Domain: wikipedia.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to wikipedia.org.
Comments · 444,599
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No PUBLIC indictments, at this time, FTFY traitor.
Sealed indictment
:
An indictment can be sealed so that it stays non-public until it is unsealed. This can be done for a number of reasons. It may be unsealed, for example, once the named person is arrested or has been notified by police. -
re-training and re-testing
When you are dealing with AI, and it gets retrained, it MUST be retested fully.
Not quite right. You are assuming that the machine learning technique involved suffers from Catastrophic Forgetting upon re-training. This was a problem back in the early days of machine learning, but any modern AI engineer and researcher knows of this problem and is or will be implementing solutions.
When a human learns to fly a Cessna, we get a pilot's license. When we get a type certificate to fly an Airbus after learning to fly the Cessna, we don't forget how to fly the Cessna and need re-training in the Cessna.... unless we don't fly a Cessna for a long time. Humans are engineered to forget, which is fundamentally important for being human, but not at all important for a control system.
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So...you prefer Tupolev?
You Marxist fools always rage against the free market, where people voluntarily trade products and services in a competative marketplace and good stuff succeeds and bad stuff fails.
You never take responsibility for the insanity of the top-down government control of anti-capitalism in which politicians and technocrats dictate what will be in the market, how many units will be available, what the characteristics of those units are, and so forth. In the Marxist model, there's no true competition and that means the good stuff does not succeed and the bad stuff does not fail.
Do you drive a Lada?
Of course, NO corruption ir incompetence would ever occur under anti-capitalism, right?
Let me guess: The Soviet Union failed because "the wrong people tried it" and "they didn't do it the right way"? [facepalm] To hate capitalism, you must first have a brainectomy.
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Not, strictly speaking, correct
The aircraft still has the most basic sensors that have been in use for most of the history of powered flight. This includes the trusty (unless it's an improperly heated Airbus version being operated in icing condtions (Air France, anybody?)) Pitot tube, which has no moving parts, and accompanied by some math courtesy of Mr Bernoulli and data on the performance of the OML of the airframe (generated at design time with the assistance of a few runs of an accurate model in a wind tunnel) will provide anything a decent programmer needs to avoid a stall. The wind tunnel data is generally updated with data from flight-tests of the full-scale airframe once that's available, but the model and tunnel data is usually adequate.
Been there, done that.
AOA detectors are a nice-to-have and I'd love to see them on all planes for better and safer flight, but the truth is that there should NEVER be a crash caused by an avionics system that is deprived of ALL angle-of-attack sensors.
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Re:So what?
Sometimes, you are a real idiot.
America is not intervening in Venezuela, other than agreeing with the law and backing the true president.
It is morons like you that are causing real issues with this. Maduro's gov has been murdering police and anybody that supports Guaidó. Yet, America has NOT done a single thing, other than saying that they back the legal president. -
Re:The ones I miss and don’t miss
I would like to see FreshRSS added to the Wikipedia list of Feed Aggregators (it's easier to avoid the deletionists when adding something to an existing article instead of trying to make a stand alone article).
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Re:Wait a minute...
Typescript is basically JavaScript syntax with some extra type information tacked on.
Oh!! So it's RATFOR (1976) for JavaScript. Why didn't you just say so?
Hell, for that matter back in 80-ish I used a C compiler with 4 separate phases. Phase 1 was macro expansion only, the other 2 started compiling the code until the phase 4 produced linkable output. ... which you then had to link with the supporting libraries before you had something that could actually run.
I don't like JavaScript, but I think I'll go look at TypeScript. -
Re:Paradox of Tolerance in action
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No, this particular kind of lawsuit wasn't predicted by Popper circa 1945, but it's a great example of how it works in action.
I actually think Trump's so-called free-speech executive order is a slightly more sophisticated attack on tolerance. The real idea is to make is easier for intolerant people to attack tolerance. NOT to suggest that #PresidentTweety possesses the sophistication. The executive order was probably dictated over Trump's iPhone by Steve Bannon, that poster child of intolerance.
Next amusing thought of the day: Steve King is actively campaigning for Pence's job in 2020.
By the way, there are a number of cow-related Twitter accounts you might want to follow. https://twitter.com/search?q=%... is obvious, but if you search on Twitter for "DevinNunes" you'll see an entire herd of them.
Jesus H. Mother Fucking Christ, how brain-dead do you have to be to think that "progressives" are "tolerant".
Saying, "No, you don't deserve FWEEEEE STUFFFZZ!!!" isn't racist, bigoted, or intolerant.
The fact that "progressives" are so thin-skinned while being so damn easy to mock over their dreams of authoritarian, statist, forced wealth redistribution is obvious to anyone not drowning in the "progressive" Kool-aide.
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Paradox of Tolerance in action
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No, this particular kind of lawsuit wasn't predicted by Popper circa 1945, but it's a great example of how it works in action.
I actually think Trump's so-called free-speech executive order is a slightly more sophisticated attack on tolerance. The real idea is to make is easier for intolerant people to attack tolerance. NOT to suggest that #PresidentTweety possesses the sophistication. The executive order was probably dictated over Trump's iPhone by Steve Bannon, that poster child of intolerance.
Next amusing thought of the day: Steve King is actively campaigning for Pence's job in 2020.
By the way, there are a number of cow-related Twitter accounts you might want to follow. https://twitter.com/search?q=%... is obvious, but if you search on Twitter for "DevinNunes" you'll see an entire herd of them.
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The ones I miss and don’t miss
First of all, it would be nice if Slashdot linked to the actual web page instead of to an ad-infested article.
Looking over the list, the one I miss the most is iGoogle; this allowed one to have a home page with news from other pages all grouped together. Many people miss Google Reader, an RSS client, but the glory days of RSS are long gone.
Google Chrome Frame is no longer needed; it was a product for an era when a web designer's job was 90% making their web page look decent in Internet Explorer and 10% actual web design. "Google Flu Trends" and "Google Flu Vaccine Finder" were created during the 2008-2009 flu panic (I remember entire malls being closed down in Mexico).
The others show that success in business is having a few hits and a lot of misses.
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I think the goal is to call the Alt-Right out
on their ties to White Supremacy and Neo-Nazis. The Alt-Right has been using dog whistles to cosy up with those two groups since day 1 without taking any flack to speak of. It's both dangerous and disingenuous to allow that to go on.
What I'm saying is this: The Alt-Right are not your friends. They're a friendly face on the same Authoritarian arm of the right wing that's been around since the 20s. They exist specifically to legitimize and normalize something that was rightly recognized as horrific post WWII and the Civil Rights movement.
Now, you can find pages and pages of posts, documents and hours of video of their leadership talking about this, but you have to plow through a lot of crap to get to it. In the old days we had professional journalists doing that work. Nowadays it's YouTubers. -
Cambridge Analytica is NOT defunct.
It just shed its skin. It's now called Emerdata. Same people, same building.
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Re:A corporation cutting corners...
Not really. Bombardier mostly makes regional jets whereas Boeing doesn't build any of them. However, they do make one line that directly competes with Boeing -- the CSeries, which competes directly with the Boeing 737 and Airbus 320. In October 2017 Airbus bought 50.01% of the C series production and the airplane is now being built in Alabama to avoid paying US tariffs. The deal was under-reported by the press for obvious reasons but the outcome is *exactly* why the 21% tariff was proposed in the first place. The airplane is still being built (only now in the US by US labor) and Boeing still has to compete with it.
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What is the big deal for wikipedia ?
I do not really get what is the real problem for wikipedia with this directive, when you take into account the WP:COPYVIO policy which about any wikipedia editor knows about.
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Lies, damned lies, and statistics
Lies, damned lies, and statistics is a phrase describing the persuasive power of numbers, particularly the use of statistics to bolster weak arguments
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... -
Semantics
US tech companies have been recruiting heavily from Canadian universities for decades. The only difference now is that those companies are going to open offices in Canada rather than sponsor those new hires to work in the US. Those workers would probably rather be paid in strong US dollars than Canadian loonies at the moment but there is no guarantee the US dollar will remain strong.
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Re:This could make possible a new type of virus
Might need to update that thinking of yours, then
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Re:This could make possible a new type of virus
Um, no. Viruses use RNA, not DNA.
Retroviruses use RNA. Most viruses use DNA.
Since RNA is less stable, retroviruses have a higher mutation rate. Influenza is a retrovirus.
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Re:Science Disagrees...
The BfR report, which was the basis for at least the EU reports was largely copied from Monsanto texts without listing those as sources: https://www.theguardian.com/en... . Given that Monsanto is far from a neutral party in this it makes the contents look rather suspect. Best case the guy in charge of the report was too lazy to do his job right, worst case he got a preprinted conclusion and only filled in some blanks.
I wasn't aware of that accusation, thanks for the interesting dive. The skeptic in me does however first want to raise a few red flags in the reporting done by The Guardian's author Arthur Neslen. First of all, a surprising amount of them cover glyphosate and Monsanto:
[2015/jul/15]
[2015/nov/12]
[2016/jan/13]
[2016/mar/04]
[2016/may/16]
[2016/may/17]
[2017/may/24]
[2017/sep/15]
[2017/sep/28]
[2019/jan/15]
[2018/may/16]These articles show a consistent style, giving undue weight by never reporting on the scientific consensus, and instead promoting the minority view of politicians, Greenpeace members, other environmental activists and study authors to criticize glyphosate, and often giving them a chance to rebut the few token sentences given by those defending glyphosate.
I note that the style is completely different for another The Guardian author, which even mentions the views of other regulatory agencies than IARC and BfR, and presents a case for why the 4,300 page report (see [2017/sep/15]) contains copied texts from the Glyphosate Task Force in a non-sensationalist way.
The plagiarism claim was also denied by BfR; and at the end of the article you linked, Arthur Neslen again was uncritical of the article's last cited study in which glyphosate is criticized, where the possible conflict of interest of the organic food researcher Charles M. Benbrook isn't even mentioned.
I meant mostly that citing each one was pointless since they just repeat the conclusions of the same review(s). Listing all of them makes it look as if you had veri
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Re:Juul is a pusher to children
> I was quite surprised that I couldn't find any proof that nicotine is harmful.
You gotta be kidding me! Ever heard of LD50? That's Leathal Dose 50%, which means 50% of test subjects die.
Good ol' Wikipedia quote:
0.5–1.0 mg/kg can be a lethal dosage for adult humans, and 0.1 mg/kg for children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... or http://www.inchem.org/document... -
Re:See that coloured glowy thing?
That glowy thing on the other end of that HDCP connection is called "A monitor" and it doesn't show encrypted pictures nor does it do the encryption itself. Therefore it has to be getting it as raw free text.
Sounds like you don't know what HDCP is. Yes, the glowy thing does do the decryption itself if it can receive HDCP content; that's the whole point.
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Re:BREAKING
Zodiac Killer to revamp his reputation by dropping Killer from his moniker.
Probably better than his real name.
:-) -
In seemingly related news ...
Nathan Summers will be dropping "Cable" from his name and will now be known as "".
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Found through Wikipedia, of course!
Wikipedia's article about the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market has useful information and pointers, such as the procedure file, itself pointing (in section "documentation gateway") to many documents, including:
- Committee report tabled for plenary, 1st reading/single reading (PDF in top right corner of frame)
- Text adopted by Parliament, partial vote at 1st reading/single reading -
Re: Nice Propaganda
Um, that was Reagan under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, aka Reagan Amnesty
Funny, huh?
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DOS variants
You do realize ms dos was an unlawful Rip-off of dr dos, right?
You're confusing the names.
Your mixing it up with Q-DOS, that's the thing that Microsoft ripped to quickly produce MS-DOS and license as PC-DOS to IBM.
DR-DOS is the earlya attempt at bringing multi-tasking to DOS, by Digital Research, the company making the *other* major OS back then i.e.: CP/M - the OS that inspired QDOS, and that Digital Research didn't manage to license to IBM.
QDOS and thus MS-DOS being close to CP/M was a big point for Microsoft. As said above CP/M was the major OS at the time, and having a very similar API meant that application developper could quickly writes port of their software for PC-DOS on the IBM PC.
DR-DOS also leverage the closeness: it's based on Concurrent DOS, which is based on CP/M-86 (which eventually added MS-DOS compatibility) and the whole CP/M family explored multi-tasking with MP/M-86 (including MP/M-86, direct predecessor of Concurrent DOS)).
Digital Research was a significant competitor to Microsoft, that's why Microsoft tried to crush them as much as possible.
(Including making the DOS-based Windows harder to run on DR-DOS) -
DOS variants
You do realize ms dos was an unlawful Rip-off of dr dos, right?
You're confusing the names.
Your mixing it up with Q-DOS, that's the thing that Microsoft ripped to quickly produce MS-DOS and license as PC-DOS to IBM.
DR-DOS is the earlya attempt at bringing multi-tasking to DOS, by Digital Research, the company making the *other* major OS back then i.e.: CP/M - the OS that inspired QDOS, and that Digital Research didn't manage to license to IBM.
QDOS and thus MS-DOS being close to CP/M was a big point for Microsoft. As said above CP/M was the major OS at the time, and having a very similar API meant that application developper could quickly writes port of their software for PC-DOS on the IBM PC.
DR-DOS also leverage the closeness: it's based on Concurrent DOS, which is based on CP/M-86 (which eventually added MS-DOS compatibility) and the whole CP/M family explored multi-tasking with MP/M-86 (including MP/M-86, direct predecessor of Concurrent DOS)).
Digital Research was a significant competitor to Microsoft, that's why Microsoft tried to crush them as much as possible.
(Including making the DOS-based Windows harder to run on DR-DOS) -
Make a Linux version also!
I can't wait to be able to install security software from a company with as sterling a track record as Microsoft's on my servers!
Also, totally unrelated, today is World Down Syndrome Day, and I have a MCSE.
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Wirth's Law
Coders might have different backgrounds and political opinions, but nearly every one I've ever met found deep, almost soulful pleasure in taking something inefficient -- even just a little bit slow -- and tightening it up a notch.
Garbage!
What gives coders pleasure is a combination of going home early, finding someone else to blame a bug on and getting stuff through acceptance testing.As for wanting to improve efficiency? There is no evidence for this. Nearly 25 years ago we were enlightened by Wirth's Law which addressed the question why does software get slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster? and nothing in the intervening quarter century has improved the matter.
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Re:All odd numbers are prime
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Re:All odd numbers are prime
1 is prime by that definition, but it's mostly called a unit and defined as *not* prime to make factorising integers into primes unique (up to the order of the factors): Prime number - Primality of 1
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Re:Science Disagrees...[declare an interest?]
I am neither an expert nor paid by any biotech company like Bayer/Monsanto. I work full time as a software developer, but I do find controversial science topics intriguing, and I have some background in scientific skepticism and fact checking.
On the topic of Roundup/Glyphosate carcinogenesis, its relatively easy to google for reliable sources. In this case, even the Wikipedia articles on its safety have a comprehensive list of citations. And I just copied some of the relevant findings from the papers' abstract.
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Re: Science Disagrees...
According to Wikipedia Monsanto took over manufacturing of PCBs in 1935. Also during the 1930s the toxicity of PCBs became well known. The first well documented medical cases were in the late 30s and warnings continued to be issued through the 1940s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It also mentions that Monsanto knew about the problems in the 1960s, despite their efforts to remain ignorant, yet carried on making PCBs anyway.
They are not much better these days. Just listen to this bullshit: https://youtu.be/ovKw6YjqSfM
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Re: Going full Communist
Communist would be if the Chinese branch of Google was owned by the government and all the profits went back into the government coffers.
The word you are looking for is Fascist.Fascism is characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy
Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state
Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party
Fits the Chinese government a bit better than Communism, don't you think?
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Re:Corporate shlll
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Re:Going full Communist
While it is important to know facts about the militaristic dictatorship of the nominally communist PRC, what is it with the "real China, Taiwan" meme?
The island what is presently called Taiwan was natively inhabited by australonesian people (related to polynesians) when it was discovered by mainland Chinese seafarers and became automatically claimed as imperial Chinese territory in the name of the sitting Chinese despot emperor.
Around the time of the US declaration of independence in mid-1700s larger scale migration of ethnic Han Chinese to the island of Taiwan had began. When the "Republic of China" (ROC) was overthrown by Mao's communists in 1949 (with massive help from the Stalin, some of it war material originally donated by the USA to fight Nazi Germany), the then-militaristic goverment of the ROC evacuated to Taiwan and established autocratic rule until finally moving towards democracy in the 1980s.
Is "the real Great Britain" an entity including all their past and present colonial possessions, or is it just the region that Britons are native to?
Likewise isn't "the real China" also simply the region where the ethnic "Han Chinese" have their revered ancestral homes and graves? The Han Chinese may have invaded and either exterminated or predominantly replaced the native populations in Tibet, East Turkestan (ch. Xinjiang), Southern Mongolia, Manchuria and Taiwan, but those are not their native homelands.
In the now-democratic Taiwan ("ROC") the direction of the post-war generations is both towards Taiwanese identity and the growing respect for the rights of the native australonesian peoples of Taiwan.
While Taiwan's autocracy-era constitution still makes references to the Greater China, it is a mere anachronism, as is increasingly even mere talk of "unification" with the mainland Chinese empire (the Communist Party-run People's Republic of China). Free people aren't interested in becoming subjects of a violent dictatorship.
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Re:Going full Communist
While it is important to know facts about the militaristic dictatorship of the nominally communist PRC, what is it with the "real China, Taiwan" meme?
The island what is presently called Taiwan was natively inhabited by australonesian people (related to polynesians) when it was discovered by mainland Chinese seafarers and became automatically claimed as imperial Chinese territory in the name of the sitting Chinese despot emperor.
Around the time of the US declaration of independence in mid-1700s larger scale migration of ethnic Han Chinese to the island of Taiwan had began. When the "Republic of China" (ROC) was overthrown by Mao's communists in 1949 (with massive help from the Stalin, some of it war material originally donated by the USA to fight Nazi Germany), the then-militaristic goverment of the ROC evacuated to Taiwan and established autocratic rule until finally moving towards democracy in the 1980s.
Is "the real Great Britain" an entity including all their past and present colonial possessions, or is it just the region that Britons are native to?
Likewise isn't "the real China" also simply the region where the ethnic "Han Chinese" have their revered ancestral homes and graves? The Han Chinese may have invaded and either exterminated or predominantly replaced the native populations in Tibet, East Turkestan (ch. Xinjiang), Southern Mongolia, Manchuria and Taiwan, but those are not their native homelands.
In the now-democratic Taiwan ("ROC") the direction of the post-war generations is both towards Taiwanese identity and the growing respect for the rights of the native australonesian peoples of Taiwan.
While Taiwan's autocracy-era constitution still makes references to the Greater China, it is a mere anachronism, as is increasingly even mere talk of "unification" with the mainland Chinese empire (the Communist Party-run People's Republic of China). Free people aren't interested in becoming subjects of a violent dictatorship.
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Re:Bribing programmers
So then we'd have a revolving door for programmers instead of politicians. I'm at the point where I think randomly picking people, like jury duty, might be better. That and a heavy handed approach to looking for "new business opportunities" that happen for friends and family for years after being picked for congress to prevent bribes. On the plus side, it would instantly reform campaign finance.
Funny enough, that's the premise of a RPG called Paranoia, where "The Computer is your friend". And yes, the top people are the coveted High Programmers.
And yes, it take place in the US.
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Re: Bribing programmersWe do need to change something. Democracy currently is a system where a minority wields power and coercion on the majority. And while AI's 'algorithmic decisions' are subject to prejudice, bias and manipulation, those terms pretty much define almost every politician these days. AI could take over policy making if those who have already subverted government allowed. The thing is, corporations make too much money to just walk away. We are ruled by those in pursuit of wealth and power. Put axiomatically, "Gain wealth, forgetting all but self."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Predator_State
I also fear that technology, left unchecked, will sabotage interpersonal relations, society as a whole, and take our jobs. Maybe technology will extract nature's wealth for the satiation of all of humanity's wants, needs and desires. Maybe not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
One big problem is we're not the enlightened, reasoning beings who elect people that serve the interest of the greater good.
Walter Lippmann, in "Public Opinion" said the masses were an incompetent "bewildered herd", the primary defect of democracy, and that democracy could only be kept functioning by an elite class of intellectuals and experts pumping out government sanctioned propaganda.
Democracy is a system of rule by law, not individuals. It could be reasoned that AI could do a better job at making and enforcing law than people. But could we handle it? Dan Dennett says our sense of self, consciousness and free will are just illusions, something we've made up. Evolution has given us the ability to abide or the possibility to skirt the law. Free will has nothing to do with it.
As a general rule, we are irrational, unreliable, greedy, gullible, cunning and conning bastards. To quote Machiavelli, "We can say this of most people: that they are ungrateful and unreliable; they lie, they fake, they're greedy for cash and they melt away in the face of danger."
Forget asking if AI could handle our government. Of course it could, one way or another, more efficiently too, and eventually better. But could we handle being ruled by AI?
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Re: Bribing programmersWe do need to change something. Democracy currently is a system where a minority wields power and coercion on the majority. And while AI's 'algorithmic decisions' are subject to prejudice, bias and manipulation, those terms pretty much define almost every politician these days. AI could take over policy making if those who have already subverted government allowed. The thing is, corporations make too much money to just walk away. We are ruled by those in pursuit of wealth and power. Put axiomatically, "Gain wealth, forgetting all but self."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Predator_State
I also fear that technology, left unchecked, will sabotage interpersonal relations, society as a whole, and take our jobs. Maybe technology will extract nature's wealth for the satiation of all of humanity's wants, needs and desires. Maybe not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
One big problem is we're not the enlightened, reasoning beings who elect people that serve the interest of the greater good.
Walter Lippmann, in "Public Opinion" said the masses were an incompetent "bewildered herd", the primary defect of democracy, and that democracy could only be kept functioning by an elite class of intellectuals and experts pumping out government sanctioned propaganda.
Democracy is a system of rule by law, not individuals. It could be reasoned that AI could do a better job at making and enforcing law than people. But could we handle it? Dan Dennett says our sense of self, consciousness and free will are just illusions, something we've made up. Evolution has given us the ability to abide or the possibility to skirt the law. Free will has nothing to do with it.
As a general rule, we are irrational, unreliable, greedy, gullible, cunning and conning bastards. To quote Machiavelli, "We can say this of most people: that they are ungrateful and unreliable; they lie, they fake, they're greedy for cash and they melt away in the face of danger."
Forget asking if AI could handle our government. Of course it could, one way or another, more efficiently too, and eventually better. But could we handle being ruled by AI?
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Re:Science Disagrees...
None of these government agencies actually did any research on the matter themselves
Agencies typically don't do their own research, as any one single primary study doesn't show much on its own. They instead perform a form of systematic review which aims to sum up multiple up high-quality papers to reach a conclusion of the current state of the science.
You could drop at least half those links since they all refer to the same study paid by monsanto to disproof the other study. [...] they all quote each other and ultimately a single scientist on Monsanto payroll.
I don't suppose you could point to which study that was composed by the Monsanto scientist, and why that study has a flawed conclusion?
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Re:Science Disagrees...
None of these government agencies actually did any research on the matter themselves
Agencies typically don't do their own research, as any one single primary study doesn't show much on its own. They instead perform a form of systematic review which aims to sum up multiple up high-quality papers to reach a conclusion of the current state of the science.
You could drop at least half those links since they all refer to the same study paid by monsanto to disproof the other study. [...] they all quote each other and ultimately a single scientist on Monsanto payroll.
I don't suppose you could point to which study that was composed by the Monsanto scientist, and why that study has a flawed conclusion?
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Re:How the electricity is delivered is not describ
It's been a long time since I visited San Francisco, but, if I remember correctly, many, if not most, of the buses were electric using overhead wiring.
SF has the second-most trolley buses in service in the western hemisphere (behind Mexico City), but they're less than a majority. They have approximately 300 trolley buses, and 500 diesels.
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Re:How the electricity is delivered is not describ
It's been a long time since I visited San Francisco, but, if I remember correctly, many, if not most, of the buses were electric using overhead wiring.
SF has the second-most trolley buses in service in the western hemisphere (behind Mexico City), but they're less than a majority. They have approximately 300 trolley buses, and 500 diesels.
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Re:Not going to happen
I'd like you to meet the remains of Tay.
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Re: so a couple decades to solve an engineering is
I know this site can be slow sometimes, but it's the first time I've seen a post from 1948.
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Re:so a couple decades to solve an engineering iss
By 2050, the cost of desalinated water could be quite reasonable. However, we need to start soon, and incentivize appropriate technologies. Reverse Osmosis plants will always be high maintenance, and use electricity which is expensive and wasteful. Multi-Effect Distillation uses half the electricity of RO, plus some thermal energy, which can be supplied by heat rejected from power plants, that would otherwise go to waste.
The key is to combine the processes, which will decrease the cost of both electricity and co-products like desalinated water. Since thermal plants are typically 30-60% efficient in generating electricity, there are large opportunities for making use of that heat for industrial processes. High temperature nuclear reactors are especially attractive, and offer more options for co-generation, including synthetic fuels and ammonia. This also allows reactors to run continuously at 100% power, while adapting to demand by varying generation of co-products.
The economics favor coupling co-generation to reliable sources of energy. Using excess renewable capacity is substantially more challenging, and of questionable benefit. For such plants to be cost effective, they can't be sitting idle most of the time, waiting for sporadic bursts of energy.
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Think of the good Kaspersky can do
The past work on malware discovery helped a lot of people and nations secure their data and networks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Bringing Kaspersky to any OS will just improve such support and detection of new and unexpected malware. -
All Hail Friend Computer
The AI knows all. The AI is our friend. The AI is insane. All hail the AI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Paranoia is a dystopian science-fiction tabletop role-playing game originally designed and written by Greg Costikyan, Dan Gelber, and Eric Goldberg, and first published in 1984 by West End Games. Since 2004 the game has been published under license by Mongoose Publishing. The game won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Rules of 1984[1] and was inducted into the Origins Awards Hall of Fame in 2007.[2] Paranoia is notable among tabletop games for being more competitive than co-operative, with players encouraged to betray one another for their own interests, as well as for keeping a light-hearted, tongue in cheek tone despite its dystopian setting.
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Re: Science Disagrees...
like supposedly suing completely innocent farmers
You can read the Canada Supreme Court decision that Monsato won over Percy Schmeiser (first link in the references). It was pretty obvious that he was innocent. The Court even reduced his fine to $1 (a fact scrubbed from the wiki page, probably by Monsanto-paid editors) because they determined that he didn't benefit in any way from planting the RoundUp Ready seeds (he never sprayed RoundUp on his crops).
The Court only decided in favor of Monsanto because they did have a patent, and they determined Schmeiser violated that patent by planting seeds with the patented gene. And even that determination is suspect because the Court bought Monsanto's argument that there was no way for plants to develop resistance to RoundUp on their own. So Schmeiser "ought to have known" that the canola plants he found in the gutters by his field that survived spraying with RoundUp were from Monsanto's patented seeds. This argument was later disproven when weeds were found which had developed resistance to RoundUp on their own, meaning Schmeiser was right when he argued that he believed the Canola in his gutters had developed resistance on their own.