Tunneling works for security, but it is far less flexible than plain old IP connectivity, which is what 802.11b delivers.
The solution is to *fix* 802.11b's security, which shouldn't be that hard. I believe that simply running the crypto algorithm through a few start cycles, before transmitting, is sufficient to stop the published attacks.
Whether the fix requires buying new hardware, or flashing old hardware, or just changing drivers, is another question.
By nature, we a tool using animals. And science is a tool. Art is another tool. Science happens to be more relevant to many practical decisions today. Art is for appreciation, not decision making.
You illustrate the problem exactly. As a former math major, I appreciate pure math. But I also know that most kids do not need, will not learn, and will not benefit by a lot of it. Furthermore, many of the concepts that the courses set out to teach require more mathematical maturity than most kids have at the age they are exposed to it. Thus those concepts become not concepts, but more dreck to be memorized.
Furthermore, teaching pure math has little to do with teaching rationality. If you don't believe me, ask Ted Kazinsky.
As a parent of a Catholic school kid, who gets the data directly, I can tell you that the per-pupil cost *includes* the "subsidies" that you mention! So who is the liar now?
Nonsense! All the literature in the world will not make your automobile run or help you understand environmental issues or your health!
The difference is that science has vast impact on social policy and the technology which we depend upon. Literature may give us great insights into human behavior (although I would contend history is better), but it is not particularly relevant to the major issues of the day.
I too am bothered by the grammar seen too often today, but one can learn grammar without avoiding science, and in any case, literature and poetry will do little to help in that regard.
Furthermore, it is better that one be able to produce understandable writings than to produce elegant or even grammatically correct ones.
and this non-sentunce is ungramtikal and filled with bad spelled words, but I bet you understand what I am commmunicatin!
The United States' public education system spends far more per pupil than the much better European systems, and the more successful Catholic system. In fact, we spend more per pupil than almost any country in the world (last time I checked, Kuwait spent more). Money ain't the problem!
The article is correct - education majors on average are less well educated and less intelligent that most other majors. This is obvious to anyone who has spent time at a college (except perhaps in education or some other soft and fuzzy field). This certainly has a negative impact on both the attitudes and information they convey to their students.
At the same time, we have had a movement to debase grading. "Outcome based education" and other profitable fads that have emerged from our "schools of education" downplay good grades and effort. A strange new egalitarianism likewise inspires parents and others to demand equal grades for all students, or no grades at all. So students are not motivated to work. This impacts science and math more than other areas because those subjects are much harder for most students.
Most of our population, and most of our teachers, don't even realize that they are scientifically ignorant. Ask them to state an opinion on global warming or nutrition or any other scientifically related field and they will be glad do so with confidence! We need to at least educate people about what science is so they can have some idea of how to treat the results of science, and how to evaluate their own level of knowledge.
An addition problem more-or-less unique to the US is the monopoly status of the government-run schools. Because of the extremely powerful teacher unions, they essentially control the debate in this issue (not to mention the Democratic Party). This means that the standard failures of bureaucracy (see Laws of Bureaucracy )
are applied to our educational system - at least through the secondary level. It means that teachers and administrators cannot be properly rewarded or punished for their performance. It means that powerful social activists alter the focus of schools towards their particular biases, to the detriment of education. It means that the incompetent are protected, the effective are ignored, and the students suffer.
Finally, the scientific educational establishment has hurt this area. For example, the "new mathematics" movement resulted in more purity in elementary math education - no doubt to the benefit of those who would become mathematicians, - but to the detriment of everyone else. The focus at universities of creating PhD's means that the undergraduate courses too often are aimed only at potential PhD's and scare off the rest.
There are many problems with the scientific education of Americans, and I shared the author's fear of what this ever more ignorant populace will do as they apply their lack of knowledge to daily living and, worse, voting!
This is getting to be an inadequate defense. If anybody else shipped products that required hundreds of thousands of people, including nontechnical consumers, to fix it every two weeks, they would have no business. And the consumers (as opposed to big-deal webmasters) never even get informed that *they* might have a problem. Furthermore, if the result of their inattention caused havoc on a major piece of infrastructure, the offending manufacturer would be torn to pieces by the media and government.
The only reason that Microsoft gets away with this is the technical ignorance of the news media.
And what are the potential effects Moscow (and surrounding areas) face if this system is ever used? Certainly beats being blown up, but probably not by that much.
I figured somebody would mention this... It beats being blown up by a WHOLE LOT. The only local effects of significance would be electromagnetic pulse and, for those few who happened to be staring at the sky, temporary or permanent blindness. Hiroshima was only known to permanently blind *one* person, BTW. The radiatoactive fallout, which would be minimal because clean weapons would be used outside the atmosphere, would be diffused all over the world, at a relatively low level.
How do you track a suitcase nuke back to its country of origin after it's been detonated?
Its very easy to determine where it was made. The nuclear test monitors have long been able to determine, from the spectrum of radioactive debris, exactly who made any particular bomb.
Also, you underestimate the abilities of intelligence agencies in something like this. The FBI and CIA could offer, let's say, $500,000,000 reward for information leading to proof of who sent it. That is a *lot* of money!
Also, if a suitcase nuke went off in the US, the US just might not care *which* rogue nation set it off. The US might choose to destroy *every* nation which was likely to have done so.
The use of a suitcase nuke would be an act of nuclear war. The providing of a suitcase nuke to a terrorist would likewise be an act of nuclear war. The US would retaliate as appropriate, or if the villain could not be determined, as inapproprate!
People should not underestimate the capabilities of the US if we get pissed of enough. Japan made that mistake in WW-II (against the advice of Yamamoto, btw). In fact, that particular case is instructive, because the Pearl Harbor attack was an example of a relatively weak nation killing thousands of Americans, with the expectation of being able to subsequently work out a "rational" peace agreement afterwards. That miscalculation on their part led to WW-II in the Pacific (although the actions of Roosevelt may have been calculated to trigger it).
For those who haven't noticed, the Russians *have* an operational ABM system protecting Moscow (as allowed by the treaty). Their system uses a large number of nuclear tipped interceptors. To those who ridicule the hit-to-kill technology (and I am suspicious of it because of decoy issues) - few of those arguments apply to a nuclear armed interceptor.
Other than the obvious problems of obtaining these sophisticated devices and smuggling them in, there is another reason why suitcase nukes are not as good as ICBM's for national purposes.
Suitcase nukes do not have a good command and control loop (although internet encryption may change this:-( ). A country wanting to attack us is taking a huge risk by putting this weapon (and it WOULD be traceable if caught) in the hands of individuals who would have to smuggle it in, and then detonate it at the right time.
What if circumstances change and the leaders who provided the weapon don't want it to go off?
What if someone in the plot is captured, or defects?
Plutonium is like any other toxin, except eventually it decays. The basic rule of toxicology is "the dose makes the poison." The relevance here is that an occasional burnup of one of these things would release nowhere near the plutonium and other rad waste that was put into the environment by the cold war.
Too many people seem to believe that *any* radioactivity is too much. That is a naive viewpoint - you can't escape radiation. Fly in a commercial airliner - you get plenty of ionizing radiation compared to sitting on the ground.
So the issue, *assuming accident*, is how bad would it be, and how does it compare to other technologies and activities.
As far as nuclear testing in the atmosphere.. you are dead wrong about your parenthetical comment. The most dirty test is one on or near the ground. Air bursts release less radioactivity and distribute it much better.
"I'm aware of no technology that is capable of preventing breakup of an object that reenters into the atmosphere unexpectedly, or, alternatively, that guarantees that such an object burns up reliably in the upper atmosphere. The worst case scenario, as far as I can tell, is that the reactor breaks up partially and finally disintegrates completely at low altitude over some densely populated area."
Tell that to an ICBM warhead designer. True, they don't enter "unexpectedly" but they certainly come in at high velocity, are quite small, and protect their radioactive contents.
I am sure one can protect these devices. The question is whether one can build adequate protections within the weight budget and form factor requirements.
If we are to seriously get into space, we need something better than current chemical rocket technology. Being able to put 45% mass into orbit instead of 10% is a vast improvement.
The biggest real issue is whether the reactor contents could be adequately contained during a worst case accident. If this is possible, and I suspect it is, there is no real danger associated with this technology.
OTOH, the biggest practical issue is whether anti-nuclear hysteria will stop this thing because of the neglible amount of radiation produced at high altitudes when it fires. I am sure that too many people are happier with the amounts of CO2, toxic gases and (at higher altitudes) ozone depletion that is caused by current rocketry than they would be with the pospect of any tiny amount of the dreaded r a d i a t i o n products released into the stratosphere. Perhaps they fear mutation in the UFO's;-)
Certainly in the US, where most people are innumerate and don't know physics, and Europe, where too many people are ecophobes, this will be the biggest problem.
Among the stranger items in my collection is a circular slide rule used to calculate nuclear blast effects. You can calculate crater size, overpressure, distance to second degree burns, instantaneous radiation, broken glass missile velocity, and all sorts of other hideous stuff with this little gadget. It comes in a pocket in the back of "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons" 1964 - US DOD/AEC.
My mother was a 9th grade math teacher, and had a giant Pickett slide rule as a classroom aid. I don't know if we kept it after she died, but it was about 3 feet wide and 6 or 8 feet long.
As a geek of the '60s, I had a full size Pickett, but my favorite "pocket protector" item was a nice little pocket slide rule. I remember engineering and physics courses where the early review was how to keep track of magnitudes and precision while doing slide rule calculations.
Arson is a violent crime
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 5
The United States has a tradition of non-violent protest against bad laws. The ELF extremists and others are not in line with that tradition. Rather, they are violent terrorists.
What, you say? Arson is not an act of violence? Tell that to the firemen who risk their lives trying to put it out! One of these days, one of these arson fires IS going to kill someone... I wonder what these twits will say then?
In Arizona, it is legal to shoot to kill to stop arson of an occupied building. Maybe these clowns should come to Phoenix. We would show them a good time!
Of course, one of these loons was here. He was showing his love of the environment by burning houses under construction next to our mountain preserves. Never you mind that he himself had a house on the preserve! Never you mind that burning these houses added pollution to the environment, and used up water and wood - which these environmentalists are supposedly so much in love with.
There is no excuse for destroying private property in a democratic society. If this
were a dictatorship, then the destruction of the dictator's property would be OK. But these days, people seem to believe that just because they don't like something, they can violate the law and peoples' rights with acts of violence! They seem to think that because a "corporation" is an owner, it must be evil - so go ahead and destroy its property. Well, how many of these people have pension funds invested in corporations? How many other people lose some of their savings as these corporations lose money and opportunity.
These ecofreaks are nothing more than misfits. They are poorly informed about environmental issues, and are rather narcissistally pretending to be heroes and heorins... but really they are just scum.
Cable modems do NOT go everywhere. There are many people, myself included, who cannot get cable at all. I live 5 miles from downtown Phoenix, AZ, a metroplex of 3,000,000 people, but cable doesn't go by my house. I am fortunate that I have a line-of-site shot to Sprint Broadband (microwave MMDS), but most of my neighbors cannot get high speed access by any means.
Ironically, even though we are 7 miles from our CO, Qwest has rebuilt all the copper plant in our area and is planning on installing DSL.
In all seriousness... the trend to put more and more gadgets in cars (and I have a *lot* in mine) shows how badly we need robotic cars... except for those who can afford chauffeurs.
Computing and sensors will ultimately solve this problem (except, perhaps, in the US where the tort legal system will make them impossible to deploy).
I hope that the fallout from the military, always useful to the personal technology industry, will bring autonomous vehicle technology before I am too old to enjoy it!
Furthermore, once robotic cars are working (and not on those silly, very expensive automatic highways), mileage will go up, pollution down, safety up (which means I may not need my monster SUV to protect me from other drivers), etc. All around... good stuff if it ever gets done!
All they are describing is bistatic radar - really, in this case, multistatic. It might be a problem for the F-117 which achieves stealth by reflecting the waves away from the source, but not for other stealth aircraft which use radar-absorbent coating. And, bistatic radar is hardly new. Many years ago an experiment was performed in the US which showed that aircraft could be tracked using the transmissions from geosynchronous TV satellites as illumination.
Also, Stealth aircraft tend to fly pretty high. This means that the signals are attenuated through distance, and the phone grid would have to cover a wide area to catch oblique reflections. Cellular towers put out aggregate powers if a few hundred watts at most, with the beam intentionally directed below the horizon. TV stations put out hundreds of thousands of watts... but they weren't mentioned!
Military radars, OTOH, put out thousands to hundreds of thousands of watts (megawatts of peak power) with highly directional antennas pointed at the target, and with the advent of stealth, bistatic military radars are under development or in place. In fact, the F-117 lost over Serbia may have fallen prey to a bi-static trap - help by knowing its exact path and time to target.
It looks like a P.R. flack wanted some free publicity for his companies cellular products.
Dr. Minsky seems to miss the point as badly as he did when he first squashed the perceptron research. His form of AI will never be able to drive my car!
There are many systems that are too complex to understand with mathematical or linquistic techniques. The day is dawning when more people will realize that to "understand" does not always mean to have a linear, provable trail of induction.
The success of mathematics in physics has probably badly hurt many areas of research into less tractable phenomena, as its demand for solvable equation systems and/or mathematical induction is too simplistic. In the same way, much of AI research has focussed on those problems which can be proven mathematically, neglecting other, less elegant problems which may have direct, valuable solutions (like driving my car!)
We will never have an equation for a cloud. We have the equations for the underlying physics, but the complex emergent phenomenon of a cloud is beyond formulation. To "understand" highly complex real-word issues has to mean developing an intuition (non-linear, imperfect, stochastic understanding) for it... and a neural-net or genetic algorithm can *be* that intuition!
At the same time, I do not mean to belittle the traditional reductionist approach to "understanding." It has gotten us a long ways... but it simply is not a complete system, and that same approach, reversed through engineering induction, will never drive my car.
We need *all* the techniques in AI, and more. Bring on the genetic algorithms (and make those darn FPLD's cheaper!); train the neural nets; parse those languages; and *drive my car!*
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The solution is to *fix* 802.11b's security, which shouldn't be that hard. I believe that simply running the crypto algorithm through a few start cycles, before transmitting, is sufficient to stop the published attacks.
Whether the fix requires buying new hardware, or flashing old hardware, or just changing drivers, is another question.
By nature, we a tool using animals. And science is a tool. Art is another tool. Science happens to be more relevant to many practical decisions today. Art is for appreciation, not decision making.
Furthermore, teaching pure math has little to do with teaching rationality. If you don't believe me, ask Ted Kazinsky.
As a parent of a Catholic school kid, who gets the data directly, I can tell you that the per-pupil cost *includes* the "subsidies" that you mention! So who is the liar now?
The difference is that science has vast impact on social policy and the technology which we depend upon. Literature may give us great insights into human behavior (although I would contend history is better), but it is not particularly relevant to the major issues of the day.
I too am bothered by the grammar seen too often today, but one can learn grammar without avoiding science, and in any case, literature and poetry will do little to help in that regard.
Furthermore, it is better that one be able to produce understandable writings than to produce elegant or even grammatically correct ones.
and this non-sentunce is ungramtikal and filled with bad spelled words, but I bet you understand what I am commmunicatin!
The article is correct - education majors on average are less well educated and less intelligent that most other majors. This is obvious to anyone who has spent time at a college (except perhaps in education or some other soft and fuzzy field). This certainly has a negative impact on both the attitudes and information they convey to their students.
At the same time, we have had a movement to debase grading. "Outcome based education" and other profitable fads that have emerged from our "schools of education" downplay good grades and effort. A strange new egalitarianism likewise inspires parents and others to demand equal grades for all students, or no grades at all. So students are not motivated to work. This impacts science and math more than other areas because those subjects are much harder for most students.
Most of our population, and most of our teachers, don't even realize that they are scientifically ignorant. Ask them to state an opinion on global warming or nutrition or any other scientifically related field and they will be glad do so with confidence! We need to at least educate people about what science is so they can have some idea of how to treat the results of science, and how to evaluate their own level of knowledge.
An addition problem more-or-less unique to the US is the monopoly status of the government-run schools. Because of the extremely powerful teacher unions, they essentially control the debate in this issue (not to mention the Democratic Party). This means that the standard failures of bureaucracy (see Laws of Bureaucracy ) are applied to our educational system - at least through the secondary level. It means that teachers and administrators cannot be properly rewarded or punished for their performance. It means that powerful social activists alter the focus of schools towards their particular biases, to the detriment of education. It means that the incompetent are protected, the effective are ignored, and the students suffer.
Finally, the scientific educational establishment has hurt this area. For example, the "new mathematics" movement resulted in more purity in elementary math education - no doubt to the benefit of those who would become mathematicians, - but to the detriment of everyone else. The focus at universities of creating PhD's means that the undergraduate courses too often are aimed only at potential PhD's and scare off the rest.
There are many problems with the scientific education of Americans, and I shared the author's fear of what this ever more ignorant populace will do as they apply their lack of knowledge to daily living and, worse, voting!
Bwhen you ISP is your only possible broadband access, and they do this, you don't realistically even have that choice!
In many areas today, there is only one broadband provider.
You cannot renew a patent.
This has always been nonsense. They have had legal recourse under US federal communications law for many years. It has nothing to do with DMCA.
The only reason that Microsoft gets away with this is the technical ignorance of the news media.
Hey, if you can patent the software for silicon, why can't you patent the software for cells? :-(
I figured somebody would mention this... It beats being blown up by a WHOLE LOT. The only local effects of significance would be electromagnetic pulse and, for those few who happened to be staring at the sky, temporary or permanent blindness. Hiroshima was only known to permanently blind *one* person, BTW. The radiatoactive fallout, which would be minimal because clean weapons would be used outside the atmosphere, would be diffused all over the world, at a relatively low level.
Its very easy to determine where it was made. The nuclear test monitors have long been able to determine, from the spectrum of radioactive debris, exactly who made any particular bomb.
Also, you underestimate the abilities of intelligence agencies in something like this. The FBI and CIA could offer, let's say, $500,000,000 reward for information leading to proof of who sent it. That is a *lot* of money!
Also, if a suitcase nuke went off in the US, the US just might not care *which* rogue nation set it off. The US might choose to destroy *every* nation which was likely to have done so.
The use of a suitcase nuke would be an act of nuclear war. The providing of a suitcase nuke to a terrorist would likewise be an act of nuclear war. The US would retaliate as appropriate, or if the villain could not be determined, as inapproprate!
People should not underestimate the capabilities of the US if we get pissed of enough. Japan made that mistake in WW-II (against the advice of Yamamoto, btw). In fact, that particular case is instructive, because the Pearl Harbor attack was an example of a relatively weak nation killing thousands of Americans, with the expectation of being able to subsequently work out a "rational" peace agreement afterwards. That miscalculation on their part led to WW-II in the Pacific (although the actions of Roosevelt may have been calculated to trigger it).
For those who haven't noticed, the Russians *have* an operational ABM system protecting Moscow (as allowed by the treaty). Their system uses a large number of nuclear tipped interceptors. To those who ridicule the hit-to-kill technology (and I am suspicious of it because of decoy issues) - few of those arguments apply to a nuclear armed interceptor.
Suitcase nukes do not have a good command and control loop (although internet encryption may change this :-( ). A country wanting to attack us is taking a huge risk by putting this weapon (and it WOULD be traceable if caught) in the hands of individuals who would have to smuggle it in, and then detonate it at the right time.
What if circumstances change and the leaders who provided the weapon don't want it to go off?
What if someone in the plot is captured, or defects?
Wrong! It is Mass. residents that don't have those rights. Here in Arizona we can shoot burglars and record what we need to.
Too many people seem to believe that *any* radioactivity is too much. That is a naive viewpoint - you can't escape radiation. Fly in a commercial airliner - you get plenty of ionizing radiation compared to sitting on the ground.
So the issue, *assuming accident*, is how bad would it be, and how does it compare to other technologies and activities.
As far as nuclear testing in the atmosphere.. you are dead wrong about your parenthetical comment. The most dirty test is one on or near the ground. Air bursts release less radioactivity and distribute it much better.
Tell that to an ICBM warhead designer. True, they don't enter "unexpectedly" but they certainly come in at high velocity, are quite small, and protect their radioactive contents.
I am sure one can protect these devices. The question is whether one can build adequate protections within the weight budget and form factor requirements.
The biggest real issue is whether the reactor contents could be adequately contained during a worst case accident. If this is possible, and I suspect it is, there is no real danger associated with this technology.
OTOH, the biggest practical issue is whether anti-nuclear hysteria will stop this thing because of the neglible amount of radiation produced at high altitudes when it fires. I am sure that too many people are happier with the amounts of CO2, toxic gases and (at higher altitudes) ozone depletion that is caused by current rocketry than they would be with the pospect of any tiny amount of the dreaded r a d i a t i o n products released into the stratosphere. Perhaps they fear mutation in the UFO's ;-)
Certainly in the US, where most people are innumerate and don't know physics, and Europe, where too many people are ecophobes, this will be the biggest problem.
My mother was a 9th grade math teacher, and had a giant Pickett slide rule as a classroom aid. I don't know if we kept it after she died, but it was about 3 feet wide and 6 or 8 feet long.
As a geek of the '60s, I had a full size Pickett, but my favorite "pocket protector" item was a nice little pocket slide rule. I remember engineering and physics courses where the early review was how to keep track of magnitudes and precision while doing slide rule calculations.
What, you say? Arson is not an act of violence? Tell that to the firemen who risk their lives trying to put it out! One of these days, one of these arson fires IS going to kill someone... I wonder what these twits will say then?
In Arizona, it is legal to shoot to kill to stop arson of an occupied building. Maybe these clowns should come to Phoenix. We would show them a good time!
Of course, one of these loons was here. He was showing his love of the environment by burning houses under construction next to our mountain preserves. Never you mind that he himself had a house on the preserve! Never you mind that burning these houses added pollution to the environment, and used up water and wood - which these environmentalists are supposedly so much in love with.
There is no excuse for destroying private property in a democratic society. If this were a dictatorship, then the destruction of the dictator's property would be OK. But these days, people seem to believe that just because they don't like something, they can violate the law and peoples' rights with acts of violence! They seem to think that because a "corporation" is an owner, it must be evil - so go ahead and destroy its property. Well, how many of these people have pension funds invested in corporations? How many other people lose some of their savings as these corporations lose money and opportunity.
These ecofreaks are nothing more than misfits. They are poorly informed about environmental issues, and are rather narcissistally pretending to be heroes and heorins... but really they are just scum.
Cable modems do NOT go everywhere. There are many people, myself included, who cannot get cable at all. I live 5 miles from downtown Phoenix, AZ, a metroplex of 3,000,000 people, but cable doesn't go by my house. I am fortunate that I have a line-of-site shot to Sprint Broadband (microwave MMDS), but most of my neighbors cannot get high speed access by any means.
Ironically, even though we are 7 miles from our CO, Qwest has rebuilt all the copper plant in our area and is planning on installing DSL.
Computing and sensors will ultimately solve this problem (except, perhaps, in the US where the tort legal system will make them impossible to deploy).
I hope that the fallout from the military, always useful to the personal technology industry, will bring autonomous vehicle technology before I am too old to enjoy it!
Furthermore, once robotic cars are working (and not on those silly, very expensive automatic highways), mileage will go up, pollution down, safety up (which means I may not need my monster SUV to protect me from other drivers), etc. All around... good stuff if it ever gets done!
Also, Stealth aircraft tend to fly pretty high. This means that the signals are attenuated through distance, and the phone grid would have to cover a wide area to catch oblique reflections. Cellular towers put out aggregate powers if a few hundred watts at most, with the beam intentionally directed below the horizon. TV stations put out hundreds of thousands of watts... but they weren't mentioned! Military radars, OTOH, put out thousands to hundreds of thousands of watts (megawatts of peak power) with highly directional antennas pointed at the target, and with the advent of stealth, bistatic military radars are under development or in place. In fact, the F-117 lost over Serbia may have fallen prey to a bi-static trap - help by knowing its exact path and time to target.
It looks like a P.R. flack wanted some free publicity for his companies cellular products.
There are many systems that are too complex to understand with mathematical or linquistic techniques. The day is dawning when more people will realize that to "understand" does not always mean to have a linear, provable trail of induction.
The success of mathematics in physics has probably badly hurt many areas of research into less tractable phenomena, as its demand for solvable equation systems and/or mathematical induction is too simplistic. In the same way, much of AI research has focussed on those problems which can be proven mathematically, neglecting other, less elegant problems which may have direct, valuable solutions (like driving my car!)
We will never have an equation for a cloud. We have the equations for the underlying physics, but the complex emergent phenomenon of a cloud is beyond formulation. To "understand" highly complex real-word issues has to mean developing an intuition (non-linear, imperfect, stochastic understanding) for it... and a neural-net or genetic algorithm can *be* that intuition!
At the same time, I do not mean to belittle the traditional reductionist approach to "understanding." It has gotten us a long ways... but it simply is not a complete system, and that same approach, reversed through engineering induction, will never drive my car.
We need *all* the techniques in AI, and more. Bring on the genetic algorithms (and make those darn FPLD's cheaper!); train the neural nets; parse those languages; and *drive my car!*