If unions are such a bad thing, then why is Germany doing so well while the US economy sucks (especially in context of salaries, employment (real figures), and salary spread)? The unions in Germany had a part in it in conjunction with a real healthcare system for everyone and the anti cyclic measures taken during the last crisis. Unions can help to guarantee same salary for similar jobs forcing companies not compete by lowering salaries, but to be innovative in their products.
Canonical is doing a good job in pioneering or at least promoting gadget-based Linux systems. As a end user Linux company they try to copy Apple a little and provide typical shop and app-like things together with their distribution. They also provide cloud storage, cloud project management in short SaaS. Their only problem is the cooperation with the Linux community. It seems they had not much luck in positioning their own ideas in it (e.g. Upstart which was shortly superseded by SystemD) and they had really unsound politics regarding Wayland. Mir would not have made such a wave if they would not have told everybody that they want to use it. Their third problem is now (also in the Mir corner) their licenses around code contribution to Mir. While they might have their reasons for it, it looks like that they did not get that they are not perceived as the good. In a doubtful context you cannot drive their license scheme without creating a lot of negative energy in other people.
Therefore, a decline would not be the worst thing that could happen. It could also be a good thing to learn to fix the license issue and to learn how they can contribute in a more useful way. But most important they have to fix their communication. It is true that to fail in communication it requires two sides to suck at it, but in recent cases it my impression is that they could have communicated better.
Like other pointed out, group learning and flipped classroom are two different things. But now to my point. You think, you could learn material just by consuming and memorizing them. This is often thought by students just out of high school, sometime even with older students. However, this is bullshit. Learning anything is not to memorize the stuff, but to understand it. One very effective method is to teach other people. Their questions, question your knowledge and your grasp of the topic. By that you have to think about it in different angles. In most cases you learn a lot from that process.
In your special university, the material to learn and the homework might only designed to test your ability to memorize the stuff. In that case, you might think that the extra work does not add up, but for any later work as a scientist or in industry, true understanding is necessary. In short a book cannot solve problems only an educated person can.
This might come sooner than you think. More and more young people are less interested in cars, which will weaken one leg of this "no speed limit law" in Germany. The other one is the automobile industry. But if there is a tipping point reached in Germany, the "evil" has to go. Just like nuclear power plants, water over consumption or illogical waste handling.
In future and today you can use self-driving car, at least in urban areas. They are called buses, trams and commuter rail. They work quite perfectly. In addition there are taxis. All these means of transportation work fine for elderly people (at least if they use modern equipment). And yes, I know they are not driver-less, but you do not have to drive yourself and in certain cities commuter rail services are already really driver-less, like in London or Nuremberg.
You will have negative growth, especially when the baby boomers start dying and you have not a descend birth or immigration rate. In addition this only will work if you educate the additions to your population.
In the 1970ies when I way just a boy, I found an "old" book from the 1960ies. They already discussed the same concept together with maglev and other high speed ground based transportation systems. As of today all these high speed "trains" are very expensive and bring little benefit to populated areas. A ground based vehicle which is as fast as a plane is most likely technical possible, but the infrastructure cost would be extreme. Therefore, it would only be an option for short distances. At short distances that much speed makes no big difference.
BTW. the Chinese have developed trains with similar speeds, which are able to run that fast. If they had worked with higher precision, the trains could use that speed in a reliable way.
This is total crap what you are talking. The US society is racist. It is even more racist then the average West-European country. Its upward mobility is one of the lowest. And to assume that everyone can life above average, as you imply by telling us that people can make their town "nice", then this is also impossible (check the math). Furthermore, you are ignoring social effects. Lower classes are often not able to leave their income and sub-cultural area, as they lack the necessary abilities. There is a good study on that topic available from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (engl. Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation) discussing these problems for Germany, but the classification is also usable for other Western countries including the US.
I don't think that the 1% upper class is racist on a global scale. That might by the case in the US, but I doubt that in other countries and continents the situation is the same. However, they are classists which is the same with just a different distinction method.
In classic revolutions, the power balance is always asymmetrical towards the suppressor before the revolution starts. In that situation you can either level the playing field with asymmetrical warfare, which has worked against any high-tech army. For example in Afghanistan, the war was too expensive for the Russians, and later the US and NATO allies where unable to convince their population to accept a war. This will not work with a robot army (assuming that such army would be possible). However, the opponents will find a weakness and use it.
Furthermore, if you have a uprising of 15-20% of the population then you cannot control that uprising. I doubt that the government would be able to produce enough soldier machines to compensate. Especially, when humans are required to build the robots.
The present Western government do not include real entrepreneurs. The same is valid for the upper 1%. More space is not on the "proposed" space station.
If you are in the wilderness this works after some time. However, 'owls' get up later than 'early birds' because of different internal clock implementations. Some are faster than earth rotations and others are slower. The clock calibration with sunlight works perfect in the summer or in equatorial regions, but not in winter. In addition, I cannot work in an area where there is no artificial light and no modern civilization around. Therefore, setting the clock right once a year will not help for long. It will just be like another jet lag.
On my CPC 464 boot time was seconds (one or two). The Monitor took a little longer. And I could then start a word processor in no time. On my 286 PC, booting was also very fast (after the BIOS) and then I could start Word Perfect in matter of seconds or use some normal editor and use LaTeX. All much faster than Word today. And LaTeX then had better text processing than Word/Libreoffice etc today.
However, it is completely understandable that an application response time today is not much faster then in the 1980s. Since humans are not any faster the reaction timings for application functions have still fulfill the same time constraints. But the original post was not about timing or features, but in concepts and functions.
Web browsers and web servers resemble an architecture, which is available since 1987 and called X-Window System (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System). The only new thing is, that they moved more code to the display server, called web-browser, which supports now also image composition, event handling and form evaluation.
As all countries are spying at each other and stop trusting each other, international trade of It goods collapse. As in most goods, electronics are involved, this will harm international trade. As present China did not ban European products, but as they encourage the use of Chinese products, this ban is not USA only. The Europeans should try to do something similar. They should avoid US, British and Chinese products all along and encourage its companies to use strong encryption and tor like systems.
A rack of IBM servers can beat the best Jeopardy players on Earth. In a few years the same level of Watson will fit in a 1U. A few years later it will be on your smartphone. But that's just anecdotal evidence of one recent achievement in AI research;
Watson is a great machine. And it represents some achievement in AI. But, it is not intelligent. It is just a big decision machine based on Prolog for the reasoning. As it achievements are remarkable, it is still dumb as a door nob. The problem is self-aware-ness and the ability to comprehend the world. Facts and reasoning are not everything, which is required to be considered intelligent.
Nice, that you mentioned Gödel. His greatest achievement was a contribution to formal systems, where, in short, a language/system cannot be consistent and complete at the same time. This applies to Watson, but that limitation does not apply to humans or animals. Furthermore, machines are always bound by their programming, as you state yourself
[they] would simply try to achieve whatever goal they were programmed for [...]
Marvin Minsky and his followers think that people (their mind) can be represented by a number (a logical system) and could therefore be put on a suitable deterministic hardware. He concludes that from the opinion that the human body is merely a complex machine and the brain is also just a complex machine, as it is driven by physical processes.
While I concur to the last part, I do not think that it is a deterministic thinking apparatus. First, to be self-aware, the brain and the body of a person interact. It is this connection which allows to build self-awareness. However, it is not the only ingredient. Second, while a single nerve cell can be modeled with mathematics, it is a large simplification. Even though each cell-model is a non-deterministic system. In combination with others it is able to solve problems, sometimes without prior knowledge, which are not computable and heuristics won't apply.
For intelligent machines to become our overlords, we would have to program them to be that, which is very unlikely. And they need to be greedy and power hungry. We have a pretty good model, why some of us are greedy and power hungry, and how this trait evolved.
However, lets assume that we program a system to become our overlord, like in iRobot, where we formulate rules, which in the end conflict with our own ability to be nice to each other, which results in drastic measures applied by the machine. If it would come to that we would be doomed. However, the machine would soon recognize that the humans would die off and that its own measures are the cause. That is, of course, only true if we do not program it to be a total asshole.
But I doubt that we would build a machine and give it the goal to solve "the problem". And, as AI has dreamed of a thinking and self-aware machine for decades, they have not achieved the goal. To build such machine we need a better understanding of intelligence and being a person.
I am for my part much more frightened by the doing of people (such as eyes five) than of any machine, which we call intelligent, because it can solve puzzles.
I've read many comment in this thread. Instead of answering them one by one. I just post one aggregated comment.
First, the possibility of intelligent machines is glimpse. All our present technology is not able to achieve intelligence. This is mainly because we do not know what that is. Furthermore, to be dangerous they must be equipped with greed and (the illusion of) a free will. It is most unlikely that someone would build that on purpose or by accident. In short, I think it is impossible to built such machine.
Second, if an alien race succeeds in this task, against all odds, and gets eradicated by their machines. And these machines would thrive out through the universe. It is most unlikely that they attack us. A) If they are greedy and logical, they will see no gain by attacking us. They would spread and multiply and die when they cannot generate enough energy to continue. B) If they are illogical, then they will start fighting with each other to gain short term gains. They could be dangerous, however, they would never reach us. C) Either way, if such civilization exists, the universe is that big, that at sub-light speed, they would need millions or even billions of years to reach Earth. Therefore, I do not assume that they are a real threat.
A real threat are NSA and their friends around the world. They suck the most. Maybe we should shot them to the moon. We could use ESAs ATV, which does not have any reentry capability.
I am not saying that religion is the problem. The problem is how it is used to justify bad things. Of course philosophies can be used in the same way. They even used the enlightenment to do unenlightened things (see Robespierre)
Romney would have done exactly the same. However, he would act faster, as he has less a conscience mocking him. So the difference is more in the time when you get there and not in where you go. I am looking forward to the EU-US trade union, so I can see how European food standards, established over decades, will be obliterated by that treaty in minutes.
BTW: That would not have happened with Romney, as he might not have found the EU on the map. (Just kidding of course).
Its like giving Obama the Peace-Prize. Oh wait... They did. Never mind. The also awarded the EU with that prize and as a citizen of the EU I am still waiting for my share of the prize money or the equivalent of two high quality jelly babies/gummy bears.
He didn't miss it. His point is, that, with some thought, you can use any religion to justify violence. We had Christians burning witches, we had gay executions in Iran, we had missile attacks on Israel, we had bombs on Catholics and protestants, we had Buddhists murdering Muslims.
On a side note: Being pro-Israel (what ever that means) does not mean Jewish terrorist. You could claim, they are pro-Israel terrorist. However, my personal opinion is, that not supporting UN resolutions and bombing or frying Muslims is helping Israel. On the contrary it destabilizes the region. From a historical point of view I can understand that Jews and especially Israel do not want to become victims again. And their solution is strength. However, when strength results in violence and the inability to agree to compromises, you loose the safety you try to achieve. Compromises, trust and friendship are much more helpful in stabilizing a region. Look at Western Europe how it evolved out of WW II.
You can use static and dynamic analysis to gain knowledge on the structure of the program. Static analysis can be done with tools like Modisco (however, Modisco is not for C++ I guess). For the dynamic analysis, you need to add a monitoring feature to the code. This can be done with AspectC++. Instrument entry and exits of public methods (if it is OO code) or structural blocks detected by the static analysis.
However, if the program is rather small, then you can do the analysis also by hand.
I do not speak Greek or are able to evaluate the quality of the public TV-station there, but I know that in Germany the public TV plays an important role in fighting dumb TV for the masses with some of their information programs (even though they also provide shows which can only be watched if you had a lobotomy, just like the US TV;-)). So from that point of view, I think this is a bad move for Greece. The Greek should start a new public TV station funded by the public and controlled by a council where every group of the Greek population has a seat in (no payments) and they have to agree on consensus on elections for directors. that will realize an independent media house, which is in high demand in Greece (and the rest of Europe).
BTW: I personally do not like the way Greece have been treated by the rest of the EU, especially Merkel, but I also think, they should get rid of their present politicians and demand more public influence in all processes. A little like Switzerland.
Yes, and they are not that menial that they can be overrun with the army, like Iraq. They are even better than the Russians, as they do not collapse after some decades. Instead they grow and they are big and they are investing in new weapons. All this allows to increase the military funds again. Who cares for health care or any other shit as long as we have BIG guns. Great!
Slashdot Mirror
If unions are such a bad thing, then why is Germany doing so well while the US economy sucks (especially in context of salaries, employment (real figures), and salary spread)? The unions in Germany had a part in it in conjunction with a real healthcare system for everyone and the anti cyclic measures taken during the last crisis. Unions can help to guarantee same salary for similar jobs forcing companies not compete by lowering salaries, but to be innovative in their products.
Canonical is doing a good job in pioneering or at least promoting gadget-based Linux systems. As a end user Linux company they try to copy Apple a little and provide typical shop and app-like things together with their distribution. They also provide cloud storage, cloud project management in short SaaS. Their only problem is the cooperation with the Linux community. It seems they had not much luck in positioning their own ideas in it (e.g. Upstart which was shortly superseded by SystemD) and they had really unsound politics regarding Wayland. Mir would not have made such a wave if they would not have told everybody that they want to use it. Their third problem is now (also in the Mir corner) their licenses around code contribution to Mir. While they might have their reasons for it, it looks like that they did not get that they are not perceived as the good. In a doubtful context you cannot drive their license scheme without creating a lot of negative energy in other people.
Therefore, a decline would not be the worst thing that could happen. It could also be a good thing to learn to fix the license issue and to learn how they can contribute in a more useful way. But most important they have to fix their communication. It is true that to fail in communication it requires two sides to suck at it, but in recent cases it my impression is that they could have communicated better.
Like other pointed out, group learning and flipped classroom are two different things. But now to my point. You think, you could learn material just by consuming and memorizing them. This is often thought by students just out of high school, sometime even with older students. However, this is bullshit. Learning anything is not to memorize the stuff, but to understand it. One very effective method is to teach other people. Their questions, question your knowledge and your grasp of the topic. By that you have to think about it in different angles. In most cases you learn a lot from that process.
In your special university, the material to learn and the homework might only designed to test your ability to memorize the stuff. In that case, you might think that the extra work does not add up, but for any later work as a scientist or in industry, true understanding is necessary. In short a book cannot solve problems only an educated person can.
This might come sooner than you think. More and more young people are less interested in cars, which will weaken one leg of this "no speed limit law" in Germany. The other one is the automobile industry. But if there is a tipping point reached in Germany, the "evil" has to go. Just like nuclear power plants, water over consumption or illogical waste handling.
In future and today you can use self-driving car, at least in urban areas. They are called buses, trams and commuter rail. They work quite perfectly. In addition there are taxis. All these means of transportation work fine for elderly people (at least if they use modern equipment). And yes, I know they are not driver-less, but you do not have to drive yourself and in certain cities commuter rail services are already really driver-less, like in London or Nuremberg.
You will have negative growth, especially when the baby boomers start dying and you have not a descend birth or immigration rate. In addition this only will work if you educate the additions to your population.
Did you miss something? Europe has only 1/2 to 1/3 of accidents per 100000 compared to the US.
In the 1970ies when I way just a boy, I found an "old" book from the 1960ies. They already discussed the same concept together with maglev and other high speed ground based transportation systems. As of today all these high speed "trains" are very expensive and bring little benefit to populated areas. A ground based vehicle which is as fast as a plane is most likely technical possible, but the infrastructure cost would be extreme. Therefore, it would only be an option for short distances. At short distances that much speed makes no big difference.
BTW. the Chinese have developed trains with similar speeds, which are able to run that fast. If they had worked with higher precision, the trains could use that speed in a reliable way.
This is total crap what you are talking. The US society is racist. It is even more racist then the average West-European country. Its upward mobility is one of the lowest. And to assume that everyone can life above average, as you imply by telling us that people can make their town "nice", then this is also impossible (check the math). Furthermore, you are ignoring social effects. Lower classes are often not able to leave their income and sub-cultural area, as they lack the necessary abilities. There is a good study on that topic available from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (engl. Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation) discussing these problems for Germany, but the classification is also usable for other Western countries including the US.
I don't think that the 1% upper class is racist on a global scale. That might by the case in the US, but I doubt that in other countries and continents the situation is the same. However, they are classists which is the same with just a different distinction method.
In classic revolutions, the power balance is always asymmetrical towards the suppressor before the revolution starts. In that situation you can either level the playing field with asymmetrical warfare, which has worked against any high-tech army. For example in Afghanistan, the war was too expensive for the Russians, and later the US and NATO allies where unable to convince their population to accept a war. This will not work with a robot army (assuming that such army would be possible). However, the opponents will find a weakness and use it.
Furthermore, if you have a uprising of 15-20% of the population then you cannot control that uprising. I doubt that the government would be able to produce enough soldier machines to compensate. Especially, when humans are required to build the robots.
The present Western government do not include real entrepreneurs. The same is valid for the upper 1%. More space is not on the "proposed" space station.
If you are in the wilderness this works after some time. However, 'owls' get up later than 'early birds' because of different internal clock implementations. Some are faster than earth rotations and others are slower. The clock calibration with sunlight works perfect in the summer or in equatorial regions, but not in winter. In addition, I cannot work in an area where there is no artificial light and no modern civilization around. Therefore, setting the clock right once a year will not help for long. It will just be like another jet lag.
On my CPC 464 boot time was seconds (one or two). The Monitor took a little longer. And I could then start a word processor in no time. On my 286 PC, booting was also very fast (after the BIOS) and then I could start Word Perfect in matter of seconds or use some normal editor and use LaTeX. All much faster than Word today. And LaTeX then had better text processing than Word/Libreoffice etc today.
However, it is completely understandable that an application response time today is not much faster then in the 1980s. Since humans are not any faster the reaction timings for application functions have still fulfill the same time constraints. But the original post was not about timing or features, but in concepts and functions.
Web browsers and web servers resemble an architecture, which is available since 1987 and called X-Window System (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System). The only new thing is, that they moved more code to the display server, called web-browser, which supports now also image composition, event handling and form evaluation.
As all countries are spying at each other and stop trusting each other, international trade of It goods collapse. As in most goods, electronics are involved, this will harm international trade. As present China did not ban European products, but as they encourage the use of Chinese products, this ban is not USA only. The Europeans should try to do something similar. They should avoid US, British and Chinese products all along and encourage its companies to use strong encryption and tor like systems.
A rack of IBM servers can beat the best Jeopardy players on Earth. In a few years the same level of Watson will fit in a 1U. A few years later it will be on your smartphone. But that's just anecdotal evidence of one recent achievement in AI research;
Watson is a great machine. And it represents some achievement in AI. But, it is not intelligent. It is just a big decision machine based on Prolog for the reasoning. As it achievements are remarkable, it is still dumb as a door nob. The problem is self-aware-ness and the ability to comprehend the world. Facts and reasoning are not everything, which is required to be considered intelligent.
Nice, that you mentioned Gödel. His greatest achievement was a contribution to formal systems, where, in short, a language/system cannot be consistent and complete at the same time. This applies to Watson, but that limitation does not apply to humans or animals. Furthermore, machines are always bound by their programming, as you state yourself
[they] would simply try to achieve whatever goal they were programmed for [...]
Marvin Minsky and his followers think that people (their mind) can be represented by a number (a logical system) and could therefore be put on a suitable deterministic hardware. He concludes that from the opinion that the human body is merely a complex machine and the brain is also just a complex machine, as it is driven by physical processes.
While I concur to the last part, I do not think that it is a deterministic thinking apparatus. First, to be self-aware, the brain and the body of a person interact. It is this connection which allows to build self-awareness. However, it is not the only ingredient. Second, while a single nerve cell can be modeled with mathematics, it is a large simplification. Even though each cell-model is a non-deterministic system. In combination with others it is able to solve problems, sometimes without prior knowledge, which are not computable and heuristics won't apply.
For intelligent machines to become our overlords, we would have to program them to be that, which is very unlikely. And they need to be greedy and power hungry. We have a pretty good model, why some of us are greedy and power hungry, and how this trait evolved.
However, lets assume that we program a system to become our overlord, like in iRobot, where we formulate rules, which in the end conflict with our own ability to be nice to each other, which results in drastic measures applied by the machine. If it would come to that we would be doomed. However, the machine would soon recognize that the humans would die off and that its own measures are the cause. That is, of course, only true if we do not program it to be a total asshole.
But I doubt that we would build a machine and give it the goal to solve "the problem". And, as AI has dreamed of a thinking and self-aware machine for decades, they have not achieved the goal. To build such machine we need a better understanding of intelligence and being a person.
I am for my part much more frightened by the doing of people (such as eyes five) than of any machine, which we call intelligent, because it can solve puzzles.
I've read many comment in this thread. Instead of answering them one by one. I just post one aggregated comment.
First, the possibility of intelligent machines is glimpse. All our present technology is not able to achieve intelligence. This is mainly because we do not know what that is. Furthermore, to be dangerous they must be equipped with greed and (the illusion of) a free will. It is most unlikely that someone would build that on purpose or by accident. In short, I think it is impossible to built such machine.
Second, if an alien race succeeds in this task, against all odds, and gets eradicated by their machines. And these machines would thrive out through the universe. It is most unlikely that they attack us. A) If they are greedy and logical, they will see no gain by attacking us. They would spread and multiply and die when they cannot generate enough energy to continue. B) If they are illogical, then they will start fighting with each other to gain short term gains. They could be dangerous, however, they would never reach us. C) Either way, if such civilization exists, the universe is that big, that at sub-light speed, they would need millions or even billions of years to reach Earth. Therefore, I do not assume that they are a real threat.
A real threat are NSA and their friends around the world. They suck the most. Maybe we should shot them to the moon. We could use ESAs ATV, which does not have any reentry capability.
I am not saying that religion is the problem. The problem is how it is used to justify bad things. Of course philosophies can be used in the same way. They even used the enlightenment to do unenlightened things (see Robespierre)
Romney would have done exactly the same. However, he would act faster, as he has less a conscience mocking him. So the difference is more in the time when you get there and not in where you go. I am looking forward to the EU-US trade union, so I can see how European food standards, established over decades, will be obliterated by that treaty in minutes.
BTW: That would not have happened with Romney, as he might not have found the EU on the map. (Just kidding of course).
Its like giving Obama the Peace-Prize. Oh wait... They did. Never mind. The also awarded the EU with that prize and as a citizen of the EU I am still waiting for my share of the prize money or the equivalent of two high quality jelly babies/gummy bears.
He didn't miss it. His point is, that, with some thought, you can use any religion to justify violence. We had Christians burning witches, we had gay executions in Iran, we had missile attacks on Israel, we had bombs on Catholics and protestants, we had Buddhists murdering Muslims.
On a side note: Being pro-Israel (what ever that means) does not mean Jewish terrorist. You could claim, they are pro-Israel terrorist. However, my personal opinion is, that not supporting UN resolutions and bombing or frying Muslims is helping Israel. On the contrary it destabilizes the region. From a historical point of view I can understand that Jews and especially Israel do not want to become victims again. And their solution is strength. However, when strength results in violence and the inability to agree to compromises, you loose the safety you try to achieve. Compromises, trust and friendship are much more helpful in stabilizing a region. Look at Western Europe how it evolved out of WW II.
You can use static and dynamic analysis to gain knowledge on the structure of the program. Static analysis can be done with tools like Modisco (however, Modisco is not for C++ I guess). For the dynamic analysis, you need to add a monitoring feature to the code. This can be done with AspectC++. Instrument entry and exits of public methods (if it is OO code) or structural blocks detected by the static analysis.
However, if the program is rather small, then you can do the analysis also by hand.
I do not speak Greek or are able to evaluate the quality of the public TV-station there, but I know that in Germany the public TV plays an important role in fighting dumb TV for the masses with some of their information programs (even though they also provide shows which can only be watched if you had a lobotomy, just like the US TV ;-)). So from that point of view, I think this is a bad move for Greece. The Greek should start a new public TV station funded by the public and controlled by a council where every group of the Greek population has a seat in (no payments) and they have to agree on consensus on elections for directors. that will realize an independent media house, which is in high demand in Greece (and the rest of Europe).
BTW: I personally do not like the way Greece have been treated by the rest of the EU, especially Merkel, but I also think, they should get rid of their present politicians and demand more public influence in all processes. A little like Switzerland.
Yes, and they are not that menial that they can be overrun with the army, like Iraq. They are even better than the Russians, as they do not collapse after some decades. Instead they grow and they are big and they are investing in new weapons. All this allows to increase the military funds again. Who cares for health care or any other shit as long as we have BIG guns. Great!