So every time anyone loses an hour or gains an hour of sleep and it causes serious health problems, it would be an easily proveable hypothesis, and a theory acceptable to near certainty.
In fact, it is an easily provable hypothesis, and it is thoroughly proven. We do the same experiment every year, and every year, we see the same statistically significant increase in deaths. How many experiments do you need before you believe the numbers? Yeah, the odds of actual death are small individually, but even that small probability multiplied times a population of 325 million people in the U.S. equals several hundred extra deaths each year, all of which are 100% avoidable. Not to mention that everybody feels like crap for a day or more.
By the way - shouldn't insomniacs all die after a few sleepless nights?
No. In healthy individuals, sleep deprivation usually just causes psychosis. It causes premature death only in people whose hearts are already marginal.
If we're going to get rid of DST, we should go to Standard Time as that's how time zones (with local solar noon) were created for, and we all managed to survive with sunset being "early".
Each state (or, for long states, part of a state) should choose whether to be permanently on standard time or DST.
If you don't want to drive home in the dark, have your municipality install street lights.
The longer after dark you drive home, the more likely you are to fall asleep behind the wheel. It's not about street lights. It's about biology. Maybe self-driving cars will fix this eventually, but until then, I suspect most areas will pick permanent DST rather than permanent standard time, for precisely that reason.
I've noticed that the folks who hate DST don't care bout anything more than how inconvenienced they are with having to reset their clocks. As Iggymanz notes, disrupt the school day, disrupt an entire process - they don't care how much trouble others have, as long as they get their way.
It isn't about inconvenience. It is about health. That much lost sleep causes serious problems for human physiology. We simply aren't built to handle it. If the time change were gradual, at a minute per day or something, it wouldn't be a problem, but as it is, people die because of DST. The time changes causes an increase in:
Heart attacks
Car accidents
Industrial accidents
Additionally, the economic cost is huge. Fatigued workers take more sick days and are more distracted when they actually show up for work, to the tune of almost half a billion dollars every spring.
Those parents will just have to grit their teeth and stop imagining every bad thing in the world that could possibly happen to their children. Maybe teach them not to stand next to the road in the dark (which they really should already be teaching them).
Or gee, I don't know, start school later? It probably makes little difference for young kids, but for sure by the time they are high-school-aged, studies show that they pretty much don't learn anything before 10 A.M. anyway, so you might as start school two hours later and solve that problem.:-)
(Yes, I'm exaggerating for comic effect here, but there actually are numerous studies showing a real improvement in grades if you start school later.)
That's not true, or rather is true only from the theoretical maximum for each technology ignoring distances and losses. The fastest phone based internet system available at a distance of more than 1.5km from an exchange is VDSL2 which clocks in at 25Mbps.
To be honest, I was trying to pretend that VDSL/VDSL2 didn't exist. They're basically a way of lowering the cost of fiber by not quite making it reach your house. But in areas where it is actually deployed, that means you have fiber really, really close to your house, so even if you're one of the very, very few people who just happens to live in that tiny distance band where VDSL is possible at 25 Mbps but not 50 Mbps, the cost of getting actual fiber should be low enough that an average person could probably afford to pay for it (as in a few hundred to a few thousand bucks, max).
That said, AFAIK, VDSL2 is nowhere near 25 Mbps even at 1.5 km unless you're doing some sort of channel bonding (read "flaky as heck"). I think it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 Mbps at 1.5 km (source: Versatek). You don't get 25 Mbps until the distance to the node is around three or four hundred meters.
And if you happen to be unlucky enough to be right at 400 meters, you can still get almost 50 Mbps via VDSL (not 2). VDSL2 is only faster from about 250 meters down, and at that point, you're really, really close to 50 Mbps.
So although I might be slightly off, it's pretty much within the margin of error.:-)
AmiMoJo is still repeating the lie that Nazi's were conservatives, a whole fucking decade after everyone but those in tiny bubbles gave up trying to sell it.
Nazis weren't conservative. However, a striking number of Nazi positions have been adopted by the leader of America's so-called "conservative" party, from President Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric to his anti-news-media rhetoric to his anti-Muslim rhetoric to the populist drivel that he spews on a near constant basis. Pretty much anyone who actually paid attention in world history class should recognize the rather alarming parallels between President Trump's rhetoric and that of Hitler.
This is the information age. Hitlers campaign speeches are seconds away. Everyone is seconds away from seeing that Hitler said the same shit the american left now says: The rich are evil, we are here for the working class, the state should provide healthcare, fuck the russians, gotta get rid of guns, etc, etc, etc... the list isnt endless but it goes on and on...
Yeah, no, that's not accurate, for two reasons. First, the American left says none of those things outside of the right-wing propaganda echo chamber, with the sole exception being the bit about the state providing healthcare. Not coincidentally, pretty much every civilized country except the United States already does that, so what you're basically saying by trying to draw equivalence there is that the Nazis have taken over the entire world, and the United States is the only remaining non-Nazi country. When you look at it that way, your entire argument just sounds silly.
Second, even if we completely ignore that bit of reality, arguing that any of the things you listed were the bad parts of the Nazi platform requires some serious reality distortion. In the minds of most sane people, it was the whole mass extermination of anyone who wasn't part of the so-called "master race" that made the Nazis evil. The other bits were just popular political opinions at the time, which the Nazis adopted to try to balance out the monstrous evil in the other parts of their platform. By the same standard, you could argue that the interstate highway system is evil, because the Nazis built a similar system of roads, and I'm pretty sure nobody remotely sane would actually try to argue that point.
What's notable, though, is that the actual evil parts of the Nazi platform have been adopted by the American far right, all the while trying to use false equivalence to somehow "prove" that the left is behaving like Nazis. Don't fall for their lies.
In fact it has always been this way and you see that clearly from the "there is a scientific consensus" people. A consensus does not make anything fact or fiction. Heck since science is more often wrong than right and the fact that most studies cannot be reproduced, it makes it very bad to stifle any information, no matter how obscene it sounds.
Although it is true that even when there is consensus that something is correct, it can occasionally be proven incorrect (or, more typically, incomplete), when there is mass consensus that something is incorrect, it is essentially never later proven to be correct.
In modern science, there are two broad classes of studies: studies that use the scientific method and statistics correctly, and thus have a prayer of being reproduced, and studies that are so full of statistical cherry picking and data dredging that even an amateur with no experience in the field can point out the flaws. The former are usually paid for by public funding sources. The latter are usually paid for by companies that stand to benefit financially from the untruths portrayed in the studies.
The supposed studies that claim to "prove" that vaccines are harmful invariably fall into that second group. They are published in non-peer-reviewed journals or, at best, journals for completely unrelated fields. They are invariably absolute crap science, and can be trivially proven to be garbage by anyone with even the most basic knowledge of the field. And studies like that are harmful because they misuse science and statistics in a fashion that can only be described as fraud, reducing public trust in science by pulling stunts like picking and choosing from larger data sets looking for correlations and performing no broader studies to show whether those correlations are real or just random chance.
My favorite goto argument for this is that once upon a time "everyone thought the earth was flat, the center of the universe, and that the sun orbited earth." AND they often wanted to kill, or harm, or jail anyone that said otherwise! These kinds of people still exist, and you know who they are when they start trash talking anyone that does not agree with every little thing they say.
There was nothing like what we would consider actual modern science involved in that belief, though. It was largely a religious belief based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, and even to the extent it was based on study of the motion of stars and planets, it could best be described as an exercise in curve matching, finding mathematical ways to approximately explain the motion of celestial bodies based purely on observation, with no attempt to explain why the pattern of motion was what it was. The Galilean model was the first model that plausibly explained how and why (gravity), and even then, it took further refinement by Kepler, Brahe, and Newton before the how and why were actually understood. Somewhere in there was when planetary orbits actually started to resemble what we would consider science today. Up to that point, it was just observation, which is only the beginning of science, not the end.
In much the same way, anti-vaccination beliefs are borderline religious, based on no actual science, relying on scientific fallacies. They are literally the modern equivalent of Ptolemaic epicycles, incorrectly claiming that correlation is causation without providing any plausible means of causation. They are not science, and they should not be treated as science. At best, they should be described as applied mathematics, pointing out areas where actual research might be warranted, knowing that the overwhelming majority of the time, the apparent patterns regress to the mean when studied with a nontrivial sample size.
The danger occurs when people point to those "studies", if you can even call them that, as "proof" of something, rather than as mere observations that are the very first ste
Whether the number of people without broadband dropped from 7.7% in 2016 to is 5.9% or 6.5% in 2019, that's still only at most 1.8% in two years, versus 2.7% in the previous one year, under Obama and the Democrat-run FCC. So that's actually a really horrible level of growth.
The numbers for 50 Mbps service are mostly meaningless when it comes to actual broadband growth. Every physical layer that can actually carry 25 Mbps service can also carry 50 Mbps service with only minor changes to the equipment at either end. The only thing that proves is that consumers are demanding more bandwidth.
<sarcasm>Yes, because raping someone is exactly the same thing as photographing the outside of someone's house.</sarcasm>
You have a fundamental right to not be horribly abused in psychologically scarring ways. Even if someone's attire makes him or her more likely to become a victim of rape, the act is still so clearly heinous that the responsibility falls on the rapist.
But you don't have any inherent right to avoid every slight little nuisance. When someone's actions make that person's house more likely to appear in photographs, the act is so harmless that the blame for any resulting annoyance falls squarely on the homeowner for being so bothered by something that most people would see as harmless and then asking the government to do something about it because they can't even be bothered to close their blinds.
Is that like "Maybe you should have thought of that before putting on that miniskirt"?
Not unless you say that to a girl complaining about something harmless, like a guy holding the door for her.
What these folks are complaining about is not the sort of action that causes permanent psychological harm (rape, harassment, etc.), but rather just a slight nuisance level of "harm" where most people would argue that no harm actually occurred at all. People walking by and taking pictures of the outside of your home doesn't really cause you harm in any meaningful way, or at least it shouldn't to a psychologically healthy person.
That said, if someone is particularly sensitive, he or she has many options for avoiding that harm — repainting the house more blandly, closing the window blinds, or even choosing to live in a neighborhood where people don't walk through all the time. And if they stop being in that situation with any of those approaches, there should be no long-term psychological after-effects from something so utterly innocuous.
There has to be a threshold of harm below which you simply say that the person needs to grow a thicker skin or find some other way to cope. Otherwise, if you allow every little minor nuisance to be prevented by legislation, nobody will be able to do anything, because everything will bother someone. And IMO, this is so many miles below that threshold of harm that I can't help but roll my eyes.
Depends on what you mean by meaningful. As a user in the admin group, without becoming root, you can:
Add per-user login items and launchd daemons and agents
Install applications in/Applications.
Monkey with/Users
Access core dumps from system daemons
Connect to non-keyboard HID devices
Access the camera and microphone
And there are probably a lot more mischievous things that one can do with code running as a non-root admin user that I'm not thinking of.:-) Some of the things in the list above don't even require you to be in the admin group. In particular, it would be trivial to add a device to a botnet even without being an admin user.
You haven't needed root to mount a filesystems in over a decade. Not sure what you mean here. All your user needs is permissions. Pop a thumb drive into your system, no root required.
Reread what I said.
Mounting a filesystem anywhere that should actually matter requires root privileges even in macOS.
Typically, you can only mount things over top of directories that you own. The Disk Arbitration framework also allows you to mount things in/Volumes as a special case, by sending requests to a daemon (diskarbitrationd) that runs as root. But I'm 99.9% certain that the permission to do so is not arbitrarily broad.
Breaching a user account gives you all the user's files, and that's pretty severe, yes. Breaching an admin account lets you change the software that deals with files, and networking, joins a botnet, etc.
Most single-user machines don't have a separate admin account. So breaching the user's account is breaching an admin account. That's why the GP said that for single-user machines, privilege escalation rarely matters.
Of course, it isn't *quite* true. There are processes like the keychain that provide some additional privilege separation between apps. If the keychain happens to store out-of-band mach message data in a vulnerable location, then this could lead to arbitrary code being able to modify keychain requests from other apps to steal passwords somehow. Maybe. But realistically, those sorts of communication mechanisms shouldn't be storing data to disk even temporarily.
Mounting a filesystem anywhere that should actually matter (e.g./tmp,/var/tmp) typically requires root privileges even in macOS. And any software that might realistically store out-of-bound data in a location where an unprivileged attacker could mount something over top of it (e.g. in the user's home directory) is not likely to be any more privileged than the attacker app.
Is there any actual evidence that this is a real vulnerability, rather than a purely hypothetical one? I mean yes, it's a bug, but in my mind, high severity should be reserved for situations where the bug itself poses a reasonable chance of letting someone destroy or compromise user data, not situations where the author of a critical system daemon does something colossally stupid *and* the bug exists. The high-severity vulnerability would be the critical system daemon storing temporary data in a vulnerable location. This would just be the low-severity springboard that makes that high-severity bug more severe.
Dark people may have "less contrast", and that doesn't matter.
It is not necessary to identify anything as "humans". A self-driving car should not hit cattle, dogs, brick walls or garbage cans either. Any obstacle is bad. A rock the size of a cat could wreck the car.
Yeah, that was the whole point of this bit:
After all, if dark skin is indistinguishable from the road, so are grey or black automobiles.
Technically speaking, there are circumstances where it is better to hit a sufficiently small object than to swerve to avoid it. For example, if a squirrel runs out across the road, you're probably better off hitting it than the car in the next lane. Same goes for a plastic bag blowing in the wind.
IIRC, there are existing techniques for crudely gauging the mass of an object based on its size and how it moves, and determining whether it is safe to hit based on that. None of those approaches would have any chance of allowing a collision with humans, cattle, large dogs, brick walls, garbage cans, or rocks the size of a cat, regardless of the human's skin tone, the color of the dog's fur, or whether the brick wall was painted to look like a road tunnel through the side of a mountain.
It is just a wishy washy way of not doing any work.
Pretty much.
NN is basically pitting us the customer against one of two 'evils' either the evil ISP or the evil data providers.
Not remotely. Net neutrality actually favors both consumers and small content providers. If an ISP decided to throttle Netflix, YouTube, or some other big content provider, they would get death threats. It has happened, and because those companies are big enough, they got enough consumer complaints to get a lawsuit on Sherman anti-trust grounds.
The main companies NN protects are startups — companies where consumers would never be able to know for sure if the problem was throttling by the ISP or the content provider simply not being able to keep up with traffic. By throttling those companies, ISPs can prevent new, interesting tech from ever happening while the ISPs decide how they're going to respond (e.g. by providing a similar service in-house), or kill it entirely to protect one of their other businesses, or give special "fast lane" access to Netflix in exchange for a kickback, while throttling every new service that's trying to start up and compete with it.
For example, suppose someone comes out with 3D video chat. The ISPs don't have that ability currently, but they could add a camera to their own cable boxes that, when attached to 3D TVs, provides 3D video chat. But they can't do that if somebody else beats them to market too badly. Of course, if that third-party service never takes off because of throttling, they can say that they decided to build their own service because the third-party service wasn't good enough, and consumers might never even know what was happening.
So the anti-NN folks are actually doing a favor for those big companies like Netflix, Google, Hulu, etc. It's unclear why so many of those companies support NN, given that it hurts them. Maybe it's a sense of altruism — the whole "if the Internet hadn't been neutral in the beginning, we wouldn't be here today" thing. Or maybe they're concerned that the "not big enough to look like throttling" problem might apply on a per-service basis, rather than a per-company basis, and might hurt some theoretical future plan. Either way, NN definitely risks increasing their exposure to competition in their existing businesses.
There is absolutely no way that NN favors any big corporation over smaller ones. That's completely implausible at a fairly fundamental level.
This is not true at all, it's based on false assumptions.
First of all, most self driving cars will end up using LIDAR. Skin color, not an issue.
Secondly. even cars with cameras do a lot of image transformations such that color is usually disposed of. You kin color is irrelevant to a recognizer looking for human forms.
In fact you could argue that during the day, darker skin is an advantage because against a blue sky it's more noticeable than really pale skin which could look like clouds... #GingerLivesMatter.
Yes and no. Image recognition tends to be more sensitive to texture than to shape, and darker skin results in less contrast, which means less ability to see things like facial features that otherwise might identify the object as a human.
You are correct that object detection should not be a meaningful part of your strategy for avoiding hitting things. Rather, object detection is for doing things like traffic light detection, road sign reading, and determining where nearby cars are located so that you can calculate when to change lanes, whether you need to accelerate while doing so, etc.
Similarly, object detection should not be used for verifying that nothing is beside you, behind you, or in front of you. Those additional sanity checks are what RADAR, LIDAR, and SONAR are for.
Moreover, even if we assume that image recognition is used for that purpose, parallax differences between cameras should tell you that there is something in front of you. No matter how dark your skin is, if the car thinks that you're part of the road, the software is doing something very wrong, and it's the procedural part of the code base that is failing, not the image recognition part. After all, if dark skin is indistinguishable from the road, so are grey or black automobiles.
But — and this is a big but — detecting people near the road is often useful in terms of avoiding unexpected interactions later by slowing down, changing lanes, etc. And detecting gestures of police officers or other personnel directing traffic also needs to work regardless of their skin color. So it is important to ensure that training data doesn't show racial bias. The same is true for gender bias, attire bias, and any number of other things that could cause confusion for machine vision.
What bugs me about this article is not that the premise is wrong, because it isn't necessarily, but rather that it appears to be entirely built upon a giant tower of hypotheticals, such as the training data being inadequate, the computer vision being used for critical behavior rather than LIDAR or other tech, etc., none of which are necessarily going to happen in the real world, and all of which are readily avoidable by just not cutting corners in development.
Basically, it's like saying that a new nuclear reactor could seriously screw up the world if you forget to connect it to a water supply. My response is, "Yeah, no kidding."
The amazing thing is that they took three pages to basically write "The FCC's reversal of its existing policy in [declaration number] is hereby reversed."
This bill stinks on ice. It doesn't actually enact net neutrality, but rather weakly allows Internet services to be regulated under a section of FCC code that would allow the FCC to regulate net neutrality if it so desires through rulemaking. The bill makes no attempt at defining net neutrality, nor any attempt at defining what constitutes reasonable rulemaking, leaving it entirely up to an unelected body (the FCC) to make those decisions.
To be fair, I'm not saying that they shouldn't pass this. It's an okay stopgap measure, except insofar as Pai's FCC is unlikely to actually issue any meaningful rulemaking to protect net neutrality, which makes this bill largely an empty gesture. But this isn't the end of the story. It is barely even a beginning.
What we actually need is an Internet Users' Bill of Rights that lays out what is and is not acceptable behavior by ISPs in concrete terms. Until we have that fundamental framework, merely having the authority to regulate ISPs over net neutrality concerns still doesn't buy us a whole lot.
Trump was the one that got rid of net neutrality through his appointments to the FCC. Let's not pretend that he's in favor of it. If it weren't for him, we wouldn't need a bill.
Pai wasn't his appointment. President Trump just promoted him to the top spot.
If President Trump even has a position on Net Neutrality, I would expect it to be extremely superficial, limited strictly to what his advisors have told him is the best policy. After all, even fairly tech-savvy people consistently misunderstand what net neutrality means and/or deliberately try to coopt it to suit their own desires. There's essentially zero chance that President Trump understands it at all, even superficially, because almost nobody does.
That said, I very much doubt that he has any position on Net Neutrality whatsoever. He probably doesn't even know that the controversy exists. After all, it doesn't have anything to do with his reputation and it doesn't benefit his business ventures, so why would he care about it? Just saying.
But I guarantee if we could create a really well thought-out bill and name it the Donald J. Trump Net Neutrality Bill Of Rights, he would not only sign it, but would insist that Congress pass it.:-) Just saying.
And now you are making the argument that there exists a government-granted monopoly on ISP services because there exists just one means of delivering the speed of service for the price you're willing to pay.
Bear in mind that my argument was not there was a government-granted monopoly. Rather, I argued that there is a natural monopoly on broadband, which means precisely that only one company can viably deliver the level of service that qualifies as broadband for a price that customers are willing to pay. The crux of my argument was that, based on repeated failures to compete back when there were government-granted monopolies, even if there are places where government-granted monopolies still exist, those monopolies are purely academic, because the natural monopoly would still exist without that government interference.
You deny that wireless fixed broadband exists because it doesn't work for you. Sorry, we have that where I live. It's not a densely populated area. It doesn't take a lot of unsightly equipment that is prohibited.
It's not that I deny that it exists. It is that if it were actually financially competitive, someone would have done it already in any given area. Yet fixed (non-cellular) wireless is relatively rare outside of urban or suburban areas. One possible reason for this is that increasing customer bandwidth for fixed wireless is relatively expensive compared with the cost of increasing bandwidth over coax, meaning that a lot of fixed wireless companies seem competitive at first, but quickly stop being competitive, eventually becoming one of the slowest services available before shutting down service entirely.
Even in the Bay Area, fixed wireless companies tend to last only a few years before going under. The junk heap of history is littered with the husks of wireless ISPs that have failed.
Also, many of the larger fixed wireless providers don't even meet the 25 Mbps minimum to even qualify as broadband, making them moot. True wireless fixed broadband is pretty much a unicorn. They might exist, but you'll probably never actually see one in practice.
No part of the political spectrum is proof from idiocy. With regard to antivaxxers? The real cause is indeed - god help me - fake news.
No, not really. There will always be some amount of misinformation out there. The problem is actually an evolutionary issue. Humans evolved over the millennia to trust what they can see, and to trust certain trusted individuals to provide information about what they can't. Their friends fall into that second category. And as long as their friends are properly informed, that system works reasonably well.
Historically, the main thing that prevented misinformation from getting broadly distributed to those friends was the cost of publishing it in the first place. Most people with enough money to do that were not complete idiots, so there was a built-in, largely financially motivated bulls**t filter.
With the rise of social media, the cost of distributing information (correct or incorrect) fell through the floor, and as a result, the need for someone at least moderately intelligent to conclude that the message has merit before spreading it far and wide no longer exists. Therefore, the opinions of intellectuals and complete bozos now have equal chance of being distributed far and wide, and the odds of your friends having incorrect information becomes significantly higher. So anyone who tends to trust those friends then goes on to repeat the bad information, and it spreads a lot like the plague.
In the absence of gatekeepers, your only real options are to either believe everything, disbelieve everything, or investigate everything yourself. Most people tend to fall into one of the first two categories, with the majority falling into the first one, leaving only a tiny minority of people constantly posting links to Snopes or whatever in a desperate attempt to stem the tide.
In other words, the real problem is that we haven't taught people enough about how to think critically, and the only viable fix for that is to instill in everyone a sufficiently sophisticated bulls**t meters. Any other solution, like specifically targeting "fake news", is basically just sticking your fingers in the dike as the water level inches closer and closer to going over the top rim.
Slashdot Mirror
Was there a parked fire truck nearby?
In fact, it is an easily provable hypothesis, and it is thoroughly proven. We do the same experiment every year, and every year, we see the same statistically significant increase in deaths. How many experiments do you need before you believe the numbers? Yeah, the odds of actual death are small individually, but even that small probability multiplied times a population of 325 million people in the U.S. equals several hundred extra deaths each year, all of which are 100% avoidable. Not to mention that everybody feels like crap for a day or more.
No. In healthy individuals, sleep deprivation usually just causes psychosis. It causes premature death only in people whose hearts are already marginal.
Each state (or, for long states, part of a state) should choose whether to be permanently on standard time or DST.
The longer after dark you drive home, the more likely you are to fall asleep behind the wheel. It's not about street lights. It's about biology. Maybe self-driving cars will fix this eventually, but until then, I suspect most areas will pick permanent DST rather than permanent standard time, for precisely that reason.
It isn't about inconvenience. It is about health. That much lost sleep causes serious problems for human physiology. We simply aren't built to handle it. If the time change were gradual, at a minute per day or something, it wouldn't be a problem, but as it is, people die because of DST. The time changes causes an increase in:
Additionally, the economic cost is huge. Fatigued workers take more sick days and are more distracted when they actually show up for work, to the tune of almost half a billion dollars every spring.
Or gee, I don't know, start school later? It probably makes little difference for young kids, but for sure by the time they are high-school-aged, studies show that they pretty much don't learn anything before 10 A.M. anyway, so you might as start school two hours later and solve that problem. :-)
(Yes, I'm exaggerating for comic effect here, but there actually are numerous studies showing a real improvement in grades if you start school later.)
To be honest, I was trying to pretend that VDSL/VDSL2 didn't exist. They're basically a way of lowering the cost of fiber by not quite making it reach your house. But in areas where it is actually deployed, that means you have fiber really, really close to your house, so even if you're one of the very, very few people who just happens to live in that tiny distance band where VDSL is possible at 25 Mbps but not 50 Mbps, the cost of getting actual fiber should be low enough that an average person could probably afford to pay for it (as in a few hundred to a few thousand bucks, max).
That said, AFAIK, VDSL2 is nowhere near 25 Mbps even at 1.5 km unless you're doing some sort of channel bonding (read "flaky as heck"). I think it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 Mbps at 1.5 km (source: Versatek). You don't get 25 Mbps until the distance to the node is around three or four hundred meters.
And if you happen to be unlucky enough to be right at 400 meters, you can still get almost 50 Mbps via VDSL (not 2). VDSL2 is only faster from about 250 meters down, and at that point, you're really, really close to 50 Mbps.
So although I might be slightly off, it's pretty much within the margin of error. :-)
Nazis weren't conservative. However, a striking number of Nazi positions have been adopted by the leader of America's so-called "conservative" party, from President Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric to his anti-news-media rhetoric to his anti-Muslim rhetoric to the populist drivel that he spews on a near constant basis. Pretty much anyone who actually paid attention in world history class should recognize the rather alarming parallels between President Trump's rhetoric and that of Hitler.
Yeah, no, that's not accurate, for two reasons. First, the American left says none of those things outside of the right-wing propaganda echo chamber, with the sole exception being the bit about the state providing healthcare. Not coincidentally, pretty much every civilized country except the United States already does that, so what you're basically saying by trying to draw equivalence there is that the Nazis have taken over the entire world, and the United States is the only remaining non-Nazi country. When you look at it that way, your entire argument just sounds silly.
Second, even if we completely ignore that bit of reality, arguing that any of the things you listed were the bad parts of the Nazi platform requires some serious reality distortion. In the minds of most sane people, it was the whole mass extermination of anyone who wasn't part of the so-called "master race" that made the Nazis evil. The other bits were just popular political opinions at the time, which the Nazis adopted to try to balance out the monstrous evil in the other parts of their platform. By the same standard, you could argue that the interstate highway system is evil, because the Nazis built a similar system of roads, and I'm pretty sure nobody remotely sane would actually try to argue that point.
What's notable, though, is that the actual evil parts of the Nazi platform have been adopted by the American far right, all the while trying to use false equivalence to somehow "prove" that the left is behaving like Nazis. Don't fall for their lies.
Although it is true that even when there is consensus that something is correct, it can occasionally be proven incorrect (or, more typically, incomplete), when there is mass consensus that something is incorrect, it is essentially never later proven to be correct.
In modern science, there are two broad classes of studies: studies that use the scientific method and statistics correctly, and thus have a prayer of being reproduced, and studies that are so full of statistical cherry picking and data dredging that even an amateur with no experience in the field can point out the flaws. The former are usually paid for by public funding sources. The latter are usually paid for by companies that stand to benefit financially from the untruths portrayed in the studies.
The supposed studies that claim to "prove" that vaccines are harmful invariably fall into that second group. They are published in non-peer-reviewed journals or, at best, journals for completely unrelated fields. They are invariably absolute crap science, and can be trivially proven to be garbage by anyone with even the most basic knowledge of the field. And studies like that are harmful because they misuse science and statistics in a fashion that can only be described as fraud, reducing public trust in science by pulling stunts like picking and choosing from larger data sets looking for correlations and performing no broader studies to show whether those correlations are real or just random chance.
There was nothing like what we would consider actual modern science involved in that belief, though. It was largely a religious belief based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, and even to the extent it was based on study of the motion of stars and planets, it could best be described as an exercise in curve matching, finding mathematical ways to approximately explain the motion of celestial bodies based purely on observation, with no attempt to explain why the pattern of motion was what it was. The Galilean model was the first model that plausibly explained how and why (gravity), and even then, it took further refinement by Kepler, Brahe, and Newton before the how and why were actually understood. Somewhere in there was when planetary orbits actually started to resemble what we would consider science today. Up to that point, it was just observation, which is only the beginning of science, not the end.
In much the same way, anti-vaccination beliefs are borderline religious, based on no actual science, relying on scientific fallacies. They are literally the modern equivalent of Ptolemaic epicycles, incorrectly claiming that correlation is causation without providing any plausible means of causation. They are not science, and they should not be treated as science. At best, they should be described as applied mathematics, pointing out areas where actual research might be warranted, knowing that the overwhelming majority of the time, the apparent patterns regress to the mean when studied with a nontrivial sample size.
The danger occurs when people point to those "studies", if you can even call them that, as "proof" of something, rather than as mere observations that are the very first ste
Whether the number of people without broadband dropped from 7.7% in 2016 to is 5.9% or 6.5% in 2019, that's still only at most 1.8% in two years, versus 2.7% in the previous one year, under Obama and the Democrat-run FCC. So that's actually a really horrible level of growth.
The numbers for 50 Mbps service are mostly meaningless when it comes to actual broadband growth. Every physical layer that can actually carry 25 Mbps service can also carry 50 Mbps service with only minor changes to the equipment at either end. The only thing that proves is that consumers are demanding more bandwidth.
<sarcasm>Yes, because raping someone is exactly the same thing as photographing the outside of someone's house.</sarcasm>
You have a fundamental right to not be horribly abused in psychologically scarring ways. Even if someone's attire makes him or her more likely to become a victim of rape, the act is still so clearly heinous that the responsibility falls on the rapist.
But you don't have any inherent right to avoid every slight little nuisance. When someone's actions make that person's house more likely to appear in photographs, the act is so harmless that the blame for any resulting annoyance falls squarely on the homeowner for being so bothered by something that most people would see as harmless and then asking the government to do something about it because they can't even be bothered to close their blinds.
Is that like "Maybe you should have thought of that before putting on that miniskirt"?
Not unless you say that to a girl complaining about something harmless, like a guy holding the door for her.
What these folks are complaining about is not the sort of action that causes permanent psychological harm (rape, harassment, etc.), but rather just a slight nuisance level of "harm" where most people would argue that no harm actually occurred at all. People walking by and taking pictures of the outside of your home doesn't really cause you harm in any meaningful way, or at least it shouldn't to a psychologically healthy person.
That said, if someone is particularly sensitive, he or she has many options for avoiding that harm — repainting the house more blandly, closing the window blinds, or even choosing to live in a neighborhood where people don't walk through all the time. And if they stop being in that situation with any of those approaches, there should be no long-term psychological after-effects from something so utterly innocuous.
There has to be a threshold of harm below which you simply say that the person needs to grow a thicker skin or find some other way to cope. Otherwise, if you allow every little minor nuisance to be prevented by legislation, nobody will be able to do anything, because everything will bother someone. And IMO, this is so many miles below that threshold of harm that I can't help but roll my eyes.
That about sums it up. :-)
Depends on what you mean by meaningful. As a user in the admin group, without becoming root, you can:
And there are probably a lot more mischievous things that one can do with code running as a non-root admin user that I'm not thinking of. :-) Some of the things in the list above don't even require you to be in the admin group. In particular, it would be trivial to add a device to a botnet even without being an admin user.
Reread what I said.
Typically, you can only mount things over top of directories that you own. The Disk Arbitration framework also allows you to mount things in /Volumes as a special case, by sending requests to a daemon (diskarbitrationd) that runs as root. But I'm 99.9% certain that the permission to do so is not arbitrarily broad.
Most single-user machines don't have a separate admin account. So breaching the user's account is breaching an admin account. That's why the GP said that for single-user machines, privilege escalation rarely matters.
Of course, it isn't *quite* true. There are processes like the keychain that provide some additional privilege separation between apps. If the keychain happens to store out-of-band mach message data in a vulnerable location, then this could lead to arbitrary code being able to modify keychain requests from other apps to steal passwords somehow. Maybe. But realistically, those sorts of communication mechanisms shouldn't be storing data to disk even temporarily.
Mounting a filesystem anywhere that should actually matter (e.g. /tmp, /var/tmp) typically requires root privileges even in macOS. And any software that might realistically store out-of-bound data in a location where an unprivileged attacker could mount something over top of it (e.g. in the user's home directory) is not likely to be any more privileged than the attacker app.
Is there any actual evidence that this is a real vulnerability, rather than a purely hypothetical one? I mean yes, it's a bug, but in my mind, high severity should be reserved for situations where the bug itself poses a reasonable chance of letting someone destroy or compromise user data, not situations where the author of a critical system daemon does something colossally stupid *and* the bug exists. The high-severity vulnerability would be the critical system daemon storing temporary data in a vulnerable location. This would just be the low-severity springboard that makes that high-severity bug more severe.
Am I missing something?
You have to reach Mach 1.35 before it starts charging?
It's kind of like how a KC-135 can land on top of Air Force One and refuel it in the air, only in this case, your Tesla drives under a flatbed semi.
Too soon?
...before you painted your houses to be visually unusual.
Dark people may have "less contrast", and that doesn't matter.
It is not necessary to identify anything as "humans". A self-driving car should not hit cattle, dogs, brick walls or garbage cans either. Any obstacle is bad. A rock the size of a cat could wreck the car.
Yeah, that was the whole point of this bit:
Technically speaking, there are circumstances where it is better to hit a sufficiently small object than to swerve to avoid it. For example, if a squirrel runs out across the road, you're probably better off hitting it than the car in the next lane. Same goes for a plastic bag blowing in the wind.
IIRC, there are existing techniques for crudely gauging the mass of an object based on its size and how it moves, and determining whether it is safe to hit based on that. None of those approaches would have any chance of allowing a collision with humans, cattle, large dogs, brick walls, garbage cans, or rocks the size of a cat, regardless of the human's skin tone, the color of the dog's fur, or whether the brick wall was painted to look like a road tunnel through the side of a mountain.
It is just a wishy washy way of not doing any work.
Pretty much.
NN is basically pitting us the customer against one of two 'evils' either the evil ISP or the evil data providers.
Not remotely. Net neutrality actually favors both consumers and small content providers. If an ISP decided to throttle Netflix, YouTube, or some other big content provider, they would get death threats. It has happened, and because those companies are big enough, they got enough consumer complaints to get a lawsuit on Sherman anti-trust grounds.
The main companies NN protects are startups — companies where consumers would never be able to know for sure if the problem was throttling by the ISP or the content provider simply not being able to keep up with traffic. By throttling those companies, ISPs can prevent new, interesting tech from ever happening while the ISPs decide how they're going to respond (e.g. by providing a similar service in-house), or kill it entirely to protect one of their other businesses, or give special "fast lane" access to Netflix in exchange for a kickback, while throttling every new service that's trying to start up and compete with it.
For example, suppose someone comes out with 3D video chat. The ISPs don't have that ability currently, but they could add a camera to their own cable boxes that, when attached to 3D TVs, provides 3D video chat. But they can't do that if somebody else beats them to market too badly. Of course, if that third-party service never takes off because of throttling, they can say that they decided to build their own service because the third-party service wasn't good enough, and consumers might never even know what was happening.
So the anti-NN folks are actually doing a favor for those big companies like Netflix, Google, Hulu, etc. It's unclear why so many of those companies support NN, given that it hurts them. Maybe it's a sense of altruism — the whole "if the Internet hadn't been neutral in the beginning, we wouldn't be here today" thing. Or maybe they're concerned that the "not big enough to look like throttling" problem might apply on a per-service basis, rather than a per-company basis, and might hurt some theoretical future plan. Either way, NN definitely risks increasing their exposure to competition in their existing businesses.
There is absolutely no way that NN favors any big corporation over smaller ones. That's completely implausible at a fairly fundamental level.
This is not true at all, it's based on false assumptions.
First of all, most self driving cars will end up using LIDAR. Skin color, not an issue.
Secondly. even cars with cameras do a lot of image transformations such that color is usually disposed of. You kin color is irrelevant to a recognizer looking for human forms.
In fact you could argue that during the day, darker skin is an advantage because against a blue sky it's more noticeable than really pale skin which could look like clouds... #GingerLivesMatter.
Yes and no. Image recognition tends to be more sensitive to texture than to shape, and darker skin results in less contrast, which means less ability to see things like facial features that otherwise might identify the object as a human.
You are correct that object detection should not be a meaningful part of your strategy for avoiding hitting things. Rather, object detection is for doing things like traffic light detection, road sign reading, and determining where nearby cars are located so that you can calculate when to change lanes, whether you need to accelerate while doing so, etc.
Similarly, object detection should not be used for verifying that nothing is beside you, behind you, or in front of you. Those additional sanity checks are what RADAR, LIDAR, and SONAR are for.
Moreover, even if we assume that image recognition is used for that purpose, parallax differences between cameras should tell you that there is something in front of you. No matter how dark your skin is, if the car thinks that you're part of the road, the software is doing something very wrong, and it's the procedural part of the code base that is failing, not the image recognition part. After all, if dark skin is indistinguishable from the road, so are grey or black automobiles.
But — and this is a big but — detecting people near the road is often useful in terms of avoiding unexpected interactions later by slowing down, changing lanes, etc. And detecting gestures of police officers or other personnel directing traffic also needs to work regardless of their skin color. So it is important to ensure that training data doesn't show racial bias. The same is true for gender bias, attire bias, and any number of other things that could cause confusion for machine vision.
What bugs me about this article is not that the premise is wrong, because it isn't necessarily, but rather that it appears to be entirely built upon a giant tower of hypotheticals, such as the training data being inadequate, the computer vision being used for critical behavior rather than LIDAR or other tech, etc., none of which are necessarily going to happen in the real world, and all of which are readily avoidable by just not cutting corners in development.
Basically, it's like saying that a new nuclear reactor could seriously screw up the world if you forget to connect it to a water supply. My response is, "Yeah, no kidding."
It's only 3 pages long, read it yourself: https://twitter.com/SenMarkey/...
The amazing thing is that they took three pages to basically write "The FCC's reversal of its existing policy in [declaration number] is hereby reversed."
This bill stinks on ice. It doesn't actually enact net neutrality, but rather weakly allows Internet services to be regulated under a section of FCC code that would allow the FCC to regulate net neutrality if it so desires through rulemaking. The bill makes no attempt at defining net neutrality, nor any attempt at defining what constitutes reasonable rulemaking, leaving it entirely up to an unelected body (the FCC) to make those decisions.
To be fair, I'm not saying that they shouldn't pass this. It's an okay stopgap measure, except insofar as Pai's FCC is unlikely to actually issue any meaningful rulemaking to protect net neutrality, which makes this bill largely an empty gesture. But this isn't the end of the story. It is barely even a beginning.
What we actually need is an Internet Users' Bill of Rights that lays out what is and is not acceptable behavior by ISPs in concrete terms. Until we have that fundamental framework, merely having the authority to regulate ISPs over net neutrality concerns still doesn't buy us a whole lot.
Trump was the one that got rid of net neutrality through his appointments to the FCC. Let's not pretend that he's in favor of it. If it weren't for him, we wouldn't need a bill.
Pai wasn't his appointment. President Trump just promoted him to the top spot.
If President Trump even has a position on Net Neutrality, I would expect it to be extremely superficial, limited strictly to what his advisors have told him is the best policy. After all, even fairly tech-savvy people consistently misunderstand what net neutrality means and/or deliberately try to coopt it to suit their own desires. There's essentially zero chance that President Trump understands it at all, even superficially, because almost nobody does.
That said, I very much doubt that he has any position on Net Neutrality whatsoever. He probably doesn't even know that the controversy exists. After all, it doesn't have anything to do with his reputation and it doesn't benefit his business ventures, so why would he care about it? Just saying.
But I guarantee if we could create a really well thought-out bill and name it the Donald J. Trump Net Neutrality Bill Of Rights, he would not only sign it, but would insist that Congress pass it. :-) Just saying.
Bear in mind that my argument was not there was a government-granted monopoly. Rather, I argued that there is a natural monopoly on broadband, which means precisely that only one company can viably deliver the level of service that qualifies as broadband for a price that customers are willing to pay. The crux of my argument was that, based on repeated failures to compete back when there were government-granted monopolies, even if there are places where government-granted monopolies still exist, those monopolies are purely academic, because the natural monopoly would still exist without that government interference.
It's not that I deny that it exists. It is that if it were actually financially competitive, someone would have done it already in any given area. Yet fixed (non-cellular) wireless is relatively rare outside of urban or suburban areas. One possible reason for this is that increasing customer bandwidth for fixed wireless is relatively expensive compared with the cost of increasing bandwidth over coax, meaning that a lot of fixed wireless companies seem competitive at first, but quickly stop being competitive, eventually becoming one of the slowest services available before shutting down service entirely.
Even in the Bay Area, fixed wireless companies tend to last only a few years before going under. The junk heap of history is littered with the husks of wireless ISPs that have failed.
Also, many of the larger fixed wireless providers don't even meet the 25 Mbps minimum to even qualify as broadband, making them moot. True wireless fixed broadband is pretty much a unicorn. They might exist, but you'll probably never actually see one in practice.
No, not really. There will always be some amount of misinformation out there. The problem is actually an evolutionary issue. Humans evolved over the millennia to trust what they can see, and to trust certain trusted individuals to provide information about what they can't. Their friends fall into that second category. And as long as their friends are properly informed, that system works reasonably well.
Historically, the main thing that prevented misinformation from getting broadly distributed to those friends was the cost of publishing it in the first place. Most people with enough money to do that were not complete idiots, so there was a built-in, largely financially motivated bulls**t filter.
With the rise of social media, the cost of distributing information (correct or incorrect) fell through the floor, and as a result, the need for someone at least moderately intelligent to conclude that the message has merit before spreading it far and wide no longer exists. Therefore, the opinions of intellectuals and complete bozos now have equal chance of being distributed far and wide, and the odds of your friends having incorrect information becomes significantly higher. So anyone who tends to trust those friends then goes on to repeat the bad information, and it spreads a lot like the plague.
In the absence of gatekeepers, your only real options are to either believe everything, disbelieve everything, or investigate everything yourself. Most people tend to fall into one of the first two categories, with the majority falling into the first one, leaving only a tiny minority of people constantly posting links to Snopes or whatever in a desperate attempt to stem the tide.
In other words, the real problem is that we haven't taught people enough about how to think critically, and the only viable fix for that is to instill in everyone a sufficiently sophisticated bulls**t meters. Any other solution, like specifically targeting "fake news", is basically just sticking your fingers in the dike as the water level inches closer and closer to going over the top rim.
But where did you manage to find a hose and a rubber chicken at this hour?
Depends. Does it have to have a pulley in the middle, or will a regular one do?
What kind of chicken has a pulley in the middle? Is it to help you pullet?