The computers can fly the planes all day long. When something isn't right, the pilot can override the system simply by flying the plane like normal.
In other fields such as medical diagnosis, allowing doctors to override the algorithm has been shown to decrease overall accuracy. Sure, sometimes they override a computer mistake, but more often they override the truth with their own mistakes: (cite)
Similarly, the clinical judgment of physicians is under increasing attack,
as seen in the trend toward evidence-based medicine. Doctors
unsurprisingly fall prey to the same mental biases that psychologists have
shown to afflict the rest of us: They are overly impressed by anecdotal evi-
dence, even though such reasoning can lead to incorrect inferences based on
coincidence. Once they formulate a theory or diagnosis, they are susceptible to tunnel vision, failing to consider alternatives and ignoring
contradictory evidence...
At approximately its midpoint, Super Crunchers turns to cover some
well-trodden ground in the decision-making literature that shows statistical
methods to be often more accurate than experts. One such study that Ayres
discusses is a comprehensive meta-analysis of the clinical-statistical
literature by psychologist William Grove and others, in which out "[o]f the
136 studies, 64 favored the actuary[,] . . . 64 showed approximately equiva-
lent accuracy, and 8 favored the clinician."
Indeed, in some of these studies,
statistical models were superior despite the experts being privy to more in-
formation (statistical models generally require a shockingly small number of
factors)
and even more outrageously, despite experts having the model results at their disposal. Having a human override for catching
"stupid" machine errors turns out to be counterproductive, because the safety valve ends up introducing more errors than it prevents.
Yeah, I've seen those particular examples of deadly bugs. So what? How much trouble would I have finding two examples of pilot error that killed people? The recent regional carrier crash in the US (Colgan) being an obvious example.
A big difference is, when you fix an engineering bug, you fix it forever, and can replicate the improvement across the whole fleet. When a pilot makes a nonfatal mistake and learns from it, it adds to his experience. But that all walks out the door when he or she retires.
What he should be doing is preaching hard work as the path to achievement, not blowing smoke about how inately smart everyone is, just like him
You'd probably feel a lot better if you'd simply read the article. He already rebutted everything you said before you even said it:
"Cavalin has a general idea what his IQ is, but doesn't like to discuss it. He says other students can achieve his success if they study hard and stay focused on their work.
His parents say they never planned to enroll their son in college at age 8, and sought to put him in a private elementary school when he was 6.
"They didn't want to accept me because I knew more than the teacher there and they said I looked too bored," the youngster recalls.
So, calm down. This kid does know he is smart, and he does encourage others to work hard. And if you're that concerned about gap between haves and have-nots disappearing in America, you simply haven't been paying attention to facts.
The real payoff is the sense of achievement when you get a good grade, or down the road when you get into college and eventually a well paying job.
The problem is, delaying gratification is hard, so it takes a huge delayed payout to motivate people. It may be cheaper overall to "front" people the money as an incentive sooner.
I see this occuring a couple places in society:
First, pensions in govt. and military jobs. They do encourage people to sign on, but I'll bet you could achieve the same incentive with a smaller, shorter-term payout that wouldn't put society on the hook for vast sums later on.
Second, doctor pay. I believe healthcare in the US would be more economical if we provided a smoother road for more people to become doctors, by paying a salary in medical school and as an intern, and making the hours better. This would drive down doctor pay, which we badly need to do.
How about taxing carbon emissions, and letting the market figure things out?
Any calculation of the long-term costs of carbon emissions will be heavily dependent on assumptions and subjective judgments, such as what people in the future will do vs what they would have done if we did something different, what new technologies will come along, how much to weight future vs. current costs, and how to weight costs to ourselves vs costs that will accrue to others (e.g. "we can affordably commute 100 miles each way to work" vs. "small island nations thousands of miles away are completely submerged."
Now, some would say all that means we should do nothing - i.e. value the future costs of pollution at $0. I certainly don't think that's reasonable. But it's not as if there's some simple, objective solution to this problem. It's bound to be a heavily political process.
I mean this is the party who seriously proposes replacing pharma patents with all drug R&D being government funded.
Count me in. In the US govt. pays for most medical research, but patents ensure prices for new drugs are stratospheric and drug companies biggest bugdet item is advertising and administration, not R&D. (cite - from the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, no less).
Americans are paying through the nose for the vast inefficiencies of for-profit medicine every day.
It is a matter of opinion, but in my opinion, sub-intelligent life forms are conceptually very similar to any other dynamical system in nature, e.g. nuclear reactions, fires, weather events like cloud formations, etc. Sure, discovering something at the level of fungus would show us some interesting new combinations of chemical processes. But it would be extremely unlikely to drastically change life on earth, much like the moon landing. That's a far cry from linking up with a civilization millions of years more advanced than our own that could simply hand over unfathomable scientific knowledge to us.
I don't think genetic kinship matters, instead it would hinge on the aliens' intelligence (more specifically, capacity for information processing). If the aliens are just at the level of fungus, it would be hard to discover them in the first place, moreover their existence wouldn't matter much anyways.
PS I would seriously consider buying a portable add-on E-ink screen for my laptop. It would have to be thin enough to sit in front of the normal screen (not with the lid closed, of course), and plug into the laptop's VGA output. Sure it would be monochrome and have a sluggish response time. But for sitting outside doing word-processing or spreadsheets, and consulting wikipedia etc, that would be fine. The add-on route would avoid having to make a special-purpose laptop with only an E-ink screen, which I agree is not too attractive.
readable outdoors in daylight implies either a monochrome e-ink display or something with enough backlighting to overcome skylight - which is where your battery life is disappearing to.
The key here is a reflective color display (not reflective in the sense of a mirror, but like a book, which uses the sunlight itself to illuminate the page). My Garmin GPS has what they call a "transflective" screen that is color, but visible in daylight in just the same was as a monochrome LCD, and for dark conditions it has a backlight also. I assume there must be some good reason they can't put this in a laptop - poor color rendition perhaps?
The other route, though it seems horribly-wasteful, is to overwhelm the ambient sunlight with a super-bright backlight as you said. I have a Lenovo T400 with an LED backlight which does this surprisingly well, though still not ideal for full-blast sunlight at, say, the beach. LEDs are more power-efficient than standard flourescents too, though as you said fighting sunlight is a losing proposition.
Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix doesn't look that dated to me.
Good lord, there is really a game called with that name. I had to look it up because I thought surely it was a joke about a tired franchise living on too long, like a new SCSI called "Ultra-640 wide fast serial-attached super-duper SCSI." "Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix" simply must be intentionally cheeky... right?
Remember, Apple managed to vault from late-comer to leadership in the first place. The blurb is just hand-wringing about things being as they have always been! Competitors are at "all at varying stages of developing and introducing their own iPhone-like devices and software, along with easily accessible stores for [] apps"... "In some cases, those companies are releasing a greater variety of phones, on more wireless carriers around the world, than Apple." That was all true even before the iPhone; Apple was among the last companies to introduce an iPhone-like device! Just as the iPod was one of the later mp3 players on the market, yet became the standard by which others were measured.
I dislike the term "Internet Fraud". Fraud is fraud, whether it was conducted on eBay or at the local flea market.
I have to disagree. From the perspective of law enforcement, fighting Internet crime requires a lot of extra technical expertise, and that means hiring additional people with extra training. If anything, internet crime is more like what the FBI and Secret Service have traditionally investigated.
I hate to be a jerk, but the example plots are not of the quality I would be proud to publish in a paper. I wish there were more of an open-source tradition among graphic artists.
It appears that the European efforts have triggered a new trend whereby EVERY country a multinational corporation operates in that isn't its native country can start engaging in the MoneyGrab(tm) technique.
Is there a trend of suing all multinationals, or just a trend of everybody suing Microsoft? If the latter, maybe, possibly, it has something to do with Microsoft?
"Business" is not a limited natural resource. Land is. People deserve money for developing real estate, but people who get rich simply speculating on unimproved properties are leeches on society, because they create nothing yet get to spend lots of money on things that other people work to create. There are thousands of people across the country who think they are special because they have lots of money when all they did was live in a place with lots of housing inflation. They only worse people are their heirs. It's funny how people get all worked up about "welfare moms" who take a few $K out of the economy without working for it when there are other people putting in nothing and taking out millions due to quirks in the economy, and how we manage natural resources.
It was saying that equipment being used by the Chinese Army is from western classified arsenal, not that HumVee is classified.
Well, sure. Militaries all over the world copy whatever they can from each other. Since our military budget is as big as the rest of the world combined, we voluntarily pick up most of the check.
I cannot imagine there's anything classified about a HumVee - even the real one (H1), let alone the H2 which is a re-decorated Chevy Tahoe / GMC Yukon. As for the "Hummer Brand" somehow having anything to do with secret ultra-cool military technology, sheesh, that's certainly what they'd like you to imagine, but it ain't so.
I'm afraid of what will happen when China becomes the new superpower and America takes up France's position of Ex-Superpower Turned Whiney Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys...
Why? Is life so bad in Frace? Canada isn't imperialistic, and it looks OK there.
I don't think striking it rich by writing a simple but hugely entertaining video game was a road to riches for any citizen of the Soviet Union... was it? Which is the downfall of communism, in a nutshell.
Though he probably wouldn't have got rich in the US either. The school or company would have asserted ownership rights since the computer he developed it on, was theirs. Which is the downfall of capitalism, in a nutshell:)
But that's not often the ethos here.
You're supposed to react with your gut, prejudices, and empirical sense of I'm smarter-than-you tact here.
"Here," as in slashdot, America, or planet Earth?
Personally I agree it's often shocking how people making decisions. If life were a chess game, most of us are only looking one or two moves ahead. Nevertheless, I will see one big argument in favor of the idiocracy: empirically, democracy works relatively well! No, not well relative to utopia (which has never existed), but well relative to systems where "great men" or "experts" are given total power.
This sounds like an echo of that concept, but with updated technology that might actualy, you know... work.
The concept of "moving your body to make stuff happen" isn't novel, no. IMHO the value of the concept is beyond question, it's purely a matter of execution - i.e. whether it works. It would seemingly be extremely difficult to get the latency low enough. If the latency is low, even if the motion tracking is fairly crude, they should be able to use it to make a DDR "dance pad" (without the pad) that doesn't wear out and break. But heck, if it worked well enough, they could take all the electronics out of a normal gamepad and just watch your fingers instead. (I'm sure it doesn't have that level of acuity though).
An explosion of discontent is unlikely in China because the 20 years since Tiananmen have been dominated by incredible economic growth. It is hard to complain when your walette is getting fat. I realize the global economic downturn hit China somewhat, but it certainly didn't roll them back 20 years. (Not that this is specific to China; Americans never minded the Iraq war enough to do anything about it, even after they learned it was a sham, it was high gas prices and finally the economic collapse that made people revile the Bush presidency.) One implication of this is that the notion of political liberalization as a necessary byproduct of capitalism is not yet dead. The next time China's growth slows or reverses for a sustained period, then we will see if its new middle class has power to go with their wealth.
I'm not sure we're sharing a definition of "verbosity. Perhaps the useful definition here is "the inverse of expressiveness." Of course expressiveness is inherently relative to what is important in a given application. For most purposes, assembler is hopelessly verbose, or lacking in expressiveness, since most of what you're writing out is meaningless detail. But for certain other purposes (performance) those details become crucial, so for that application only assembler has the necessary expressiveness. Again, I am not contradicting myself by saying assembler is both lacking in expressiveness and high in expressiveness, it depends on the application. I've heard German is a fantastic language for writing technical legal documents, whereas the Inuit language is supposedly very good for describing cold weather and snow.
Slashdot Mirror
In other fields such as medical diagnosis, allowing doctors to override the algorithm has been shown to decrease overall accuracy. Sure, sometimes they override a computer mistake, but more often they override the truth with their own mistakes: (cite)
A big difference is, when you fix an engineering bug, you fix it forever, and can replicate the improvement across the whole fleet. When a pilot makes a nonfatal mistake and learns from it, it adds to his experience. But that all walks out the door when he or she retires.
You'd probably feel a lot better if you'd simply read the article. He already rebutted everything you said before you even said it:
"Cavalin has a general idea what his IQ is, but doesn't like to discuss it. He says other students can achieve his success if they study hard and stay focused on their work.
His parents say they never planned to enroll their son in college at age 8, and sought to put him in a private elementary school when he was 6.
"They didn't want to accept me because I knew more than the teacher there and they said I looked too bored," the youngster recalls.
So, calm down. This kid does know he is smart, and he does encourage others to work hard. And if you're that concerned about gap between haves and have-nots disappearing in America, you simply haven't been paying attention to facts.
The problem is, delaying gratification is hard, so it takes a huge delayed payout to motivate people. It may be cheaper overall to "front" people the money as an incentive sooner.
I see this occuring a couple places in society:
First, pensions in govt. and military jobs. They do encourage people to sign on, but I'll bet you could achieve the same incentive with a smaller, shorter-term payout that wouldn't put society on the hook for vast sums later on.
Second, doctor pay. I believe healthcare in the US would be more economical if we provided a smoother road for more people to become doctors, by paying a salary in medical school and as an intern, and making the hours better. This would drive down doctor pay, which we badly need to do.
Any calculation of the long-term costs of carbon emissions will be heavily dependent on assumptions and subjective judgments, such as what people in the future will do vs what they would have done if we did something different, what new technologies will come along, how much to weight future vs. current costs, and how to weight costs to ourselves vs costs that will accrue to others (e.g. "we can affordably commute 100 miles each way to work" vs. "small island nations thousands of miles away are completely submerged."
Now, some would say all that means we should do nothing - i.e. value the future costs of pollution at $0. I certainly don't think that's reasonable. But it's not as if there's some simple, objective solution to this problem. It's bound to be a heavily political process.
Count me in. In the US govt. pays for most medical research, but patents ensure prices for new drugs are stratospheric and drug companies biggest bugdet item is advertising and administration, not R&D. (cite - from the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, no less).
Americans are paying through the nose for the vast inefficiencies of for-profit medicine every day.
It is a matter of opinion, but in my opinion, sub-intelligent life forms are conceptually very similar to any other dynamical system in nature, e.g. nuclear reactions, fires, weather events like cloud formations, etc. Sure, discovering something at the level of fungus would show us some interesting new combinations of chemical processes. But it would be extremely unlikely to drastically change life on earth, much like the moon landing. That's a far cry from linking up with a civilization millions of years more advanced than our own that could simply hand over unfathomable scientific knowledge to us.
I don't think genetic kinship matters, instead it would hinge on the aliens' intelligence (more specifically, capacity for information processing). If the aliens are just at the level of fungus, it would be hard to discover them in the first place, moreover their existence wouldn't matter much anyways.
PS I would seriously consider buying a portable add-on E-ink screen for my laptop. It would have to be thin enough to sit in front of the normal screen (not with the lid closed, of course), and plug into the laptop's VGA output. Sure it would be monochrome and have a sluggish response time. But for sitting outside doing word-processing or spreadsheets, and consulting wikipedia etc, that would be fine. The add-on route would avoid having to make a special-purpose laptop with only an E-ink screen, which I agree is not too attractive.
The key here is a reflective color display (not reflective in the sense of a mirror, but like a book, which uses the sunlight itself to illuminate the page). My Garmin GPS has what they call a "transflective" screen that is color, but visible in daylight in just the same was as a monochrome LCD, and for dark conditions it has a backlight also. I assume there must be some good reason they can't put this in a laptop - poor color rendition perhaps?
The other route, though it seems horribly-wasteful, is to overwhelm the ambient sunlight with a super-bright backlight as you said. I have a Lenovo T400 with an LED backlight which does this surprisingly well, though still not ideal for full-blast sunlight at, say, the beach. LEDs are more power-efficient than standard flourescents too, though as you said fighting sunlight is a losing proposition.
Good lord, there is really a game called with that name. I had to look it up because I thought surely it was a joke about a tired franchise living on too long, like a new SCSI called "Ultra-640 wide fast serial-attached super-duper SCSI." "Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix" simply must be intentionally cheeky... right?
Remember, Apple managed to vault from late-comer to leadership in the first place. The blurb is just hand-wringing about things being as they have always been! Competitors are at "all at varying stages of developing and introducing their own iPhone-like devices and software, along with easily accessible stores for [] apps"... "In some cases, those companies are releasing a greater variety of phones, on more wireless carriers around the world, than Apple." That was all true even before the iPhone; Apple was among the last companies to introduce an iPhone-like device! Just as the iPod was one of the later mp3 players on the market, yet became the standard by which others were measured.
I have to disagree. From the perspective of law enforcement, fighting Internet crime requires a lot of extra technical expertise, and that means hiring additional people with extra training. If anything, internet crime is more like what the FBI and Secret Service have traditionally investigated.
I hate to be a jerk, but the example plots are not of the quality I would be proud to publish in a paper. I wish there were more of an open-source tradition among graphic artists.
Is there a trend of suing all multinationals, or just a trend of everybody suing Microsoft? If the latter, maybe, possibly, it has something to do with Microsoft?
"Business" is not a limited natural resource. Land is. People deserve money for developing real estate, but people who get rich simply speculating on unimproved properties are leeches on society, because they create nothing yet get to spend lots of money on things that other people work to create. There are thousands of people across the country who think they are special because they have lots of money when all they did was live in a place with lots of housing inflation. They only worse people are their heirs. It's funny how people get all worked up about "welfare moms" who take a few $K out of the economy without working for it when there are other people putting in nothing and taking out millions due to quirks in the economy, and how we manage natural resources.
Twenty times 10 million is 200 million. A new F22 is 137 million. I don't think there are any $200 million missiles, unless they are nuclear.
Well, sure. Militaries all over the world copy whatever they can from each other. Since our military budget is as big as the rest of the world combined, we voluntarily pick up most of the check.
I cannot imagine there's anything classified about a HumVee - even the real one (H1), let alone the H2 which is a re-decorated Chevy Tahoe / GMC Yukon. As for the "Hummer Brand" somehow having anything to do with secret ultra-cool military technology, sheesh, that's certainly what they'd like you to imagine, but it ain't so.
Why? Is life so bad in Frace? Canada isn't imperialistic, and it looks OK there.
Though he probably wouldn't have got rich in the US either. The school or company would have asserted ownership rights since the computer he developed it on, was theirs. Which is the downfall of capitalism, in a nutshell :)
"Here," as in slashdot, America, or planet Earth?
Personally I agree it's often shocking how people making decisions. If life were a chess game, most of us are only looking one or two moves ahead. Nevertheless, I will see one big argument in favor of the idiocracy: empirically, democracy works relatively well! No, not well relative to utopia (which has never existed), but well relative to systems where "great men" or "experts" are given total power.
The concept of "moving your body to make stuff happen" isn't novel, no. IMHO the value of the concept is beyond question, it's purely a matter of execution - i.e. whether it works. It would seemingly be extremely difficult to get the latency low enough. If the latency is low, even if the motion tracking is fairly crude, they should be able to use it to make a DDR "dance pad" (without the pad) that doesn't wear out and break. But heck, if it worked well enough, they could take all the electronics out of a normal gamepad and just watch your fingers instead. (I'm sure it doesn't have that level of acuity though).
An explosion of discontent is unlikely in China because the 20 years since Tiananmen have been dominated by incredible economic growth. It is hard to complain when your walette is getting fat. I realize the global economic downturn hit China somewhat, but it certainly didn't roll them back 20 years. (Not that this is specific to China; Americans never minded the Iraq war enough to do anything about it, even after they learned it was a sham, it was high gas prices and finally the economic collapse that made people revile the Bush presidency.) One implication of this is that the notion of political liberalization as a necessary byproduct of capitalism is not yet dead. The next time China's growth slows or reverses for a sustained period, then we will see if its new middle class has power to go with their wealth.
I'm not sure we're sharing a definition of "verbosity. Perhaps the useful definition here is "the inverse of expressiveness." Of course expressiveness is inherently relative to what is important in a given application. For most purposes, assembler is hopelessly verbose, or lacking in expressiveness, since most of what you're writing out is meaningless detail. But for certain other purposes (performance) those details become crucial, so for that application only assembler has the necessary expressiveness. Again, I am not contradicting myself by saying assembler is both lacking in expressiveness and high in expressiveness, it depends on the application. I've heard German is a fantastic language for writing technical legal documents, whereas the Inuit language is supposedly very good for describing cold weather and snow.