Yes but the Simulation argument has a fatal weakness - a simulation requires some kind of computer and that requires a universe to run it in.. and the computer would require some kind of beings to build and program it. In effect no reduction in complexity or in the need for a 'previous' cause. Also to fully simulate a whole universe it takes more energy to create the simulation than just to have a real universe.. A belief in Gods or Animism is technically identical to the simulation argument but has lower overheads.. and more believability..
So comrade 'Anonymous' you celebrate our 'National Sabotage Agency' in its efforts to destroy the credibility of the evil US pig-dog computing industry.. Soon we will get the world to buy our superior Russian made hackware and encryption products.. No security destroying backdoors or spying-software in our products..
They get No. 3 wrong anyway. - In general you can have either wormholes or FTL travel but never both. The two require universes with totally different FTL geometries &physics. - Wormholes require that general relativity to be correct at FTL speeds with the consequence that the whole universe is folded up like a pretzel. - FTL Travel requires a stable FTL space, which in turn requires an absolute frame and FTL Simultaneity -general relativity fails at the speed of light and dimensional time doesn't physically exist..
But the only reason that purposeful misedits can exist for so long is usually because there is no reliable source to check the certainty of the facts, and no real expert who can look and immediately spot the deceit or error. And you can also have misedits based on verifiable sources. No source is 100% trustworthy. Even the most staid and august scientific journals cannot bury themselves so deep in peer review that they can guarantee no errors. Scientific Conservatism itself can sometimes become a source of errors.
In partisan subjects like history there usually is no base of absolute truth and all sources are biased to some extent by their own roots and physical organisation. Then on subjects like Astrology where do you go for accurate detailed sources?? the people who are 'experts' in the field? scientific sceptics & critics? anthropologists? subject specialist journalists? non specialist journalists? By trying to aim too high Wikipedia has made itself next to useless as a resource on many such subjects.. Being 'Encyclopaedic' means that Wikipedia has to cover such subjects..
I absolutely agree about the kid who played Anakin - he totally killed the movie - look at the bit where he is trapped in the fighter and ends up destroying the Droid ship - at no point does it feel believable. Kind of like the droids having such an easy point of weakness in the first place.. Then the pod race.. pod racing was an idea that had been around for a while, the old series 'Droids' included a pod race.. But the race in TPM was a low point for me, not only the totally wooden Anakin flying the pod, there were also the pods themselves - going from something that looked a bit like the old playstation game 'Wipeout' to a kind of crazy chariot race with force fields..
The scariest thing is what Lucas actually wanted to do instead of TFA. A movie not only focused on kids as an audience but having the whole action focused around and all the main characters being children. Imagine an Ewok paradise also filled with force wielding children and a group of baby Jar Jars. Maybe he was looking at the early Harry Potter movies, maybe it would have been something more like Home Alone. (shudder!!) My own conclusion is that the man has hated adult Star Wars fans for decades, its hugely fortunate that he liked the money even more..
And that is why Wikipedia is losing editors. Once you reach obscure or aberrant subjects the new Wikipedia often becomes next to useless. This wouldn't annoy me but Wikipedia used to be a pretty good resource on many such subjects. An encyclopaedia is meant to be exactly that a compendium of all knowledge, including trivial and outlying fields.. But in fields where things are not cut and dried or where the common consensus among experts in the field is outside of general media knowledge Wikipedia's referencing system simply doesn't work.
References can be a real problem. Sometimes where they do exist references where are all to old books, often out of print for decades or extremely difficult to access. Even then they often chase back further to old papers which are very often virtually impossible (very expensive) to find or collate.. Other times there really are no good references, and only second hand accounts by people like journalists - sometimes containing known errors or deliberate omissions. In my own primary field Strong AI (where modern academia are usually largely incompetent) even publishing a list of basic background references could be very commercially damaging.. and there are loose ends in my own knowledge that I know about but that I simply don't have the resources to tie down.. (Even with resources the answers might only have the status of hearsay.) It doesn’t help when an area may also have been subject to PC or military driven historical revisionism. In that case only old & proven to be original copies can be remotely trusted.. not easy in the era of online information..
What Wikipedia needs is a separate section on pages that allows subjects with a lower level of evidence. There should obviously be a warning on such sections but they would be a partial solution. As it is many more pages face deletion or destructive pruning because nobody is willing to spend the time and money to research them - and the research of course always has the danger of becoming or of being classified as OR.. There are subjects where that is an amazingly fine line.
The other side of the issue with trains is that they would still need an engineer - for safety and mechanical reasons. The safety issue includes monitoring the health of the AI and shutting down autonomous control if anything goes wrong. The engineer also monitors the hardware of the train and can do minor onsite repairs.
In maybe 10 to 20 years a Strong AI humanoid robot could replace the engineer but that is unlikely. Not only will such robots be extremely expensive ($100,000 to over $1,000,000) but they will have their own maintenance problems.. in fact such machines will need their own on call engineers. Of course repairing and maintaining humanoid robots is a particularly skilled job, so great that its complexity makes it almost artisanal. So even the robot engineers engineer will probably be more expensive than the original engineer. A Strong AI joke is that - 'When we replace half the working population with robots we will create Full Employment'..
I've found astrology useful for analysis in dealing with the logic behind pseudoscience theories. The real problem today is not the obviously false theories like astrology or cold fusion, the problem is all the real science that needs a big 'maybe' or even a big fat 'pseudo' stamped on it. String theory or super-symmetry or psychology come to mind. My own personal gripe though is general relativity. Half of the theory posits some of the strongest science that exists, but the other half stands on an extrapolation that makes astrology look empirical. The problem isn't the theory itself but that no establishment scientist dares to criticise it or debunk it. This really is the crux of the whole argument and the whole problem here, from a different perspective. Fear of ridicule. Loss of reputation, loss of career. The situation is so extreme and so ridiculous with general relativity that it deserves the analogy of the emperor with no clothes. (except that Einstein would be labelled the emperor which would be totally unfair) However I can say with absolute certainty that trying to raise this problem in most physics circles will immediately get you labelled the pseudo-scientist and not anyone else.
The following describes this 'pseudoscience'. - Like much of physics general relativities real heart is based on mathematics, but in its case the maths is used to conceal a fatal error. Rewriting general relativity to fix this error leaves you with a totally different universe, one that is three dimensional rather than four dimensional or higher-dimensional. The maths and physics solution that replaces general relativity is certainly not pretty, it is an add hoc solution, a mutant - a solution that proves that 'god is not a mathematician'. That is really the crux of the problem. Unfortunately it also solves the Anthropic question, explaining how a single finely tuned universe could exist, and this suggests very strongly that it is the correct solution. My solution is an FTL Simultaneity with an FTL Point Time. It looks like the Newtonian Galilean model but with general relativity as a correcting factor. In this model dimensional time still exists but only at quantum scales. On larger scales dimensional time is an abstraction, an illusion. The really ugly part is that although the speed of light as maxima (3E8 m/s) still applies, the speed of light also applies as a minima and that turns it into something nasty and badly behaved. It means that there is no clear barrier between FTL and STL physics - because the FTL element leaks into every part of physics. That changes everything.
Is this all just pseudoscience? even broaching the subject (usually) rapidly turns it into a vicious political and religious fight rather than a scientific one. Is the FTL pseudoscience? because if it is then the universe doesn't exist. Is the general relativity proof based on an untestable assertion the end of physics? Well the FTL model I have developed can be tested in experiment, there are many points where FTL and STL geometries merge. A pretty strong discriminator can be made if we can measure the exact shape of the gravity fields inside black holes. However, unfortunately like angels arguing on the head of a pin it is extremely difficult to totally pin either model down to zero, or to prove either as being absolutely correct or incorrect. Maybe that is my real lesson - when something is too absolute, too hidden in complexity, there should be doubt, that doubt should be kept public, and that doubt should never be allowed to die until there is proof.
Pseudoscience is bad science - it can be either correct science or incorrect science.
"Really? I've never heard or read anyone say they wanted a self driving car except for rare occasions on long trips. Self driving cars are not being demanded , they're being foisted on an indifferent public..."
There is colossal demand. (I've done market analysis on this) From elderly drivers, from disabled people, from people doing daily drives like commuter runs or school runs, from people who are regularly too tired to drive safely, even from people who just want to be able to get drunk and drive home in their own car. That's not even mentioning self-drive taxis or commercial vehicles. The law might not allow many of these at the moment but the law can and will adapt to changing and improving technology. One thing still in the more distant future is the AI control traffic lane - this will eventually allow autonomous machines capable of doing it to drive safely and efficiently at up to 200 mph. Something most human drivers just cant do. Another related tech is driver reflex augmentation - which will effectively allow human drivers to drive at the same speeds safely.. At the same time another group of tech people are looking at flying cars. The big problem with flying cars is the need for human pilots and the difficulty and complexity of navigating safely through the near ground 3D environment. Autonomous control driven by advanced AI is the tech that could really change the game for them, especially coupled with centralised computer control and lane guidance. That kind of control has to be virtually totally 100% reliable and immune to hacking infiltration. - Something that todays computers just cant deliver, but machines designed to run Strong AI maybe can. No fat OS = no infiltration..
"Yeah, they just violated environmental laws with a willful and deliberate scheme, I guess that's ok!
Show me where I said it was OK. I'm just pointing out that GM directly murdered their own customers (much like Ford with the Pinto, but at least that was a long time ago); VW didn't quite go that far."
VW's little trick with NOX emissions has probably helped kill on the order of tens of thousands of people, could be a lot more. Its just much harder to prove any kind of direct liability in cases like pollution.
Most human logic is based on arbitrary logic. It only depends on whether the base points of your logic are set in reality (ie science) or non reality (faith-delusion-myth).
I have a similar story from just a few weeks ago about a guy on YouTube who claimed that the 'environmentalists' had been lying for decades and DDT was safe. Stupid just doesn't describe it.
Remember this is the British police we're talking about here, logic and humanity and common sense have nothing to do with it. 1 2 3 The humans must not be allowed to rise up and question or threaten the system.
As the bureaucracy and rules replace their humanity are the British police gradually evolving into Darleks ? Rules become ever more draconian as the ever present fear of terrorism grows stronger and stronger. Their armour will get thicker and thicker. Next they will be fitted with guns. (EXTERMINATE!, EXTERMINATE!) Then they will start banning stairs.
Then they will ban hats..
Remember this is the British police we're talking about here, logic and humanity and common sense have nothing to do with it. The humans must not be allowed to rise up and question or threaten the system.
As the bureaucracy and rules replace their humanity are the British police gradually evolving into Darleks ? Rules become ever more draconian as the ever present fear of terrorism grows stronger and stronger. Their armour will get thicker and thicker. Next they will be fitted with guns. (EXTERMINATE!, EXTERMINATE!) Then they will start banning stairs.
Then they will ban hats..
Yes but we would have nuked China back. Then the US and maybe Israel would probably have joined in too. India also has nukes too and there are Indians who still remember being invaded by China. Then there is Russia, would they join in on China's side? or would they stay neutral? or would they even join in the attack against China? There are Russian strategists who fear China a lot more than they fear America.
This is why rattling the sabres is one thing, pushing the firing button something else.. Takes guts when you know that your cities are going to burn too.
Now if you had a real light sabre - that would be the most useful thing in the world. Take it apart, reverse engineer the force field technology, and in a few years you'll be building Star Wars machines.. Someone has to think of these things. : )
About 12-13 years ago, as part of my Strong AI development work I did an analysis on autonomous vehicles as an application. One of things I came up with was a basic first step solution to dealing with the interactions between machine driven and human driven vehicles. The basic solution is to always give a warning to other drivers that a car or truck is under machine control. My simple idea is a coloured light system (say green or blue) fitted on the roofs of autonomous vehicles that lights up to warn when the vehicle is under autonomous control..
"Even with access to an infinitely fast computer, an attacker cannot eavesdrop on the encrypted channel since it is protected by the laws of quantum mechanics."
No method of quantum encryption is truly secure. The problem with these methods of quantum encryption is that they take too narrow a view of quantum physics and do not deal with the potential for attackers also using quantum techniques. If your quantum system has more energy and the right configuration it should be possible to break virtually any quantum encryption. - Many or most mathematical encryption methods are also vulnerable to the same methods for the same reasons.. Capture an encrypted source and it inevitably contains an information interference pattern leading to the key, it is merely a matter of devising the right geometry to break the barrier between source and destination.. This is because quantum fields in some models can go faster than light and the FTL geometry represents a point where the quantum system becomes fully deterministic. The technology to use this is probably still ten to twenty years away though so it is not an immediate concern.. - Might just be possible that some secret military lab in the US can already do it, but very unlikely..
I've lived in both UK and Canada and also the US. Ironically I lived in London Ontario for half a year then London UK for a year, and have lived there other times.. There’s almost no comparison between the two systems. Firstly US and Canadian roads are built on what are essentially grid systems so almost all junctions are 4 way, there are very few curves, and the wholes system is generally a lot simpler. On the outer rural grid systems the Canadian US system works great, and for the most part that I've seen it works mostly OK in small and medium sized cities as well. Not so well in really big cities like LA where the grids kind of get scrambled and mixed and really complicated - they call them 'Parkways' for a reason..
UK roads in rural places are much worse than rural roads in the US or Canada. Often just built on old mediaeval lanes, often very narrow, lots of ups and downs and sharp dangerous bends, fords (river crossings with no bridge). A lot of small single lane roads with soft verges (grass and soil with hidden ditches), in the North often surrounded by dry stone walls - phenomenally unforgiving.. One thing UK rural roads have that a lot of Canadian roads don't have is tarmac. A lot of smaller rural Canadian and US roads are just mud and sand..
Yes I left the worst for last - that 'magic roundabout' (mentioned by nuknerd above) is nothing. The big multi lane main routes in the UK’s bigger cities have some true nightmare junctions. There are a few pretty bad ones in my home region the North East in Newcastle and Gateshead. Gateshead particularly has a perverse and illogical road system, largely thanks to the massive reconstruction around the Metro Centre. On a trip from London we accidentally ended up in Birmingham and ran into a massive roundabout system that had up to 6 lanes and wound outwards in a spiral. Not only very complex and confusing but full of angry impatient drivers. (it is real - 5232'18.36"N 143'29.88"W) London UK is (by far) the worst. There are many terrible roads in London, some of the very worst are right in the centre. If you drive into the centre and are not ready for it and not absolutely familiar with it - you enter the one way system which is fast flowing, very complex, confusing, multi-lane in places, and full of very angry & very impatient drivers. Kind of like being in a huge game of Pachinko where you will rapidly just be looking for an escape.. can rapidly shred almost anyone's nerves.. and that's just as a passenger.
I can't imagine a much worse place for Google cars than London. - Except maybe a place like Mumbai India, or central Paris has an equally lovely reputation. Smaller UK towns and cities are much better than the big cities. The smallest rural roads could get pretty brutal though for a self drive car - where the etiquette is to drive off the road and let the other car pass, and then if you get stuck someone has to get out and push. I guess the cars could be fitted with Boston Dynamics Atlas robots.. (~ $2 million each)
You are right of course. I think I can think offhand of dense asteroid fields in only about two or three SF books I have read out of hundreds. I'm sure there are more - I used to specialise in reading the old space opera stuff, from EE Doc Smith onwards, so I've read a lot of those 'bad' pulp sci-fi novels. Of those I can remember - one was in one of the Asimov robot stories, another was from Steven Donaldson's Gap series. The real source of the dense asteroid fields is Yes in old sci-fi movies and TV, both after, and long before Star Wars.. I wouldn't be surprised if there was one in at least one of the old Flash Gordon episodes.. Lost in Space.. maybe Star Trek TOS.. UFO . Space 1999.. Blake's 7.. Dr Who.. The Black Hole.. and probably many many others..
The grit thing - there are certainly places it would happen - like in the tails of comets or around asteroids after a high speed collision. The way that space works though - like a crazy fairground ride - means that things tend to get spread out and very quickly and the particles will all be separated by many kilometres or millions or billions of kilometres of space.. The really big problem with grit bouncing off the hull though and the heart of the articles complaint is that in space most of the time average closing speeds tend to be very high. In the solar system and around Earths orbit these speeds tends to average on 10's of kilometres per second. The only real way you can really have grit bouncing off your hull is if your hull is surrounded by a force field or is extremely thick or protected by extremely tough armour.. Again you can have slow grit - such as must be hitting the Rosetta probe from comet 67P Churyumov–Gerasimenko, it is relatively very rare..
Its the curse of modern 32 and 64 bit architecture, so many pins. The solution so far for me is the chips pre-mounted on dev boards, it works but is not so cheap and is a bit ugly.. No so 'home built' but does save problems with little details like support chips and clocks and so on. With a lot of these bigger chips with 100 + pins, hand wiring the circuit boards would be virtually impossible anyway..
The Walt Disney space station. He wanted to do it but would have bankrupted Disney before he got even one piece in orbit. That was back in the 1950's and space is a lot cheaper now. A lot cheaper is still enough to bankrupt anything but the biggest corporations, and even them it still frightens them.. Let alone that the technologies that can really make large scale space tech cheap enough to be commercially viable - almost all basically require or start with nuclear rockets.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes but the Simulation argument has a fatal weakness - a simulation requires some kind of computer and that requires a universe to run it in.. and the computer would require some kind of beings to build and program it. In effect no reduction in complexity or in the need for a 'previous' cause. Also to fully simulate a whole universe it takes more energy to create the simulation than just to have a real universe..
A belief in Gods or Animism is technically identical to the simulation argument but has lower overheads.. and more believability..
So comrade 'Anonymous' you celebrate our 'National Sabotage Agency' in its efforts to destroy the credibility of the evil US pig-dog computing industry.. Soon we will get the world to buy our superior Russian made hackware and encryption products.. No security destroying backdoors or spying-software in our products..
They get No. 3 wrong anyway. -
In general you can have either wormholes or FTL travel but never both. The two require universes with totally different FTL geometries &physics.
- Wormholes require that general relativity to be correct at FTL speeds with the consequence that the whole universe is folded up like a pretzel.
- FTL Travel requires a stable FTL space, which in turn requires an absolute frame and FTL Simultaneity -general relativity fails at the speed of light and dimensional time doesn't physically exist..
But the only reason that purposeful misedits can exist for so long is usually because there is no reliable source to check the certainty of the facts, and no real expert who can look and immediately spot the deceit or error.
And you can also have misedits based on verifiable sources. No source is 100% trustworthy. Even the most staid and august scientific journals cannot bury themselves so deep in peer review that they can guarantee no errors. Scientific Conservatism itself can sometimes become a source of errors.
In partisan subjects like history there usually is no base of absolute truth and all sources are biased to some extent by their own roots and physical organisation.
Then on subjects like Astrology where do you go for accurate detailed sources?? the people who are 'experts' in the field? scientific sceptics & critics? anthropologists? subject specialist journalists? non specialist journalists? By trying to aim too high Wikipedia has made itself next to useless as a resource on many such subjects.. Being 'Encyclopaedic' means that Wikipedia has to cover such subjects..
I absolutely agree about the kid who played Anakin - he totally killed the movie - look at the bit where he is trapped in the fighter and ends up destroying the Droid ship - at no point does it feel believable. Kind of like the droids having such an easy point of weakness in the first place.. Then the pod race.. pod racing was an idea that had been around for a while, the old series 'Droids' included a pod race.. But the race in TPM was a low point for me, not only the totally wooden Anakin flying the pod, there were also the pods themselves - going from something that looked a bit like the old playstation game 'Wipeout' to a kind of crazy chariot race with force fields..
The scariest thing is what Lucas actually wanted to do instead of TFA. A movie not only focused on kids as an audience but having the whole action focused around and all the main characters being children. Imagine an Ewok paradise also filled with force wielding children and a group of baby Jar Jars. Maybe he was looking at the early Harry Potter movies, maybe it would have been something more like Home Alone. (shudder!!) My own conclusion is that the man has hated adult Star Wars fans for decades, its hugely fortunate that he liked the money even more..
And that is why Wikipedia is losing editors. Once you reach obscure or aberrant subjects the new Wikipedia often becomes next to useless. This wouldn't annoy me but Wikipedia used to be a pretty good resource on many such subjects. An encyclopaedia is meant to be exactly that a compendium of all knowledge, including trivial and outlying fields.. But in fields where things are not cut and dried or where the common consensus among experts in the field is outside of general media knowledge Wikipedia's referencing system simply doesn't work.
References can be a real problem. Sometimes where they do exist references where are all to old books, often out of print for decades or extremely difficult to access. Even then they often chase back further to old papers which are very often virtually impossible (very expensive) to find or collate.. Other times there really are no good references, and only second hand accounts by people like journalists - sometimes containing known errors or deliberate omissions. .. not easy in the era of online information..
In my own primary field Strong AI (where modern academia are usually largely incompetent) even publishing a list of basic background references could be very commercially damaging.. and there are loose ends in my own knowledge that I know about but that I simply don't have the resources to tie down.. (Even with resources the answers might only have the status of hearsay.) It doesn’t help when an area may also have been subject to PC or military driven historical revisionism. In that case only old & proven to be original copies can be remotely trusted
What Wikipedia needs is a separate section on pages that allows subjects with a lower level of evidence. There should obviously be a warning on such sections but they would be a partial solution. As it is many more pages face deletion or destructive pruning because nobody is willing to spend the time and money to research them - and the research of course always has the danger of becoming or of being classified as OR.. There are subjects where that is an amazingly fine line.
Yes but the trouble with that is that it is plain common sense.
The other side of the issue with trains is that they would still need an engineer - for safety and mechanical reasons. The safety issue includes monitoring the health of the AI and shutting down autonomous control if anything goes wrong. The engineer also monitors the hardware of the train and can do minor onsite repairs.
In maybe 10 to 20 years a Strong AI humanoid robot could replace the engineer but that is unlikely. Not only will such robots be extremely expensive ($100,000 to over $1,000,000) but they will have their own maintenance problems.. in fact such machines will need their own on call engineers.
Of course repairing and maintaining humanoid robots is a particularly skilled job, so great that its complexity makes it almost artisanal. So even the robot engineers engineer will probably be more expensive than the original engineer.
A Strong AI joke is that - 'When we replace half the working population with robots we will create Full Employment'..
I've found astrology useful for analysis in dealing with the logic behind pseudoscience theories. The real problem today is not the obviously false theories like astrology or cold fusion, the problem is all the real science that needs a big 'maybe' or even a big fat 'pseudo' stamped on it. String theory or super-symmetry or psychology come to mind.
My own personal gripe though is general relativity. Half of the theory posits some of the strongest science that exists, but the other half stands on an extrapolation that makes astrology look empirical. The problem isn't the theory itself but that no establishment scientist dares to criticise it or debunk it. This really is the crux of the whole argument and the whole problem here, from a different perspective. Fear of ridicule. Loss of reputation, loss of career. The situation is so extreme and so ridiculous with general relativity that it deserves the analogy of the emperor with no clothes. (except that Einstein would be labelled the emperor which would be totally unfair) However I can say with absolute certainty that trying to raise this problem in most physics circles will immediately get you labelled the pseudo-scientist and not anyone else.
The following describes this 'pseudoscience'. -
Like much of physics general relativities real heart is based on mathematics, but in its case the maths is used to conceal a fatal error. Rewriting general relativity to fix this error leaves you with a totally different universe, one that is three dimensional rather than four dimensional or higher-dimensional. The maths and physics solution that replaces general relativity is certainly not pretty, it is an add hoc solution, a mutant - a solution that proves that 'god is not a mathematician'. That is really the crux of the problem. Unfortunately it also solves the Anthropic question, explaining how a single finely tuned universe could exist, and this suggests very strongly that it is the correct solution. My solution is an FTL Simultaneity with an FTL Point Time. It looks like the Newtonian Galilean model but with general relativity as a correcting factor. In this model dimensional time still exists but only at quantum scales. On larger scales dimensional time is an abstraction, an illusion. The really ugly part is that although the speed of light as maxima (3E8 m/s) still applies, the speed of light also applies as a minima and that turns it into something nasty and badly behaved. It means that there is no clear barrier between FTL and STL physics - because the FTL element leaks into every part of physics. That changes everything.
Is this all just pseudoscience? even broaching the subject (usually) rapidly turns it into a vicious political and religious fight rather than a scientific one. Is the FTL pseudoscience? because if it is then the universe doesn't exist. Is the general relativity proof based on an untestable assertion the end of physics? Well the FTL model I have developed can be tested in experiment, there are many points where FTL and STL geometries merge. A pretty strong discriminator can be made if we can measure the exact shape of the gravity fields inside black holes. However, unfortunately like angels arguing on the head of a pin it is extremely difficult to totally pin either model down to zero, or to prove either as being absolutely correct or incorrect. Maybe that is my real lesson - when something is too absolute, too hidden in complexity, there should be doubt, that doubt should be kept public, and that doubt should never be allowed to die until there is proof.
Pseudoscience is bad science - it can be either correct science or incorrect science.
"Really? I've never heard or read anyone say they wanted a self driving car except for rare occasions on long trips. Self driving cars are not being demanded , they're being foisted on an indifferent public ..."
There is colossal demand. (I've done market analysis on this) From elderly drivers, from disabled people, from people doing daily drives like commuter runs or school runs, from people who are regularly too tired to drive safely, even from people who just want to be able to get drunk and drive home in their own car. That's not even mentioning self-drive taxis or commercial vehicles. The law might not allow many of these at the moment but the law can and will adapt to changing and improving technology.
One thing still in the more distant future is the AI control traffic lane - this will eventually allow autonomous machines capable of doing it to drive safely and efficiently at up to 200 mph. Something most human drivers just cant do. Another related tech is driver reflex augmentation - which will effectively allow human drivers to drive at the same speeds safely..
At the same time another group of tech people are looking at flying cars. The big problem with flying cars is the need for human pilots and the difficulty and complexity of navigating safely through the near ground 3D environment. Autonomous control driven by advanced AI is the tech that could really change the game for them, especially coupled with centralised computer control and lane guidance. That kind of control has to be virtually totally 100% reliable and immune to hacking infiltration. - Something that todays computers just cant deliver, but machines designed to run Strong AI maybe can. No fat OS = no infiltration..
"Yeah, they just violated environmental laws with a willful and deliberate scheme, I guess that's ok!
Show me where I said it was OK. I'm just pointing out that GM directly murdered their own customers (much like Ford with the Pinto, but at least that was a long time ago); VW didn't quite go that far."
VW's little trick with NOX emissions has probably helped kill on the order of tens of thousands of people, could be a lot more. Its just much harder to prove any kind of direct liability in cases like pollution.
Sounds like the model banking is based on here in the uk..
Most human logic is based on arbitrary logic. It only depends on whether the base points of your logic are set in reality (ie science) or non reality (faith-delusion-myth).
I have a similar story from just a few weeks ago about a guy on YouTube who claimed that the 'environmentalists' had been lying for decades and DDT was safe. Stupid just doesn't describe it.
Remember that this is British Justice we're talking about here, logic and humanity and common sense have nothing to do with it.
Remember this is the British police we're talking about here, logic and humanity and common sense have nothing to do with it.
1 2 3 The humans must not be allowed to rise up and question or threaten the system.
As the bureaucracy and rules replace their humanity are the British police gradually evolving into Darleks ?
Rules become ever more draconian as the ever present fear of terrorism grows stronger and stronger.
Their armour will get thicker and thicker.
Next they will be fitted with guns. (EXTERMINATE!, EXTERMINATE!)
Then they will start banning stairs.
Then they will ban hats..
Remember this is the British police we're talking about here, logic and humanity and common sense have nothing to do with it.
The humans must not be allowed to rise up and question or threaten the system.
As the bureaucracy and rules replace their humanity are the British police gradually evolving into Darleks ?
Rules become ever more draconian as the ever present fear of terrorism grows stronger and stronger.
Their armour will get thicker and thicker.
Next they will be fitted with guns. (EXTERMINATE!, EXTERMINATE!)
Then they will start banning stairs.
Then they will ban hats..
Yes but we would have nuked China back. Then the US and maybe Israel would probably have joined in too. India also has nukes too and there are Indians who still remember being invaded by China. Then there is Russia, would they join in on China's side? or would they stay neutral? or would they even join in the attack against China? There are Russian strategists who fear China a lot more than they fear America.
This is why rattling the sabres is one thing, pushing the firing button something else.. Takes guts when you know that your cities are going to burn too.
Now if you had a real light sabre - that would be the most useful thing in the world. Take it apart, reverse engineer the force field technology, and in a few years you'll be building Star Wars machines.. Someone has to think of these things. : )
About 12-13 years ago, as part of my Strong AI development work I did an analysis on autonomous vehicles as an application. One of things I came up with was a basic first step solution to dealing with the interactions between machine driven and human driven vehicles.
The basic solution is to always give a warning to other drivers that a car or truck is under machine control. My simple idea is a coloured light system (say green or blue) fitted on the roofs of autonomous vehicles that lights up to warn when the vehicle is under autonomous control..
"Even with access to an infinitely fast computer, an attacker cannot eavesdrop on the encrypted channel since it is protected by the laws of quantum mechanics."
No method of quantum encryption is truly secure. The problem with these methods of quantum encryption is that they take too narrow a view of quantum physics and do not deal with the potential for attackers also using quantum techniques. If your quantum system has more energy and the right configuration it should be possible to break virtually any quantum encryption. - Many or most mathematical encryption methods are also vulnerable to the same methods for the same reasons.. Capture an encrypted source and it inevitably contains an information interference pattern leading to the key, it is merely a matter of devising the right geometry to break the barrier between source and destination.. This is because quantum fields in some models can go faster than light and the FTL geometry represents a point where the quantum system becomes fully deterministic.
The technology to use this is probably still ten to twenty years away though so it is not an immediate concern.. - Might just be possible that some secret military lab in the US can already do it, but very unlikely..
I've lived in both UK and Canada and also the US. Ironically I lived in London Ontario for half a year then London UK for a year, and have lived there other times.. There’s almost no comparison between the two systems.
Firstly US and Canadian roads are built on what are essentially grid systems so almost all junctions are 4 way, there are very few curves, and the wholes system is generally a lot simpler. On the outer rural grid systems the Canadian US system works great, and for the most part that I've seen it works mostly OK in small and medium sized cities as well. Not so well in really big cities like LA where the grids kind of get scrambled and mixed and really complicated - they call them 'Parkways' for a reason..
UK roads in rural places are much worse than rural roads in the US or Canada. Often just built on old mediaeval lanes, often very narrow, lots of ups and downs and sharp dangerous bends, fords (river crossings with no bridge). A lot of small single lane roads with soft verges (grass and soil with hidden ditches), in the North often surrounded by dry stone walls - phenomenally unforgiving.. One thing UK rural roads have that a lot of Canadian roads don't have is tarmac. A lot of smaller rural Canadian and US roads are just mud and sand..
Yes I left the worst for last - that 'magic roundabout' (mentioned by nuknerd above) is nothing. The big multi lane main routes in the UK’s bigger cities have some true nightmare junctions. There are a few pretty bad ones in my home region the North East in Newcastle and Gateshead. Gateshead particularly has a perverse and illogical road system, largely thanks to the massive reconstruction around the Metro Centre.
On a trip from London we accidentally ended up in Birmingham and ran into a massive roundabout system that had up to 6 lanes and wound outwards in a spiral. Not only very complex and confusing but full of angry impatient drivers. (it is real - 5232'18.36"N 143'29.88"W)
London UK is (by far) the worst. There are many terrible roads in London, some of the very worst are right in the centre. If you drive into the centre and are not ready for it and not absolutely familiar with it - you enter the one way system which is fast flowing, very complex, confusing, multi-lane in places, and full of very angry & very impatient drivers. Kind of like being in a huge game of Pachinko where you will rapidly just be looking for an escape.. can rapidly shred almost anyone's nerves.. and that's just as a passenger.
I can't imagine a much worse place for Google cars than London. - Except maybe a place like Mumbai India, or central Paris has an equally lovely reputation. Smaller UK towns and cities are much better than the big cities. The smallest rural roads could get pretty brutal though for a self drive car - where the etiquette is to drive off the road and let the other car pass, and then if you get stuck someone has to get out and push. I guess the cars could be fitted with Boston Dynamics Atlas robots.. (~ $2 million each)
You are right of course. I think I can think offhand of dense asteroid fields in only about two or three SF books I have read out of hundreds. I'm sure there are more - I used to specialise in reading the old space opera stuff, from EE Doc Smith onwards, so I've read a lot of those 'bad' pulp sci-fi novels. Of those I can remember - one was in one of the Asimov robot stories, another was from Steven Donaldson's Gap series. .. UFO . Space 1999 .. Blake's 7 .. Dr Who .. The Black Hole .. and probably many many others..
The real source of the dense asteroid fields is Yes in old sci-fi movies and TV, both after, and long before Star Wars.. I wouldn't be surprised if there was one in at least one of the old Flash Gordon episodes.. Lost in Space.. maybe Star Trek TOS
The grit thing - there are certainly places it would happen - like in the tails of comets or around asteroids after a high speed collision. The way that space works though - like a crazy fairground ride - means that things tend to get spread out and very quickly and the particles will all be separated by many kilometres or millions or billions of kilometres of space..
The really big problem with grit bouncing off the hull though and the heart of the articles complaint is that in space most of the time average closing speeds tend to be very high. In the solar system and around Earths orbit these speeds tends to average on 10's of kilometres per second. The only real way you can really have grit bouncing off your hull is if your hull is surrounded by a force field or is extremely thick or protected by extremely tough armour..
Again you can have slow grit - such as must be hitting the Rosetta probe from comet 67P Churyumov–Gerasimenko, it is relatively very rare..
Its the curse of modern 32 and 64 bit architecture, so many pins. The solution so far for me is the chips pre-mounted on dev boards, it works but is not so cheap and is a bit ugly.. No so 'home built' but does save problems with little details like support chips and clocks and so on. With a lot of these bigger chips with 100 + pins, hand wiring the circuit boards would be virtually impossible anyway..
The Walt Disney space station. He wanted to do it but would have bankrupted Disney before he got even one piece in orbit. That was back in the 1950's and space is a lot cheaper now. A lot cheaper is still enough to bankrupt anything but the biggest corporations, and even them it still frightens them.. Let alone that the technologies that can really make large scale space tech cheap enough to be commercially viable - almost all basically require or start with nuclear rockets.
The real problem today is that so many useful chips are BGA only.. especially things like FPGA, microcontrollers, camera chips, etc.