I'm afraid that the new Google Scoop(tm) riot management solution is fully automated and operates on the basis of Maps(tm) data and the Policy-Based-Disposition matrix specified by your jurisidiction's compliance specialist through the easy-to-use admin panel.
I may be giving the professor too much credit; but my impression was that he was predicting a situation where advances in automation made robots more cost-effective than humans for essentially any task... Not that that would necessarily lead to especially pleasant outcomes for the redundant humans.
People who think that the benefits of increased automation will magically accrue to everyone are... questionably balanced... but the notion that an increasing number of tasks will be sufficiently well automated that even literal slave labor can't beat machines on price seems much harder to dispute.
Well, that's a tricky one: If the worker-robots advance faster than the killer robots, it seems likely that the unemployed humans will find exciting new opportunities in either the 'rioting jobless masses' sector or the 'rentacops keeping the rioting jobless masses in their place' sector.
If the killer robots advance as fast or faster than the worker-robots, I predict a surge of new applicants in the organic fertilizer sector.
Well Chrome has one if you want to use it, just doesn't come with Chromium. I am sure they want Chromium instead of Chrome for the whole "pure open-source" thing it has going for it, though.
I suspect that not using Google's pet browser for your competitor-to-Google's-pet-OS might be more of a consideration that OSS purity...
Obviously, Google has no reason to make the slightest nuisance of themselves if people install Chrome on any desktop Linux; but Ubuntu is shooting for some touch-based something that can be shoehorned into phones and tablets, an area where Google has slightly more incentive to be unhelpful.
Is there any word on why they aren't looking at libpoppler, if they need PDF rendering? Practically all the other major linux PDF-reader applications seem to use it.
There should some kind of standard for laptop video cards both slot and cooling / space in higher end systems.
It vaguely exists; but the real-world utility is kind of a clusterfuck. Only the most monstrous of desktop replacement machines implement 100% to spec, availability of replacement/upgrade parts is spotty, and even within the bounds of the spec there is a bit of a morass of thermal envelopes and other variables.
For better or worse, The Market appears to have spoken in favor of slim, rather than modular, on this matter...
I'm not sure if tragicomic alcohol-related accidents help compensate; but slaughterhouses(by virtue of the absolutely punishing pace and general powerless expendability of the peons on the line) actually chew people up pretty hard. They process livestock a great deal faster, of course; but the rates of occupational morbidity and mortality aren't pretty.
You use a spear? Try not clipping your fingernails for a month and hunting like a real man.
That said, it's a very curious definition of 'fair' when a game's historical stats are as lopsided as hunting. Call me back when team wildlife kills and butchers the hunters at a rate with, say, three orders of magnitude, of the rate at which team hunters kills and butchers the wildlife...
It's probably still too expensive; but I wouldn't count it out of the 'lite' end of the sniper market just yet.
Outside of jurisdictions where(either because they are large and rough, or because the sheriff is compensating for something) some sub-group of the police are practically a standing army, a lot of police forces spend most of their time doing things that require little or no marksmanship(during which time budget cuts or apathy are liable to come after their range time), with the occasional incident that could really use substantially greater abilities in the 'lethal action at a distance' area.
The 'buy this widget and turn anyone who doesn't flinch violently when using a rifle into a marksman!' pitch could likely move some units in a context like that...
His whole argument is you don't NEED a definition of intelligence in order to build a replica. (Like you don't need to, I dunno, read German in order to be able to copy a passage of text written in German.) I mean, he's probably still wrong and crazy. But lack of a definition is not WHY he's probably wrong and crazy.
Arguably is wrongness is more a matter of degree than of kind: As with your analogy, it is perfectly possible to mechanically copy things that you don't understand. However, in this case the passage of text is written in a script where details down to the molecular scale are salient to meaning, and it's wriggling around all the time, and all you have are a limited supply of fairly blunt pencils and a bunch of imperfect copies that have been sliced and stained for microscopy...
If we could 'snapshot' an operational brain well enough to build a computer simulation of one, we could save a lot of money on silicon with just a little unethical human experimentation...
Sysinternals(now part of Microsoft) has you covered.
Autoruns examines more or less all the legitimate mechanisms for starting programs and services and provides information on all entries, with the option to exclude MS-signed system components. You can also delete autorun entries from here, without grovelling around in all the various places that they can be stashed.
Process Explorer lets you observe what is actually running in greater detail than task manager.
Unless your computer is positively antediluvian(HLT as a powersaving feature was pretty cool in 1994), even a process running at 'obsequiously deferential' priority is still keeping your computer active when it should be idle. Less of a problem on a properly cooled desktop, considerably more annoying if you are running on batteries...
I'm surprised that nobody makes a replacement application. I remember virtually having to buy one for my NJ3 years back because the OEM software was so bad.
If memory serves, older flavors of ipod where more or less equivalent USB mass storage devices, though they required media files to be stored in a specific arrangement and a little database file to be uploaded, so you needed a utility of one sort or another to do transfers(you could drag and drop; but the device wouldn't do anything useful with files added that way).
For the iDevices that Apple actually cares about(ie. not the 'classic') the situation is a bit weirder and more complex: it's strongly resembles TCP-over-USB. On top of that, all kinds of behavior has been implemented. As the latter link suggests, there has been some work on the matter; but it's a relatively complex beast(which Apple has no particular compunction about changing as it suits them).
I honestly wasn't expecting that. Toward the end of Vista's lifecycle, I think that they were offering 'buy this computer now, upgrade for free*(additional charges may apply) when 7 comes out' in order to avoid having a sales slump while people waited it out; but offering '8.1' as a free update, this soon after 8, is about as close to a concession speech as you could expect to see. (Especially in light of the rumored move to a 'release often cheaply or by subscription' model, which would have made a cheap, but nonzero, upgrade price a more natural option than it otherwise would have been)
I'm no expert on the refined world of supercomputers; but my money would be on latency. If you are made of money, bandwidth is a problem that you can substantially brute force. Not 100% efficiently; and layout gets to be a real headache; but if the state of the art in serial interconnects isn't good enough, you can bolt a bunch of them together and have a parallel interconnect(it'll be harder to do board layout for, the wiring will suck more, and it'll cost more; but the major sticking point is money).
If you want to cut latency, even the most exotic photonics-on-die-with-hollow-fiber arrangement imaginable still gives you surprisingly short distances before you start losing CPU cycles to waiting for the return photon.
It's a particular nuisance because the speed of light is pretty strictly enforced...
Even if you went full-on-nuts and replaced fiber interconnects with little tubes full of hard vacuum, to squeak out that slight improvement over the speed of light in glass or air, you'll still see latency that meaningfully hinders the cooperation of multi-GHz CPUs and RAM across systems of any nontrivial size.
For loosely coupled problems, that barely matters; but not all problems are loosely coupled.
I'd honestly be fascinated to know; because, if you flip the context around, 'Microsoft reads your skype URLs' is equivalent to 'some poor sysadmin at MS runs a system that accesses any URL anybody on the internet chooses to feed it.' That sure as hell isn't something I'd want to take on lightly...
Urban areas also have the convenience of offering some degree of choice when it comes to which stupid and greedy people you want to deal with(except on the subway, then you have to take the cards you are dealt). It's a great deal easier to write people off and not deal with them when you have plenty of alternatives nearby.
Both Facebook and Google's chats use bog standard XMPP (aka Jabber). Normal, clueless people use Facebook to chat. The few that don't use Facebook use the chat inside Gmail, or the one installed on their smartphone. Encryption over XMPP is very common; You'd need to use a non-standard client (say, Pidgin), but it's feasible.
The major problem is that encryption requires support at both ends:
Even a totally proprietary chat network(if it's been cracked open far enough that 3rd party clients exist, or 3rd-party wrappers around the first party client or libraries exist) can be used to send encrypted payloads; but only if both users are set up for that(Pidgin with OTR, say, works just fine over AOL's 'Oscar' protocol; but only if both ends are using it. This is the real killer. If you don't have control over what your clueless compatriot is using, none of the client-side encryption options are going to help you much. Not supported in Google's gmail web app window thing? No deal. Not supported by cellphone's default chat client? no deal.
You'll still probably get SSL, from all but the shittiest chat services; but that only protects you from people watching the wire, not from the service provider(who is the man in the middle, with one SSL-protected connection to you and a second to your chat compatriot).
Same with email: it's less common than it used to be for email to go between the client and the mailserver in the clear; but it's still damn rare for messages to be encrypted at the client end and thus safe from the mailserver operator.
Is anybody else suddenly feeling a sense of curiosity about what sorts of vulnerabilities, if any, the program that Microsoft probes URLs sent over skype with may possess?
If TFA is accurate, you can make whatever software this is visit a URL just by skype-chatting it to somebody. What sort of security measures would they have in place for systems whose job it is to poke every last probably-malware link that goes across skype?
The issue, though, is that dealers aren't adding value, so there aren't 'profits made in NC'(if the complaint were 'buyers are test-driving at our dealership and then buying online', that would be a case of dealers offering a valuable service; but being unable to get paid for doing so.) This is simply an attempt to make it illegal to not hire a middleman to take his cut of what you pay for your car.
Essentially, NC car dealers are attempting to buy legislation that allows them to certain transactions undertaken by NC residents for their own benefit. If they were offering some sort of value(say, local repair capabilities, or the ability to buy a car without waiting for delivery), they wouldn't need to make their competitors illegal, because they'd have a selling point of their own.
Looks like a pretty blatant act of political corruption to me.
The only REAL problem here, is that in the US, this kind of corruption is perfectly legal.
It's a great pity. The US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act actually provides fairly robust(by the standards of white collar crime) penalties for companies that do business in the US and also engage in bribery in foreignistan or wherever.
The 'Domestic Corrupt Practices Act', by contrast, does not exist.
That's crazy talk! How are you going to replicate the experience of good, honest, high-pressure salesmanship in a browser window? Or prevent the consumer from opening a second tab for comparison shopping purposes?
So, shockingly enough, this gem of free-market-capitalism is being pushed by the state's auto-dealers cartel. Their argument concerning Tesla's menace to the public strikes me as totally compelling:
'Robert Glaser, president of the dealers association, told the News & Observer that the law prohibiting Tesla sales isn’t just about his industry’s self-interest. Pointing to the Tesla representatives at a recent hearing, he said, “You tell me they’re gonna support the little leagues and the YMCA?”'
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid that the new Google Scoop(tm) riot management solution is fully automated and operates on the basis of Maps(tm) data and the Policy-Based-Disposition matrix specified by your jurisidiction's compliance specialist through the easy-to-use admin panel.
I may be giving the professor too much credit; but my impression was that he was predicting a situation where advances in automation made robots more cost-effective than humans for essentially any task... Not that that would necessarily lead to especially pleasant outcomes for the redundant humans.
People who think that the benefits of increased automation will magically accrue to everyone are... questionably balanced... but the notion that an increasing number of tasks will be sufficiently well automated that even literal slave labor can't beat machines on price seems much harder to dispute.
'What kind of work will they do instead?'
Well, that's a tricky one: If the worker-robots advance faster than the killer robots, it seems likely that the unemployed humans will find exciting new opportunities in either the 'rioting jobless masses' sector or the 'rentacops keeping the rioting jobless masses in their place' sector.
If the killer robots advance as fast or faster than the worker-robots, I predict a surge of new applicants in the organic fertilizer sector.
Well Chrome has one if you want to use it, just doesn't come with Chromium. I am sure they want Chromium instead of Chrome for the whole "pure open-source" thing it has going for it, though.
I suspect that not using Google's pet browser for your competitor-to-Google's-pet-OS might be more of a consideration that OSS purity...
Obviously, Google has no reason to make the slightest nuisance of themselves if people install Chrome on any desktop Linux; but Ubuntu is shooting for some touch-based something that can be shoehorned into phones and tablets, an area where Google has slightly more incentive to be unhelpful.
Is there any word on why they aren't looking at libpoppler, if they need PDF rendering? Practically all the other major linux PDF-reader applications seem to use it.
There should some kind of standard for laptop video cards both slot and cooling / space in higher end systems.
It vaguely exists; but the real-world utility is kind of a clusterfuck. Only the most monstrous of desktop replacement machines implement 100% to spec, availability of replacement/upgrade parts is spotty, and even within the bounds of the spec there is a bit of a morass of thermal envelopes and other variables.
For better or worse, The Market appears to have spoken in favor of slim, rather than modular, on this matter...
I'm not sure if tragicomic alcohol-related accidents help compensate; but slaughterhouses(by virtue of the absolutely punishing pace and general powerless expendability of the peons on the line) actually chew people up pretty hard. They process livestock a great deal faster, of course; but the rates of occupational morbidity and mortality aren't pretty.
You use a spear? Try not clipping your fingernails for a month and hunting like a real man.
That said, it's a very curious definition of 'fair' when a game's historical stats are as lopsided as hunting. Call me back when team wildlife kills and butchers the hunters at a rate with, say, three orders of magnitude, of the rate at which team hunters kills and butchers the wildlife...
It's probably still too expensive; but I wouldn't count it out of the 'lite' end of the sniper market just yet.
Outside of jurisdictions where(either because they are large and rough, or because the sheriff is compensating for something) some sub-group of the police are practically a standing army, a lot of police forces spend most of their time doing things that require little or no marksmanship(during which time budget cuts or apathy are liable to come after their range time), with the occasional incident that could really use substantially greater abilities in the 'lethal action at a distance' area.
The 'buy this widget and turn anyone who doesn't flinch violently when using a rifle into a marksman!' pitch could likely move some units in a context like that...
His whole argument is you don't NEED a definition of intelligence in order to build a replica. (Like you don't need to, I dunno, read German in order to be able to copy a passage of text written in German.) I mean, he's probably still wrong and crazy. But lack of a definition is not WHY he's probably wrong and crazy.
Arguably is wrongness is more a matter of degree than of kind: As with your analogy, it is perfectly possible to mechanically copy things that you don't understand. However, in this case the passage of text is written in a script where details down to the molecular scale are salient to meaning, and it's wriggling around all the time, and all you have are a limited supply of fairly blunt pencils and a bunch of imperfect copies that have been sliced and stained for microscopy...
If we could 'snapshot' an operational brain well enough to build a computer simulation of one, we could save a lot of money on silicon with just a little unethical human experimentation...
Sysinternals(now part of Microsoft) has you covered.
Autoruns examines more or less all the legitimate mechanisms for starting programs and services and provides information on all entries, with the option to exclude MS-signed system components. You can also delete autorun entries from here, without grovelling around in all the various places that they can be stashed.
Process Explorer lets you observe what is actually running in greater detail than task manager.
Unless your computer is positively antediluvian(HLT as a powersaving feature was pretty cool in 1994), even a process running at 'obsequiously deferential' priority is still keeping your computer active when it should be idle. Less of a problem on a properly cooled desktop, considerably more annoying if you are running on batteries...
I'm surprised that nobody makes a replacement application. I remember virtually having to buy one for my NJ3 years back because the OEM software was so bad.
If memory serves, older flavors of ipod where more or less equivalent USB mass storage devices, though they required media files to be stored in a specific arrangement and a little database file to be uploaded, so you needed a utility of one sort or another to do transfers(you could drag and drop; but the device wouldn't do anything useful with files added that way).
For the iDevices that Apple actually cares about(ie. not the 'classic') the situation is a bit weirder and more complex: it's strongly resembles TCP-over-USB. On top of that, all kinds of behavior has been implemented. As the latter link suggests, there has been some work on the matter; but it's a relatively complex beast(which Apple has no particular compunction about changing as it suits them).
I honestly wasn't expecting that. Toward the end of Vista's lifecycle, I think that they were offering 'buy this computer now, upgrade for free*(additional charges may apply) when 7 comes out' in order to avoid having a sales slump while people waited it out; but offering '8.1' as a free update, this soon after 8, is about as close to a concession speech as you could expect to see. (Especially in light of the rumored move to a 'release often cheaply or by subscription' model, which would have made a cheap, but nonzero, upgrade price a more natural option than it otherwise would have been)
I'm no expert on the refined world of supercomputers; but my money would be on latency. If you are made of money, bandwidth is a problem that you can substantially brute force. Not 100% efficiently; and layout gets to be a real headache; but if the state of the art in serial interconnects isn't good enough, you can bolt a bunch of them together and have a parallel interconnect(it'll be harder to do board layout for, the wiring will suck more, and it'll cost more; but the major sticking point is money).
If you want to cut latency, even the most exotic photonics-on-die-with-hollow-fiber arrangement imaginable still gives you surprisingly short distances before you start losing CPU cycles to waiting for the return photon.
It's a particular nuisance because the speed of light is pretty strictly enforced...
Even if you went full-on-nuts and replaced fiber interconnects with little tubes full of hard vacuum, to squeak out that slight improvement over the speed of light in glass or air, you'll still see latency that meaningfully hinders the cooperation of multi-GHz CPUs and RAM across systems of any nontrivial size.
For loosely coupled problems, that barely matters; but not all problems are loosely coupled.
I'd honestly be fascinated to know; because, if you flip the context around, 'Microsoft reads your skype URLs' is equivalent to 'some poor sysadmin at MS runs a system that accesses any URL anybody on the internet chooses to feed it.' That sure as hell isn't something I'd want to take on lightly...
Urban areas also have the convenience of offering some degree of choice when it comes to which stupid and greedy people you want to deal with(except on the subway, then you have to take the cards you are dealt). It's a great deal easier to write people off and not deal with them when you have plenty of alternatives nearby.
It's commonly used as a polite synonym for 'darkies voting'.
I hope for his sake that he's just a lying fuckwad; because if he said that sincerely, then he's dumber than a sack of hammers...
Both Facebook and Google's chats use bog standard XMPP (aka Jabber). Normal, clueless people use Facebook to chat. The few that don't use Facebook use the chat inside Gmail, or the one installed on their smartphone. Encryption over XMPP is very common; You'd need to use a non-standard client (say, Pidgin), but it's feasible.
The major problem is that encryption requires support at both ends:
Even a totally proprietary chat network(if it's been cracked open far enough that 3rd party clients exist, or 3rd-party wrappers around the first party client or libraries exist) can be used to send encrypted payloads; but only if both users are set up for that(Pidgin with OTR, say, works just fine over AOL's 'Oscar' protocol; but only if both ends are using it. This is the real killer. If you don't have control over what your clueless compatriot is using, none of the client-side encryption options are going to help you much. Not supported in Google's gmail web app window thing? No deal. Not supported by cellphone's default chat client? no deal.
You'll still probably get SSL, from all but the shittiest chat services; but that only protects you from people watching the wire, not from the service provider(who is the man in the middle, with one SSL-protected connection to you and a second to your chat compatriot).
Same with email: it's less common than it used to be for email to go between the client and the mailserver in the clear; but it's still damn rare for messages to be encrypted at the client end and thus safe from the mailserver operator.
Is anybody else suddenly feeling a sense of curiosity about what sorts of vulnerabilities, if any, the program that Microsoft probes URLs sent over skype with may possess?
If TFA is accurate, you can make whatever software this is visit a URL just by skype-chatting it to somebody. What sort of security measures would they have in place for systems whose job it is to poke every last probably-malware link that goes across skype?
The issue, though, is that dealers aren't adding value, so there aren't 'profits made in NC'(if the complaint were 'buyers are test-driving at our dealership and then buying online', that would be a case of dealers offering a valuable service; but being unable to get paid for doing so.) This is simply an attempt to make it illegal to not hire a middleman to take his cut of what you pay for your car.
Essentially, NC car dealers are attempting to buy legislation that allows them to certain transactions undertaken by NC residents for their own benefit. If they were offering some sort of value(say, local repair capabilities, or the ability to buy a car without waiting for delivery), they wouldn't need to make their competitors illegal, because they'd have a selling point of their own.
Looks like a pretty blatant act of political corruption to me.
The only REAL problem here, is that in the US, this kind of corruption is perfectly legal.
It's a great pity. The US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act actually provides fairly robust(by the standards of white collar crime) penalties for companies that do business in the US and also engage in bribery in foreignistan or wherever.
The 'Domestic Corrupt Practices Act', by contrast, does not exist.
That's crazy talk! How are you going to replicate the experience of good, honest, high-pressure salesmanship in a browser window? Or prevent the consumer from opening a second tab for comparison shopping purposes?
So, shockingly enough, this gem of free-market-capitalism is being pushed by the state's auto-dealers cartel. Their argument concerning Tesla's menace to the public strikes me as totally compelling:
'Robert Glaser, president of the dealers association, told the News & Observer that the law prohibiting Tesla sales isn’t just about his industry’s self-interest. Pointing to the Tesla representatives at a recent hearing, he said, “You tell me they’re gonna support the little leagues and the YMCA?”'
A terrifying possibility, truly.