Everyone seems to forget we've had fully autonomous lethal weapons for decades - they're called land mines and sea mines. All we've done is make them smarter and more mobile. Making them smarter should only help reduce the number of false-positive casualties.
To some extent, the same basic rules apply to robots as minefields - the person culpable is the one who deploys them. We've just got more control now than we did before.
Yeah, that would be a terrible commute - >12 miles by ferry each way, every day. Admittedly, there's often less traffic to deal with, but you don't tend to get seasick on the Interstate on a regular basis. It's probably not worth doing until you can virtualize most of your workforce and make them telecommute. Even then, it leaves you reliant on a network and power bridge to the mainland, which is not cheap. It does fix your cooling problem somewhat - the ocean is a decent heat-sink.
An alternate strategy - if you choose to opt out, you are then financially liable for all measles cases in your state. Take the costs from all those cases, divide by the # of children on your "Idiot Parents" list, and send each parent a bill. Do this every year until they wise up. This prevents people from externalizing the costs of their poor decisions on everyone else.
This math error basically doesn't matter. 1.3 trillion seems like a lot for a mistake, but that's like arguing with the magician who's just accidentally dropped a card out of his sleeve. Does it really matter whether it was a card from the deck or an extra copy of a card? It's still a magic trick. The whole proposal is built on poor estimates and pipe dreams with little or no supporting evidence.
Admittedly, it's still a pretty big math error. I wonder if someone forgot to renew the license on the spreadsheet software at the White House and they had to break out the pencils and slide rules?
This is already being solved - the Defense industry is working on autonomous offroad driving which handles all the things you've mentioned. Plus, some of the newer farm machinery can already be programmed to drive waypoints by GPS, so you can easily see combining the two in the near future.
Found the other relevant paper - "Model-assisted pattern search methods for optimizing expensive computer simulations" by Seifert, Torczon, and Trosset at The College of William and Mary in VA
Yep - it looks like they rediscovered known methods for optimization using a series of cheap approximations of the black-box. You find the optimal solution of the approximation and use that to choose one or more points to evaluate on the original black-box. Then you update your approximation with the results and repeat. I was doing this in college back in 1999. I wrote to generate pseudo-random functions to test on, and we used the same class of functions as approximations for the harder, more expensive problem.
The group that's complaining doesn't realize that we've deployed "killer robots" for a century now - they're called mines and especially naval mines. They may not be your traditional humanoid Robbie the Robot with a gun, but they are fully autonomous, capable of selecting targets on their own, and definitely capable of killing people.
Many of the arguments they make in the article are bogus anyway. If you took the text and substituted "people" for "robot" it would read just as well and make just as much sense. The authors act like people don't routinely mess up, make bad decisions, follow charismatic, insane evil overlords, or do generally nasty things to each other for very little reason all the time.
There is a lot of strategy. However, since the battle happens in 3D and there's no real way to maintain formations, you tend to end up with these blobs of friendly ships and enemy ships. The strategy is in maintaining the proper range to friends and enemies. Weapons have different ranges and tracking speeds. Similarl, the repair ships (think healers) have limited range as well (roughly 50 km for the largest). In these big fights, a lot of the work is in choosing targets, trying to do enough damage to destroy the target before his repairs kick in. There's also a fair amount of complication from the electronic warfare possibilities - jamming and such.
I work in the defense industry, writing software for both fielded systems and the modeling and simulation used to define and design such systems. I constantly use algebra, trigonometry, FFTs, logarithms, complex mathematics, statistics, probability, and a bit of calculus underlying many of the models. I do a fair amount of data analysis, which has me thinking about the various ways to condense and display data.
My coworkers who can't understand the math are relegated to building UIs and writing messaging interfaces. Those of us who can understand the math create all the underlying code doing the real work. The former are much more likely to be viewed as replaceable and laid off in the bad times.
It seems like the system would be greatly enhanced by simply requiring the cellular providers to send a free text message to every subscriber. It could contain the essential information and/or a link to more info, or simply say, "Turn on the radio or TV"
I did precisely what you described - good state school undergrad followed by top-tier university for graduate school. I still met many of the leaders in the field while a PhD student and got paid to go - tuition waiver plus stipend. I came out with a PhD debt-free and have never regretted it.
Paid internships or co-op work are definitely worthwhile.
This would be a lot more interesting if it was actual autonomous vehicles. The article makes this sound like the same old human-labor intensive process, just by a tethered remote vehicle. It seems like a well designed set of robots would be capable of finding, identifying, and destroying the mines with minimal supervision. You could run a mothership to supply power and fresh explosives. A bit of effort could clean up ALL the mines in the area, not just the few that happen to be in the way of this particular pipeline.
Agree. The "who learns about the transmission or storage of information about certain illegal activities or an illegal image " part is critical. It doesn't say you have to screen everything that passes through your Wi-fi connection, just that you are obligated to report such a crime if you should happen to spot it.
They've stated that when you uninstall the game, it gives you back the one usage that installation was occupying. Thus, you could uninstall from your PC and install on your laptop, and it wouldn't count against your total. This still leaves the loophole when a harddrive crashes or you have to wipe for some other reason, but it's not as bad as it sounds.
The part that makes the least sense is that it sounds like they aren't making the information classified, just unexportable. ITAR governs what materials US citizens and companies are allowed to discuss, give, or sell to foreign entities.
NASA specifically implements activities for which it does not make sense for the private sector to pursue. They've been battered by short term budget politics for decades. The big projects need consistent funding over a period of time. If the leadership wants to pursue something on the scale of a manned MARS mission, it needs to pass a specific, multi-year appropriation to do so. Otherwise, it just forces NASA to redirect funds from an already strapped budget which were being spent to support research underway.
I think Congress got this right. The president just wants a bullet point for speeches, "I will put humans on Mars by 20XX" without facing the facts that he got to pay for these things as well.
But even so, all government contractors are bound by ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Restrictions) and DoD security protocols which would proclude offshore contractors from even being given the technical data necessary to write code. I'm skeptical that there's any meat to this story. Admittedly, the DoD is trying to buy more COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) technology and programs, some of which could easily be coded anywhere. But such items are not specifically built for the DoD, and any malicious code would affect all consumers of the product. Further, any procurement item undergoes rigorous testing, which would hopefully catch many problems.
I read this post and thought you were making up a quote to be funny. Then I read TFA. I wonder if such an e-mail can be submitted as evidence at his contempt hearing?
Favorite Quote from the Consumer Products Safety Comission: "Computer batteries can get hot during normal use. Do not use your computer on your lap."
Not much good as a LAPtop, then.
While I'm hesitant to accept the truth of this information, if it is true, it could be an excellent sign that the movie will actually get made. Everything I heard was that all involved wanted to make "The Hobbit", but the Tolkein estate either wouldn't lease the rights to the story or had already leased them to somebody who was sitting on them. This sounds like MGM may have managed to aquire the rights, finally.
In addition to being an orbiter, it will also serve to land the crew on Earth when they come home. Prior to the moon mission, NASA intends to use it to continue construction and maintainence on the International Space Station.
The portion that lands on the moon, and the other portion that pushes everything out of earth orbit are being developed seperately.
Like your company, we have some restrictions on what items can't be checked in. You are allowed to travel with Proprietary data, but it MUST remain in your possession at all times. This may include data on paper, CDs, removeable storage, and laptops. The severe restrictions would make it impossible for us to travel with such data and comply with company security directives.
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Everyone seems to forget we've had fully autonomous lethal weapons for decades - they're called land mines and sea mines. All we've done is make them smarter and more mobile. Making them smarter should only help reduce the number of false-positive casualties. To some extent, the same basic rules apply to robots as minefields - the person culpable is the one who deploys them. We've just got more control now than we did before.
Yeah, that would be a terrible commute - >12 miles by ferry each way, every day. Admittedly, there's often less traffic to deal with, but you don't tend to get seasick on the Interstate on a regular basis. It's probably not worth doing until you can virtualize most of your workforce and make them telecommute. Even then, it leaves you reliant on a network and power bridge to the mainland, which is not cheap. It does fix your cooling problem somewhat - the ocean is a decent heat-sink.
An alternate strategy - if you choose to opt out, you are then financially liable for all measles cases in your state. Take the costs from all those cases, divide by the # of children on your "Idiot Parents" list, and send each parent a bill. Do this every year until they wise up. This prevents people from externalizing the costs of their poor decisions on everyone else.
This math error basically doesn't matter. 1.3 trillion seems like a lot for a mistake, but that's like arguing with the magician who's just accidentally dropped a card out of his sleeve. Does it really matter whether it was a card from the deck or an extra copy of a card? It's still a magic trick. The whole proposal is built on poor estimates and pipe dreams with little or no supporting evidence. Admittedly, it's still a pretty big math error. I wonder if someone forgot to renew the license on the spreadsheet software at the White House and they had to break out the pencils and slide rules?
For example, see the article http://arstechnica.com/cars/20...
This is already being solved - the Defense industry is working on autonomous offroad driving which handles all the things you've mentioned. Plus, some of the newer farm machinery can already be programmed to drive waypoints by GPS, so you can easily see combining the two in the near future.
Found the other relevant paper - "Model-assisted pattern search methods for optimizing expensive computer simulations" by Seifert, Torczon, and Trosset at The College of William and Mary in VA
Yep - it looks like they rediscovered known methods for optimization using a series of cheap approximations of the black-box. You find the optimal solution of the approximation and use that to choose one or more points to evaluate on the original black-box. Then you update your approximation with the results and repeat. I was doing this in college back in 1999. I wrote to generate pseudo-random functions to test on, and we used the same class of functions as approximations for the harder, more expensive problem.
Wrong - the CIA keeps its own records separate, for exactly this reason. FBI, DoD, and Contractors however were screwed by this.
The group that's complaining doesn't realize that we've deployed "killer robots" for a century now - they're called mines and especially naval mines. They may not be your traditional humanoid Robbie the Robot with a gun, but they are fully autonomous, capable of selecting targets on their own, and definitely capable of killing people. Many of the arguments they make in the article are bogus anyway. If you took the text and substituted "people" for "robot" it would read just as well and make just as much sense. The authors act like people don't routinely mess up, make bad decisions, follow charismatic, insane evil overlords, or do generally nasty things to each other for very little reason all the time.
There is a lot of strategy. However, since the battle happens in 3D and there's no real way to maintain formations, you tend to end up with these blobs of friendly ships and enemy ships. The strategy is in maintaining the proper range to friends and enemies. Weapons have different ranges and tracking speeds. Similarl, the repair ships (think healers) have limited range as well (roughly 50 km for the largest). In these big fights, a lot of the work is in choosing targets, trying to do enough damage to destroy the target before his repairs kick in. There's also a fair amount of complication from the electronic warfare possibilities - jamming and such.
I work in the defense industry, writing software for both fielded systems and the modeling and simulation used to define and design such systems. I constantly use algebra, trigonometry, FFTs, logarithms, complex mathematics, statistics, probability, and a bit of calculus underlying many of the models. I do a fair amount of data analysis, which has me thinking about the various ways to condense and display data. My coworkers who can't understand the math are relegated to building UIs and writing messaging interfaces. Those of us who can understand the math create all the underlying code doing the real work. The former are much more likely to be viewed as replaceable and laid off in the bad times.
It seems like the system would be greatly enhanced by simply requiring the cellular providers to send a free text message to every subscriber. It could contain the essential information and/or a link to more info, or simply say, "Turn on the radio or TV"
I did precisely what you described - good state school undergrad followed by top-tier university for graduate school. I still met many of the leaders in the field while a PhD student and got paid to go - tuition waiver plus stipend. I came out with a PhD debt-free and have never regretted it. Paid internships or co-op work are definitely worthwhile.
This would be a lot more interesting if it was actual autonomous vehicles. The article makes this sound like the same old human-labor intensive process, just by a tethered remote vehicle. It seems like a well designed set of robots would be capable of finding, identifying, and destroying the mines with minimal supervision. You could run a mothership to supply power and fresh explosives. A bit of effort could clean up ALL the mines in the area, not just the few that happen to be in the way of this particular pipeline.
Agree. The "who learns about the transmission or storage of information about certain illegal activities or an illegal image " part is critical. It doesn't say you have to screen everything that passes through your Wi-fi connection, just that you are obligated to report such a crime if you should happen to spot it.
They've stated that when you uninstall the game, it gives you back the one usage that installation was occupying. Thus, you could uninstall from your PC and install on your laptop, and it wouldn't count against your total. This still leaves the loophole when a harddrive crashes or you have to wipe for some other reason, but it's not as bad as it sounds.
The part that makes the least sense is that it sounds like they aren't making the information classified, just unexportable. ITAR governs what materials US citizens and companies are allowed to discuss, give, or sell to foreign entities.
NASA specifically implements activities for which it does not make sense for the private sector to pursue. They've been battered by short term budget politics for decades. The big projects need consistent funding over a period of time. If the leadership wants to pursue something on the scale of a manned MARS mission, it needs to pass a specific, multi-year appropriation to do so. Otherwise, it just forces NASA to redirect funds from an already strapped budget which were being spent to support research underway. I think Congress got this right. The president just wants a bullet point for speeches, "I will put humans on Mars by 20XX" without facing the facts that he got to pay for these things as well.
But even so, all government contractors are bound by ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Restrictions) and DoD security protocols which would proclude offshore contractors from even being given the technical data necessary to write code. I'm skeptical that there's any meat to this story. Admittedly, the DoD is trying to buy more COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) technology and programs, some of which could easily be coded anywhere. But such items are not specifically built for the DoD, and any malicious code would affect all consumers of the product. Further, any procurement item undergoes rigorous testing, which would hopefully catch many problems.
I read this post and thought you were making up a quote to be funny. Then I read TFA. I wonder if such an e-mail can be submitted as evidence at his contempt hearing?
Favorite Quote from the Consumer Products Safety Comission: "Computer batteries can get hot during normal use. Do not use your computer on your lap." Not much good as a LAPtop, then.
While I'm hesitant to accept the truth of this information, if it is true, it could be an excellent sign that the movie will actually get made. Everything I heard was that all involved wanted to make "The Hobbit", but the Tolkein estate either wouldn't lease the rights to the story or had already leased them to somebody who was sitting on them. This sounds like MGM may have managed to aquire the rights, finally.
In addition to being an orbiter, it will also serve to land the crew on Earth when they come home. Prior to the moon mission, NASA intends to use it to continue construction and maintainence on the International Space Station. The portion that lands on the moon, and the other portion that pushes everything out of earth orbit are being developed seperately.
Like your company, we have some restrictions on what items can't be checked in. You are allowed to travel with Proprietary data, but it MUST remain in your possession at all times. This may include data on paper, CDs, removeable storage, and laptops. The severe restrictions would make it impossible for us to travel with such data and comply with company security directives.