My dad was chronically ill for years, one organ after another failing. Towards the end, he wanted nothing more than for it all to be over. The miracles of modern medicine - they just wouldn't let him die. He had registered a DNR - the hospital even f*cking knew about it - and when his heart gave out, they revived him anyway. He suffered on for another year or more. Gee, thanks for that.
We initially decided not to honor the tattoo, invoking the principle of not choosing an irreversible path when faced with uncertainty.
What uncertainly. Seriously, what does a guy have to do in order to be allowed to die in peace? Filing a piece of paper in some government office somewhere is useless: the paramedics show up, or someone takes you to the ER, and no one has time to find out whether that paper exists. That's what the tattoo is for.
Look, I read the other comments about drunken idiots getting DNR tattoos. They probably also enjoy playing the odd round of Russian Roulette and do drunken dares with running chainsaws. There's no cure for stupid. Believe the tattoo, don't make other people suffer because of a few idiots.
Re socialization: One shouldn't forget that dogs are pack animals, whereas cats are not. Different socialization needs are not, in this case, an indication of intelligence. Also: dogs have been bred for trainability, and for successful human interaction.
Anyone who's surprised dogs are the smarter species hasn't been paying attention.
Yup. Even as someone who prefers cats: cats clearly are not as intelligent as dogs.
I have never understood why the tax authorities in the US (or, indeed, almost anywhere else) should be exempt from the requirement to get a warrant.
If the government suspects you of wrongdoing, they are supposed to present evidence to a judge, in order to get the right to invade your privacy. Yet tax authorities have direct access to your banking information, your salary, your investments - and now, of course, they want your cryptocurrency transactions. Why should they have this right?
Sure, some people would cheat on their taxes. That doesn't (or shouldn't) give the government carte blanche to invade your privacy. Alternatively, maybe a tax system that requires massive invasion of privacy is the wrong way for governments to collect money.
What, exactly, are they going to do with this information? What will the false-positive rate be? Intuitively, I expect it to be very high: 90% or more of the reported cases will be false positives.
So: The suicide prevention lines will suddenly be overloaded with incorrect reports? And random individuals will have the police knocking on their doors as 3am, saving them from...nothing?
Prediction: This is yet another feel-good idea that will have predominantly negative effects. Why do SJWs insist on sticking their noses in other people's lives?
Some of the benchmarks run seem pretty stupid, for the goal of evaluating Linux for the enterprise. Whether your Perl script compiles in 0.001 or 0.002 seconds? Really? On others, it had more to do with packages, for example, PHP/5 was slower than PHP/7. That's not really relevant: If you need PHP/7, you'll install it.
That said, Clear Linux does come in ahead on virtually all of the benchmarks listed. Clear Linux is by Intel, and these tests are all running on Intel processors. I suspect this advantage comes down to some very special drivers: better instruction set usage, cache optimizations, etc. Stuff that could be made available to the Linux kernel, but that Intel has kept for their particular Linux flavor.
- Tesla production lagging, massive problems... Look! I build a battery plant in Australia!
- Tesla can't even produce enough cars to fill the pre-orders... Look! We're going to revolutionize trucking!
- Tesla hasn't got enough materials to build car batteries - maybe because it all went to Australia... Look! Another squirrel!
How long are people going to be fooled?
There are so many reasons that Tesla electric semis are not going to go anywhere; it's not even worth listing them. Tesla will build a couple, to serve as additional distractions from their problems, but doing so will just make Tesla's production problems even worse...
Once upon a time, I did my doctorate in machine learning. The machines were less powerful, but the algorithms? Basically the same as they are today. Sorry, the stuff most widely in use is still the same back-propagating neural networks. The machines are just faster, so the networks can be bigger. That's it.
Neural networks can work really well on specific problem domains. The problem is: You have no idea what they are actually learning. The features that a network identifies within its layers are not really accessible to us. The problem lies, imho, in the total lack of domain knowledge. Since the network doesn't understand what the objects in those pictures are, they are doing a purely mechanical analysis of some (and who knows which) aspects of the pictures. They can learn some really weird things.
In a well-trained network, the results mostly coincide with our expectations. In a completely isolated domain, like chess or go, a network can be trained sufficiently to perform quite well. However, in open domains, they are fragile: we have no idea when they will break. Look at the video of the turtle being identified as a rifle (in the link above). Why does the identification jump seemingly at random? When will a cat will suddenly be guacamole? When will a pedestrian crossing the road will suddenly be just a pile of leaves? We have no idea, none.
It is certainly true that selecting and managing training data is a very different task from classic programming. However, it doesn't really take much domain knowledge. In most domains, gathering training data is tedious, not difficult. The hard part comes in figuring out how to make the best use of that data to train and test a network - and that requires a deep understanding of how the neural networks work (and how they don't work). Plus, frankly, a huge pile of trial and error, because there aren't many rules on how to best structure a net for any particular task.
There are three aspects to security: something you are, something you know, something you have. Implement two for rudimentary security, implement all three for good security.
- Something you are: User ID, biometrics, or some other public information that serves to identify the person.
- Something you know: Typically a password, used to prove the identity
- Something you have: Second factor, used to prove that the password and identity were not stolen.
Face-ID and fingerprints are insecure and easily fooled.
A good PM protects his team from interference by management, who otherwise interrupt and change their priorities every second day. At the same time, a good PM sets priorities, and adapts them to the developing reality, for example, when some task takes longer than planned, or when requirements really do change. With a good PM, developers get to spend more time developing.
A bad PM does pretty much the opposite of all that. There are a lot of bad PMs.
The overdiagnosis of autism and Aspergers is not useful. Many of us have difficulties in social situations. Being officially diagnosed provides an excuse to stop trying. It also provides an excuse for other people to write you off, and ignore what you say.
Damore's letter was on point. Google, and apparently most of Silicon Valley, is stuffed full of SJWs and political correctness, and this needs to stop. Diversity is oh so important, as long as it does not include diversity of opinion. Having a non-PC opinion cannot be tolerated, in fact, counts as a micro-aggression against whoever chooses to feel offended that day.
It's a total shame that Damore is retreating into an autism diagnosis. Piss off the SJWs? The best defense is a good offense. Don't apologize, don't excuse yourself. Instead, keep right on telling them that they're full of shit.
You're in the US, right? Nice "twin towers" you have, shame they fell down. But terrorism isn't a real threat. Right. Got it.
"What I don't understand is why bother? Trump has thrown enough red meat to his xenophobic base already.... He doesn't even need to DO anything, his base is still convinced he's 'draining the swamp,'"
No, I think you misunderstand: his base hopes he will drain the swamp, but it is only a hope. Trump is a total wildcard. No one knew what he would do - heck, even now, a year later, no one knows what he will do. The reason people voted for him is really simple: all of the other candidates were fully owned by the swamp, and that made Trump the only possible choice. Jeb? Give me a break, the Bush family maybe thinks the oval office is hereditary? Hillary? Sure, if you want to sell the oval office to the highest bidder, like the Clintons do with everything else they can shoplift off of your country. Seriously, given the slate of candidates, who else would anyone have voted for?
There will certainly be genetic factors. To the comments about longevity being luck, of course that plays a role. Want to live to 100, don't get hit by a train, duh. Lot of illness is driven by luck. If you have a gene that makes you prone to cancer, that's no guarantee that you will get cancer. However, the fact remains that your chances of longevity are a lot better without that gene.
There have been some experiments with simpler life forms (fruit flies, iirc), where - in surprisingly few generations - they were able to triple the average lifespan through planned breeding. The selection criteria was simply to breed the critters as late as possible in their lives. In any case, the results are pretty clear proof that genetics play a decisive role in longevity.
Who has read Heinlein's novel Methusalah's Children? The premise of the book was that someone had created a legacy - a couple of centuries ago - to encourage certain people to marry and have children (selected, iirc, by their grandparents' longevity). Based on what we know today, this would be entirely possible and reasonable. Equally possible and reasonable was the inevitable resentment felt by the rest of the human race, towards people who lived for hundreds of years. No one wants their neighbor to be smarter, richer or healthier than they, themselves are - humans rejoice in Schadenfreude, but we don't even have a word for the reverse.
The problem is, as said in TFS: "32,6 million children of primary-school age and 25,7 million adolescents are not going to school". Step one: get them in school, where a teacher has access to them.
Then this: "ICT in education...offers a number of possible benefits...these include access to low-cost teaching resources"
Um, no. Low cost is chalk and a blackboard. Pencil and paper. Using digital technology, especially for primary school children, is an idiotic idea. The kind of idea dreamed up by technology fans who haven't got the slightest clue about the actual challenges facing the kids there.
You are overly cynical; governments do solve a problem. Or, at least, they are supposed to solve a problem. The primary purpose of a government is to promulgate and enforce rules on personal interactions; these are the laws. The secondary purpose is to provide the citizens a means of acting collectively, for example, to hire police to enforce those laws.
In a free-wheeling anarchy (which is the libertarian utopia), there is no state, there is only private power. The dream is that the good folk will outnumber the bad folk, and be able to dominate the society. Nice dream, but human nature will ensure that this does not happen. Power will tend to accumulate in the hands of violent sociopaths. They may initially sell themselves as the hired protectors, but it won't be long before they demand protection money. Eventually, they will abuse the libertarian utopia to establish themselves as tyrants. By all reports, many people living under effective Mafia rule in Sicily are quite happy - as long as you are in the inner circle, it's great. It's less great for everyone else, especially those people who want to opt out of the protection racket, and get their kneecaps broken.
Government is an attempt by the "good guys" to solve these problems. We haven't got it quite right yet - our governments take on lives of their own, and get out of control. The current batch is going to have to be replaced at some point (and the politicians losing power are not going to like this). But first, we need better ideas, and we don't have them:
- The progressives yearning for communism, socialist or fascism (which is just socialism under another name) want to go backwards to stuff that worked even worse than what we have now.
- The conservatives basically want to "conserve" what we have now, which has mutated into crony-capitalism.
- The few libertarian idealists effectively want anarchy, which is the short road to tyranny.
What we need is an incremental improvement on democracy and capitalism, because those systems are - so far - the best we have managed. Some iteration that limits the accumulation of money and power into the hands of the 1%, while at the same time avoiding "bread and circuses" for the populist masses. The development of this incremental improvement is left as an exercise for the reader:-)
The thing is: developing actual, meaningful relationships requires going through a lot of superficial crap. You don't know in advance which people you are going to be able to relate to, so you sample around, and you first meet lots and lots of people who don't work out for you. If you don't go to that trouble, just how are you supposed to magically meet the rare person you actually hit it off with?
Now, you may say "it's not worth it". And who would I be to disagree? I make about 1 good friend every 20 years, because I mostly can't be bothered to socialize. But be aware that this is the price you pay for being a "hermit".
If I may, let me ask a possibly silly question: Why do these companies always have to be interviewed by some Congressional committee? What's the point? I mean, the damage is already done, nothing Congress can do to change that. If a crime has been committed, those responsible should be prosecuted. If civil damages occurred, they should be sued. What's the point of the grandstanding by Congresscritters?
That said, a CEO who knows he is going to get publicly grilled ought to have all of his ducks in a row. There's no excuse for not knowing something as basic as "is your data encrypted".
And on the gripping hand, depending on how something is hacked, "at rest" encryption may just be totally useless. It will protect you if someone gets a raw copy of your database, but if they have access to your application infrastructure, that infrastructure will happily decrypt the data for them, because that's what it does. Meanwhile, you will take a *huge* performance hit on a lot of database operations. Really, I have trouble imagining the small additional security being worth the cost in performance. But maybe I'm not familiar with enterprise-scale operations - anyone who is care to comment?
The term in the sex trade I believe is "girlfriend experience". In addition to having sex with you the sex worker will also spend time pretending to love you. Since it's a higher level of service it naturally costs more.
I speak from a lack of experience, but...isn't that the basically difference between a prostitute and an escort? The former will have sex with you, and that's it. The latter will go to an event with you, or out to dinner, or even spend the weekend. While sex may be part of the deal, it's really the full companionship package that you are paying for.
That said, I agree with your comment about nonconsenting participants. The case mentioned in TFS is a horrible fraud played on the child. It is entirely likely that she will discover this at some point, and the feelings of betrayal will be huge.
Serious question, especially for the author of the parent comment, since he understand Japan so well: how is the service in TFA different from an escort service?
If you pay someone to be a father, for the life, that includes some serious commitment. Next to that, paying a woman to be your girlfriend for a night or a weekend pales to insignificance.
People find this "icky" because we're growing neurons in a glass, but they have no problem with liver cells or muscle cells. Why, exactly?
A clump of neurons is not sentient, nor is it going to be sentient. Not even if it develops in layers. Without external influence and control, it is going to be basically unstructured. It's just a bunch of cells.
Maybe, someday, scientists will be able to provide the stimuli necessary to make a clump of neurons into something more. That day is not yet, and these clumps aren't even close to any sort of ethical boundary.
We have Windows machines in the house, also mostly for gaming. Really, it's not that dramatic. My list for you:
- Don't visit dodgy sites offering free games. As long as you install games and DLC from reputable sources, viruses and adware really aren't a problem. Windows Defender is all the defense you need.
- To be safe, figure out how to restore the machine to its factory defaults. My kids both have Alienware machines, and they offer an option to nuke-and-restore. If your child goes off and installs all sorts of awful stuff, and does manage to fill the machine with adware - having everything erased is (a) safe and (b) a really good lesson.
- If you value your (theoretical) privacy, follow any of the zillion online guides for turning off the Windows 10 telemetry.
Really, that's it. You will find some of the UI differences really annoying (I go the other way - using a Mac is really annoying), but that's small stuff...
Wow, a whole new target for hacking. Bluetooth range is pretty variable - someone sitting in a conference room or a waiting room has a good chance of contacting a computer on the other side of the wall. Many users will be completely unaware that this feature even exists.
I don't understand why they are going in this direction. Why not a locked box outside your door? Make it big enough for any normal package, or allow different sizes. Make it sturdy and weather proof. Put the same kind of lock system and camera on it. More people would be willing to have a box on their porch, as compared to the very few people who want their door lock under someone else's remote control.
I think a series like this could be good fun. My only objection is paying off the Tolkein trust. The copyrights on LOTR should have expired long ago. No one now alive produced anything - this should all be in the public domain.
For that reason, i object. Don't feed the copyright trolls.
The easy answer: I don't understand why anyone would by a television anymore. Buy a dumb screen, or a projector, and put whatever content you want on it.
I confess, we do have a commercial tuner (cable box) as one possible input to our projector, but it is only used to tune in standard cable channels. Films and such go directly from our media server.
Slashdot Mirror
My dad was chronically ill for years, one organ after another failing. Towards the end, he wanted nothing more than for it all to be over. The miracles of modern medicine - they just wouldn't let him die. He had registered a DNR - the hospital even f*cking knew about it - and when his heart gave out, they revived him anyway. He suffered on for another year or more. Gee, thanks for that.
We initially decided not to honor the tattoo, invoking the principle of not choosing an irreversible path when faced with uncertainty.
What uncertainly. Seriously, what does a guy have to do in order to be allowed to die in peace? Filing a piece of paper in some government office somewhere is useless: the paramedics show up, or someone takes you to the ER, and no one has time to find out whether that paper exists. That's what the tattoo is for.
Look, I read the other comments about drunken idiots getting DNR tattoos. They probably also enjoy playing the odd round of Russian Roulette and do drunken dares with running chainsaws. There's no cure for stupid. Believe the tattoo, don't make other people suffer because of a few idiots.
Re socialization: One shouldn't forget that dogs are pack animals, whereas cats are not. Different socialization needs are not, in this case, an indication of intelligence. Also: dogs have been bred for trainability, and for successful human interaction.
Anyone who's surprised dogs are the smarter species hasn't been paying attention.
Yup. Even as someone who prefers cats: cats clearly are not as intelligent as dogs.
I have never understood why the tax authorities in the US (or, indeed, almost anywhere else) should be exempt from the requirement to get a warrant.
If the government suspects you of wrongdoing, they are supposed to present evidence to a judge, in order to get the right to invade your privacy. Yet tax authorities have direct access to your banking information, your salary, your investments - and now, of course, they want your cryptocurrency transactions. Why should they have this right?
Sure, some people would cheat on their taxes. That doesn't (or shouldn't) give the government carte blanche to invade your privacy. Alternatively, maybe a tax system that requires massive invasion of privacy is the wrong way for governments to collect money.
What, exactly, are they going to do with this information? What will the false-positive rate be? Intuitively, I expect it to be very high: 90% or more of the reported cases will be false positives.
So: The suicide prevention lines will suddenly be overloaded with incorrect reports? And random individuals will have the police knocking on their doors as 3am, saving them from...nothing?
Prediction: This is yet another feel-good idea that will have predominantly negative effects. Why do SJWs insist on sticking their noses in other people's lives?
Stupid benchmarks
Some of the benchmarks run seem pretty stupid, for the goal of evaluating Linux for the enterprise. Whether your Perl script compiles in 0.001 or 0.002 seconds? Really? On others, it had more to do with packages, for example, PHP/5 was slower than PHP/7. That's not really relevant: If you need PHP/7, you'll install it.
That said, Clear Linux does come in ahead on virtually all of the benchmarks listed. Clear Linux is by Intel, and these tests are all running on Intel processors. I suspect this advantage comes down to some very special drivers: better instruction set usage, cache optimizations, etc. Stuff that could be made available to the Linux kernel, but that Intel has kept for their particular Linux flavor.
Look! A squirrel!
- Tesla production lagging, massive problems... Look! I build a battery plant in Australia!
- Tesla can't even produce enough cars to fill the pre-orders... Look! We're going to revolutionize trucking!
- Tesla hasn't got enough materials to build car batteries - maybe because it all went to Australia... Look! Another squirrel!
How long are people going to be fooled?
There are so many reasons that Tesla electric semis are not going to go anywhere; it's not even worth listing them. Tesla will build a couple, to serve as additional distractions from their problems, but doing so will just make Tesla's production problems even worse...
Once upon a time, I did my doctorate in machine learning. The machines were less powerful, but the algorithms? Basically the same as they are today. Sorry, the stuff most widely in use is still the same back-propagating neural networks. The machines are just faster, so the networks can be bigger. That's it.
Neural networks can work really well on specific problem domains. The problem is: You have no idea what they are actually learning. The features that a network identifies within its layers are not really accessible to us. The problem lies, imho, in the total lack of domain knowledge. Since the network doesn't understand what the objects in those pictures are, they are doing a purely mechanical analysis of some (and who knows which) aspects of the pictures. They can learn some really weird things.
In a well-trained network, the results mostly coincide with our expectations. In a completely isolated domain, like chess or go, a network can be trained sufficiently to perform quite well. However, in open domains, they are fragile: we have no idea when they will break. Look at the video of the turtle being identified as a rifle (in the link above). Why does the identification jump seemingly at random? When will a cat will suddenly be guacamole? When will a pedestrian crossing the road will suddenly be just a pile of leaves? We have no idea, none.
It is certainly true that selecting and managing training data is a very different task from classic programming. However, it doesn't really take much domain knowledge. In most domains, gathering training data is tedious, not difficult. The hard part comes in figuring out how to make the best use of that data to train and test a network - and that requires a deep understanding of how the neural networks work (and how they don't work). Plus, frankly, a huge pile of trial and error, because there aren't many rules on how to best structure a net for any particular task.
Biometrics are user-ids, not passwords.
There are three aspects to security: something you are, something you know, something you have. Implement two for rudimentary security, implement all three for good security.
- Something you are: User ID, biometrics, or some other public information that serves to identify the person.
- Something you know: Typically a password, used to prove the identity
- Something you have: Second factor, used to prove that the password and identity were not stolen.
Face-ID and fingerprints are insecure and easily fooled.
A good PM protects his team from interference by management, who otherwise interrupt and change their priorities every second day. At the same time, a good PM sets priorities, and adapts them to the developing reality, for example, when some task takes longer than planned, or when requirements really do change. With a good PM, developers get to spend more time developing.
A bad PM does pretty much the opposite of all that. There are a lot of bad PMs.
The overdiagnosis of autism and Aspergers is not useful. Many of us have difficulties in social situations. Being officially diagnosed provides an excuse to stop trying. It also provides an excuse for other people to write you off, and ignore what you say.
Damore's letter was on point. Google, and apparently most of Silicon Valley, is stuffed full of SJWs and political correctness, and this needs to stop. Diversity is oh so important, as long as it does not include diversity of opinion. Having a non-PC opinion cannot be tolerated, in fact, counts as a micro-aggression against whoever chooses to feel offended that day.
It's a total shame that Damore is retreating into an autism diagnosis. Piss off the SJWs? The best defense is a good offense. Don't apologize, don't excuse yourself. Instead, keep right on telling them that they're full of shit.
Geez, what planet do you live on?
"Terrorism isn't a real threat"
You're in the US, right? Nice "twin towers" you have, shame they fell down. But terrorism isn't a real threat. Right. Got it.
"What I don't understand is why bother? Trump has thrown enough red meat to his xenophobic base already. ... He doesn't even need to DO anything, his base is still convinced he's 'draining the swamp,'"
No, I think you misunderstand: his base hopes he will drain the swamp, but it is only a hope. Trump is a total wildcard. No one knew what he would do - heck, even now, a year later, no one knows what he will do. The reason people voted for him is really simple: all of the other candidates were fully owned by the swamp, and that made Trump the only possible choice. Jeb? Give me a break, the Bush family maybe thinks the oval office is hereditary? Hillary? Sure, if you want to sell the oval office to the highest bidder, like the Clintons do with everything else they can shoplift off of your country. Seriously, given the slate of candidates, who else would anyone have voted for?
There will certainly be genetic factors. To the comments about longevity being luck, of course that plays a role. Want to live to 100, don't get hit by a train, duh. Lot of illness is driven by luck. If you have a gene that makes you prone to cancer, that's no guarantee that you will get cancer. However, the fact remains that your chances of longevity are a lot better without that gene.
There have been some experiments with simpler life forms (fruit flies, iirc), where - in surprisingly few generations - they were able to triple the average lifespan through planned breeding. The selection criteria was simply to breed the critters as late as possible in their lives. In any case, the results are pretty clear proof that genetics play a decisive role in longevity.
Who has read Heinlein's novel Methusalah's Children? The premise of the book was that someone had created a legacy - a couple of centuries ago - to encourage certain people to marry and have children (selected, iirc, by their grandparents' longevity). Based on what we know today, this would be entirely possible and reasonable. Equally possible and reasonable was the inevitable resentment felt by the rest of the human race, towards people who lived for hundreds of years. No one wants their neighbor to be smarter, richer or healthier than they, themselves are - humans rejoice in Schadenfreude, but we don't even have a word for the reverse.
The problem is, as said in TFS: "32,6 million children of primary-school age and 25,7 million adolescents are not going to school". Step one: get them in school, where a teacher has access to them.
Then this: "ICT in education...offers a number of possible benefits...these include access to low-cost teaching resources"
Um, no. Low cost is chalk and a blackboard. Pencil and paper. Using digital technology, especially for primary school children, is an idiotic idea. The kind of idea dreamed up by technology fans who haven't got the slightest clue about the actual challenges facing the kids there.
You are overly cynical; governments do solve a problem. Or, at least, they are supposed to solve a problem. The primary purpose of a government is to promulgate and enforce rules on personal interactions; these are the laws. The secondary purpose is to provide the citizens a means of acting collectively, for example, to hire police to enforce those laws.
In a free-wheeling anarchy (which is the libertarian utopia), there is no state, there is only private power. The dream is that the good folk will outnumber the bad folk, and be able to dominate the society. Nice dream, but human nature will ensure that this does not happen. Power will tend to accumulate in the hands of violent sociopaths. They may initially sell themselves as the hired protectors, but it won't be long before they demand protection money. Eventually, they will abuse the libertarian utopia to establish themselves as tyrants. By all reports, many people living under effective Mafia rule in Sicily are quite happy - as long as you are in the inner circle, it's great. It's less great for everyone else, especially those people who want to opt out of the protection racket, and get their kneecaps broken.
Government is an attempt by the "good guys" to solve these problems. We haven't got it quite right yet - our governments take on lives of their own, and get out of control. The current batch is going to have to be replaced at some point (and the politicians losing power are not going to like this). But first, we need better ideas, and we don't have them:
- The progressives yearning for communism, socialist or fascism (which is just socialism under another name) want to go backwards to stuff that worked even worse than what we have now.
- The conservatives basically want to "conserve" what we have now, which has mutated into crony-capitalism.
- The few libertarian idealists effectively want anarchy, which is the short road to tyranny.
What we need is an incremental improvement on democracy and capitalism, because those systems are - so far - the best we have managed. Some iteration that limits the accumulation of money and power into the hands of the 1%, while at the same time avoiding "bread and circuses" for the populist masses. The development of this incremental improvement is left as an exercise for the reader :-)
Geez, who peed in your breakfast cereal?
The thing is: developing actual, meaningful relationships requires going through a lot of superficial crap. You don't know in advance which people you are going to be able to relate to, so you sample around, and you first meet lots and lots of people who don't work out for you. If you don't go to that trouble, just how are you supposed to magically meet the rare person you actually hit it off with?
Now, you may say "it's not worth it". And who would I be to disagree? I make about 1 good friend every 20 years, because I mostly can't be bothered to socialize. But be aware that this is the price you pay for being a "hermit".
If I may, let me ask a possibly silly question: Why do these companies always have to be interviewed by some Congressional committee? What's the point? I mean, the damage is already done, nothing Congress can do to change that. If a crime has been committed, those responsible should be prosecuted. If civil damages occurred, they should be sued. What's the point of the grandstanding by Congresscritters?
That said, a CEO who knows he is going to get publicly grilled ought to have all of his ducks in a row. There's no excuse for not knowing something as basic as "is your data encrypted".
And on the gripping hand, depending on how something is hacked, "at rest" encryption may just be totally useless. It will protect you if someone gets a raw copy of your database, but if they have access to your application infrastructure, that infrastructure will happily decrypt the data for them, because that's what it does. Meanwhile, you will take a *huge* performance hit on a lot of database operations. Really, I have trouble imagining the small additional security being worth the cost in performance. But maybe I'm not familiar with enterprise-scale operations - anyone who is care to comment?
The term in the sex trade I believe is "girlfriend experience". In addition to having sex with you the sex worker will also spend time pretending to love you. Since it's a higher level of service it naturally costs more.
I speak from a lack of experience, but...isn't that the basically difference between a prostitute and an escort? The former will have sex with you, and that's it. The latter will go to an event with you, or out to dinner, or even spend the weekend. While sex may be part of the deal, it's really the full companionship package that you are paying for.
That said, I agree with your comment about nonconsenting participants. The case mentioned in TFS is a horrible fraud played on the child. It is entirely likely that she will discover this at some point, and the feelings of betrayal will be huge.
Serious question, especially for the author of the parent comment, since he understand Japan so well: how is the service in TFA different from an escort service?
If you pay someone to be a father, for the life, that includes some serious commitment. Next to that, paying a woman to be your girlfriend for a night or a weekend pales to insignificance.
People find this "icky" because we're growing neurons in a glass, but they have no problem with liver cells or muscle cells. Why, exactly?
A clump of neurons is not sentient, nor is it going to be sentient. Not even if it develops in layers. Without external influence and control, it is going to be basically unstructured. It's just a bunch of cells.
Maybe, someday, scientists will be able to provide the stimuli necessary to make a clump of neurons into something more. That day is not yet, and these clumps aren't even close to any sort of ethical boundary.
We have Windows machines in the house, also mostly for gaming. Really, it's not that dramatic. My list for you:
- Don't visit dodgy sites offering free games. As long as you install games and DLC from reputable sources, viruses and adware really aren't a problem. Windows Defender is all the defense you need.
- To be safe, figure out how to restore the machine to its factory defaults. My kids both have Alienware machines, and they offer an option to nuke-and-restore. If your child goes off and installs all sorts of awful stuff, and does manage to fill the machine with adware - having everything erased is (a) safe and (b) a really good lesson.
- If you value your (theoretical) privacy, follow any of the zillion online guides for turning off the Windows 10 telemetry.
Really, that's it. You will find some of the UI differences really annoying (I go the other way - using a Mac is really annoying), but that's small stuff...
Wow, a whole new target for hacking. Bluetooth range is pretty variable - someone sitting in a conference room or a waiting room has a good chance of contacting a computer on the other side of the wall. Many users will be completely unaware that this feature even exists.
How long until the first hack?
I don't understand why they are going in this direction. Why not a locked box outside your door? Make it big enough for any normal package, or allow different sizes. Make it sturdy and weather proof. Put the same kind of lock system and camera on it. More people would be willing to have a box on their porch, as compared to the very few people who want their door lock under someone else's remote control.
I think a series like this could be good fun. My only objection is paying off the Tolkein trust. The copyrights on LOTR should have expired long ago. No one now alive produced anything - this should all be in the public domain.
For that reason, i object. Don't feed the copyright trolls.
The easy answer: I don't understand why anyone would by a television anymore. Buy a dumb screen, or a projector, and put whatever content you want on it.
I confess, we do have a commercial tuner (cable box) as one possible input to our projector, but it is only used to tune in standard cable channels. Films and such go directly from our media server.