In theory netstat, ifconfig, and company could be rewritten to use netlink too; in practice this doesn't seem to have happened and there may be political issues involving different groups of developers with different opinions on which way to go.
No, it is far simpler than looking for some mythical "political" issues. It is simply that hackers - especially amateur ones, who write code as a hobby - dislike trying to work out how old stuff works. They like writing new stuff, instead.
Partly this is because of the poor documentation: explanations of why things work, what other code was tried but didn't work out, the reasons for weird-looking constructs, techniques and the history behind patches. It could even be that many programmers are wedded to a particular development environment and lack the skill and experience (or find it beyond their capacity) to do things in ways that are alien to it. I feel that another big part is that merely rewriting old code does not allow for the "look how clever I am" element that is present in fresh, new, software. That seems to be a big part of the amateur hacker's effort-reward equation.
One thing that is imperative however is to keep backwards compatibility. So that the same options continue to work and that they provide the same content and format. Possibly Unix / Linux only remaining advantage over Windows for sysadmins is its scripting. If that was lost, there would be little point keeping it around.
Life is objectively, scientifically going downhill
Not true!
Just look at the hundreds of millions of people in China who are doing very well, now. The same applies to India and most of the rest of Asia. All you are seeing is equality taking place.
There are two ways to equalise a society. You can either raise everyone up to the level of the best, which is expensive, resource-intensive and broadly unsustainable. Or you can push everyone down to the level of the lowest. Both result in an "equal" society - one where the range from the lowest to the highest is reduced. (Excluding the ultra-rich, as they will never be subject to the pressures of "ordinary" people).
What globalisation has done is to make the flow of capital, knowledge and goods into a two-way street. Americans and some Europeans became wealthy (i.e. income above the global average) because they were better at the high-value, knowledge-driven stuff - leaving the commoditised, low value stuff to the RoW. It is pretty obvious to all who care to look, that this is no longer the case. China has the world's best supercomputers, many countries have space programmes, AI will blossom in the far-east as their governments aren't hobbled by funny western ideas of "privacy" and can make huge datasets of personal information available to their corporations. Transport costs are so low that goods can be made whereever it is cheapest.
The only thing that has declined is the west's ability to meet its level of entitlement.
A technical director at the agency "declined to say which smartphone and chipmakers planned to participate in the project
Very wise. It sounds like an ideal way to completely kill-off the sales of any manufacturer who gives in and installs this.
Apart from all the drawbacks listed, any phone that did this would essentially be spying on its user. Not just with trying to identify the user, but with the record of encrypted (yeah.... right) positioning data to know where that person had been.
The only people I can see who would ever use one of these would be government employees and I doubt that they would do so freely.
A quick search for Telsa deaths suggests that ALL the fatalities (of people in Teslas) have been when autopilot was running.
What would be a useful addition to the debate would be to understand just how much of the time Tesla drivers use autopilot. Is it engaged for (say) 90% of the time on almost all journeys? Or is it only used for a tiny fraction of the miles that Teslas clock up?
The meaning of "sophisticated" will influence the answer. But if we go with a combination of many different uses, complexity and nuanced output, then I would suggest one of those two categories would take the title.
Maybe they could tell me if there is anything important or interesting that I have been sent recently?
(and I don't count their SPAM as either of those things).
The same way they react to every significant change. A small minority will recognise the benefits for all and the potential. But most will react with fear, hostility, anger, resentment and criticism. Unless it can be shown that it will improve people's access to sex. In which case add intolerance, hypocrisy and profiteering to the lists.
There are many precursors for defining a "living" being. But the greatest of them is the ability to reproduce. In higher animals that comes with a parental, nurturing, instinct or drive.
An AI will lack that ability and therefore will feel no emotions towards other living things. Whether it turns out to be a full-on psychopath, or merely a cold, calculating machine where life, happiness, rights, safety or emotions are concerned is unknowable. Those factors cannot be readily programmed-in and any machine-learning in that aspect of an AI's self-awareness would at best be artificial.
With luck, soon both sides: the appointment-making and the reservation-taking will be given over to the machines. So this will simply be my Duplex calling your Duplex. I can see some benefits to each of them knowing they are talking to (essentially) themself, that way they could both hang up and negotiate whatever the call was about far more efficiently in a few milliseconds.
It is only while there is the possibility that one system is so archaic that it still has an actual person taking the call that there is a difficulty. But even then, it's not much of an issue, what with the Duplex system being backwards compatible with meat.
I don't know how much more AI can reduce the number of manual jobs in banks. In Europe most activities can, and are, performed by ATMs. Either ones in-branch, in a halfway lobby or street-facing. Here they don't just dispense cash, buy will accept pay-ins of cash or cheques, allow you to order statements, chequebooks (if there are still any people who use them?) and they will even scan bills and pay them. The bill-paying system can also set up a direct debit so the same bill will be paid automatically in the future if you wish.
The only people who seem to actually require human interaction are those who are uncomfortable with the thought of pressing buttons and following on-screen instructions and those few who need something unusual such as a foreign currency conversion (although banks offer the worst exchange rates) or who want to pay-in a bagfull of pennies.
I agree that most of the stuff I read on Stack Overflow is pretty high quality. Although it does tend towards the curt. That in itself is no bad thing: when I want an answer, I just want an answer - what buttons to press, I don't want to be lectured on principles, alternatives, the respondent's preferred alternative or what is in vogue that month.
But there are many people who reply, who seem to be mostly concerned with displaying their own talents for creating complexity out of simplicity, (imagined) superiority and opinions-as-fact. Few of them actually contribute anything worthwhile, but they do create a toxic environment that I can see, would deter people less thick-skinned from coming back.
more thought is put into it than you might imagine. Should it go at the top or the bottom of the page? In the right or left margin? Or in the center? These are all conscious and deliberate choices made by designers.
Page numbers go at the bottom on the outside of each page.
There is no need for thought, just do that and follow what everyone else does. While other options are possible, there is no need for them. yOU MIGHT AS WELL INVERT CAPITALISATION. iT IS POSSIBLE, BUT STUPID. jUST DO THE RIGHT THING.
We already have computers that can assemble IKEA chairs - a task that defeats many humans. I would suggest that "human level" is not a great target and that many actual humans fail to register much, it at all, on what computer scientists and pundits consider that target.
The question we hear many times a day. Yet we expect that almost all websites will not charge us. Even though they have costs: depreciation, electricity, staff, buildings - that someone has to pay for.
So would the public be willing to hand over a credit card to use a website? Experience shows that almost nobody does, when compared with the billions of accesses per day that come from subscribers to "free" sites. And what happens to "privacy" then? We would just trade fears of all the lies we tell when we subscribe to a website being replaced with the far more serious fears of having our card details stolen, bought and sold.
Personally, I don't give a damn about who knows when my date of birth was, what I last bought from Amazon or whether I "liked" a particular posting or not. It seems to me that the only people who do worry, do so about how other people might be losing their privacy - not about their own. If it bothers you, then stop. If it doesn't then ignore all the media frenzy. Though since almost all the online sites that are carrying scare stories about mass data collection are doing exactly the same thing they criticise FB and social media in general, of doing.
In other words, to compete, it's going to have to create as few jobs as possible.
Sadly, people are the worst possible investment,
Any business that can remove them from its model will have an overwhelming advantage over "traditional" enterprises. But then, what do you do with all the people? The ones you rely on to buy your products. Consumerism without consumers is a meaningless failure.
In other words, you can install 18.04 and be confident that it will be supported for 5 years
But if you install any third-party apps, there is little prospect that they will install on a 5 year-old system, if you feel the need to upgrade them during the LTS period. Even if you install all the fixes, patches and other stuff provided by the LTS supplier.
And it is practically certain that some of your apps will require bug fix upgrades or security upgrades during that time. And once those (non LTS) apps start to require libraries or other dependencies that fall outside what the LTS system has chosen to provide as part of that 5 year support, then having an O/S that is "supported" - i.e. receives upgrades - becomes pointless.
the AI powering U.S. war efforts will need to be resilient in ways that today's AI simply isn't
The crucial point about AI is the training they need. Unless the americans have been collecting data for decades (given how few armed conflicts there are and that each one is different from the one before) there won't be any realistic scenarios for the AIs to learn from.
It would also be quite easy to defeat AIs that had been trained - just do the unexpected, as all gifted military leaders do.
Although once they get past the initial phase of monumentally screwing up everything they touch - another facet of "superpower" military might - they could easily develop new strategies. The best strategy would be for the AIs to decide that the battle isn't worth fighting.
But how are the average consumers just trying to buy the right home laptop or gaming PC for their kids supposed to cope
They don't need to. The average user will have their needs met by any computer built in the past 10 years.
if you want high-end or specialised stuff, just let the price guide you. The more expensive (so long as you don't get suckered into paying a brand premium) a generic computer is, the better it will perform.
Most people buy to a budget, anyway - not to a specification. That is why the first question a sales-droid will ask you is "how much do you have to spend?".
We know that peoples circadian rhythms can be changed. We know that Jet lag is a temporary condition. We know that individuals manage to adjust their body clocks to the schedules of different time zones.
So if some students have lifestyles that aren't in sync with their study schedules, they should ask themselves whether their social lives are more important - or whether they went to university to study?
This issue seems to be bordering on blaming the colleges for the timetabling, rather than recognising that the students' convenience is subordinate to the academic goals.
Slashdot Mirror
In theory netstat, ifconfig, and company could be rewritten to use netlink too; in practice this doesn't seem to have happened and there may be political issues involving different groups of developers with different opinions on which way to go.
No, it is far simpler than looking for some mythical "political" issues. It is simply that hackers - especially amateur ones, who write code as a hobby - dislike trying to work out how old stuff works. They like writing new stuff, instead.
Partly this is because of the poor documentation: explanations of why things work, what other code was tried but didn't work out, the reasons for weird-looking constructs, techniques and the history behind patches. It could even be that many programmers are wedded to a particular development environment and lack the skill and experience (or find it beyond their capacity) to do things in ways that are alien to it. I feel that another big part is that merely rewriting old code does not allow for the "look how clever I am" element that is present in fresh, new, software. That seems to be a big part of the amateur hacker's effort-reward equation.
One thing that is imperative however is to keep backwards compatibility. So that the same options continue to work and that they provide the same content and format. Possibly Unix / Linux only remaining advantage over Windows for sysadmins is its scripting. If that was lost, there would be little point keeping it around.
Life is objectively, scientifically going downhill
Not true!
Just look at the hundreds of millions of people in China who are doing very well, now. The same applies to India and most of the rest of Asia. All you are seeing is equality taking place.
There are two ways to equalise a society. You can either raise everyone up to the level of the best, which is expensive, resource-intensive and broadly unsustainable. Or you can push everyone down to the level of the lowest. Both result in an "equal" society - one where the range from the lowest to the highest is reduced. (Excluding the ultra-rich, as they will never be subject to the pressures of "ordinary" people).
What globalisation has done is to make the flow of capital, knowledge and goods into a two-way street. Americans and some Europeans became wealthy (i.e. income above the global average) because they were better at the high-value, knowledge-driven stuff - leaving the commoditised, low value stuff to the RoW. It is pretty obvious to all who care to look, that this is no longer the case. China has the world's best supercomputers, many countries have space programmes, AI will blossom in the far-east as their governments aren't hobbled by funny western ideas of "privacy" and can make huge datasets of personal information available to their corporations. Transport costs are so low that goods can be made whereever it is cheapest.
The only thing that has declined is the west's ability to meet its level of entitlement.
Reuters world news is about as relevant and impartial as it gets.
Ahhh, yes. The outfit that reported about China sending a probe to the Dark Side of the Moon.
Would you like to have another guess?
a sample size of 1 can hardly be considered meaningful indicator.
Well, please feel free to drop your phone down the toilet and let us all know how well it held up.
as a matter of fact it's all dark
A technical director at the agency "declined to say which smartphone and chipmakers planned to participate in the project
Very wise. It sounds like an ideal way to completely kill-off the sales of any manufacturer who gives in and installs this.
Apart from all the drawbacks listed, any phone that did this would essentially be spying on its user. Not just with trying to identify the user, but with the record of encrypted (yeah .... right) positioning data to know where that person had been.
The only people I can see who would ever use one of these would be government employees and I doubt that they would do so freely.
five deaths in Tesla vehicles.
A quick search for Telsa deaths suggests that ALL the fatalities (of people in Teslas) have been when autopilot was running.
What would be a useful addition to the debate would be to understand just how much of the time Tesla drivers use autopilot. Is it engaged for (say) 90% of the time on almost all journeys? Or is it only used for a tiny fraction of the miles that Teslas clock up?
The meaning of "sophisticated" will influence the answer. But if we go with a combination of many different uses, complexity and nuanced output, then I would suggest one of those two categories would take the title.
Axios asked Google for the name of the hair salon or restaurant,... A longtime Google spokeswoman declined to provide either name.
Maybe the "spokeswoman" was part of the same AI?
Maybe they could tell me if there is anything important or interesting that I have been sent recently? (and I don't count their SPAM as either of those things).
But the makers' ideas that it can be used for
SpotMini robots could be useful for security patrols or for helping construction companies keep tabs on what's happening at building sites
sounds like a fail. The device doesn't look particularly waterproof - so not much use for security patrols, unless it is limited to inside buildings.
But worse is that if this thing is expensive, it will become a target for thieves. So rather than preventing crime it could encourage it.
Now, where's the attachment for the sink-plunger?
how humans will react to such a development.
The same way they react to every significant change. A small minority will recognise the benefits for all and the potential. But most will react with fear, hostility, anger, resentment and criticism. Unless it can be shown that it will improve people's access to sex. In which case add intolerance, hypocrisy and profiteering to the lists.
There are many precursors for defining a "living" being. But the greatest of them is the ability to reproduce. In higher animals that comes with a parental, nurturing, instinct or drive. An AI will lack that ability and therefore will feel no emotions towards other living things. Whether it turns out to be a full-on psychopath, or merely a cold, calculating machine where life, happiness, rights, safety or emotions are concerned is unknowable. Those factors cannot be readily programmed-in and any machine-learning in that aspect of an AI's self-awareness would at best be artificial.
With luck, soon both sides: the appointment-making and the reservation-taking will be given over to the machines. So this will simply be my Duplex calling your Duplex. I can see some benefits to each of them knowing they are talking to (essentially) themself, that way they could both hang up and negotiate whatever the call was about far more efficiently in a few milliseconds.
It is only while there is the possibility that one system is so archaic that it still has an actual person taking the call that there is a difficulty. But even then, it's not much of an issue, what with the Duplex system being backwards compatible with meat.
I don't know how much more AI can reduce the number of manual jobs in banks. In Europe most activities can, and are, performed by ATMs. Either ones in-branch, in a halfway lobby or street-facing. Here they don't just dispense cash, buy will accept pay-ins of cash or cheques, allow you to order statements, chequebooks (if there are still any people who use them?) and they will even scan bills and pay them. The bill-paying system can also set up a direct debit so the same bill will be paid automatically in the future if you wish.
The only people who seem to actually require human interaction are those who are uncomfortable with the thought of pressing buttons and following on-screen instructions and those few who need something unusual such as a foreign currency conversion (although banks offer the worst exchange rates) or who want to pay-in a bagfull of pennies.
I agree that most of the stuff I read on Stack Overflow is pretty high quality. Although it does tend towards the curt. That in itself is no bad thing: when I want an answer, I just want an answer - what buttons to press, I don't want to be lectured on principles, alternatives, the respondent's preferred alternative or what is in vogue that month.
But there are many people who reply, who seem to be mostly concerned with displaying their own talents for creating complexity out of simplicity, (imagined) superiority and opinions-as-fact. Few of them actually contribute anything worthwhile, but they do create a toxic environment that I can see, would deter people less thick-skinned from coming back.
more thought is put into it than you might imagine. Should it go at the top or the bottom of the page? In the right or left margin? Or in the center? These are all conscious and deliberate choices made by designers.
Page numbers go at the bottom on the outside of each page.
There is no need for thought, just do that and follow what everyone else does. While other options are possible, there is no need for them. yOU MIGHT AS WELL INVERT CAPITALISATION. iT IS POSSIBLE, BUT STUPID. jUST DO THE RIGHT THING.
computers will have human-level intelligence
We already have computers that can assemble IKEA chairs - a task that defeats many humans. I would suggest that "human level" is not a great target and that many actual humans fail to register much, it at all, on what computer scientists and pundits consider that target.
best way to check whether private passwords or sensitive information
Easily defeated
The question we hear many times a day. Yet we expect that almost all websites will not charge us. Even though they have costs: depreciation, electricity, staff, buildings - that someone has to pay for.
So would the public be willing to hand over a credit card to use a website? Experience shows that almost nobody does, when compared with the billions of accesses per day that come from subscribers to "free" sites. And what happens to "privacy" then? We would just trade fears of all the lies we tell when we subscribe to a website being replaced with the far more serious fears of having our card details stolen, bought and sold.
Personally, I don't give a damn about who knows when my date of birth was, what I last bought from Amazon or whether I "liked" a particular posting or not. It seems to me that the only people who do worry, do so about how other people might be losing their privacy - not about their own. If it bothers you, then stop. If it doesn't then ignore all the media frenzy. Though since almost all the online sites that are carrying scare stories about mass data collection are doing exactly the same thing they criticise FB and social media in general, of doing.
In other words, to compete, it's going to have to create as few jobs as possible.
Sadly, people are the worst possible investment,
Any business that can remove them from its model will have an overwhelming advantage over "traditional" enterprises. But then, what do you do with all the people? The ones you rely on to buy your products. Consumerism without consumers is a meaningless failure.
In other words, you can install 18.04 and be confident that it will be supported for 5 years
But if you install any third-party apps, there is little prospect that they will install on a 5 year-old system, if you feel the need to upgrade them during the LTS period. Even if you install all the fixes, patches and other stuff provided by the LTS supplier.
And it is practically certain that some of your apps will require bug fix upgrades or security upgrades during that time. And once those (non LTS) apps start to require libraries or other dependencies that fall outside what the LTS system has chosen to provide as part of that 5 year support, then having an O/S that is "supported" - i.e. receives upgrades - becomes pointless.
the AI powering U.S. war efforts will need to be resilient in ways that today's AI simply isn't
The crucial point about AI is the training they need. Unless the americans have been collecting data for decades (given how few armed conflicts there are and that each one is different from the one before) there won't be any realistic scenarios for the AIs to learn from.
It would also be quite easy to defeat AIs that had been trained - just do the unexpected, as all gifted military leaders do.
Although once they get past the initial phase of monumentally screwing up everything they touch - another facet of "superpower" military might - they could easily develop new strategies. The best strategy would be for the AIs to decide that the battle isn't worth fighting.
But how are the average consumers just trying to buy the right home laptop or gaming PC for their kids supposed to cope
They don't need to. The average user will have their needs met by any computer built in the past 10 years.
if you want high-end or specialised stuff, just let the price guide you. The more expensive (so long as you don't get suckered into paying a brand premium) a generic computer is, the better it will perform.
Most people buy to a budget, anyway - not to a specification. That is why the first question a sales-droid will ask you is "how much do you have to spend?".
So if some students have lifestyles that aren't in sync with their study schedules, they should ask themselves whether their social lives are more important - or whether they went to university to study?
This issue seems to be bordering on blaming the colleges for the timetabling, rather than recognising that the students' convenience is subordinate to the academic goals.