has it really reached a point that we can call it a monopoly?
Yes, but it is a monopoly unlike any other and breaking it up will fail. The whole point of Facebook is that everyone is on the same site and so can share information and details with each other (and of course Facebook itself). If you break that up one of the parts will become dominant, everyone will move to that because sharing requires it and all you have is Facebook 2.0.
Even if you pass laws to try and limit what a social media company can do that will likely fail as well because the company can simply relocate its servers outside whatever country is trying to regulate it. The best approach I've seen so far is extremely strict privacy laws such as those in the EU.
We use common sense to fill in gaps in training sets,
...and "common sense" is simply the extrapolation based on other data that we have been exposed to. Even if we have never seen a particular object before "common sense" tells us it will fall downwards if it is knocked off a table simply because every object we see usually falls downwards. However, we never spend time training a computer with data like this because what use is an algorithm that can tell us that objects fall downwards?
That's the key difference between AI and humans at the moment. Humans are trained with a massive amount of data from birth courtesy of the senses. An AI is trained on a tiny subset of data relevant to the one problem we want it to solve. The reason it cannot reason is because it has no wider context than the one problem it is considering.
Put simply, today's machine-learning programs can't tell whether a crowing rooster makes the sun rise, or the other way around. Whatever volumes of data a machine analyzes, it cannot understand what a human gets intuitively.
A human does not reach this conclusion "intuitively". We reach it by having a lot more data such as the fact that roosters crow at other times of day and a sun does not rise; that other birds also make noise at dawn (the dawn chorus) or that even when no roosters are present the sun still rises.
What you lump into "intuition" is a logical world view based on observation. Give a computer the same data and an appropriate algorithm and it will be able to figure that out too. However, if you give it a world consisting only of one rooster which crows only when the sun rises and it's not surprising that it does not know which causes which and I doubt a human with nothing but that exact data (i.e. no knoweldge of the real world) too would be any different.
Absolutely true but if you RTFA (I know that's not expected!) right at the end they suggest a reason which is that the jobs they looked at require 8 hours of continuous activity vs. the 0.5 hours or so of typical leisure activity. Apparently, "continuous activity works to actually inhibit our cardiovascular system, not improve it" according to the article. Of course, this possible cause will require more data to establish.
That was my point. They _SHOULD_ be able to do something to him. If schools cannot punish kids then their behaviour is likely to deteriorate until it crosses the criminal threshold and they can use courts to punish the kids. However, the legal system is totally inappropriate for this. As you say if his parents can afford an expensive lawyer he may get off scot-free at which point he learns that even laws don't really apply to him and his behaviour gets even worse or he does not get off and has life-altering judgements imposed which provide little to no opportunity for him to learn from his mistake.
I'm not surprised that the figure is low for Canada and the UK. When it is -40C or pouring with rain most people will not want to go outside and I'm not sure it really is any healthier for them to do so. They should correlate these results with the local climate.
That's the point though. The punishment for a 5 year old running in the street is being grabbed by their parents to prevent a serious accident, being told off and likely not being allowed to play outside for some time period. I hope you are not suggesting that the right way to deal with this would be to arrest the kid, haul them off to gaol and then charge them with obstructing traffic?
If you hack a system, you're a criminal. If you are a high school student, you know it is a crime.
It is a well established, scientific fact that teenage brains work differently from adult brains. This is why parents are necessary and why we have laws which restrict people's rights before they are 18 years old e.g. no alcohol, voting, tobacco etc. It's hardly fair, or even self-consistent, to claim that teenagers are incapable of making sensible decisions about politics, alcohol or tobacco use but that they should be fully capable of making a decision about whether it is sensible to hack a computer.
By all means, punish the kid but let's have a punishment appropriate for a teenage kid being stupid and not one designed for serious, adult criminals.
We don't live in a universe. We live in a multiverse.
Firstly, there is absolutely zero evidence of this. It might be true, and some theoretical physicists (including a colleague) have suggested this but that in no way makes it true.
Secondly, even if this is true the fact that the time machine departing for the past occurs after the time machine arrives is sufficient to violate causality which, simply put, is just the requirement that if event A causes event B that event A occurs before event B. The multiverse conjecture may be a way to solve all the paradoxes of time travel but it still does not stop causality from being broken.
No, a time machine does not violate causality any more than a car does.
Unless that car can travel _really_ fast, faster than light in fact, that's not true. Causality in physics simply stated is that if event A causes event B then A must always occur before event B. If event A is the time machine departing and event B is the time machine arriving at its destination then, unless you have a really boring one directional time machine that only travels to the future (like a car!), the moment the time machine travels to the past it has violated causality. No fancy temporal paradoxes are required: simply having a cause occur after the effect is sufficient.
..oh, and never mind the fact that these so-called 'AIs'...will inevitably make mistakes, which will lead to non-combatants being targeted and killed.
That's not the thing to worry about. What you need to ask is whether this system will result in fewer mistakes than whatever system they currently have. Fewer mistakes means fewer innocents killed which is something everyone should want. It's true that the best way to do this is to stop shooting but, so long as someone is shooting, making sure they have the best possible support to make the right decision about whom to shoot is not a bad thing.
Zeno's Paradox: In theory you can infinitely sub-divide space, in application you can't. Answer: Both time and space are quantized.
We do not know that. It's certainly plausible but unless you have a working theory of quantum gravity that you have been keeping to yourself, with experimental evidence to back it up, we have literally no idea how space-time works on incredibly small scales.
You can't violate the Law of Causality no matter how hard you try. It would _instantly_ cause you to cease to exist. Ergo, there is no paradox.
By its very nature, a time machine violates the law of causality so, if one exists clearly the law of causality can be broken and how to resolve paradoxes is then a legitimate question. If you believe the law of causality to be unbroken then you have to believe that it is impossible to build a time machine.
...and would require unfathomable physics to carry out (on the order of constraining the energy of a hydrogen bomb in the volume occupied by a human such that no damage or radiation occurred.)
...which means that it is not "unfathomable physics" since you claim to have just "fathomed" what is needed. Indeed there is a theoretical time machine consisting of two, linked Black Holes. If you can create that then you accelerate one of the holes up to very close to the speed of light and then passage through them would take you back in time. However, apart from constructing the two, linked Black Holes you also need something with negative mass to open the singularity to allow objects to pass through.
If this even is possible it requires unbelievable energy densities - far, far greater than an H-bomb since you need enough to create a singularity and then hold it "open". We also know of nothing with negative mass (gravitationally repulsive) but, if it is ever possible to build such a thing, it does solve the problem of time travellers from the distant future because it is only possible to travel back in time to the point where the machine was constructed and not before.
So the physics of time travel might have just have been "fathomed" and, if so, it's now just an engineering problem.
Nobody is arguing that he should not be punished it is the severity of the punishment that is in question. A badly behaved schoolkid changing a few internal school grades is not the sort of thing a court is designed to deal with. You cannot achieve justice in schools through the court system: either kids will get off without any punishment or they end up with extremely serious consequences. What is needed is serious, but not life-changing consequences so they have a chance to learn from their mistakes.
Should we ruin his life with 14 felonies over it? Nope.
I completely agree - this should be handled internally by the school. However, if parents are going to use the courts to stop their kids being punished by schools then it's not surprising that schools have ended up having to use the courts to punish students. Courts are not at all designed to cope with misbehaving schoolkids and the result is that either they get off scot-free or they end up with life-ruining consequences.
Wow, you just changed the conversation to fit your argument. Where did I mention "extinction of life" or any "doomsday scenario"?
No, I did not change the conversation at all! Did you actually bother to even read what the 86-year-old social scientist that you are defending so vigorously with your "logic" wrote? It's right there in the summary, you do not need to even RTFA:
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports an alternate perspective from 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman: "We're doomed." He's predicting the end of most life on the planet,...
If you actually read the Guardian article he goes on in more detail. That's why I was saying that we should not listen to this idiot and that's the person you were using "logic" to defend and arguing that we should listen to! Next time it might be a good idea to figure out what the person you are defending actually said before leaping in because it seems that we are both in agreement that his statements are complete rubbish but that nevertheless, climate change is still a serious issue that needs addressing!
They didn't ban the sale of these devices nationwide
I never said they did. My point still stands whether it be a nationwide ban or a more limited ban. However, you cannot guarantee that a response will be limited in quite the same fashion which is how these things escalate.
I think the surprising thing about it to some people is that the device was not one that was plugged in, and yet it was still affected.
This should not be a surprise. Hospitals worry a lot about the EM radiation from mobile phones affecting their delicate medical instruments. I think most people would be aware that the EM emission from lightning is going to be a bit more powerful than your typical mobile!
There is a straight path but it is just a lot shorter. The oceans have a depth so you can travel in a straight line through them but it is going to be a lot shorter than 32,000 km.
Slashdot Mirror
has it really reached a point that we can call it a monopoly?
Yes, but it is a monopoly unlike any other and breaking it up will fail. The whole point of Facebook is that everyone is on the same site and so can share information and details with each other (and of course Facebook itself). If you break that up one of the parts will become dominant, everyone will move to that because sharing requires it and all you have is Facebook 2.0.
Even if you pass laws to try and limit what a social media company can do that will likely fail as well because the company can simply relocate its servers outside whatever country is trying to regulate it. The best approach I've seen so far is extremely strict privacy laws such as those in the EU.
A Greek word with Latin endings? Sounds as implausible as the octopus evolving on Earth. Clearly, the word we use for them come from outer space too.
We use common sense to fill in gaps in training sets,
That's the key difference between AI and humans at the moment. Humans are trained with a massive amount of data from birth courtesy of the senses. An AI is trained on a tiny subset of data relevant to the one problem we want it to solve. The reason it cannot reason is because it has no wider context than the one problem it is considering.
But Mickey Mouse? The only work being done on that is paying lawyers to get copyright extended again.
They have to pay for Walt's cryogenics somehow!
Put simply, today's machine-learning programs can't tell whether a crowing rooster makes the sun rise, or the other way around. Whatever volumes of data a machine analyzes, it cannot understand what a human gets intuitively.
A human does not reach this conclusion "intuitively". We reach it by having a lot more data such as the fact that roosters crow at other times of day and a sun does not rise; that other birds also make noise at dawn (the dawn chorus) or that even when no roosters are present the sun still rises.
What you lump into "intuition" is a logical world view based on observation. Give a computer the same data and an appropriate algorithm and it will be able to figure that out too. However, if you give it a world consisting only of one rooster which crows only when the sun rises and it's not surprising that it does not know which causes which and I doubt a human with nothing but that exact data (i.e. no knoweldge of the real world) too would be any different.
Correlation isn't causation.
Absolutely true but if you RTFA (I know that's not expected!) right at the end they suggest a reason which is that the jobs they looked at require 8 hours of continuous activity vs. the 0.5 hours or so of typical leisure activity. Apparently, "continuous activity works to actually inhibit our cardiovascular system, not improve it" according to the article. Of course, this possible cause will require more data to establish.
Please, the school can do nothing to him.
That was my point. They _SHOULD_ be able to do something to him. If schools cannot punish kids then their behaviour is likely to deteriorate until it crosses the criminal threshold and they can use courts to punish the kids. However, the legal system is totally inappropriate for this. As you say if his parents can afford an expensive lawyer he may get off scot-free at which point he learns that even laws don't really apply to him and his behaviour gets even worse or he does not get off and has life-altering judgements imposed which provide little to no opportunity for him to learn from his mistake.
The problem is not Bird itself.
I think the real Venice would disagree: they clearly have a real bird problem.
I'm not surprised that the figure is low for Canada and the UK. When it is -40C or pouring with rain most people will not want to go outside and I'm not sure it really is any healthier for them to do so. They should correlate these results with the local climate.
That's the point though. The punishment for a 5 year old running in the street is being grabbed by their parents to prevent a serious accident, being told off and likely not being allowed to play outside for some time period. I hope you are not suggesting that the right way to deal with this would be to arrest the kid, haul them off to gaol and then charge them with obstructing traffic?
If you hack a system, you're a criminal. If you are a high school student, you know it is a crime.
It is a well established, scientific fact that teenage brains work differently from adult brains. This is why parents are necessary and why we have laws which restrict people's rights before they are 18 years old e.g. no alcohol, voting, tobacco etc. It's hardly fair, or even self-consistent, to claim that teenagers are incapable of making sensible decisions about politics, alcohol or tobacco use but that they should be fully capable of making a decision about whether it is sensible to hack a computer.
By all means, punish the kid but let's have a punishment appropriate for a teenage kid being stupid and not one designed for serious, adult criminals.
We don't live in a universe. We live in a multiverse.
Firstly, there is absolutely zero evidence of this. It might be true, and some theoretical physicists (including a colleague) have suggested this but that in no way makes it true.
Secondly, even if this is true the fact that the time machine departing for the past occurs after the time machine arrives is sufficient to violate causality which, simply put, is just the requirement that if event A causes event B that event A occurs before event B. The multiverse conjecture may be a way to solve all the paradoxes of time travel but it still does not stop causality from being broken.
No, a time machine does not violate causality any more than a car does.
Unless that car can travel _really_ fast, faster than light in fact, that's not true. Causality in physics simply stated is that if event A causes event B then A must always occur before event B. If event A is the time machine departing and event B is the time machine arriving at its destination then, unless you have a really boring one directional time machine that only travels to the future (like a car!), the moment the time machine travels to the past it has violated causality. No fancy temporal paradoxes are required: simply having a cause occur after the effect is sufficient.
...imaginary spacial space which is what airlines use for your legroom.
36-moth warranty though
With that many bugs they'll really be rivalling Intel soon!
..oh, and never mind the fact that these so-called 'AIs' ...will inevitably make mistakes, which will lead to non-combatants being targeted and killed.
That's not the thing to worry about. What you need to ask is whether this system will result in fewer mistakes than whatever system they currently have. Fewer mistakes means fewer innocents killed which is something everyone should want. It's true that the best way to do this is to stop shooting but, so long as someone is shooting, making sure they have the best possible support to make the right decision about whom to shoot is not a bad thing.
Zeno's Paradox: In theory you can infinitely sub-divide space, in application you can't. Answer: Both time and space are quantized.
We do not know that. It's certainly plausible but unless you have a working theory of quantum gravity that you have been keeping to yourself, with experimental evidence to back it up, we have literally no idea how space-time works on incredibly small scales.
You can't violate the Law of Causality no matter how hard you try. It would _instantly_ cause you to cease to exist. Ergo, there is no paradox.
By its very nature, a time machine violates the law of causality so, if one exists clearly the law of causality can be broken and how to resolve paradoxes is then a legitimate question. If you believe the law of causality to be unbroken then you have to believe that it is impossible to build a time machine.
...and would require unfathomable physics to carry out (on the order of constraining the energy of a hydrogen bomb in the volume occupied by a human such that no damage or radiation occurred.)
If this even is possible it requires unbelievable energy densities - far, far greater than an H-bomb since you need enough to create a singularity and then hold it "open". We also know of nothing with negative mass (gravitationally repulsive) but, if it is ever possible to build such a thing, it does solve the problem of time travellers from the distant future because it is only possible to travel back in time to the point where the machine was constructed and not before.
So the physics of time travel might have just have been "fathomed" and, if so, it's now just an engineering problem.
Nobody is arguing that he should not be punished it is the severity of the punishment that is in question. A badly behaved schoolkid changing a few internal school grades is not the sort of thing a court is designed to deal with. You cannot achieve justice in schools through the court system: either kids will get off without any punishment or they end up with extremely serious consequences. What is needed is serious, but not life-changing consequences so they have a chance to learn from their mistakes.
Should we ruin his life with 14 felonies over it? Nope.
I completely agree - this should be handled internally by the school. However, if parents are going to use the courts to stop their kids being punished by schools then it's not surprising that schools have ended up having to use the courts to punish students. Courts are not at all designed to cope with misbehaving schoolkids and the result is that either they get off scot-free or they end up with life-ruining consequences.
Wow, you just changed the conversation to fit your argument. Where did I mention "extinction of life" or any "doomsday scenario"?
No, I did not change the conversation at all! Did you actually bother to even read what the 86-year-old social scientist that you are defending so vigorously with your "logic" wrote? It's right there in the summary, you do not need to even RTFA:
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports an alternate perspective from 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman: "We're doomed." He's predicting the end of most life on the planet,...
If you actually read the Guardian article he goes on in more detail. That's why I was saying that we should not listen to this idiot and that's the person you were using "logic" to defend and arguing that we should listen to! Next time it might be a good idea to figure out what the person you are defending actually said before leaping in because it seems that we are both in agreement that his statements are complete rubbish but that nevertheless, climate change is still a serious issue that needs addressing!
WTF, people, are the signatures going in reverse?
No, he meant to write 7,000 but he was using an Apple keyboard.
They didn't ban the sale of these devices nationwide
I never said they did. My point still stands whether it be a nationwide ban or a more limited ban. However, you cannot guarantee that a response will be limited in quite the same fashion which is how these things escalate.
I think the surprising thing about it to some people is that the device was not one that was plugged in, and yet it was still affected.
This should not be a surprise. Hospitals worry a lot about the EM radiation from mobile phones affecting their delicate medical instruments. I think most people would be aware that the EM emission from lightning is going to be a bit more powerful than your typical mobile!
There is a straight path but it is just a lot shorter. The oceans have a depth so you can travel in a straight line through them but it is going to be a lot shorter than 32,000 km.