The moon has no atmosphere.

I remember, almost thirty years ago, running across a book with that title. It was the story of a girl (about fourteen, I think) whose family relocated to a lunar colony because her father got a good job up there. The title is a bit of a play on words, of course, but both meanings were appropriate and it wasn't a bad book.

Backwards. The Republicans know that the biggest source of bogus voter registrations, and the areas with the largest number of actively dead registered voters and turnout at polling places where the number of votes exceeds the eligible population, are in places where Democrat activists work the hardest to hold on to power. It's not that knowing people who vote are voting legally and only once isn't going to benefit Democrats, it's that such a process is counter to what liberal activist groups work so hard to put in place. Like huge efforts to get college students to register to vote where they go to school, but to also vote absentee in their home state. Stuff like that. When they pour so much work into it that it starts to show (like the thousands of bogus registrations routinely created by the former ACORN), you know they won't like having that work undone by basic truth-telling at the polling place.

If you're worried about people not knowing there's an election coming up, and not bothering to get an ID (really? you can't go to the doctor, fill a prescription, collect a welfare check, or much of ANYTHING else with already having an ID), then why not encourage the Democrats to apply the same level of effort they put into the shady practices described above, and focus it instead on getting that rare person who never sees a doctor, never gets a prescription, collects no government benefits of any kind, doesn't work (but whom you seem to suggest none the less are a large voting block) and, with YEARS to work with between elections ... just getting them an ID?

I think you need to go back and revisit the history of speech recognition. It's not done using AI. It's done using brute force statistics. Chomsky's ideal of a universal grammar turned out to be a dead end -- language is too complex to get semantic meaning from grammar alone. In fact, AI still cannot consistently extract semantic meaning from everyday English sentences.

The breakthrough with speech recognition was to abandon AI and instead gather a huge corpus of actual sentences. These are tabulated, and with parallel processing can be quickly scanned to determine the likelihood of any particular word following another, regardless of grammatical relationship. Transcription is the process of mapping phonemes to words and querying the language corpus to find statistically likely matches. You don’t have to solve the Chomskyan problem of how language and meaning are structured. You just brute force it mathematically.

But you can't brute force what mosquito's do, because those task require true cognition. Learning is just one of the cognitive processes mosquitoes perform, and I earlier enumerated many more. It's true that a computer can perform some of these tasks computationally, one at a time, but it can't integrate the solutions simultaneously to achieve a goal. That requires cognition, and AI has never achieved cognition at any level.

Sure they are. Because the only people who could possibly take actual offense at this would be those who, having it explained to them, still can't understand it. Those who are insisting that black people be offended by this are insisting that black people can't handle the simple information that would remove any perception of malice from the narrative.

When the apology is a completely over-wrought bit of silly nonsense rendered in response to gleeful press releases from the Big SJW industry (who desperately NEED there to be events like this, whipped hugely out of proportion, in order to have things to get sound angry about), then it's not an apology. It's a forced sacrifice on the alter of Political Correctness gone (ever more) insane. There's nothing to apologize for here, because nobody at Google sat down to create a racist process or racist results. People who can't mentally untangle the difference between intent and coincidence should just shut up ... except, they're all media darlings now, because it's fashionable to be completely irrational on that front, now.

If Google tagged me as "albino ape" or "yeti" or "Stay-Pufft Marshmallow Man" I'd think it was hilarious. Those manufacturing faux offense at this bit of completely benign nonsense are the real racists. They are the ones who are saying that black people aren't smart enough to understand the situation. As usual, the racist SJW condescension is the most actually offensive thing in the room.

You're not paying attention. These days, outcomes that have nothing to do with intention, purpose, or simple transparent standards, but which happen to lean statistically towards results not in perfect balance with skin color as a function of population (though, only in one direction) ... the process must be considered racist. The whole "disparate impact" line of thinking is based on this. If you apply a standard (say, physical strength or attention to detail or quick problem solving, whatever) to people applying to work as, say, firefighters ... if (REGARDLESS of the mix of people who apply) you get more white people getting the jobs, then the standards must surely be racist, even if nobody can point to a single feature of those standards that can be identified as such. Outcomes now retro-actively re-invent the character of whoever sets a standard, and finds them to be a racist. Never mind that holding some particular group, based on their skin color, to some LOWER standard is actually racist, and incredibly condescending. But too bad: outcomes dictate racist-ness now, not policies, actions, purpose, motivation, or objective standards.

So, yeah. The algorithm, without having a single "racist" feature to it, can still be considered racist. Because that pleases the Big SJW industry.

It's the same thinking that says black people aren't smart enough to get a free photo ID from their state, and so laws requiring people to prove who they are when they're casting votes for the people who will govern all of us are, of course, labeled as racist by SJW's sitting in their Outrage Seminar meetings. It's hard to believe things have come that far, but they have.

A robot can only do what it's designed to do. It can only use the tools or probes you built into it unless you've added to the cost, weight and complexity of the device by giving it the ability to reconfigure itself, and even then, there are a limited number of configurations it can use. A human, with a tool kit can swap things around however needed, limited only by what's available and can stop in the middle of an experiment if needed to record some unexpected phenomenon. You can't do things like that with a robot because by the time the controllers back here see what's happening, it's too late.

The lack of effort from Verizon is not *hindering* anyone from obtaining internet service from anyone else. That's like saying LeBron James not playing on your basketball team is hindering your team.

What do we get from sending a meat robot to mars, other than the sort of daredevil glory?

We get something on the scene that's able to adapt to the situation, take advantage of the unexpected and do things on its own initiative. I don't know about you, but I find the Risk well worth the potential benefits.

So, they DO care? How much less could they care?

"ATM0" is your friend. It shuts the modem speaker off entirely including during dialing. "ATL0" works on some modems but not others (like internals with the sound piped through the sound card).

They could just delete most of the photos after they age a bit, analyzing it with some of their AI whiz-bang software.

If anyone ever asks to see the image again, they can just show one that is "close enough" and nobody would ever know the difference.

I personally, have never posted a photo to Facebook, so I'd be OK with that.

From the summary

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So, while this particular group is complaining that they are relatively underpaid, it seems,on average, government employees are overpaid.

Let them train some H1-B visa holders to replace themselves and help get the government average down to the private sector average.

Let's put it this way: a mosquito brain provides all the neurological equipment to enable the bug to sense air currents, process visual data and perform aerobatic flight maneuvers to evade attempted execution via swatting, execute sophisticated navigation algorithms, smell and classify pheromones for preferred host animals, identify infrared signatures of near-surface blood vessels, deploy a penetrating blood extraction needle to the appropriate depth, acquire a meal without bursting, then fly away after accommodating its new weight and balance condition to a safe place. Oh, and Mosquitos clearly learn about their environment and can locate familiar places. Later it will perform all the intricacies of mating and laying eggs in water, a totally different environment.

Nobody knows how the 100K-neuron mosquito brain does that. We have further developed no AI that can perform even mosquito-grade cognitive functions. My whole point is that the AI community gives the public the impression that we are much further along in achievement than even the mosquito brain, yet today's AI can't remotely do what a mosquito brain does. .

So I am confident in my statement that we have no idea whatsoever how a human brain works.