Not necessarily, not if it's a "private cloud" that you've set up. But if it's a public cloud or a hosted private cloud, then yes, in much the same way that any hosted server is "outsourced".

I think we have different understandings of the turing test. I think the point is more of a thought experiment to show the difficulty in measuring intelligence. It's pointing out that, if something can respond as an intelligent being would, than you may as well treat it as intelligent, whether it is or it isn't. The problem comes from the fact that I can't tell, even in this conversation with people, whether they're actually intelligent and self-aware, or just have a way to say the right thing at the right time and seem intelligent. When talking with people, we determine their intelligence by speaking with them and trying to sort out the degree to which what they're saying makes sense. Since that's the only method we have for determining whether a being is intelligent, Turing has suggested that we use the same standard for assessing machines are intelligent.

And it's an interesting concept, but it's not necessarily the definitive and only test of intelligence. It's possible that, if we create a real AI successfully, we could create an intelligent and self-aware AI that cannot pass the Turing test. It's also possible that we could create a non-self-aware AI that can pass the test.

Well I think the reality is that the reason we make driving tests so easy to pass is that we've also made it impossible to live a comfortable life without driving. We've dismantled some of our existing public transportation, failed to develop public transportation, and built everything so as to force people to drive anywhere they want to go. If you build things this way, then revoking someone's driver's license is almost as destructive to their lives as putting them under house arrest.

If we had developed our cities, towns, and public transportation better, then being able to drive wouldn't be nearly as necessary, and we could restrict driver's licenses to those who are both able and responsible enough to drive safely. However, since we have been unwilling to build intelligently (and continue to be unwilling to stop shooting ourselves in the foot), I'm hopeful that self-driving cars may help address the issue.

We've seen a few instances in human history where you have relations between two groups with some common interest, and it results in attempts to dominate and commit genocide. I don't think we have any real reason to think an AI couldn't decide to behave similarly.

I think the definition of "the cloud" that has emerged is "servers managed by someone other than you, managed to the extent that you are not aware of or concerned with the actual hardware."

So the difference between having someone host your VM and having your VM hosted in "the cloud" is essentially just, "the way in which it's hosted makes it so I don't know, and it doesn't matter, which hardware it's running on." It's about the level of abstraction of management. If I have a couple of virtual hosts in my private datacenter where I'm manually spinning up VMs on particular hosts, that's just hosting VMs in my datacenter. If I have systems where I don't even specify where VMs are deployed or which resources they use, but just say, "Spin up a new VM" and the automated systems allocate appropriate resources on appropriate servers, then I have a "private cloud". It could be the same hardware in the same datacenter, but its "cloud"-iness is related to how abstract the hardware resource allocation has become for me.

I'm not saying that this is my preferred definition. I'm saying that I believe this seems to be, in my experience, what people intend when using the term.

Here's a compromise, then: don't do it all at once. To start with, only make it a little harder to maintain a driver's license, such as requiring people to take the test more often (especially the elderly), while also putting in the intelligent accident avoidance systems.

After a few years of this, increase the accident avoidance systems' level of control a little bit, so that not only will it kick in when someone is about to crash, but also... let's say for example, you make it so if someone is tailgating in an unsafe manner, the car will automatically slow to maintain a safe distance. Little by little, increase the accident avoidance systems every few years, until after a few decades, the people who want to drive are in self-driving cars that have a toy steering wheel that does nothing except make vroom-vroom noises.

Meanwhile, keep making the driving tests more strict. Not impossibly difficult, but maybe difficult and expensive is roughly the same range as getting your pilot's license. At the same time, open up special lanes, similar to carpool lanes, where only self-driving cars that are networked just enough to aid in collision avoidance and traffic prevention. Set the speed limit in those lanes for "as fast as the self-driving cars can safely go", and set the speed limit everywhere else to 35 MPH. If you're still driving a manually driven car, increase insurance costs to account for the increased risk.

I like your list, in that it contains some interesting points and seems like you've put some thought into it. I'm not sure I agree with all of your points, though.

I think it's more likely that, if we ever do develop a real artificial intelligence, it's thought processes and motivations are likely to be completely alien to us. We will have a very hard time predicting what it will do, and we may not understand its explanations.

Here's the problem, as I see it: a lot of the way we think about things is bound to our biology. Our perception of the world is bound up in the limits of our sensory organs. Our thought processes are heavily influenced by the structures of our brains. As much trouble as we having understanding people who are severely autistic or schizophrenic, the machine AI's thought processes will seem even more random, alien, and strange. This is part of the reason it will be very difficult to recognize when we've achieved a real AI, because unless and until it learns to communicate with us, its output may seem as nonsensical as a AI that doesn't work correctly.

The only way an AI will produce thoughts that are not alien to us would be if we were to grow an AI specifically to be human. It would need to build a computer capable of simulating the structure of our brains in sufficient detail to create a functional virtual human brain. The simulation would need to include human desires, motivations, and emotions. It would need to include experiences of pleasure and pain, happiness and anger, desire and fear. The simulation would need to encompass all the various hormones and neurotransmitters that influences our thinking. We would then either need to put it into an android body and let it live in the world, or put it into a virtual body and let it live in a virtual world. And then we let it grow up, and it learns and grows like a person. If we could do that with a good enough simulation, we should end up with an intelligence very much like our own.

However, if we build an AI with different "brain" structures, different kinds of stimuli, and different methods of action, then I don't think we should expect that the AI will think in a way that we comprehend. It might be able to learn to pass a touring test, but it might be intentionally faking us out. It might want to live alongside us, live as our pet/slave, or kill us all. It would be impossible to predict until we make it, and it might be impossible to tell what it wants even after we've made it.

Even with my favorite movies, I usually walk out of the theater after seeing the ending.

Yeah, I don't see any reason to think that the Google car is at fault. I was once rear-ended twice in the same month, while stopped at the same red light. There wasn't anything particularly wrong with the layout of the light either. It boils down to this: People are not good at driving.

To those reading this: Oh, I know, I get it. You're great at driving, and insulted by any suggestion to the contrary. Your reflexes are great, and you're in control when you're on the road. You even drive stick because you need the extra control that it gives you, and not at all because you like to imaging you're a race car driver.

But really and honestly, if you haven't been in accidents, as much as skill and safe driving may have contributed to your safety, luck has really contributed just as much. All things considered, we're generally not very good at driving, and the result is that tens of thousands of people die every year. As far as I'm concerned, we should make it a goal to work to get safe self driving cars on the road ASAP, and then get really strict on issuing drivers licenses so that almost nobody is allowed to do it.

I'm confused. You're complaining that it's overpriced, but it's free. You're complaining that the speed is not based on ones ability to pay, but isn't it just the free tier? Do you not have the option to pay to upgrade? You complain about "being branded with poverty-net", but how would people know? Are they going to check the IP you're connecting from and link it up with your plan to see whether you're on the free service?

I don't know that really makes sense, unless they want to get into that business. They can just continue paying for an ISP and hosting, and let their ISP/host work out whether they want to roll out new fiber. I think that if Netflix has a bunch of excess money, the smart move would be to continue investing in new original content, and expand their licensing. The more content that they have that people want to see, the better position they'll be in.

The studios are always going to have a middleman or two. Considering how much difficulty they've had in cutting out middlemen, I don't think Netflix has much to worry about there. This concern is also mitigated by expanding their original content.

I think there's another possibility: Windows will become permanently free (gratis) for home and non-commercial use.

I actually think this would be a really smart move for Microsoft at this time. Apple and Google have beaten them in the mobile area, and Apple has been making inroads on the desktop, even in businesses. Some businesses and schools are even opting for Chromebooks. Windows doesn't provide them with the sort of leverage and dominance that it used to.

As people move away from Windows, not only does Microsoft lose the revenue from licensing, they also start losing an advantage in selling their other products/services. If you run a business and all of your desktops are Macs or Chromebooks, then having a Windows domain isn't nearly as useful. If you're not running Outlook on Windows, then the value of Exchange Server is diminished. (They have Outlook for Mac, but it's not as good, and they have no Outlook for Linux) A lot of their expensive management tools and services become much more effective when your network is all Windows servers and Windows desktops/laptops.

In that sense, I could see an argument that Microsoft should give away Windows to consumers (and maybe even businesses) as a loss leader in order to sell various services, similar to the way that Apple provides OSX and the iLife/iWork software "free" as a way to sell their hardware. Personally, I think they should restructure Office 365 to include various management tools, like MDM, RMM, SSO, and remote control similar to LogMeIn. Turn it into a one-stop shop for IT departments to control all of their servers and desktops, with an eye toward eventually enabling IT to replace onsite domain controllers and file servers with a completely hosted cloud solution, where that would be desirable. Provide similar (but simplified) functionality for home users, including update management, cloud managed AV, find-my-phone (or laptop), remote control, cloud backup, etc.

I think that's the best move for long-term growth: give away Windows, come up with a well defined set of subscription services that provide useful features that integrate well with Windows, and price those subscriptions cheaply enough that IT departments and home users will say, "why not?", and then try to make money on volume.

Besides, making Windows free removes the biggest reason people have to stay on old versions of Windows, and old versions of Windows are more expensive for Microsoft to support. I think that's why Apple started making their OS upgrades free.

I feel like there's a bit of irony here.

The thing that bothers me about "social justice warriors" is that there's a sort of contrived generation of outrage against imagined slights, and if someone is successful in getting that outrage to catch on, it has the potential to turn into a sort of witch hunt. There's a real reason to be concerned that, to give an example, if you post a random off-color joke, it could go viral with your name attached, and that could result in losing your job and having a hard time getting another job. Online, there's no sympathy. If you say something that people don't like online, it's rare that anyone tries to find a deeper understanding of who you are. In their mind you become a two-dimensional villain without any redeeming qualities, and you deserve to have your life ruined. At least, that's the kind of thing that worries me about the whole SJW phenomenon.

So what I find ironic is, the people who get most upset about the SJW thing also have a tendency to do the same thing. If a woman has a blog describing sexist tropes in video games, the anti-SJW crowd will be outraged that she's questioning the quality of their favorite games, and that she's questioning the developer's intentions. It's like, "How dare she imply that Super Mario Bros is oppressing women! She should have a more nuanced understanding of what's going on!" On the other hand, they might also be failing to understand the nuance of that woman's blog. In a way, they're generating the same kind of contrived outrage and the SJW.

And I think that's a component of what happened here. I don't have any behind-the-scenes knowledge to tell you whether Pao was a good or bad CEO, or which decisions were hers. I support the reddit community's right to stand against inappropriate policies-- if you don't like what's going on with the site, you have every right to refuse to participate, including shutting down the subreddits that you moderate. However, it doesn't really seem like the reddit community knew enough about what was going on to warrant so much hatred of Pao. I still haven't heard an explanation as to why Victoria Taylor was fired. Do we know?

It seems like there was a major fuckup in managing the relationship between reddit, the moderators, and the user base. Things weren't communicated well, changes were made that seemed arbitrary, and from that I would agree that there needed to be a change in leadership. However, the kind vitriol leveled at Pao seemed childish and... kind of fucked up.

That's my feeling anyway. I won't claim to be thoroughly knowledgeable about the whole thing, but as a bystander, I thought it was cool that the user base is able to strong-arm the corporation when they feel they need to, but I still didn't like what I was seeing.

In your desciption, you have lots of different random things you're trying to do, and it'd take me some time to parse it out, and then I'd have questions.

But you say, "I primarily want this to be able to remote into my parents' systems to provide maintenance and support instead of having to budget an emergency trip when things go awry." Ok, so my first question would be, do you really want VPN for that? It might be easier to go with some kind of remote-control service or MDM. LogMeIn comes to mind as something that does not require someone to send an invitation, though it's not free anymore. Speaking of LogMeIn, you could also look into their Hamachi service as a VPN. (For the record, I have no affiliation with LogMeIn).

You could set up routers on each site that are capable of creating a VPN tunnel, and then just create a VPN tunnel between them. I think DD-WRT supports this, if you can't find anything else to do the job, and Buffalo makes routers with it pre-installed. I haven't used them, but I'd bet I could get something working with that. On the other hand, the reason I've never done that is that site-to-site VPN tunnels can be just finicky enough that I wouldn't bother with them unless I need a constant ongoing connection between two locations for a serious purpose, and when I do need that, I get professional gear. As a result, I can't verify the reliability of VPN for any consumer level gear.

I would also wonder, if the ISP is blocking "desktop sharing ports", might they also be blocking common VPN ports? Can you just change the "desktop sharing ports"? Maybe you can do a NAT on the firewall to redirect the ports, and then you don't need to reconfigure the desktops to use different ports.

You made a point of saying that you knew what I said, and then conveniently ignore the part where I mentioned having bus lanes that avoid traffic.

Except that, for as much as they hinder traffic, they also account for fewer cars on the road. If you have a bus with 20 people on it, that may account for 20 fewer cars on the road. Also, if the infrastructure is built for it (e.g. bus lanes), then it doesn't hinder other traffic much.

And how many bus trips have you taken in locations that have infrastructure specifically to enable fast bus travel (e.g. dedicated bus lanes)? Most of your arguments can be dismissed this way. "Public transportation is inherently slow and inconvenient because in my experience, where I live, public transportation is slow and inconvenient."

It makes as much sense as saying, "All apple pies taste like cherries because my mother puts cherries in her apple pie." You're being dense.

See, this is a great example of why your arguments are so clueless. Having practical public transportation is not about simply dumping an excessive number of buses into poorly planned developments and expecting people who own cars to take the bus instead. It's about creating a long term plan and design for development that allows public transportation to be effective. That is, don't build the city for cars and then drop buses into it, but build the city in such a way that makes it practical to never buy a car, and live your life with buses, trains, bikes, and on foot. If you have an already existing city, create a plan for future development for those modes of transportation.

Now if you want to live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, then no, it doesn't make sense to run a train track straight to your house. However, it's utterly retarded the way we've been developing our towns and cities to encourage/force car use, discourage walking/biking, and make effective public transportation impossible. It's not just a pollution/energy problem, but it's shown itself to be unsustainable, even if you only consider the traffic and parking problems that arise as cities grow.