hitting them. We just don't have the technology to overcome them yet. Come back in 50 years and see what's up, I bet you'll be pleasantly surprised. :)
I don't know about Seattle or Vancouver, but what I've seen from Portlan (my son lives there) it isn't that bad.
Seattle is rapidly approaching a tipping point, especially anywhere near the city. You've got to go quite a ways out before you can find affordable housing (depending on your definition of "affordable", of course).
Seattle, Redmond, Kirkland, Bellevue, Totem Lake, etc are all now extremely expensive places to live compared with just 10 or 15 years ago.
You can live somewhere. Just not in a $5000/month apartment in SF. It doesn't contradict anything. Moronic.
Exactly. The fact is that economics often dictates where someone can live.
I have no "right" to live in an area that I can't afford.
Yes, I know some people are being forced out by the predatory pricing schemes that some landlords engage in, but that is reality. That's one of the downsides of a "free market"- some people will inevitably get priced out of things they want or need. I don't like it, but it is what it is.
People who have made their lives in San Francisco, especially in the arts, have a right to stay where they are.
Only in their dreams.
It would be nice if that were true, but it's not.
You store CCNs so you can re-bill people when you get hacked.
The best strategy is simply not to store them, ever. Let the card gateway store them (Authorize.net, PayPal, Amazon, etc) so if anything happens, it's not on your shoulders. I've run sites that accept credit cards for ~15 years, but I never, EVER store the numbers on my servers.
Apparently the company was using the same root password for all its servers, and had stored credit card details in plain text.
What a brilliant strategy- standardizing on server passwords!
Storing credit card details in plain text is a super-duper PCI compliance no-no, however, and I'm truly amazed they had the balls to do this when they MUST have known better. This is one of the most serious violations when storing credit card data, and to have a security-industry company doing it is kind of mind-boggling.
"The banking malware ... disguises itself as Flash Player..."
That's funny, usually it's the other way around.
A retired Air Force fighter pilot once said that "the best part of the Starfighter was its name".
Apparently it was a dreadful bag of bolts that couldn't be relied upon to takeoff, circle the field, and land safely.
It'll be totally fixed in the F-36 and it'll also include cool sound effects when the radar target windows minimize and maximize!
Okay, now that's just creepy and more than a little unsettling.
And Facebook, an app that just eats cycles and battery life on both iOS and Android.
Exactly...how can an app like Facebook that does constant background queries and refreshes not use more battery power than when it's off or disabled??
My chess computer beat me every &^#@! time, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.
Impossible. It won't be a single program. It won't run on a single machine. It will require multiple racks of a high-powered data center.
Ha ha, you're funny! This is more or less the exact same thing they said about computers in general only a few short decades ago.
In 10 or 20 years I wouldn't be a bit surprised if a powerful AI was able to easily fit into a toaster-sized box, or phone-sized, or watch-sized.
Seriously, your average musical greeting card or child's toy has more processing power and memory than the entire Department of Defense had in ~1950. Your phone probably has a million times as much, if not more.
-
An anonymous hacker won't have near the resources needed just to boot the thing up.
And no one will ever own a gigabyte of RAM or a terabyte of hard drive space. Never ever!
they may just make an update specifically for you to push you over the edge.
I doubt it.
No, they want me to upgrade to Win 10 so they can monetize me, just like everyone else.
Adblock + NoScript is my solution and so far it seems to work fine.
Adblock kills the ads and NoScript kills off all the naughty little javascript bits that bog everything down.
I've not tried Debian or Scientific OS, but I can certainly recommend Linux Mint. After about 8 or 9 installs on various desktops and laptops, so far it's been 100% every time. No problems at all, everything works perfectly as near as I can tell. Sound, video, wifi, CD/DVD players, mice, everything.
I can't speak for everyone but for me it's been easy to install and it just works, no fiddling or messing about required.
Why can't they put a description in Windows Update instead of making us look up KBxxxx? It takes forever to click on them and see what each one claims to do.
Because if you knew what it was, you might not install it.
I never got any update notice, but then I've done some things to block the Win 10 updates.
But keep pushing Microsoft- I've got Linux Mint already installed on my laptop (dual boot) and it won't take but about 15 minutes to install it on my desktop too.
The first time I see anything related to Windows 10 on my PC, you're toast. Any conversion, any forced "upgrade", anything like that...and that'll be the last time I run Windows on my PC.
It'll take ~10 minutes to backup and offload my most recent data and 15 minutes to load Mint, and we'll be done. Get it through your heads- I like Win 7, I do NOT want Windows 10, period.
So yeah, just keep pushing and you'll push me right off your OS.