This is one of my arguments about so-called 'self driving cars': The manufacturer is technically driving it if it's in self-driving mode, but just like so many of them, they'll dodge responsibility one way or the other if someone gets killed, and in the end there'll be no justice at all. It'll get tied up in the civil court system for years, or in some sort of arbitration, and in the end you'll either get nothing or some paltry chunk of change, and meanwhile a person is dead, all because of some shitty technology that was rushed to market that doesn't even have the cognitive ability of a smart dog. These so-called 'autonomous/self driving cars' are not going to be the panacea that some of you think it's going to be, we're just going to trade human error behind the wheel for human error in the development division of an auto manufacturer, or human error in the marketing department for rushing it to market before it was really safe to do so. All I can say is I'm not going to be the one strapped into a car seat with no controls whatsoever to stop the gods-be-damned thing when it goes haywire and kills me, and I have nothing but feelings of horror for whoever does, and deep sympathy for whoever the poor bugger leaves behind them.
Oh, and by the way? The way I think this should be handled legally-speaking, since it's obvious we'll be subjected to these gods-be-damned things regardless, is the same way aircraft mechanics are treated, legally: If a plane they worked on crashes and people die, and the cause of the crash is proven to be a mechanical failure that's the responsibility of the mechanic that worked on it, he is arrested and tried for murder. A so-called 'self-driving car' kills someone? The programmer(s) responsible for not doing their job correctly get thrown in jail charged with murder. Oh and before any of you give me shit for this? You all make a big point about how 'self driving cars will save lives'; well if they TAKE a life then some HUMAN has to be held criminally responsible for it, plain and simple. Otherwise you're just hypocrites.
Thinking for a moment like I'm reading a science fiction novel, what if the energy sustaining it's oscillation is coming from outside the physical Universe, from 'subspace', if you will? Ignoring the possibility, especially in the face of accepted facts like the continual expansion of the Universe, and the 'spooky action at a distance' of entangled particles, is rather foolish, don't you think? To believe that we've discovered all there is to discover in physics is about as arrogant as you can get.
The two lasers that were periodically nudging the ytterbium atoms were producing a repetition in the system at twice the period of the nudges, something that couldn't occur in a normal system.
When they're saying 'twice the period of the nudges', do they mean twice the frequency of the nudges, or twice the duration of the nudges? What I'm after here is, is whether or not they're actually implying that there's more energy coming out of this than is being put into it, and by the way unless I'm totally misreading it, it sounds like this isn't 'perpetual motion' at all, not in the sense I think of 'perpetual motion', because they have to 'nudge' it with a pulse from a laser to cause this effect to occur -- unless what I'm missing here, is that all they have to do is 'nudge' it once, and it starts a self-sustaining oscillation? Even if it's self-sustaining once started, isn't it then in a state of equilibrium regardless, and any attempt to tap into the energy of that oscillation would cause it to stop?
Wasn't actually aware that USB-C cables differed from other USB cables in that there is in fact active electronics embedded in the cable assembly. Apologies for any confusion or consternation this may have caused.
It's a cynical-as-hell way of thinking, but I do think you're pretty much spot-on; my own observation of the way humanity behaves, world-wide, indicates to me that our so-called 'civilization' is just a coat of paint over the cavemen we still are underneath. You see evidence of this when times get tough and things start going bad; people, and nations, revert to their true natures, and all our so-called 'civilization' goes out the window. As a species, we're still a long, long way from what I'd consider 'civilized'. If we manage to not extinguish ourselves completely for another 10,000 years, we might be 'civilized', or we may not. We have to get over things like racism, sexism, and religious 'beliefs' driving our thinking, otherwise it's just going to be neverending cycles of conflict, always taking one step forward and three steps back. We have to change hearts and minds, worldwide, which is damned near impossible, since ideas are almost impossible to kill, and there's lots of very bad ideas that have been floating around human consciousness for aeons.
The summary of this article makes no sense. A USB cable is just a cable with connectors, there's nothing in it to 'regulate' anything, and the connectors have nothing to do with that. A poorly made cable, that shorts out internally? That's a different matter entirely, that's a quality issue, but the connectors and the cable itself have nothing to do with regulating current draw. You plug a USB cable into your computer and leave the other end unconnected, it draws ZERO power -- assuming the cable isn't shorted internally.
I suspect that if you had a time machine and could gather data from every era of human history, you'd find that this '85%' they speak of is probably fairly consistent.
I don't speak but a handful of words in a very short list of languages, I'm certainly no expert in language, but aren't there some languages that are so nuanced that a slight change in inflection, or tone, or emphasis, or maybe even cadence changes the entire meaning of what's being said? Wouldn't that be rather difficult to code for?
The so-called 'Doomsday Clock' is qualitative, not quantitative.
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
I'd sooner listen to the 'opinions' of learned, lettered men, than that of politicians, the media, and Average Joe. It doesn't take an IQ of 180 and multiple PhD's to reason through that more nuclear weapons are worse than fewer nuclear weapons -- especially with who in the world has their fingers on the Red Buttons right now -- and who might have their fingers on their own Red Buttons (i.e., extremists, terrorists, etc); the more of them that legitimate countries have, the more nervous some of the whackos out there get. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should do it; just because we can make more nuclear weapons doesn't mean we should. Besides, I think anyone in the command structure of the military (assuming they're sane, at least) will tell you that nuclear weapons aren't practical; they're last-resort only, and last time I heard about it, we still have enough in our collective arsenals to make the Earth uninhabitable several times over. Why do we need more of them? If we're going to advance the concept of human civilization -- REAL civilization -- then we need to move away from this all-or-nothing train of thought that involves doomsday weapons. I know that nukes are just a symptom of the real problem, and that problem will require changing hearts and minds on a global scale, but we've got to start somewhere, and getting everyone to stop pointing their guns at everyone else is a first step to ending this nuclear Mexican standoff.
Ah, I see; you're not worried at all about there being more nuclear weapons in the world? So in other words, you're perfectly OK with North Korea and Iran having nuclear weapons, so long as we have more of them. Gotcha.
No, Anonymous Friend, most don't know, and the rest don't care because they think their lives are so uninteresting that no one else should care either. Of course they're wrong. Knowledge is power, and if you gather enough information about a person, especially information that should be private, you can have a degree of control over them that would astound them. Worse, you can control people without them even realizing they're being controlled. But, you know, bread and circuses, and all that.
Imagine this: You have 350000 twitter-bots at your command. For the right price you can be hired to flood Twitter with whatever message you want. It's a social engineering tool. People are gullible. Regardless of the 'strange usernames' or any enigmatic content they're tweeting otherwise, if the average Twitter user sees 350000 retweets of a particular message, they're going to believe it's a Real Thing, and they'll probably retweet it themselves, giving it even more momentum and credibility. Instant viral content.
As someone that rides bikes and has a Master's degree in AI
LOLOLOLOLOLOL yeah sure you do buddy. You're just another shitty Internet Troll trying to stir shit up. How many trolling accounts do you have here? Five? Ten? Or are you just a paid Google shill trying to argue support for their crappy so-called 'self driving' car investment?
No matter. The vast majority of people don't want a box on wheels that has no controls, and that's not going to change, ever, and rightly so.
Being a public library, it's not like they have to have backups for every single computer either. Most if not all of their workstations, including especially the ones intended for public access, would just be paved over with a standard image, and pretty much also for employee workstations. Only their server(s) would really be affected, right? So long as they have backup(s) they'd be fine.
Well, be sure to enjoy living in your fantasy world, because that's what it amounts to: There won't be a blanket ban on people operating their own vehicles in our lifetime, probably never, and rightly so. But since you're so hot to give up control of how and where you're being transported, I'd recommend to you that you sell your vehicles and start taking the bus or a cab everywhere instead; it's a win-win, you get to have someone else have control of you, and the rest of us have to put up with one less scared little rabbit, white-knuckling it the entire time they're behind the wheel, actually causing accidents due to their complete lack of confidence. Regardless of what you decide to do I suggest you actually do some research into the actual state-of-the-art in so-called 'artificial intelligence' instead of just drinking the kool-aid the media and other uninformed people keep feeding you.
I'm more afraid of so-called 'AI' in so-called 'self driving autonomous cars' killing me when I'm on my bike than I am of any so-called military 'AI'. As typical these things are getting rushed to market, working just 'good enough', and with the blessing of the manufacturers' legal department, who assure them that the 'risk is low, and we can handle any settlements for injury or wrongful death'.
Today too many dumb people consider a well written computer program to be AI, like Alexa. Alexa will not threaten humanity because it's really not 'artificial intelligence' to start with, it's just a clever piece of software.
FTFY
We are nowhere near having real 'AI' yet and won't be for decades.
Sure thing, friend. Because the underlying proprietary code that runs the cellphone parts of your smartphone couldn't possibly have anything malicious in it, no sir.
First of all, 10kV would possibly arc across the air-gap in a USB connector, and secondly, I'd think it much more likely criminal organizations would like to hijack your phone for fun and profit, and not so much that some asshole would like to destroy people's phones. But by all means just avoid them entirely if that's what you're comfortable with.
Say you're an alien on an alien world, and some probe you sent out to Earth comes back with a fully-functioning Chevy muscle-car, complete with fuel in the tank and a fully charged battery. Your civilization never used fossil fuels or internal combustion engines, but you're a technological civilization regardless of that. You start the car up, figure out how to make it move and stop, and how to shut it off again; you know what it's for now. Now, carefully, you dismantle the engine and the drivetrain, making notes and diagrams as you go, analyzing every part for what it's function is, then, just as carefully, you reassemble it. If you did your job right (and you did) it starts right back up when you're done, runs and drives just as well as when it was delivered to you. You can even make more of them, if you want, because you've blueprinted it, analyzed how it functions, understand the operating principles. You can even improve on it!
Now you have a working brain to analyze. Small problem: You can't take it apart to figure out how it works, because as soon as you do, it dies and all the parts of it that made it work as a system stop functioning. So you're limited to observing it as best you can without altering it -- or the organism it's a part of, which is co-dependent with it, to keep functioning. You're limited by whatever instrumentality you've managed to develop that can observe things deeper than at the surface level, but without damaging, altering, or influencing how it's operating in any way.
That's how I view the problem of determining how our brains work. You can't take it apart to figure it out, you have to come up with clever devices that can remotely sense how it works as a whole system, or otherwise be stuck just observing how it behaves. But it's a very complex system, and just because you observe behavior of one type based on inputs one day, doesn't necessarily mean it'll do exactly, precisely the same thing the next day, or that what you observed means what you think it means, either. We sort-of understand what some of the most basic building-blocks of it do, and have some ideas what some of the subsystems do, but how the whole thing works as a complete system is still largely a mystery to us. Because we can't take it apart, examine and play with all the parts, and put it back together and have it work anymore; it's just dead meat at that point, we have to try to figure out how to build clever machines that can peer into it while it's working, then make educated guesses at what it's actually doing.
For what it's worth, what I'm taking away from this, is that they're willing to question whether their methods of analysis are valid/sufficient, which I'll take as a good sign.
If this sort of thing becomes commonplace, my recommendation to you all is to get a charge-only USB cable for your phone, i.e. one that does not have the Data pair connected. Unless, of course, you really don't care if your phone gets hacked. Technology like this could easily be subverted, either by governments or by criminal organizations, to become attack vectors against unsuspecting smartphone owners.
If you can't find a 'charge only' USB cable, you can make your own easily enough out of a normal USB cable, even without any technical expertise to speak of. Take a regular USB cable appropriate for your phone, and with an Xacto or similar razor knife, carefully slit the outer jacket open lengthwise for 2 to 3 inches. You'll find a braided shield, foil shielding, or both; open these up and move them aside so you can get to the 4 wires within. You'll find a red wire and a black wire; leave these alone, they're 'power' and 'ground' respectively. The other pair of wires (very often green and white), twisted together, are the 'Data' pair; cut these, and remove a small section so they don't accidentally connect to each other again. Wrap the cable back up in electrical tape, and you're done. You should be able to plug into any USB port and charge your phone with no data connection to the phone from the port you're charging from.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of my arguments about so-called 'self driving cars': The manufacturer is technically driving it if it's in self-driving mode, but just like so many of them, they'll dodge responsibility one way or the other if someone gets killed, and in the end there'll be no justice at all. It'll get tied up in the civil court system for years, or in some sort of arbitration, and in the end you'll either get nothing or some paltry chunk of change, and meanwhile a person is dead, all because of some shitty technology that was rushed to market that doesn't even have the cognitive ability of a smart dog. These so-called 'autonomous/self driving cars' are not going to be the panacea that some of you think it's going to be, we're just going to trade human error behind the wheel for human error in the development division of an auto manufacturer, or human error in the marketing department for rushing it to market before it was really safe to do so. All I can say is I'm not going to be the one strapped into a car seat with no controls whatsoever to stop the gods-be-damned thing when it goes haywire and kills me, and I have nothing but feelings of horror for whoever does, and deep sympathy for whoever the poor bugger leaves behind them.
Oh, and by the way? The way I think this should be handled legally-speaking, since it's obvious we'll be subjected to these gods-be-damned things regardless, is the same way aircraft mechanics are treated, legally: If a plane they worked on crashes and people die, and the cause of the crash is proven to be a mechanical failure that's the responsibility of the mechanic that worked on it, he is arrested and tried for murder. A so-called 'self-driving car' kills someone? The programmer(s) responsible for not doing their job correctly get thrown in jail charged with murder. Oh and before any of you give me shit for this? You all make a big point about how 'self driving cars will save lives'; well if they TAKE a life then some HUMAN has to be held criminally responsible for it, plain and simple. Otherwise you're just hypocrites.
Thinking for a moment like I'm reading a science fiction novel, what if the energy sustaining it's oscillation is coming from outside the physical Universe, from 'subspace', if you will? Ignoring the possibility, especially in the face of accepted facts like the continual expansion of the Universe, and the 'spooky action at a distance' of entangled particles, is rather foolish, don't you think? To believe that we've discovered all there is to discover in physics is about as arrogant as you can get.
The two lasers that were periodically nudging the ytterbium atoms were producing a repetition in the system at twice the period of the nudges, something that couldn't occur in a normal system.
When they're saying 'twice the period of the nudges', do they mean twice the frequency of the nudges, or twice the duration of the nudges? What I'm after here is, is whether or not they're actually implying that there's more energy coming out of this than is being put into it, and by the way unless I'm totally misreading it, it sounds like this isn't 'perpetual motion' at all, not in the sense I think of 'perpetual motion', because they have to 'nudge' it with a pulse from a laser to cause this effect to occur -- unless what I'm missing here, is that all they have to do is 'nudge' it once, and it starts a self-sustaining oscillation? Even if it's self-sustaining once started, isn't it then in a state of equilibrium regardless, and any attempt to tap into the energy of that oscillation would cause it to stop?
This is a retraction for the above comment.
Wasn't actually aware that USB-C cables differed from other USB cables in that there is in fact active electronics embedded in the cable assembly. Apologies for any confusion or consternation this may have caused.
It's a cynical-as-hell way of thinking, but I do think you're pretty much spot-on; my own observation of the way humanity behaves, world-wide, indicates to me that our so-called 'civilization' is just a coat of paint over the cavemen we still are underneath. You see evidence of this when times get tough and things start going bad; people, and nations, revert to their true natures, and all our so-called 'civilization' goes out the window. As a species, we're still a long, long way from what I'd consider 'civilized'. If we manage to not extinguish ourselves completely for another 10,000 years, we might be 'civilized', or we may not. We have to get over things like racism, sexism, and religious 'beliefs' driving our thinking, otherwise it's just going to be neverending cycles of conflict, always taking one step forward and three steps back. We have to change hearts and minds, worldwide, which is damned near impossible, since ideas are almost impossible to kill, and there's lots of very bad ideas that have been floating around human consciousness for aeons.
The summary of this article makes no sense. A USB cable is just a cable with connectors, there's nothing in it to 'regulate' anything, and the connectors have nothing to do with that. A poorly made cable, that shorts out internally? That's a different matter entirely, that's a quality issue, but the connectors and the cable itself have nothing to do with regulating current draw. You plug a USB cable into your computer and leave the other end unconnected, it draws ZERO power -- assuming the cable isn't shorted internally.
I suspect that if you had a time machine and could gather data from every era of human history, you'd find that this '85%' they speak of is probably fairly consistent.
I don't speak but a handful of words in a very short list of languages, I'm certainly no expert in language, but aren't there some languages that are so nuanced that a slight change in inflection, or tone, or emphasis, or maybe even cadence changes the entire meaning of what's being said? Wouldn't that be rather difficult to code for?
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
I'd sooner listen to the 'opinions' of learned, lettered men, than that of politicians, the media, and Average Joe.
It doesn't take an IQ of 180 and multiple PhD's to reason through that more nuclear weapons are worse than fewer nuclear weapons -- especially with who in the world has their fingers on the Red Buttons right now -- and who might have their fingers on their own Red Buttons (i.e., extremists, terrorists, etc); the more of them that legitimate countries have, the more nervous some of the whackos out there get.
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should do it; just because we can make more nuclear weapons doesn't mean we should. Besides, I think anyone in the command structure of the military (assuming they're sane, at least) will tell you that nuclear weapons aren't practical; they're last-resort only, and last time I heard about it, we still have enough in our collective arsenals to make the Earth uninhabitable several times over. Why do we need more of them?
If we're going to advance the concept of human civilization -- REAL civilization -- then we need to move away from this all-or-nothing train of thought that involves doomsday weapons. I know that nukes are just a symptom of the real problem, and that problem will require changing hearts and minds on a global scale, but we've got to start somewhere, and getting everyone to stop pointing their guns at everyone else is a first step to ending this nuclear Mexican standoff.
Ah, I see; you're not worried at all about there being more nuclear weapons in the world?
So in other words, you're perfectly OK with North Korea and Iran having nuclear weapons, so long as we have more of them. Gotcha.
No, Anonymous Friend, most don't know, and the rest don't care because they think their lives are so uninteresting that no one else should care either. Of course they're wrong. Knowledge is power, and if you gather enough information about a person, especially information that should be private, you can have a degree of control over them that would astound them. Worse, you can control people without them even realizing they're being controlled. But, you know, bread and circuses, and all that.
First we should make sure it's not the Trump administration buying these. They might be mistaken for operating manuals.
I'm glad there's at least one other person in this country who is thinking this.
Imagine this: You have 350000 twitter-bots at your command. For the right price you can be hired to flood Twitter with whatever message you want.
It's a social engineering tool. People are gullible. Regardless of the 'strange usernames' or any enigmatic content they're tweeting otherwise, if the average Twitter user sees 350000 retweets of a particular message, they're going to believe it's a Real Thing, and they'll probably retweet it themselves, giving it even more momentum and credibility. Instant viral content.
As someone that rides bikes and has a Master's degree in AI
LOLOLOLOLOLOL yeah sure you do buddy. You're just another shitty Internet Troll trying to stir shit up. How many trolling accounts do you have here? Five? Ten? Or are you just a paid Google shill trying to argue support for their crappy so-called 'self driving' car investment?
No matter. The vast majority of people don't want a box on wheels that has no controls, and that's not going to change, ever, and rightly so.
Being a public library, it's not like they have to have backups for every single computer either. Most if not all of their workstations, including especially the ones intended for public access, would just be paved over with a standard image, and pretty much also for employee workstations. Only their server(s) would really be affected, right? So long as they have backup(s) they'd be fine.
I was thinking #2, actually, assuming that is that they haven't been lying this whole time and have been collecting and using data.
Well, be sure to enjoy living in your fantasy world, because that's what it amounts to: There won't be a blanket ban on people operating their own vehicles in our lifetime, probably never, and rightly so. But since you're so hot to give up control of how and where you're being transported, I'd recommend to you that you sell your vehicles and start taking the bus or a cab everywhere instead; it's a win-win, you get to have someone else have control of you, and the rest of us have to put up with one less scared little rabbit, white-knuckling it the entire time they're behind the wheel, actually causing accidents due to their complete lack of confidence. Regardless of what you decide to do I suggest you actually do some research into the actual state-of-the-art in so-called 'artificial intelligence' instead of just drinking the kool-aid the media and other uninformed people keep feeding you.
Trololololololololol.
I'm more afraid of so-called 'AI' in so-called 'self driving autonomous cars' killing me when I'm on my bike than I am of any so-called military 'AI'. As typical these things are getting rushed to market, working just 'good enough', and with the blessing of the manufacturers' legal department, who assure them that the 'risk is low, and we can handle any settlements for injury or wrongful death'.
Today too many dumb people consider a well written computer program to be AI, like Alexa. Alexa will not threaten humanity because it's really not 'artificial intelligence' to start with, it's just a clever piece of software.
FTFY
We are nowhere near having real 'AI' yet and won't be for decades.
Sure thing, friend. Because the underlying proprietary code that runs the cellphone parts of your smartphone couldn't possibly have anything malicious in it, no sir.
First of all, 10kV would possibly arc across the air-gap in a USB connector, and secondly, I'd think it much more likely criminal organizations would like to hijack your phone for fun and profit, and not so much that some asshole would like to destroy people's phones. But by all means just avoid them entirely if that's what you're comfortable with.
Say you're an alien on an alien world, and some probe you sent out to Earth comes back with a fully-functioning Chevy muscle-car, complete with fuel in the tank and a fully charged battery. Your civilization never used fossil fuels or internal combustion engines, but you're a technological civilization regardless of that. You start the car up, figure out how to make it move and stop, and how to shut it off again; you know what it's for now. Now, carefully, you dismantle the engine and the drivetrain, making notes and diagrams as you go, analyzing every part for what it's function is, then, just as carefully, you reassemble it. If you did your job right (and you did) it starts right back up when you're done, runs and drives just as well as when it was delivered to you. You can even make more of them, if you want, because you've blueprinted it, analyzed how it functions, understand the operating principles. You can even improve on it!
Now you have a working brain to analyze. Small problem: You can't take it apart to figure out how it works, because as soon as you do, it dies and all the parts of it that made it work as a system stop functioning. So you're limited to observing it as best you can without altering it -- or the organism it's a part of, which is co-dependent with it, to keep functioning. You're limited by whatever instrumentality you've managed to develop that can observe things deeper than at the surface level, but without damaging, altering, or influencing how it's operating in any way.
That's how I view the problem of determining how our brains work. You can't take it apart to figure it out, you have to come up with clever devices that can remotely sense how it works as a whole system, or otherwise be stuck just observing how it behaves. But it's a very complex system, and just because you observe behavior of one type based on inputs one day, doesn't necessarily mean it'll do exactly, precisely the same thing the next day, or that what you observed means what you think it means, either. We sort-of understand what some of the most basic building-blocks of it do, and have some ideas what some of the subsystems do, but how the whole thing works as a complete system is still largely a mystery to us. Because we can't take it apart, examine and play with all the parts, and put it back together and have it work anymore; it's just dead meat at that point, we have to try to figure out how to build clever machines that can peer into it while it's working, then make educated guesses at what it's actually doing.
For what it's worth, what I'm taking away from this, is that they're willing to question whether their methods of analysis are valid/sufficient, which I'll take as a good sign.
If this sort of thing becomes commonplace, my recommendation to you all is to get a charge-only USB cable for your phone, i.e. one that does not have the Data pair connected. Unless, of course, you really don't care if your phone gets hacked. Technology like this could easily be subverted, either by governments or by criminal organizations, to become attack vectors against unsuspecting smartphone owners.
If you can't find a 'charge only' USB cable, you can make your own easily enough out of a normal USB cable, even without any technical expertise to speak of. Take a regular USB cable appropriate for your phone, and with an Xacto or similar razor knife, carefully slit the outer jacket open lengthwise for 2 to 3 inches. You'll find a braided shield, foil shielding, or both; open these up and move them aside so you can get to the 4 wires within. You'll find a red wire and a black wire; leave these alone, they're 'power' and 'ground' respectively. The other pair of wires (very often green and white), twisted together, are the 'Data' pair; cut these, and remove a small section so they don't accidentally connect to each other again. Wrap the cable back up in electrical tape, and you're done. You should be able to plug into any USB port and charge your phone with no data connection to the phone from the port you're charging from.