Yes, people have, over and over again. The banks' answer was always that they use the interest on your money to cover the cost of the transaction. Thankfully, my bank (ABN Amro) has changed their ways. Instead of delaying transactions, my money is transferred instantly from one account to the other, but the rent date on the account where the money was withdrawn from is back-dated two days. The bank get their rent, and I don't have to wait for my money to arrive in my second account. Suits me just fine.
As for the future of money... I don't see cash disappearing in the next 25 years. Cash is still very convenient for a numbe of purposes and I carry some with me at all times. Cash is useful for person-to-person transactions on the spot, and as a safeguard against overdrawn accounts, broken electronic wallets and the debit card / ATM / CC verification server being down. If any of these happen to you while you're checking out in the supermarket, you'll be glad to be carrying soe cash.
I think we will see a form of Internet (micro) payments such as Paypal coming into being in the next 25 years. It'll be less clunky and more fail-safe than Paypal as it will be run by proper banks and institutions. Most likely it will be seen as a regular banking transaction system, and be subject to the susual government regulations, scrutiny and taxes where applicable.
Hmm... that PM (I am guessing: project manager) sounds like a paranoid luddite to me... which isn't to say that one should not be careful. But the few stories one hears of people having their money stolen because of credit card or Internet banking fraud dwindle beside the millions upon millions of happy users of these services. And the cases in which the defrauded users haven't had their money restored to them in the end are even fewer.
Cash has its drawbacks too, and it's not just the waiting in line to withdraw or deposit money. Ever gotten a counterfit bill as payment, or as change in a supermarket or bar? Good luck convincing anyone that they were the ones to hand you that particular bill.
"The real thing to remember is to never, ever, ever use a public system. That is the most sure way to give up all privacy. Even if there isn't a 3rd party breaking into and modifying the public machines, the true administrator of the machine might have all sorts of logging software."
I feel quite safe doing my online banking in any dodgy Internet cafe. As with most online banking services, the bank's website sends a challenge which I key into a device that generates a response. This response is then used a a one-time password. (Actually, the chip on my bank card is inserted into the device and generates the response, only after keying in my PIN first). Our company web mail system and tunneling software use a similar system. I have no worries about my passwords being stolen, since I use them only once.
Of course, even with a challenge-response system you still have to be careful about theft of data that you retrieve.
Re:Expect fianl report in 6 months
on
Latest Columbia News
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
It might be partly because most (or all) of the on-board measurements are beamed down as telemetry data.
Which doesn't mean adding a black box isn't useful, since the telemetry link itself could fail.
Ah, another one... While all you sceptics are thinking of all the reasons why this can't be done, scientists have already figured out the answer to your particular concern: it is not an issue. At least read up on this thing before slamming it.
Who will you be: a sceptic or one of the persons making this thing happen?
"And besides, bin Laden and crew would drool over a high profile target like that, and it wouldn't even get very far under construction without getting nailed by some radical towel heads who can't wait to get to their how-ever-many virgins in the name of their god."
That is a very common misconception. Most terrorists would have a hard time hitting any non-radiating target higher up than a mile or so, The weapons that the more civilised nations posess do not reach that much higher. In the case of the space elevator, that leaves you with a rather small ground area to defend against terrorists. And most of that area will be water anyway, which makes spotting approaching baddies even easier. Crashing a plane into it would be harder than you think: the cable would not be very visible from a distance, besides it would fly way outside any air traffic lanes so you could not use a hijacked passenger plane.
In short, terrorists will give this thing a miss and go for the easy targets: sarin in the NY subways, exploding a radiation bomb in Washington, driving a truck full of explosives into a shopping mall, these are all easier to pull off and probably make for better news items and propaganda back home, due to the number of casualties.
"The cable is also going to have to have a counterweight weighing at least as much as the cable itself to balance the space elevator in orbit."
Actually I thought the latest design showed that a counterweight was not required. The cable itself acts as its own counterweight.
"Plus, there are a whole host of engineering concerns that haven't been addresed about a space elevator yet. These would have to be a dead issue, given how much of a catastrophe it would be should a space elevator ever come crashing back to earth."
In short: the academics are not wasting their time studying this. There are indeed issues that we need to address before we begin building this thins, or decide not to. As for the catastrophic failure: studies show that most of the cable would burn up, with the last bit crashing to earth at a moderate speed, in a part of the ocean devoid of human settlements or even shipping lanes.
"So it's not really a question of if it's possible, so much as a question of safety plus who is going to foot the bill for its fabrication, launch, and assembly. Given the financial woes that have surrounded the ISS since its conception, I think the clear answer would be nobody."
Indeed. Part of those academics studying this thing are working on those questions: what does the elevator cost to build and operate. And unlike the ISS which was built purely for scientific reasons (and bad ones at that), the space elevator can show a decent return on investment once it is built, according to some studies.
Whether you want to believe those studies is another matter. But to abandon the space elevator as impractical is way too early.
"As for that retarded idea of space elevator, let's repeat for the zillionth time: It won't work. It's just an occupation of "acaedmics" to keep them occupied with such "ideas".
Yes, it is exactly the same as the other huge time-wasters some idiot academics spent time on in the past, such as:
- That improbable heavier-than-air flying machine
- The ludricous notion that one could reach India by sailing west around the world instead of east...
- That silly experiment of using steam to turn wheels and do useful work.
- Trying to figure out the course of planets by assuming they revolve around the sun, where any fool can see that everything revolves around the earth.
Seriously, with a mentality like that we'd still be hunting wooly mammoths with sticks.
If no one even tries it will certainly not get passed. Rather than giving up before even beginning, we would do better to see how we can support this, and urge our representatives to look after our rights.
Actually Holland has a long and dismal history of protecting all sorts of cartels and anti-consumer practices, with affected markets ranging from telephony and books to odd things like prayer candles and onions. It has only been a few years since the Nederlandse Mededingingsautoriteit (the Dutch cartel watchdog) is trying to put a stop to that. There is actually little legislation in Holland to protect consumers, perhaps they even have less rights than in the US.
On top of that, we will have to deal increasingly with directives from the European Commission. This body is (sadly) of low democratic alloy. John Q Public does not have easy access to them, or even have a say in who sits in that committee, but you can be sure that industry lobbyists have found their way to these people.
But I agree, it is very good to see politicians look at the current laws and proposals with different eyes, and asking "Where are the consumer rights in all of this?".
There is sound! At the end when the other guys run towards the wreck you hear the following:
"He was told not to fly that thing."
- "Has he been checked out on that thing?"
"No, I don't think so, not at all"
"The real legislative power in these matters is with the EU Commission, which deliberates in secret. How this appalling state of things came to be is another matter"
No surprise that the Economist said being a EU commissioner was the "cushy job of the year". Lots of power, hardly anyone to answer to, rather good pay and best of all, you work behind the scenes and largely out of the public spotlight.
"I consider placing of impediments to fair use applications to be a severe infringement of MY rights."
Just so, and I would like to see politicians stand up for our rights instead of the interests of the content producers. Hell, that's their job isn't it? The entertainment industry can implement all the anti-piracy measures and DRM they want, as long as they keep our rights in mind:
Our rights to make copies for our own use, transpose content to different media, and play back content on (compatible) equipment of our choice, must not be abridged. Incidently that means that the old-fashioned copy protection schemes have to go as well, such as the protection on some CDs that won't let you play it on a computer, or Macrivision that won't let me play video's in the den where I have an old Amiga monitor hooked up to a VCR.
We have the right to record, distribute and play back unencrypted, unprotected and un-DRM'ed media. Both for backward-compatibility reasons, and also so that a local band will not have to suck up to the RIAA for a private DRM key so they can press their own CDs.
With the DMCA and all these new copyright laws, I'd like to see the rights of us citizens properly laid down for once. Ask your representative in the EU, or your political party: protecting content providers against piracy is all well and good, but where do we the people stand in all this? What about our rights?
There is no substitute for experience, but there is something resembling a fast track.
Get paired to a senior programmer/systems engineer
If you have the opportunity to work with a senior on a one-to-one basis, grab it with both hands. There will not be many times when an experienced guy is willing to work with you or coach you, so rejoice when the opportunity presents itself, take it. A colleague of mine asked me which project he should take: a glamorous one where he would be working in a large team with no coaching, or a boring-looking but difficult job, working under one senior programmer. I adviced him to take the latter... which he did, and while he often complained about the job itself, his programming skills improved by leaps and bounds, which made him a senior programmer on the next assignment. I was glad to see he has taken it upon himself to teach in the same manner and spend lots of time with the junior guys.
"It's because you don't know how to do it the 'real' way. "
I think the great thing about the advance of electronics and computers in music is precisely this:it has made many hard-to-do things easier. And even the script kiddies as you call them come up with good music every now and then. Sure, they turn out a lot of bad stuff but it isn't all bad.
"I think that they could possibly kill the "global" P2P systems if they managed to effectively attack and fine people who are sharing data. As it is, the worst thing that can happen if you share is that you get told to stop - if there was a substantial chance that sharing files meant a $100 ticket, they would dry out pretty fast."
If they manage to actually find you sharing files on Kazaa, they have the clout to make your life a living hell of litigation, financial worries and threats of a jailtime hanging over your head. Even if you win the legal battle in the end, no one in their right mind will risk sharing files after they see all this happen to someone else, and that is why they'll probably go all out against the first of such cases.
Re:My dad worked for Philips...
on
Why VHS Was Better
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I had a V2000 recorder and loved it. Brilliant quality and the tapes could be flipped over and recorded on the other side like audio cassettes. IIRC you got 2x4 hours on one tape. Also, the players were quite easy to operate by non-techies.
The refusal of Philips to allow the release of pr0n on V2000 may have contributed to its demise, but I think it was more due to the idiotic Philips marketing department. Philips V2000 entered the consumer market quite late and was still priced at "early adopter" prices when VHS and Betamax prices were already coming down. Why? Because Philips, in all their wisdom, decided that consumers weren't interested in recording video. Why would anyone want to record TV shows? Instead, they aimed their marketing primarily at companies and schools and such, and priced the units accordingly.
I doubt that intelligent life, alien or human, would fall for the "false gift" of [b]altenating caps[/b].
"Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. BELIEvE. There is GOOD out there. We OPpose DECEPTION. Conduit CLOSING. Acknowledge"
Reminds me of the story about mr. Read, the CEO of Logica Plc. He purportedly had all company credit cards cancelled overnight, and made a deal with a different CC company, causing all sorts of grief for people trying to use their company CC the next day, out on business trips abroad and what have you. All because his card was refused once at a restaurant. And in that case the card was actually over the limit....
"No, what we need is an economic model that doesn't include a bunch of pointy haired bosses forcing tons of idiot (and even good) developers to spew crap. And we need consumers to up their standards, so that crap programs can't become popular because they look shiny or promise 100,000 features that people don't need. And we need to get rid of pointy-haired bosses that choose software because of all the wrong reasons."
Indeed. Why do so many software projects fail? Rarely because of bugs (at least from where I am standing). Rarely because it is hard to interface different complex components together (like system integration). Sure it's often hard, but not impossible. Software projects fail because of unreasonable or poorly managed expectations, failing to define the functionality of the software properly, or unrealistic timelines.
"Sounds like AI and another great method of using 10,000 GHZ CPUs to let people do simple tasks with software written by morons, instead of simply writing better code and firing and putting out of business the morons."
That is what it sounded like to me. And you know what? Making two bits of software exchange information using a loose protocol, and letting some AI sort out the details, isn't all that hard to realise. This guy might well make that happen. But! for this to be any use, the systems will have to understand the data as well as receive it properly. The system will still have to know what to do with, for instance, a record of an on-line order transaction. It needs to be told by us, by programming to make it do the right thing. And that is the hard part of system integration: not the exchange of information, but dealing with the often slightly different meaning the various systems give to a similar piece of data. I don't see AI or genetic algorithms solve that problem anytime soon, and when at last they will... the focus will shift from programming to training and debugging the initial mistakes the AI will make, and that process may prove just as hard as programming in the knowledge ourselves.
Armies are generally concerned with civilian casualties. If the choice is victory or civilians; they'll choose victory. If the choice is civvie lives or the lives of one's own soldiers, the choice again is clear. But if the army already has the upper hand and their own lives are not much at risk, they might take civilian casualties seriously and try to minimise them. I'd reverse your statement: armies are generally not overly concerned for leaving buildings intact. (Bridges might be are another matter)
Oh... their motives might not be entirely clean. It might just be propaganda for the bleeding hearts back home... But come on, what is the US army going to do with a bunch of intact buildings in Iraq?
It isn't completely safe. Even the example from the article about zapping a chemical plant without releasing toxins isn't entirely accurate. Chemical processes don't just stop if the control systems conk out all at once, there might well be a catastrophic reaction.
But in most cases it's safer than conventional weapons: disabling electronics in a hospital, on an intersection or at a chemical plant is better than just pelt those targets with bombs.
"Seriously, in the U.S. we just recently had a paralytic dockworkers' strike. I don't think they'd be amused by this labor-saving innovation. Not that I think people should be kicked out of jobs by robots"
They were already striking yesterday!;-)
(That was about the EU allowing non-skilled workers to work at the docks though. Heh... "sharing the wealth" somehow doesn't apply when it is their wealth". Of course they are just looking after the membership, but I wish they'd just say that, instead of always giving us that tired line that they do things for the greater good)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, people have, over and over again. The banks' answer was always that they use the interest on your money to cover the cost of the transaction. Thankfully, my bank (ABN Amro) has changed their ways. Instead of delaying transactions, my money is transferred instantly from one account to the other, but the rent date on the account where the money was withdrawn from is back-dated two days. The bank get their rent, and I don't have to wait for my money to arrive in my second account. Suits me just fine.
As for the future of money... I don't see cash disappearing in the next 25 years. Cash is still very convenient for a numbe of purposes and I carry some with me at all times. Cash is useful for person-to-person transactions on the spot, and as a safeguard against overdrawn accounts, broken electronic wallets and the debit card / ATM / CC verification server being down. If any of these happen to you while you're checking out in the supermarket, you'll be glad to be carrying soe cash.
I think we will see a form of Internet (micro) payments such as Paypal coming into being in the next 25 years. It'll be less clunky and more fail-safe than Paypal as it will be run by proper banks and institutions. Most likely it will be seen as a regular banking transaction system, and be subject to the susual government regulations, scrutiny and taxes where applicable.
Hmm... that PM (I am guessing: project manager) sounds like a paranoid luddite to me... which isn't to say that one should not be careful. But the few stories one hears of people having their money stolen because of credit card or Internet banking fraud dwindle beside the millions upon millions of happy users of these services. And the cases in which the defrauded users haven't had their money restored to them in the end are even fewer.
Cash has its drawbacks too, and it's not just the waiting in line to withdraw or deposit money. Ever gotten a counterfit bill as payment, or as change in a supermarket or bar? Good luck convincing anyone that they were the ones to hand you that particular bill.
"The real thing to remember is to never, ever, ever use a public system. That is the most sure way to give up all privacy. Even if there isn't a 3rd party breaking into and modifying the public machines, the true administrator of the machine might have all sorts of logging software."
I feel quite safe doing my online banking in any dodgy Internet cafe. As with most online banking services, the bank's website sends a challenge which I key into a device that generates a response. This response is then used a a one-time password. (Actually, the chip on my bank card is inserted into the device and generates the response, only after keying in my PIN first). Our company web mail system and tunneling software use a similar system. I have no worries about my passwords being stolen, since I use them only once.
Of course, even with a challenge-response system you still have to be careful about theft of data that you retrieve.
It might be partly because most (or all) of the on-board measurements are beamed down as telemetry data.
Which doesn't mean adding a black box isn't useful, since the telemetry link itself could fail.
Here are a bunch of details.
Ah, another one... While all you sceptics are thinking of all the reasons why this can't be done, scientists have already figured out the answer to your particular concern: it is not an issue. At least read up on this thing before slamming it.
Who will you be: a sceptic or one of the persons making this thing happen?
"And besides, bin Laden and crew would drool over a high profile target like that, and it wouldn't even get very far under construction without getting nailed by some radical towel heads who can't wait to get to their how-ever-many virgins in the name of their god."
That is a very common misconception. Most terrorists would have a hard time hitting any non-radiating target higher up than a mile or so, The weapons that the more civilised nations posess do not reach that much higher. In the case of the space elevator, that leaves you with a rather small ground area to defend against terrorists. And most of that area will be water anyway, which makes spotting approaching baddies even easier. Crashing a plane into it would be harder than you think: the cable would not be very visible from a distance, besides it would fly way outside any air traffic lanes so you could not use a hijacked passenger plane.
In short, terrorists will give this thing a miss and go for the easy targets: sarin in the NY subways, exploding a radiation bomb in Washington, driving a truck full of explosives into a shopping mall, these are all easier to pull off and probably make for better news items and propaganda back home, due to the number of casualties.
"The cable is also going to have to have a counterweight weighing at least as much as the cable itself to balance the space elevator in orbit."
Actually I thought the latest design showed that a counterweight was not required. The cable itself acts as its own counterweight.
"Plus, there are a whole host of engineering concerns that haven't been addresed about a space elevator yet. These would have to be a dead issue, given how much of a catastrophe it would be should a space elevator ever come crashing back to earth."
In short: the academics are not wasting their time studying this. There are indeed issues that we need to address before we begin building this thins, or decide not to. As for the catastrophic failure: studies show that most of the cable would burn up, with the last bit crashing to earth at a moderate speed, in a part of the ocean devoid of human settlements or even shipping lanes.
"So it's not really a question of if it's possible, so much as a question of safety plus who is going to foot the bill for its fabrication, launch, and assembly. Given the financial woes that have surrounded the ISS since its conception, I think the clear answer would be nobody."
Indeed. Part of those academics studying this thing are working on those questions: what does the elevator cost to build and operate. And unlike the ISS which was built purely for scientific reasons (and bad ones at that), the space elevator can show a decent return on investment once it is built, according to some studies.
Whether you want to believe those studies is another matter. But to abandon the space elevator as impractical is way too early.
"As for that retarded idea of space elevator, let's repeat for the zillionth time: It won't work. It's just an occupation of "acaedmics" to keep them occupied with such "ideas".
Yes, it is exactly the same as the other huge time-wasters some idiot academics spent time on in the past, such as:
- That improbable heavier-than-air flying machine
- The ludricous notion that one could reach India by sailing west around the world instead of east...
- That silly experiment of using steam to turn wheels and do useful work.
- Trying to figure out the course of planets by assuming they revolve around the sun, where any fool can see that everything revolves around the earth.
Seriously, with a mentality like that we'd still be hunting wooly mammoths with sticks.
If no one even tries it will certainly not get passed. Rather than giving up before even beginning, we would do better to see how we can support this, and urge our representatives to look after our rights.
Actually Holland has a long and dismal history of protecting all sorts of cartels and anti-consumer practices, with affected markets ranging from telephony and books to odd things like prayer candles and onions. It has only been a few years since the Nederlandse Mededingingsautoriteit (the Dutch cartel watchdog) is trying to put a stop to that. There is actually little legislation in Holland to protect consumers, perhaps they even have less rights than in the US.
On top of that, we will have to deal increasingly with directives from the European Commission. This body is (sadly) of low democratic alloy. John Q Public does not have easy access to them, or even have a say in who sits in that committee, but you can be sure that industry lobbyists have found their way to these people.
But I agree, it is very good to see politicians look at the current laws and proposals with different eyes, and asking "Where are the consumer rights in all of this?".
There is sound! At the end when the other guys run towards the wreck you hear the following:
"He was told not to fly that thing."
- "Has he been checked out on that thing?"
"No, I don't think so, not at all"
"The real legislative power in these matters is with the EU Commission, which deliberates in secret. How this appalling state of things came to be is another matter"
No surprise that the Economist said being a EU commissioner was the "cushy job of the year". Lots of power, hardly anyone to answer to, rather good pay and best of all, you work behind the scenes and largely out of the public spotlight.
"I consider placing of impediments to fair use applications to be a severe infringement of MY rights."
Just so, and I would like to see politicians stand up for our rights instead of the interests of the content producers. Hell, that's their job isn't it? The entertainment industry can implement all the anti-piracy measures and DRM they want, as long as they keep our rights in mind:
Our rights to make copies for our own use, transpose content to different media, and play back content on (compatible) equipment of our choice, must not be abridged. Incidently that means that the old-fashioned copy protection schemes have to go as well, such as the protection on some CDs that won't let you play it on a computer, or Macrivision that won't let me play video's in the den where I have an old Amiga monitor hooked up to a VCR.
We have the right to record, distribute and play back unencrypted, unprotected and un-DRM'ed media. Both for backward-compatibility reasons, and also so that a local band will not have to suck up to the RIAA for a private DRM key so they can press their own CDs.
With the DMCA and all these new copyright laws, I'd like to see the rights of us citizens properly laid down for once. Ask your representative in the EU, or your political party: protecting content providers against piracy is all well and good, but where do we the people stand in all this? What about our rights?
There is no substitute for experience, but there is something resembling a fast track.
Get paired to a senior programmer/systems engineer
If you have the opportunity to work with a senior on a one-to-one basis, grab it with both hands. There will not be many times when an experienced guy is willing to work with you or coach you, so rejoice when the opportunity presents itself, take it. A colleague of mine asked me which project he should take: a glamorous one where he would be working in a large team with no coaching, or a boring-looking but difficult job, working under one senior programmer. I adviced him to take the latter... which he did, and while he often complained about the job itself, his programming skills improved by leaps and bounds, which made him a senior programmer on the next assignment. I was glad to see he has taken it upon himself to teach in the same manner and spend lots of time with the junior guys.
"It's because you don't know how to do it the 'real' way. "
I think the great thing about the advance of electronics and computers in music is precisely this:it has made many hard-to-do things easier. And even the script kiddies as you call them come up with good music every now and then. Sure, they turn out a lot of bad stuff but it isn't all bad.
"I think that they could possibly kill the "global" P2P systems if they managed to effectively attack and fine people who are sharing data. As it is, the worst thing that can happen if you share is that you get told to stop - if there was a substantial chance that sharing files meant a $100 ticket, they would dry out pretty fast."
If they manage to actually find you sharing files on Kazaa, they have the clout to make your life a living hell of litigation, financial worries and threats of a jailtime hanging over your head. Even if you win the legal battle in the end, no one in their right mind will risk sharing files after they see all this happen to someone else, and that is why they'll probably go all out against the first of such cases.
I had a V2000 recorder and loved it. Brilliant quality and the tapes could be flipped over and recorded on the other side like audio cassettes. IIRC you got 2x4 hours on one tape. Also, the players were quite easy to operate by non-techies.
The refusal of Philips to allow the release of pr0n on V2000 may have contributed to its demise, but I think it was more due to the idiotic Philips marketing department. Philips V2000 entered the consumer market quite late and was still priced at "early adopter" prices when VHS and Betamax prices were already coming down. Why? Because Philips, in all their wisdom, decided that consumers weren't interested in recording video. Why would anyone want to record TV shows? Instead, they aimed their marketing primarily at companies and schools and such, and priced the units accordingly.
I doubt that intelligent life, alien or human, would fall for the "false gift" of [b]altenating caps[/b].
"Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. BELIEvE. There is GOOD out there. We OPpose DECEPTION. Conduit CLOSING. Acknowledge"
Reminds me of the story about mr. Read, the CEO of Logica Plc. He purportedly had all company credit cards cancelled overnight, and made a deal with a different CC company, causing all sorts of grief for people trying to use their company CC the next day, out on business trips abroad and what have you. All because his card was refused once at a restaurant. And in that case the card was actually over the limit....
"No, what we need is an economic model that doesn't include a bunch of pointy haired bosses forcing tons of idiot (and even good) developers to spew crap. And we need consumers to up their standards, so that crap programs can't become popular because they look shiny or promise 100,000 features that people don't need. And we need to get rid of pointy-haired bosses that choose software because of all the wrong reasons."
Indeed. Why do so many software projects fail? Rarely because of bugs (at least from where I am standing). Rarely because it is hard to interface different complex components together (like system integration). Sure it's often hard, but not impossible. Software projects fail because of unreasonable or poorly managed expectations, failing to define the functionality of the software properly, or unrealistic timelines.
"Sounds like AI and another great method of using 10,000 GHZ CPUs to let people do simple tasks with software written by morons, instead of simply writing better code and firing and putting out of business the morons."
That is what it sounded like to me. And you know what? Making two bits of software exchange information using a loose protocol, and letting some AI sort out the details, isn't all that hard to realise. This guy might well make that happen. But! for this to be any use, the systems will have to understand the data as well as receive it properly. The system will still have to know what to do with, for instance, a record of an on-line order transaction. It needs to be told by us, by programming to make it do the right thing. And that is the hard part of system integration: not the exchange of information, but dealing with the often slightly different meaning the various systems give to a similar piece of data. I don't see AI or genetic algorithms solve that problem anytime soon, and when at last they will... the focus will shift from programming to training and debugging the initial mistakes the AI will make, and that process may prove just as hard as programming in the knowledge ourselves.
Agreed. I was citing the example named in the post that I replied to.
Armies are generally concerned with civilian casualties. If the choice is victory or civilians; they'll choose victory. If the choice is civvie lives or the lives of one's own soldiers, the choice again is clear. But if the army already has the upper hand and their own lives are not much at risk, they might take civilian casualties seriously and try to minimise them. I'd reverse your statement: armies are generally not overly concerned for leaving buildings intact. (Bridges might be are another matter)
Oh... their motives might not be entirely clean. It might just be propaganda for the bleeding hearts back home... But come on, what is the US army going to do with a bunch of intact buildings in Iraq?
It isn't completely safe. Even the example from the article about zapping a chemical plant without releasing toxins isn't entirely accurate. Chemical processes don't just stop if the control systems conk out all at once, there might well be a catastrophic reaction.
But in most cases it's safer than conventional weapons: disabling electronics in a hospital, on an intersection or at a chemical plant is better than just pelt those targets with bombs.
"Seriously, in the U.S. we just recently had a paralytic dockworkers' strike. I don't think they'd be amused by this labor-saving innovation. Not that I think people should be kicked out of jobs by robots"
;-)
They were already striking yesterday!
(That was about the EU allowing non-skilled workers to work at the docks though. Heh... "sharing the wealth" somehow doesn't apply when it is their wealth". Of course they are just looking after the membership, but I wish they'd just say that, instead of always giving us that tired line that they do things for the greater good)