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Comment Re:HIPAA is irrelevant... attacks are past stoppin (Score 3, Insightful) 60

If the biggest, most secure organizations in the world (Sony x 2, Target, OPM) can get breached, anyone can.

I don't think anyone ever said they were the most secure organizations in the world. In the case of Sony specifically, their security was notable for its poor quality.

Comment We have no idea what "superintelligent" means. (Score 4, Insightful) 262

When faced with a tricky question, one think you have to ask yourself is 'Does this question actually make any sense?' For example you could ask "Can anything get colder than absolute zero?" and the simplistic answer is "no"; but it might be better to say the question itself makes no sense, like asking "What is north of the North Pole"?

I think when we're talking about "superintelligence" it's a linguistic construct that sounds to us like it makes sense, but I don't think we have any precise idea of what we're talking about. What *exactly* do we mean when we say "superintelligent computer" -- if computers today are not already there? After all, they already work on bigger problems than we can. But as Geist notes there are diminishing returns on many problems which are inherently intractable; so there is no physical possibility of "God-like intelligence" as a result of simply making computers merely bigger and faster. In any case it's hard to conjure an existential threat out of computers that can, say, determine that two very large regular expressions match exactly the same input.

Someone who has an IQ of 150 is not 1.5x times as smart as an average person with an IQ of 100. General intelligence doesn't work that way. In fact I think IQ is a pretty unreliable way to rank people by "smartness" when you're well away from the mean -- say over 160 (i.e. four standard deviations) or so. Yes you can rank people in that range by *score*, but that ranking is meaningless. And without a meaningful way to rank two set members by some property, it makes no sense to talk about "increasing" that property.

We can imagine building an AI which is intelligent in the same way people are. Let's say it has an IQ of 100. We fiddle with it and the IQ goes up to 160. That's a clear success, so we fiddle with it some more and the IQ score goes up to 200. That's a more dubious result. Beyond that we make changes, but since we're talking about a machine built to handle questions that are beyond our grasp, we don't know whether we're making actually the machine smarter or just messing it up. This is still true if we leave the changes up to the computer itself.

So the whole issue is just "begging the question"; it's badly framed because we don't know what "God-like" or "super-" intelligence *is*. Here's I think a better framing: will we become dependent upon systems whose complexity has grown to the point where we can neither understand nor control them in any meaningful way? I think this describes the concerns about "superintelligent" computers without recourse to words we don't know the meaning of. And I think it's a real concern. In a sense we've been here before as a species. Empires need information processing to function, so before computers humanity developed bureaucracies, which are a kind of human operated information processing machine. And eventually the administration of a large empire have always lost coherence, leading to the empire falling apart. The only difference is that a complex AI system could continue to run well after human society collapsed.

Comment Re:Wait Wait Wait... (Score 3, Insightful) 215

In 2011, they ran out from IANA. Now they are running out in ARIN, which is the supply allocated to North America.

After this the only way to get IP addresses will be to pay a broker. The cost will go up and up over several years, until IPv6 is adopted, then the price will go down. IPv6 is already being rolled out in several places, so it's not an impossibility. Your phone more than likely uses IPv6, for example.

Comment Re:Exploiters need chumps (Score 1) 129

Agreed, but a substantial amount is gaming the business and the trick is attracting and extracting investor dollars with full knowledge that there's little chance of success

I'll bet venture capitalists know that game, and are more skilled at avoiding tricksters than you are at tricking them.

Comment Re:It's coming. Watch for it.. (Score 1) 163

The overriding principle in any encounter between vehicles should be safety; after that efficiency. A cyclist should make way for a motorist to pass , but *only when doing so poses no hazard*. The biggest hazard presented by operation of any kind of vehicle is unpredictability. For a bike this is swerving in and out of a lane a car presents the greatest danger to himself and others on the road.

The correct, safe, and courteous thing to do is look for the earliest opportunity where it is safe to make enough room for the car to pass, move to the side, then signal the driver it is OK to pass. Note this doesn't mean *instantaneously* moving to the side, which might lead to an equally precipitous move *back* into the lane.

Bikes are just one of the many things you need to deal with in the city, and if the ten or fifteen seconds you're waiting to put the accelerator down is making you late for where you're going then you probably should leave a few minutes earlier, because in city driving if it's not one thing it'll be another. In any case if you look at the video the driver was not being significantly delayed by the cyclist, and even if that is so that is no excuse for driving in an unsafe manner, although in his defense he probably doesn't know how to handle the encounter with the cyclist correctly.

The cyclist of course ought to know how to handle an encounter with a car though, and for that reason it's up to the cyclist to manage an encounter with a car to the greatest degree possible. He should have more experience and a lot more situational awareness. I this case the cyclist's mistake was that he was sorta-kinda to one side in the lane, leaving enough room so the driver thought he was supposed to squeeze past him. The cyclist ought to have clearly claimed the entire lane, acknowledging the presence of the car; that way when he moves to the side it's a clear to the driver it's time to pass.

Comment Re:Interesting argument (Score 1) 124

Congress decided by giving the FCC the authority. In a nation of over 300 million people no legislative assembly could ever hope to directly deal with every possible permutation of policy decision or interpretation. I doubt there has been a legislaturw since the rise of the nation state that could.

Comment Re:The biggest question of all: (Score 1) 43

How on earth can you be that huge and JOG?

Lots of people do, because exercise makes you hungrier. If you jog for an hour, you'll burn ~400 calories, which is the number of calories in a good sized bagel with cream cheese.

Exercise to keep yourself healthy and strong. If you want to lose weight, change what you eat.

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