And what about the not so intelligent intersection that has a bug that paralyzes traffic for miles around? What happens if a vehicle decides to make a turn that it failed to tell the intersection about? What if the sun is setting or rising and vehicles are trying to communicate with intersection sensors directly between the sun and the vehicle? And what if a car that is supposed to zip through the intersection runs out of gas/diesel/ charge? How about those absurd vehicles that some folks favor thet block line of sight between the intersection and any vehicles behind them. What about the somewhat notorious intersection a mile from my house where three state highways and two active rail lines come together? Is it going to require different software? And what happens when they run the Memorial Day Parade through that intersection as they do every year
What happens when the power fails?
Gonna be a few problems.
How about the alternative of having the vehicles approaching the intersection negotiate right of way with each other?
Seven level teletype tape, not punched cards. For typos on cards, we just replaced the faulty card with a corrected card. (And, BTW, most everyone used a sequence number in cols 72-80 initially all ending in 00 so we could insert cards when we'd left a few lines of code out).
But this isn't being proposed by teh Ebil Gubbermint, it's being proposed by nice, safe and friendly private enterprise...
Jawohl!!!.. Giants of integrity like Volkswagen
In reality I cant see this working. They're trying to replace individual registrations with one giant registration. In theory it sounds great, but in reality it'll just be one more password you need to remember and another giant security nightmare.
Being as nothing on the Internet seems to be secure other than the US Treasury, Treasury Direct program which seemingly achieves security by being pretty much unusable, I imagine this will turn out to be just another attack vector.
Might want to check the currents in the Indian Ocean. Presumably they would drag the ice North a bit -- far enough to get i picked up by the counter-clockwise flowing West Australian Current, then near the coast of Africa, they will drag it North a bit to pick up the clockwise currents in Arabian Sea, and finally drag it North a bit as it drifts by on its way toward India. It's surely nowhere near that simple, but the point is that they probably don't have to drag it all the way. OTOH, there's a lot of really warm water in the equatorial Indian Ocean. I wonder how much ice you need to start with to deliver 20,000,000,000 gallons to the UAE?
It is true that if you visit France and appear to be a native English speaker, lots of people will pretend they don't speak it. Just practice asking, "Do you speak Russian?" first and then they'll answer you in English.
Many decades ago there was a US TV show called Candid Camera that taped people's reactions to impossible/uncomfortable situations using a hidden camera. One episode featured a young woman with a VERY heavy suitcase seeking help in handling it in Paris. The woman was a native Parisian. The passersby she stopped pretended not to understand her French.
I believe that it is a French tradition to declare English to be a dying language on Star Wars Day (May 4) every year. The practice purportedly dates back at least to 1415AD when Charles the VI's inflamatory anti-English language Star Wars Day speech purportedly led directly to the Battle of Agincourt in October of that year and thus to a dramatic change in direction in the Hundred Years War.
(Charles VI was reportedly exceptionally crazed even for a 15th Century European monarch.)
I believe that most of Apple's (untaxed) expenses are incurred in elsewhere, but most of its profits are made in Ireland where they are taxed at a whopping 0%. The Irish operation is said to be so efficient that it requires no office space, no utilities, and no actual employees.
I've had far more problems with Apple software than MS.
Much like the recent US election, both the candidates are so awful that it's difficult to decide which is worse. I'm not Apple compatible and I loathe Windows which has deteriorated over the past 20 years to the point of being pretty much unusable. That said, I have trouble believing that Unix based Apple software that is vendor tuned to specific known hardware configurations could possibly have as many problems as Windows which tries to work equally poorly on pretty much anything that could pass in bad light for a PC.
I also wonder if the R&D dollars wouldn't be better spent on energy storage/battery systems and wind/solar.
I think there is plenty of R&D money available for energy storage of all sorts. And lots of profits to be made/being made as "batteries" improve. It's a long, slow slog from where we are to where we want to be. Sort of like in 1965 when we knew we'd eventually have supercomputer computing capacity in desktop units. We just didn't know how long it would take. I suspect that more R&D money probably wouldn't have speeded the development of modern PCs very much.
The big problem with wind and solar is that they really aren't all that much use without abundant cheap electrical storage -- a point that seems to be completely lost on those who advocate them.
I am a bit surprised that so little of the money going toward "green" R&D isn't directed at storage. I don't think money would help (much), but I'm surprised we aren't trying anyway.
Whether it produces more energy out than it takes to maintain tells you it can run....
It also needs to not blow up. The Tokamak design is awfully complex and seems to me to depend on a lot of things never, ever failing. While a failed fusion power plant probably isn't going to be a Chernobyl style disaster, it's probably not going to be all that cheap or easy to clean up.
Not that I wouldn't like fusion power to work. But I'd like to see a few of these things running in the Mojave and delivering power to the grid with reasonable capacity factors over a period of a few years before I developed any enthusiasm for them anywhere near my back yard.
What you are really saying is that we should colonize Venus first.
The current record for instrument package survival under Venerian conditions is what? Two hours and seven minutes I think. How about you go colonize Venus and I'll stay here make sure nobody steals your beer cap collection? Have a great trip and send lots of postcards.
What exactly can a human do that a rover can't? More importantly, what can a human do that a THOUSAND rovers, each with uniquely specialized instrument packages, can't do?
Yep, You get it. I think we're just about at the end of the era where geology, mineral exploration, etc even on Earth can be done by a guy with a shovel, a pickaxe and a mule. If that's your thing better get out into the wilderness NOW because you'll be lucky to get 30 years in the field. And that's on Earth where you don't need breathing gear, a high tech suit, etc,etc,etc just to move around
There may be some cases where planetary exploration works best with a robot, human team. But the human probably is mostly going to be someplace safe (e.g. in orbit) not down in the adit sorting gravel.
Can we have a little common sense on both sides? Putting a couple of humans on Mars for a few hours a couple of decades from now is going to be incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive (I'm thinking around $200,000,000,000US) and largely pointless. Alternatively we could launch a new Mars Rover every two years for decades and learn far more about Mars for far less money and without putting lives at risk.
OTOH rocketry costs are coming down and technology is improving. I'm thinking that within a century there probably will be one or more manned research stations on Mars. It isn't THAT much more uninhabitable than the South Pole where there's been a base for 60 years (why?). Yes the researchers will likely be underground, but presumably they can find some way to use their time there productively while glancing occasionally at the big screen TV image of the out of doors.. It's no dumber than the ISS really.
Is Mars terraformable? Probably. It's got some gravity and a near 24 hour day and probably useful differentiated mineral deposits. But we can't make it Earthlike with today's technologies. Moreover, folks who live there for many years probably aren't ever coming back to Earth. Earth gravity might not kill them, but they'd probably wish they were dead after a few days at 1G.
"Tell that to someone whose brakes go out while they're driving."
Happens from time to time when master cylinders fail. Mostly people manage to get the vehicle stopped with engine braking and or the parking brake. Or they end up in a low speed collision with something solid like the vehicle in front of them.
Now having a ball joint fail causing the front wheel to tuck under the car... That's a different story.
But mostly car engines stop running and the car just sort of coasts to a stop.
Seriously, if you keep the bloody things below say 500 meters above terrain and keep them out of controlled airspace, you may not need ATC. They can just negotiate right of way with each other... In principle anyway.... Might even work.
The greatest innovation of Apple Computer was their Newton device, which generates the neccessary gravity to keep cars and users from flying off our planet because of the centrifugal force.
Man, you telling us that all we have to do to go to Mars is turn our Apple devices upside down? That's gotta be good for a Nobel Prize.
You're right. However, autonomous cars are almost certainly going to happen, albeit after a longer delay than most folks think. Once the problems of navigation in two dimensions are routinely handled by hardware and software, extending the sensors and computer control to three dimensions probably won't be that big a deal.
I think other issues like safety, maintenance, insurance, security might be a bigger problem than driver skill. Hopefully none of the latter will be needed, otherwise no structure or living creature will be safe.
If flying cars are available the defenses will be useless.
Naw, the flying cars won't work well enough to be a security problem.
Seriously, You're absolutely correct. I expect that once the problem becomes apparent, the use of Personal Air Vehicles will be SEVERELY restricted. Might still be some usage for taxis and delivery services -- if the vehicles can be made safe enough, if they can't land on people, and can really be kept out of restricted areas including military bases, public areas, parks, etc, etc, etc.
So the new test for AI should not be, can we distinguish it from a human, but is it able to cold call an elderly widow and scam her out of most of her savings?
It'll probably write nightmarish recursive logic in some language of its own design that no human or other AI can make any sense of.
Seriously -- given the diversity of human thinking and the fact that no two people can actually agree on much of anything, why do we expect that large scale AI will be trustworthy, useful, or even sane.
Slashdot Mirror
And what about the not so intelligent intersection that has a bug that paralyzes traffic for miles around? What happens if a vehicle decides to make a turn that it failed to tell the intersection about? What if the sun is setting or rising and vehicles are trying to communicate with intersection sensors directly between the sun and the vehicle? And what if a car that is supposed to zip through the intersection runs out of gas/diesel/ charge? How about those absurd vehicles that some folks favor thet block line of sight between the intersection and any vehicles behind them. What about the somewhat notorious intersection a mile from my house where three state highways and two active rail lines come together? Is it going to require different software? And what happens when they run the Memorial Day Parade through that intersection as they do every year
What happens when the power fails?
Gonna be a few problems.
How about the alternative of having the vehicles approaching the intersection negotiate right of way with each other?
Seven level teletype tape, not punched cards. For typos on cards, we just replaced the faulty card with a corrected card. (And, BTW, most everyone used a sequence number in cols 72-80 initially all ending in 00 so we could insert cards when we'd left a few lines of code out).
clang practically writes your code for you.
Indeed? Is this clang thingee cheaper than Indians?
Asking for a friend with an MBA.
But this isn't being proposed by teh Ebil Gubbermint, it's being proposed by nice, safe and friendly private enterprise. ..
Jawohl!!!.. Giants of integrity like Volkswagen
In reality I cant see this working. They're trying to replace individual registrations with one giant registration. In theory it sounds great, but in reality it'll just be one more password you need to remember and another giant security nightmare.
Being as nothing on the Internet seems to be secure other than the US Treasury, Treasury Direct program which seemingly achieves security by being pretty much unusable, I imagine this will turn out to be just another attack vector.
Like we need more attack vectors.
Might want to check the currents in the Indian Ocean. Presumably they would drag the ice North a bit -- far enough to get i picked up by the counter-clockwise flowing West Australian Current, then near the coast of Africa, they will drag it North a bit to pick up the clockwise currents in Arabian Sea, and finally drag it North a bit as it drifts by on its way toward India. It's surely nowhere near that simple, but the point is that they probably don't have to drag it all the way. OTOH, there's a lot of really warm water in the equatorial Indian Ocean. I wonder how much ice you need to start with to deliver 20,000,000,000 gallons to the UAE?
Care to share your photos of irrigated fruit, vegetable, and grain crops stretching off to the horizon in Finland's fertile Central Valley?
It is true that if you visit France and appear to be a native English speaker, lots of people will pretend they don't speak it. Just practice asking, "Do you speak Russian?" first and then they'll answer you in English.
Many decades ago there was a US TV show called Candid Camera that taped people's reactions to impossible/uncomfortable situations using a hidden camera. One episode featured a young woman with a VERY heavy suitcase seeking help in handling it in Paris. The woman was a native Parisian. The passersby she stopped pretended not to understand her French.
I believe that it is a French tradition to declare English to be a dying language on Star Wars Day (May 4) every year. The practice purportedly dates back at least to 1415AD when Charles the VI's inflamatory anti-English language Star Wars Day speech purportedly led directly to the Battle of Agincourt in October of that year and thus to a dramatic change in direction in the Hundred Years War.
(Charles VI was reportedly exceptionally crazed even for a 15th Century European monarch.)
I believe that most of Apple's (untaxed) expenses are incurred in elsewhere, but most of its profits are made in Ireland where they are taxed at a whopping 0%. The Irish operation is said to be so efficient that it requires no office space, no utilities, and no actual employees.
No, I'm not making this up -- see https://phys.org/news/2016-08-...
The EU takes a dim view of this arrangement BTW, and says that Apple owes Ireland about $14B in back taxes.
I've had far more problems with Apple software than MS.
Much like the recent US election, both the candidates are so awful that it's difficult to decide which is worse. I'm not Apple compatible and I loathe Windows which has deteriorated over the past 20 years to the point of being pretty much unusable. That said, I have trouble believing that Unix based Apple software that is vendor tuned to specific known hardware configurations could possibly have as many problems as Windows which tries to work equally poorly on pretty much anything that could pass in bad light for a PC.
I also wonder if the R&D dollars wouldn't be better spent on energy storage/battery systems and wind/solar.
I think there is plenty of R&D money available for energy storage of all sorts. And lots of profits to be made/being made as "batteries" improve. It's a long, slow slog from where we are to where we want to be. Sort of like in 1965 when we knew we'd eventually have supercomputer computing capacity in desktop units. We just didn't know how long it would take. I suspect that more R&D money probably wouldn't have speeded the development of modern PCs very much.
The big problem with wind and solar is that they really aren't all that much use without abundant cheap electrical storage -- a point that seems to be completely lost on those who advocate them.
I am a bit surprised that so little of the money going toward "green" R&D isn't directed at storage. I don't think money would help (much), but I'm surprised we aren't trying anyway.
Whether it produces more energy out than it takes to maintain tells you it can run. ...
It also needs to not blow up. The Tokamak design is awfully complex and seems to me to depend on a lot of things never, ever failing. While a failed fusion power plant probably isn't going to be a Chernobyl style disaster, it's probably not going to be all that cheap or easy to clean up.
Not that I wouldn't like fusion power to work. But I'd like to see a few of these things running in the Mojave and delivering power to the grid with reasonable capacity factors over a period of a few years before I developed any enthusiasm for them anywhere near my back yard.
What you are really saying is that we should colonize Venus first.
The current record for instrument package survival under Venerian conditions is what? Two hours and seven minutes I think. How about you go colonize Venus and I'll stay here make sure nobody steals your beer cap collection? Have a great trip and send lots of postcards.
What exactly can a human do that a rover can't? More importantly, what can a human do that a THOUSAND rovers, each with uniquely specialized instrument packages, can't do?
Yep, You get it. I think we're just about at the end of the era where geology, mineral exploration, etc even on Earth can be done by a guy with a shovel, a pickaxe and a mule. If that's your thing better get out into the wilderness NOW because you'll be lucky to get 30 years in the field. And that's on Earth where you don't need breathing gear, a high tech suit, etc,etc,etc just to move around
There may be some cases where planetary exploration works best with a robot, human team. But the human probably is mostly going to be someplace safe (e.g. in orbit) not down in the adit sorting gravel.
Can we have a little common sense on both sides? Putting a couple of humans on Mars for a few hours a couple of decades from now is going to be incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive (I'm thinking around $200,000,000,000US) and largely pointless. Alternatively we could launch a new Mars Rover every two years for decades and learn far more about Mars for far less money and without putting lives at risk.
OTOH rocketry costs are coming down and technology is improving. I'm thinking that within a century there probably will be one or more manned research stations on Mars. It isn't THAT much more uninhabitable than the South Pole where there's been a base for 60 years (why?). Yes the researchers will likely be underground, but presumably they can find some way to use their time there productively while glancing occasionally at the big screen TV image of the out of doors.. It's no dumber than the ISS really.
Is Mars terraformable? Probably. It's got some gravity and a near 24 hour day and probably useful differentiated mineral deposits. But we can't make it Earthlike with today's technologies. Moreover, folks who live there for many years probably aren't ever coming back to Earth. Earth gravity might not kill them, but they'd probably wish they were dead after a few days at 1G.
The power of modern programming languages is that they are expressive, readable, concise, precise, and executable
Maybe SciAm has decided to compete with the Onion. Of course the sentence above isn't really Onion class, but it did make me chuckle.
Anyone have an example of a non-executable programming language and a situation where you might want to use it?
"Tell that to someone whose brakes go out while they're driving."
Happens from time to time when master cylinders fail. Mostly people manage to get the vehicle stopped with engine braking and or the parking brake. Or they end up in a low speed collision with something solid like the vehicle in front of them.
Now having a ball joint fail causing the front wheel to tuck under the car... That's a different story.
But mostly car engines stop running and the car just sort of coasts to a stop.
Seriously, if you keep the bloody things below say 500 meters above terrain and keep them out of controlled airspace, you may not need ATC. They can just negotiate right of way with each other. .. In principle anyway. ... Might even work.
Everybody seems to think energy is free
Well, nearly free. Just need a few more windmills. For details, check in with the Slashdot editors.
(Or ask Donald Trump. He'll explain how coal powered flying cars are gonna make America great again.)
The greatest innovation of Apple Computer was their Newton device, which generates the neccessary gravity to keep cars and users from flying off our planet because of the centrifugal force.
Man, you telling us that all we have to do to go to Mars is turn our Apple devices upside down? That's gotta be good for a Nobel Prize.
More succinctly -- Broken Cars STOP. Broken Aircraft DROP
You're right. However, autonomous cars are almost certainly going to happen, albeit after a longer delay than most folks think. Once the problems of navigation in two dimensions are routinely handled by hardware and software, extending the sensors and computer control to three dimensions probably won't be that big a deal.
I think other issues like safety, maintenance, insurance, security might be a bigger problem than driver skill. Hopefully none of the latter will be needed, otherwise no structure or living creature will be safe.
If flying cars are available the defenses will be useless.
Naw, the flying cars won't work well enough to be a security problem.
Seriously, You're absolutely correct. I expect that once the problem becomes apparent, the use of Personal Air Vehicles will be SEVERELY restricted. Might still be some usage for taxis and delivery services -- if the vehicles can be made safe enough, if they can't land on people, and can really be kept out of restricted areas including military bases, public areas, parks, etc, etc, etc.
So the new test for AI should not be, can we distinguish it from a human, but is it able to cold call an elderly widow and scam her out of most of her savings?
Beware an AI that can do software development
It'll probably write nightmarish recursive logic in some language of its own design that no human or other AI can make any sense of.
Seriously -- given the diversity of human thinking and the fact that no two people can actually agree on much of anything, why do we expect that large scale AI will be trustworthy, useful, or even sane.