grkvlt

i would hope not. in fact, two of the best programmers i know have doctorates in computer science and maths respectively.

these people generally do not learn computer science on their own, they learn programming instead. This is useful, but it is not computer science and there is no way that (most, modulo some exceptional edge cases) non college graduates will have the same skills or abilities as someone who has studied maths and computer science at university, as well as software engineering. there is some truth that the core (80%) of the software engineering profession will always be formed of programmers/developers/software engineers who do not need computer science skills, and simply need to be able to write code according to a specification i suppose. but the profession will be advanced by the (20%) rest who have the skills and knowledge of the underlying science...

Surely this is pretty obviously true for any (US) business person? The S&P 500 represents the top 500 market listed companies, so if you run a company that (within an order of magnitude or two) has the same capitalisation as one of the index companies, then you should expect (on average) to have the same returns as the index. Maybe some people earn a bit more, some less, but they are all operating in the same economy with the same risks and so forth.

But define 'plain file system' - is that NTFS? ext4? ZFS? FAT32? HFS? UFS? ISO9660? TAR? cpio? Some of these are more complicated than others, and all of them have catastrophic failure modes...

Sucks to be you, I guess? But really, what is being suggested is that you can do something you find enjoyable when you are not working; in your case I would assume this would be trying to correct these injustices you see around you...

As with all car analogies, this is NOT about cars - it's telling a story about wealth creation...

I'm not convinced it would be illegal anywhere though. She isn't being prevented from eating there, simply being asked to sit is a particular place, chosen by the management. This is basically the definition of how seating works in restaurant. Your seats are selected for you, and if you don't like it you can go elsewhere...

True, but then you have e.g. The National Enquirer and other supermarket tabloid style outlets. How would you criminalise deceptive fake news about Russia, Elections, Trump or Clinton, versus fake news about Elvis, Aliens, Hitler and Hamsters? Remember that the tabloids publish these false stories intentionally with the deliberate intent to try and convince the reader they are real. The authors know that Elvis is not alive and working in Burger King, but they say it anyway...

It's basically going to prove impossible to find a definition of 'fake news' that everyone is happy with. It can't just be 'Anything that some political group does not approve of' for instance, and it must be neither too broad (including all sorts of innocent publications, like tabloids mentioned earlier, foreign or historical propaganda, advertising that criticises its competitors, etc.) making it impossible to enforce, or narrow (fail to include certain categories of fakery) thus allowing loopholes and failing to accomplish anything.

But ... I think there are pretty good laws in place at the moment to deal with slander, libel, defamation and generally saying (or publishing) untrue things about people (or companies, entire groups of people defined by some shared attribute, locations, etc.) in a way that harms them (materially, or emotionally, maybe just potentially), and they actually deal with the situation where the intent is humour or parody. Too much of the time people have this knee-jerk reaction to X, something happening on the Internet, where they decide that the Internet-relatedness of this X makes it special (despite it being simply the age old problem of Y, but on the Internet) and demand a new crime of 'X' be created with incredibly harsh penalties like life in prison or death or billion dollar fines. But in general, it would suffice to continue to prosecute people for Y, just making sure that the Y-on-the-Internet cases also get looked at and prosecuted equally. I have no real problem with adding 'but on the Internet' as a qualifier to exiting crimes, in the same way as 'with a firearm' or 'while intoxicated' get tacked on as modifiers, increasing prison time and fines as appropriate, but this is almost never put forward as a suggestion.

So maybe we just need 'Libel, but on the Internet' to be prosecuted more often? Meh...

> There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

I think this version is better, sadly no idea who to attribute it to ... ?

Actually, there were plenty of anti-vaxxers on the early Net, as I recall - Look up some of the Sun vs. DEC vs. IBM vs. SGI vs. ... holy wars! ;)

In the UK there is the crime of 'Theft by finding' [0] when you find something you think is abandoned and take it, but do not do anything to determine if it really was abandoned, as opposed to lost, unattended, etc. The Wikipedia article suggests similar offences exist elsewhere...

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_by_finding

Also, remember that this is medium-wavelength IR at 1500nm, which is between two and three times the wavelength of visible at 400-700nm approximately. The energy in a photon is calculated as E = hf = hc/l where h is Planck's constant and c is the speed of light, while l is the wavelength. Notice how the energy decreases nice and linearly as the wavelength increases - this is good!

But if eye-glasses could do that, then people would get retinal burns from the sun, and so on. Remember that all glasses do is adjust the path of light reaching the lens of the eye so that when it arrives at the retina it is identical to the path of light focussed by a normal, healthy eye. Which also means that another way we know it isn't a problem is that people without glasses are safe.

There are absolutely no weather conditions that can transform this near-IR into visible light.

For an example of self-propelled rounds, see the Gyrojet [0] which fired 'microjet' mini rocket propelled bullets. It turns out that militaries have been thinbking about this stuff for a long time, and spendinga lot of money trying to solve these problems. So, most ideas you think of will already have been lookedn at, tested, and devloped iff they actually work, otherwise abandoned - sometimes pending future technological progress and advancements, admittedly...

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet

Or, just maybe, the USA feels that today is not a good day to start a war with Russia?

And the wake word detection is done offline, as can be easily proven by disconnecting your internet and saying 'Alexa report this conversation to the NSA' - she will wake up, but then blink red due to lack of network connectivity.

Tensor-based computing, as you put it, is linear algebra, and it can be simulated on a turing machine quite easily, but this has really no relevance in terms of practical use. Maybe you are thinking of von-Neumann architectures? But there is no escaping the fact that tensorflow and similar algorithms have nothing special about them that requres a different computational paradigm...

No. Hearing is, unquestionably, absolutely, no argument whatsoever, qualitatively BETTER then not being able to hear. A hearing person has a strict superset of the abilities and experiences of a non-hearing person. If a deaf person had my hypothetical 100% hearing restoration device fitted, but still wanted to do the things they did while deaf, nothing is stopping them - maybe my imaginary device has an off switch. But, when that switch is off, they will never be able to hear their name called from across a dimly lit room, or experience the full gamut of orchestral music , or many other things. But they can still use sign language, or write things down on paper to communicate, and so on. I agree that there's more to be developed in terms of CI type technology before this becomes a reality, and there will absolutely be a period of learning and adjustment.

It is unrealistic to suggest that most deaf people would refuse an operation to have their hearing restored. This is just as crass as suggesting that someone who has learned to live a full life with a prosthetic leg would turn down the (hypothetical, futuristic) opportunity to have a brand new biological leg...

No, he's not. Autonomous vehicles and household robots existed when he made these predictions. The predictions are about the ubiquity and widespread, mass market adoption of these things - which has not happened. Yes, the robots and driver assistance systems are better, sometimes hugely improved, and more widespread than 20 years ago, but the operative word in the predictions is MOST and that is where they fall down, and fail to be true.

That's crazy. I find it hard to believe that any profoundly deaf person would refuse some technological device that would give them perfect hearing because 'They are quite happy in their own network.'

No matter whether they consider themselves disabled or not, hearing > not hearing, and anything they could do while deaf can still be done with 100% hearing restored.

I think you're overstating the 'definitely' column here by an enormous amount. Most of the things you included just have not happened. Here are two examples:

1. Household robots are ubiquitous and reliable.

No. Household robots exist and are in an early stage of adoption and development, but are not very capable (single tasks) or reliable, and have yet to reach widespread adoption outside of wealthy, early adopters and enthusiasts.

2. Computers do most of the vehicle driving.

No. Some cars have driver assistance technologies, but mainly expensive luxury models. Most vehicles are driven by humans with zero computer assistance.

I think you are confusing the existance of a thing with the universal availability and adoption of that thing. Where Kurzweil says most he means it. Even back in 1999 there were examples of these things in research labs and so on, the prediction he was making was that they would have moved forward from there to becoming everyday household items, present in the council estates, trailer parks and so on of the world, as well as the San Francisco area...

No, there's also 3G as well, remember. My phone allows 2G, 3G, 2G and 3G, 3G and 4G, or 2G and 3G and 4G network selections in its settins menu (Android 7, Sony)

The thing is, an 'average person' has no real idea or mental model of what five years in prison actually entails. They haven't been locked up ever, even for shorter stretches, and most likely neither have their friends. Basically they know its bad, but with no frame of reference it gets left at that and filed away as irrelevant anyway since prison happens to other, bad people. So there's no way to make a risk calculation about e.g 6mo vs 5y sentences, they are both just vague bad things. Monetary fines work because people understand money and what losing a sum of money means because they deal with money all the time. I assume corporal punishment works too, since everyone has experience with pain?

Yeah, I'm extra happy I have my Amazon Echo now, if it also works as a way of preventing paranoid conspiracy-theorist lunatics from interacting with me!

Sure. The only condition is that you don't share the information in public, on pain of massive fines and imprisonment - you can only use it to improve your internal business processes.

How do you manage to do the typing when you're in the bath?or stepping out of the shower? or when you've left your laptop in another room? or if someone else is using your laptop for something important? The point is not that the voice commands are easy to learn or remember, it's that you have with you at all times (even if entirely naked, hey it's your house) the equipment needed to issue these commands...

yep, i've been pulled aside on the jetway while boarding a british airways flight to the usa, to have my carry-on searched. this was in heathrow, so not sure who the particular security agent worked for. none of my phones or electronics were turned on or checked, though...

you want a bell-lapadula [0] style security labeling model on the phone, i think. it would only allow allow write-up (copy data from insecure to secure side) and read-down (view data on insecure side from secure) mechanisms.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%E2%80%93LaPadula_model

And of course, this is explained in one of the dialogues, which is structured exactly like this - after it ends, there is some fake padding dialogue afterwards to hide where the actual ending is...

> When authors today again consider Titantic to be "unthinkable", what does it mean?

That the thip wath not going to think, same ath in the patht?