Right, but you missed my first sentence, which comes from "we guarantee that our software works on all known models as of a certain date. It's in the contract and the clients do pay us well for it" constraint from ducomputergeek. If this is what you promise, then emulators are not good enough. If your client knows and approves of your use of VMs, then you're obviously in the clear.
And now you're changing the argument. What I'm objecting to is your contention that they could just use the emulator and not buy hardware, and still "effectively test on every conceivable hardware platform", which is plain false.
If testing on real hardware is what the client wants, you do it or turn down the gig. I don't see how silliness enters into consideration, and testing on all Windows laptops is literally a problem of a different magnitude, and quite irrelevant as an analogy.
Professionals who tell their clients that "the software sill work on all shipping Android phones" better have tested on actual hardware. Emulators could not replicate for you chipset quirks, subtle timing problems, and many other issues that only occur on hardware. If you've shipped commercial software tested only against an emulator, I would strongly urge you to not admit it, and maybe get a lawyer.
If you want to build "lots and lots of them", then suddenly you need a supply chain, factories, and skilled workers. All of those are more easily detected and destroyed before you have the numbers for a swarm.
who was upset because they felt that deep blue had demeaned mankind?
Everybody who felt the need to explain that Deep Blue wasn't really smart, or maybe even kinda cheated. Point is, I can cheat all I want and I'm not going to beat Kasparov. Deep Blue - whether or not it really beat Kasparov - will kick all our asses. It's entirely clear that chess is difficult only to the way our brains are wired.
In other words, the lesson is really about the game of chess more than it is about AI or Humanity. If you draw a lot of meaning from it, you might be a bit upset or defensive, and it's quite natural.
The fact that a relatively simple machine (especially when we look back ten or fifty years from now) can do what was originally thought to be difficult undermines the pedestal that many humans have put themselves on. This is why people were upset when Deep Blue beat Kasparov. It would have to be a skill that we've abandoned as uniquely human - such as raw mathematical calculations - that a machine would be allowed to beat us at without this sort of reaction.
Fact is, what's hard for humans to do isn't necessarily hard for a computer, but those who fail to understand that get upset.
So was slavery, but you don't hear much support for that these days. Bombings targeting civilians were common in WWII, and defoliant chemicals were used in Vietnam, but not anymore. Things have changed.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
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It still makes no sense to me that a person who works for five years should pay more taxes than one who does literally nothing holding stock for the same five. Inflation is already a good incentive for capital to be invested, so it's not as if it'll just be sitting in a bank.
Nobody said you should freeze to death. But simply putting on more clothes on warmer winter days instead of turning the heater on, and keeping the heater thermostat as low as you can when it gets unbearable, would be helpful (and even save you money). This makes the problem a bit smaller, and a bit easier to solve. Instead, all around us are wood-burning fireplaces that aren't even all that warm!
If, on the other hand, you are waiting for some indisputable scientific authority to prescribe how each of us must live before doing anything at all, then I doubt that will arrive in time.
You don't have to believe anything if you don't want to.
However, oil is not going to last forever, and it's not likely to run out in a gradual and controlled way. Water is increasingly a contested resource. Coal, even if you disregard the greenhouse gas emitted from burning it, pollutes the air we breathe. Nuclear energy generates nuclear waste which is really hard to keep safely. Deforestation also results in mudslides and desertification, which have economic consequences. None of these should be controversial, so the question is what do we do about it?
Coincidentally, solving these problems might also help ward off or slow down climate change. So even if you're unsure of what to believe in terms of climate science, you can still act or at least get out of the way of people trying to act.
No, "equal opportunity" in employment refers to the fact that it is illegal to discriminate against people of certain sex, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. It does not say that you should hire anybody other than your best applicant.
You are probably mixing it up with "affirmative action", which seeks to address historical injustice by bending over backwards for the wronged groups. In this case, because simply freeing the African American slaves still left their descendants at a severe disadvantage in the open market, society decides to give them preferential treatment.
All I'm going to say is that it's quite common for the successful to think that they did it all themselves, without thinking too much about whether they'd be where they are if they were born in a different color or socio-economic background.
Oh, absolutely. My point wasn't to blame the women only, rather to say that it's not some faceless industrial capitalist who made this happen for nefarious purposes. People individually decided to do what makes sense for them, only now that everybody does it, two incomes no longer put a family ahead of the pack.
...we _suck_ at teaching...What is one more, made of silicon, going to offer us?
This statement is shockingly shortsighted. Yes, this supercomputer would have to be taught, but unlike humans they don't die after 80 or 100 years, replaced by children who need to be re-taught many of the same things. They could continue learning year after year, transferring their software onto new hardware with no loss of functionality. What of this computer ten or fifty lifetimes later?
No, the "wives" chose this path. At the start, it was probably a few women who ventured outside the house, partly because they really wanted to have a career, and partly because it was extra money for the household. The "problem" was that the double-income family was able to afford a bigger house and more stuff, which lured more women out of the house to keep up. Today, the single-income household is probably a minority, because the inflationary pressure caused by the double-income households made things unaffordable otherwise. The capitalists were happy to have more supply of labor, because it kept their costs lower, but ultimately the people chose this for themselves.
Note that I'm not saying this is right or wrong, just that it is.
At least the laws haven't started telling people to pull over to make or take calls [...] Getting onto and off of a highway from the shoulder is one of the most dangerous things you can do in a car
Uh, "pull over to take the call" isn't talking about the highway shoulder. Heavens, the shoulder is for emergencies, why don't you know that?
I would totally expect you or anyone to be able to do the tasks much faster but would you be able to to them as long.
If we're talking about equivalent tasks, being able to do them much faster means I wouldn't have to do it for as long to achieve the same results.
Driving around faster doesn't equate to getting more done.
Correct, but it might. The rovers are limited by their range to giving us only a very small sample of Martian soil and rocks. Driving around gives us a much bigger sample, which might lead to interesting discoveries, or it might not.
Look, I'm not trying to convince you that humans can completely replace rovers in terms of cost, risk, etc. I'm trying to answer your question: "What is the point of putting people on Mars other than to be the first. They can't do much more than what robots are doing now and the cost doesn't justify the information gained." by pointing out that humans can do things that the rovers can't, and vice versa.
They can't do much more than what robots are doing now
First of all, even if you're completely correct, I'm fairly certain that they can do the tasks more quickly, because the rover's average speed is only 10 mm/s. By May 2009, Opportunity had just passed the 16 km mark in its travels, while the manned Apollo 15-17 lunar rovers were driven about 90 km in about 11 hours!
Secondly, while the rovers have been a marvelous success story, consider if they had gotten stuck like this three days instead of six years after landing. What's the return ratio on that cost, then? A human can obviously deal with far rougher terrain, and would be able to dig out of bigger trouble.
and the cost doesn't justify the information gained.
Sure, assuming that the humans don't actually discover something you didn't expect to find. But how do you already know what sort of information can be gained?
Now, I actually agree that we should be very sensitive to the costs and potential returns of both robot or human missions, but robots have a long way to go before they can match human versatility. There are different costs and advantages to either approach, and neither can replace the other convincingly yet.
You may also observe that most complaints against impoliteness can be answered childishly with "boo hoo." Whether you agree or not, etiquette is based on other people's feelings, so if your behavior is bothering other people, you are in fact being rude. We're not talking about a moral failing, but a social one, like slurping your soup or writing your email in caps.
If your instinct is to answer "boo hoo" to these complaints, then etiquette is simply not for you.
Gosh, no. Shuttles in museums will inspire kids and adults alike, which will mean far more to NASA (both in terms of voter support for budgets, as well as talent recruitment) than $10 or $20 million more that some private collector might offer.
The whole "Peak Oil" thing is somewhat of a sham, given that technology is emerging beyond a dependence on petroleum (we should be there completely within a couple of decades under normal market conditions, and if oil does start to become scarce, I'm certain that we'll get there even sooner due to simple market pressures).
I'm not as optimistic. I don't trust the market to price oil out gradually enough for emergent technologies to take over, so that there won't be a horribly-painful transitional period where energy is unaffordable. What you say is true: oil will run out and become too expensive. The problem is we need that to happen at a certain pace that oil producers aren't necessarily going to cooperate with.
If your security scenario involves dealing with bombs on planes that are big enough to destroy the entire plane, then everything else is moot. The point is that other security measures help ensure that even if explosive materials make it on board, they're only available in small quantities. (Obviously that hasn't always worked, but the last one that I can recall where a terrorist bomb destroyed an entire plane is Pan Am over Lockerby.)
is there some physics that makes an explosion 30 minutes before landing more dangerous then 1 hour and 30 minutes?
Of course there is. The plane is at a lower altitude, giving pilots less time to respond to grave damage. The pilots are also busier, both in preparation for landing and because air traffic is typically denser near airports.
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Right, but you missed my first sentence, which comes from "we guarantee that our software works on all known models as of a certain date. It's in the contract and the clients do pay us well for it" constraint from ducomputergeek. If this is what you promise, then emulators are not good enough. If your client knows and approves of your use of VMs, then you're obviously in the clear.
And now you're changing the argument. What I'm objecting to is your contention that they could just use the emulator and not buy hardware, and still "effectively test on every conceivable hardware platform", which is plain false.
If testing on real hardware is what the client wants, you do it or turn down the gig. I don't see how silliness enters into consideration, and testing on all Windows laptops is literally a problem of a different magnitude, and quite irrelevant as an analogy.
Professionals who tell their clients that "the software sill work on all shipping Android phones" better have tested on actual hardware. Emulators could not replicate for you chipset quirks, subtle timing problems, and many other issues that only occur on hardware. If you've shipped commercial software tested only against an emulator, I would strongly urge you to not admit it, and maybe get a lawyer.
If you want to build "lots and lots of them", then suddenly you need a supply chain, factories, and skilled workers. All of those are more easily detected and destroyed before you have the numbers for a swarm.
Everybody who felt the need to explain that Deep Blue wasn't really smart, or maybe even kinda cheated. Point is, I can cheat all I want and I'm not going to beat Kasparov. Deep Blue - whether or not it really beat Kasparov - will kick all our asses. It's entirely clear that chess is difficult only to the way our brains are wired.
In other words, the lesson is really about the game of chess more than it is about AI or Humanity. If you draw a lot of meaning from it, you might be a bit upset or defensive, and it's quite natural.
The fact that a relatively simple machine (especially when we look back ten or fifty years from now) can do what was originally thought to be difficult undermines the pedestal that many humans have put themselves on. This is why people were upset when Deep Blue beat Kasparov. It would have to be a skill that we've abandoned as uniquely human - such as raw mathematical calculations - that a machine would be allowed to beat us at without this sort of reaction.
Fact is, what's hard for humans to do isn't necessarily hard for a computer, but those who fail to understand that get upset.
...so you must also be in terror of your government designing, producing, and safeguarding thousands of nuclear weapons? ;)
So was slavery, but you don't hear much support for that these days. Bombings targeting civilians were common in WWII, and defoliant chemicals were used in Vietnam, but not anymore. Things have changed.
It still makes no sense to me that a person who works for five years should pay more taxes than one who does literally nothing holding stock for the same five. Inflation is already a good incentive for capital to be invested, so it's not as if it'll just be sitting in a bank.
Nobody said you should freeze to death. But simply putting on more clothes on warmer winter days instead of turning the heater on, and keeping the heater thermostat as low as you can when it gets unbearable, would be helpful (and even save you money). This makes the problem a bit smaller, and a bit easier to solve. Instead, all around us are wood-burning fireplaces that aren't even all that warm!
If, on the other hand, you are waiting for some indisputable scientific authority to prescribe how each of us must live before doing anything at all, then I doubt that will arrive in time.
You don't have to believe anything if you don't want to.
However, oil is not going to last forever, and it's not likely to run out in a gradual and controlled way. Water is increasingly a contested resource. Coal, even if you disregard the greenhouse gas emitted from burning it, pollutes the air we breathe. Nuclear energy generates nuclear waste which is really hard to keep safely. Deforestation also results in mudslides and desertification, which have economic consequences. None of these should be controversial, so the question is what do we do about it?
Coincidentally, solving these problems might also help ward off or slow down climate change. So even if you're unsure of what to believe in terms of climate science, you can still act or at least get out of the way of people trying to act.
No, "equal opportunity" in employment refers to the fact that it is illegal to discriminate against people of certain sex, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. It does not say that you should hire anybody other than your best applicant.
You are probably mixing it up with "affirmative action", which seeks to address historical injustice by bending over backwards for the wronged groups. In this case, because simply freeing the African American slaves still left their descendants at a severe disadvantage in the open market, society decides to give them preferential treatment.
All I'm going to say is that it's quite common for the successful to think that they did it all themselves, without thinking too much about whether they'd be where they are if they were born in a different color or socio-economic background.
Sorry, isn't that exactly what "stand-by" means?
Oh, absolutely. My point wasn't to blame the women only, rather to say that it's not some faceless industrial capitalist who made this happen for nefarious purposes. People individually decided to do what makes sense for them, only now that everybody does it, two incomes no longer put a family ahead of the pack.
This statement is shockingly shortsighted. Yes, this supercomputer would have to be taught, but unlike humans they don't die after 80 or 100 years, replaced by children who need to be re-taught many of the same things. They could continue learning year after year, transferring their software onto new hardware with no loss of functionality. What of this computer ten or fifty lifetimes later?
No, the "wives" chose this path. At the start, it was probably a few women who ventured outside the house, partly because they really wanted to have a career, and partly because it was extra money for the household. The "problem" was that the double-income family was able to afford a bigger house and more stuff, which lured more women out of the house to keep up. Today, the single-income household is probably a minority, because the inflationary pressure caused by the double-income households made things unaffordable otherwise. The capitalists were happy to have more supply of labor, because it kept their costs lower, but ultimately the people chose this for themselves.
Note that I'm not saying this is right or wrong, just that it is.
Uh, "pull over to take the call" isn't talking about the highway shoulder. Heavens, the shoulder is for emergencies, why don't you know that?
If we're talking about equivalent tasks, being able to do them much faster means I wouldn't have to do it for as long to achieve the same results.
Correct, but it might. The rovers are limited by their range to giving us only a very small sample of Martian soil and rocks. Driving around gives us a much bigger sample, which might lead to interesting discoveries, or it might not.
Look, I'm not trying to convince you that humans can completely replace rovers in terms of cost, risk, etc. I'm trying to answer your question: "What is the point of putting people on Mars other than to be the first. They can't do much more than what robots are doing now and the cost doesn't justify the information gained." by pointing out that humans can do things that the rovers can't, and vice versa.
First of all, even if you're completely correct, I'm fairly certain that they can do the tasks more quickly, because the rover's average speed is only 10 mm/s. By May 2009, Opportunity had just passed the 16 km mark in its travels, while the manned Apollo 15-17 lunar rovers were driven about 90 km in about 11 hours!
Secondly, while the rovers have been a marvelous success story, consider if they had gotten stuck like this three days instead of six years after landing. What's the return ratio on that cost, then? A human can obviously deal with far rougher terrain, and would be able to dig out of bigger trouble.
Sure, assuming that the humans don't actually discover something you didn't expect to find. But how do you already know what sort of information can be gained?
Now, I actually agree that we should be very sensitive to the costs and potential returns of both robot or human missions, but robots have a long way to go before they can match human versatility. There are different costs and advantages to either approach, and neither can replace the other convincingly yet.
You may also observe that most complaints against impoliteness can be answered childishly with "boo hoo." Whether you agree or not, etiquette is based on other people's feelings, so if your behavior is bothering other people, you are in fact being rude. We're not talking about a moral failing, but a social one, like slurping your soup or writing your email in caps.
If your instinct is to answer "boo hoo" to these complaints, then etiquette is simply not for you.
Gosh, no. Shuttles in museums will inspire kids and adults alike, which will mean far more to NASA (both in terms of voter support for budgets, as well as talent recruitment) than $10 or $20 million more that some private collector might offer.
I'm not as optimistic. I don't trust the market to price oil out gradually enough for emergent technologies to take over, so that there won't be a horribly-painful transitional period where energy is unaffordable. What you say is true: oil will run out and become too expensive. The problem is we need that to happen at a certain pace that oil producers aren't necessarily going to cooperate with.
You mean the Chrome browser that uses WebKit, which is an Apple-funded improvement over KHTML?
If your security scenario involves dealing with bombs on planes that are big enough to destroy the entire plane, then everything else is moot. The point is that other security measures help ensure that even if explosive materials make it on board, they're only available in small quantities. (Obviously that hasn't always worked, but the last one that I can recall where a terrorist bomb destroyed an entire plane is Pan Am over Lockerby.)
Of course there is. The plane is at a lower altitude, giving pilots less time to respond to grave damage. The pilots are also busier, both in preparation for landing and because air traffic is typically denser near airports.