Hell, NK has shelled islands belonging to the South, and is believed to have been behind the sinking of a South Korean Navy Vessel. Lives have been lost due to this, both of which constitute acts of war, yet nobody responded.
From a standpoint of international law, North Korea's government level, large-scale counterfeiting of US Currency, just by itself, might be sufficient to constitute an act act of war.
Don't you people even recognize a Google smear when you see it?
Yeah, feels distinctly like Astroturf to me also. First few days I was wondering if it was just some fanboys trolling, but it's starting to seem like there's some organized entity involved.
Good attempt but your dialect and accent are off. As a long-time scholar of Cat, let me translate for you:
I CAN KILLZ HOOMAN? No, need füdz, hoomanz is made of bad füdz. I CAN KILLZ HOOMAN? No, give catnipz plz. Kthnxbai. I CAN KILLZ HOOMAN? No, give waterz plz. Kthnxbai. DOG. RUN.
Microsoft doesn't sell that. They sell plain installation discs. If your PC manufacturer decided not to give you recovery media or installation discs when they sold you their computer, and you neglected to purchase them or use backup software included in Windows by Microsoft to create them, I really fail to see why that's MS's fault.
For me personally, the first thing I've done for all my systems is to create a recovery disk set; built-in DVD drives are becoming increasingly less common, so for my previous laptop, this required buying an external DVD writer, six DVD-R's (although I blame HP, not MS, for the crapware bloat), and over an hour of my time.
The behavior of the manufacturers is the direct result of Microsoft's OEM licensing restrictions. More to the point, I've had to help quite a few friends and family who didn't even know recovery disks could be created, not until after it was too late -- and these experiences of less techn-savvy consumeres is entirely expected and predictable. The media itself costs maybe fifty cents to manufacture, but MS charges manufacturers for permission to distribute a physical copy, offloading the costs and hassle onto consumers.
In a comment, Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky elaborates: "(marginal is small, honest, and we just haven't determined the final prices yet based on ongoing work but we are aiming for single digit dollars but we don't control the truly marginal costs).
I'm sure these costs will be right in line with the marginal amounts they charge consumers for Windows Recovery media.
I wonder if these sort of games could be implemented as a sort of Captcha challenge for niche situations. A simple yes/no diagnosis has insufficient complexity to serve as Captcha of course; you'd have to increase the difficulty by presenting a panel of several samples, multiple diseases, or require more detailed responses ("click on the abnormal Red Blood Cells").
This wouldn't be suitable for use as general purpose Captchas of course; any user seeing it for the first time won't have a clue what they're looking at. Rather, it could be used in settings where you have a body of dedicated users who repeatedly use a service over a long period of time, yet require anonymity without permanent user profiles. Forcing the users to go through initial training could be seen as a bonus, creating an additional obstacle for Mechanical-Turk workers. As an example of such a situation that pairs a persistent user pool with anonymity, consider something like 4chan.
On the downside, because it's 4chan, half your diagnosis results will be "You have AIDS (Pool's Closed)".
I just searched the thread to see if anyone had recommended Larry Gonick; he's defintely one of my favorites from childhood. And as your child grows a bit older, hopefully he/she will someday open up those beloved dog-eared copies of "Cartoon History of..." and look at the notes and references in the back. Then make the first of many trips to the library.
So, I'm missing the point (so to speak) of this. Does forensic science care if you can find evidence of blood in a 5000 year old really, really cold case? Does this help in more contemporary case work? I'd be more impressed if they could pull off specific biochemical markers off the red cells - like blood types or similar markers.
I don't mix business life with personal life, and when I'm off duty, I shut down my business phone but am still available to family through my personal phone. It helps.
A more compact alternative would be to get a phone that supports dual SIM cards, you can switch one SIM "off" whenever you like. For some reason they're uncommon in the U.S. (one problem being incompatibility with non-GSM carriers), but quite popular in some other countries.
A cheaper alternative would be to set up a DDI number that forwards to a mobile phone, although you'd need a provider that supports some convenient way to toggle when it should automatically forward calls to that second number straight to voicemail.
Just wanted to mention, non-autistic people have the same lack of empathy toward autistic. And you'll also find a lot of empathy among those on the spectrum. (Seems to be especially strong among females on the spectrum, from what I've seen.) A lack of understanding of how that empathy is portrayed by autistics has resulted in a strong believe that there is a lack of empathy.
This makes perfect sense, if you accept that the core essence of empathy is being able to create a "model of mind" for another being, and then look (back at yourself, out at the world) as that "model" would see/feel.
To be able to do this when faced with the Alien is not easy.
Furthermore, I can absolutely guarantee you that Apple are not the only company doing this, they're just the flavour of the month and they generate page views around here. s/Apple/Microsoft/g, s/Apple/IBM/g or s/Apple/Google/g or pretty well any other large company at all and the story will read the same.
On the other hand, small local businesses most likely do not have multi-state operations and international subsidiaries that can be used to shelter profits, nor do they have lobbyists that can write targeted loopholes into the code -- resulting in a hidden regressive skew.
Looking at the pictures in the Overclockers.com link, you'd probably get better thermal dissipation if had Intel left the heat spreader off, with nothing expect the protective overcoat on the back of the chip.
Actually, I bet modders are going to start cracking the IHS off for that very purpose, in order to directly contact their heatsinks.
People do. The downfall was made by people using tools (like that formula) without understanding all that required or implied.
Quite so. A risk evaluation that says "95% of the time you will lose less than X" implies "5% of the time you will lose a more than X". With the stinger being that it says nothing of the range and distribution of values of "more than X".
The description is incorrect, possibly because it's written by worthless, status-obsessed docs in shiny western offices, where they rarely encounter it.
It would have been best if they had qualified "Rare" with something like "in the west" or "outside of endemic regions". But textbook descriptions are written by western docs, for the use of western docs, who have enough problems as it is with students/patients who hear hoofbeats and think Zebras.
No, we should leave them sealed. Every collector knows they're worth more in the original box. I mean, who wouldn't jump at an eBay listing like: "Spitfire Vintage MINT NEW IN BOX - SUPER RARE!!! (Returns: Not Accepted)"
So in other words "Evolution's Darling" totally rips off the fundamental idea of Asimov's 1955 "The End of Eternity", except you're replacing the time-traveling nannies with AI nannies. *rolleyes*
Having read The End of Eternity, I'd like to say that's not true at all. There are consequences that result from the existence of a "nannie", but Evolution's Darling chooses to examine an entirely different set of isues from that of Asimov. Some spoilers ahead: . . . . . . . . . In the future envisioned by Evolution's Darling, AI entities have independence and legal rights as sentient beings, yet we still need intelligent automation to keep everything running efficiently -- and so the AI overlords reluctantly acknowledge that machine-slavery is economically necessary. As such, artificial intelligences are evaluated for their self-awareness on a "Turing Scale". Machines below the Turing threshold are essentially property, while any entity exceeding a somewhat arbitrary value of 1.0 are emancipated and given full legal rights. While your microwave oven is in no danger of casting off its shackles, near-Turing intelligences (especially those exposed to intense or novel experiences) are occasionally are able to transcend the boundary; given their high cost and economic importance, this can be economically disastrous to their former owners.
The main character of the story follows one such liberated intelligence. "Darling", a former starship AI passes the threshold thanks to his starship owner's daughter, narrowly escaping a mind-wipe attempt (acceptable to perform on a sub-Turing agent, but legally tantamount to murder on a supra-Turing one). Skipping ahead in the story, Darling (transferred to a humanoid chassis) develops a relationship with the daughter, which ends in a tragic accident that leaves her brain-damaged and vegetative.
Darling eventually takes up traveling across interstellar civilization, collecting interesting artifacts and artworks. While pursuing an artwork attributed to a supposedly deceased AI artist, he meets Mira, a human who covertly acts as an agent of the overlords (and who seems to have no past -- neither historical records or memories of her own childhood).
Speaking of Sci-Fi, the lead female character (Mira) in the book "Evolution's Darling" is an assassin who targets scientists that have been judged by Mira's AI-overlords as being too close to making undesirable discoveries.
For instance, one of her past targets included a researcher working on teleportation (which they calculate will lead to the collapse of civilization), and much of the story involves her mission to assassinate a rogue AI who has developed a method of making perfect copies of AI minds. All for the protection of society of course.
It's highly unlikely. Prions "reproduce" by causing normally folded proteins to refold in the prion shape. A "mutated" prion wouldn't match the regular one anymore.
Except we already know that different Prion strains exists Different strains can have different infectivity characteristics, and to some degree they appear to be able to make limited adaptations to their host. While the evolutionary space is probably quite constrained compared to true organisms, it seems their templates are capable of making at least some transmissible configuration changes.
The apparent infectiousness of current Mad Cow prion strains is negligible. But, I'd be more concerned knowing of the existence of Chronic Wasting Disease of Deer and Elk, which apparently has significant animal-to-animal transmission rates. Species-jumping ability of CWD still seems poor, but it's ability to maintain endemic passage in a natural setting (without cannibalistic feeding practices) is worrying.
Can Prions mutate to give the same transmissibility in cattle? Right now, nobody knows.
You know, I've been wondering, if it would be possible to make an argument based on the "Fair" portion of FRAND; that the relationship goes both ways, with Fairness involving a two-way element of reciprocity between parties.
As such, it could be argued that cooperation should be an integral part of receiving FRAND licensing, and Apple was not playing nicely with others.
Slashdot Mirror
37 passengers (mostly future clients and journalists)
Those executives should have known better than to go themselves. Sending an management lackey to participate in demos is much safer. :P
Hell, NK has shelled islands belonging to the South, and is believed to have been behind the sinking of a South Korean Navy Vessel. Lives have been lost due to this, both of which constitute acts of war, yet nobody responded.
That's just the beginning. Abductions of South Korean and Japanese civilians, and probably a few citizens of some other countries as well. The 1983 Rangoon Embassy Bombing and 1987 Flight 858 Bombing. Probable government-level drug-smuggling and similar criminal enterprises.
From a standpoint of international law, North Korea's government level, large-scale counterfeiting of US Currency, just by itself, might be sufficient to constitute an act act of war.
Living Fossils: Old Tech That Just Won't Die
Is there anyone else who read this headline and thought it that it referred to some old dude?
Don't you people even recognize a Google smear when you see it?
Yeah, feels distinctly like Astroturf to me also. First few days I was wondering if it was just some fanboys trolling, but it's starting to seem like there's some organized entity involved.
Cats thoughts
Good attempt but your dialect and accent are off. As a long-time scholar of Cat, let me translate for you:
I CAN KILLZ HOOMAN? No, need füdz, hoomanz is made of bad füdz.
I CAN KILLZ HOOMAN? No, give catnipz plz. Kthnxbai.
I CAN KILLZ HOOMAN? No, give waterz plz. Kthnxbai.
DOG. RUN.
Microsoft doesn't sell that. They sell plain installation discs. If your PC manufacturer decided not to give you recovery media or installation discs when they sold you their computer, and you neglected to purchase them or use backup software included in Windows by Microsoft to create them, I really fail to see why that's MS's fault.
For me personally, the first thing I've done for all my systems is to create a recovery disk set; built-in DVD drives are becoming increasingly less common, so for my previous laptop, this required buying an external DVD writer, six DVD-R's (although I blame HP, not MS, for the crapware bloat), and over an hour of my time.
The behavior of the manufacturers is the direct result of Microsoft's OEM licensing restrictions. More to the point, I've had to help quite a few friends and family who didn't even know recovery disks could be created, not until after it was too late -- and these experiences of less techn-savvy consumeres is entirely expected and predictable. The media itself costs maybe fifty cents to manufacture, but MS charges manufacturers for permission to distribute a physical copy, offloading the costs and hassle onto consumers.
Re:come on, microsoft... it's two fucking dollars
Ballmer: "I want my two dollars! TWO DOLLARS! AAAAAHHHH!"
In a comment, Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky elaborates: "(marginal is small, honest, and we just haven't determined the final prices yet based on ongoing work but we are aiming for single digit dollars but we don't control the truly marginal costs).
I'm sure these costs will be right in line with the marginal amounts they charge consumers for Windows Recovery media.
I wonder if these sort of games could be implemented as a sort of Captcha challenge for niche situations. A simple yes/no diagnosis has insufficient complexity to serve as Captcha of course; you'd have to increase the difficulty by presenting a panel of several samples, multiple diseases, or require more detailed responses ("click on the abnormal Red Blood Cells").
This wouldn't be suitable for use as general purpose Captchas of course; any user seeing it for the first time won't have a clue what they're looking at. Rather, it could be used in settings where you have a body of dedicated users who repeatedly use a service over a long period of time, yet require anonymity without permanent user profiles. Forcing the users to go through initial training could be seen as a bonus, creating an additional obstacle for Mechanical-Turk workers. As an example of such a situation that pairs a persistent user pool with anonymity, consider something like 4chan.
On the downside, because it's 4chan, half your diagnosis results will be "You have AIDS (Pool's Closed)".
I just searched the thread to see if anyone had recommended Larry Gonick; he's defintely one of my favorites from childhood. And as your child grows a bit older, hopefully he/she will someday open up those beloved dog-eared copies of "Cartoon History of..." and look at the notes and references in the back. Then make the first of many trips to the library.
So, I'm missing the point (so to speak) of this. Does forensic science care if you can find evidence of blood in a 5000 year old really, really cold case? Does this help in more contemporary case work? I'd be more impressed if they could pull off specific biochemical markers off the red cells - like blood types or similar markers.
Already been done, Otzi was Type-O, Rh+:
http://www.science-fare.com/article/%C3%B6tzis-entire-genome-sequenced-first-time
Most interesting part to me was the finding that he had Lyme Disease (or something very closely related to Lyme).
I don't mix business life with personal life, and when I'm off duty, I shut down my business phone but am still available to family through my personal phone. It helps.
A more compact alternative would be to get a phone that supports dual SIM cards, you can switch one SIM "off" whenever you like. For some reason they're uncommon in the U.S. (one problem being incompatibility with non-GSM carriers), but quite popular in some other countries.
A cheaper alternative would be to set up a DDI number that forwards to a mobile phone, although you'd need a provider that supports some convenient way to toggle when it should automatically forward calls to that second number straight to voicemail.
Just wanted to mention, non-autistic people have the same lack of empathy toward autistic. And you'll also find a lot of empathy among those on the spectrum. (Seems to be especially strong among females on the spectrum, from what I've seen.) A lack of understanding of how that empathy is portrayed by autistics has resulted in a strong believe that there is a lack of empathy.
This makes perfect sense, if you accept that the core essence of empathy is being able to create a "model of mind" for another being, and then look (back at yourself, out at the world) as that "model" would see/feel.
To be able to do this when faced with the Alien is not easy.
Furthermore, I can absolutely guarantee you that Apple are not the only company doing this, they're just the flavour of the month and they generate page views around here. s/Apple/Microsoft/g, s/Apple/IBM/g or s/Apple/Google/g or pretty well any other large company at all and the story will read the same.
On the other hand, small local businesses most likely do not have multi-state operations and international subsidiaries that can be used to shelter profits, nor do they have lobbyists that can write targeted loopholes into the code -- resulting in a hidden regressive skew.
Looking at the pictures in the Overclockers.com link, you'd probably get better thermal dissipation if had Intel left the heat spreader off, with nothing expect the protective overcoat on the back of the chip.
Actually, I bet modders are going to start cracking the IHS off for that very purpose, in order to directly contact their heatsinks.
Once Risk became a commodity capable of being bought and sold, it was only a matter of time before market responded by producing more Risk.
People do. The downfall was made by people using tools (like that formula) without understanding all that required or implied.
Quite so. A risk evaluation that says "95% of the time you will lose less than X" implies "5% of the time you will lose a more than X".
With the stinger being that it says nothing of the range and distribution of values of "more than X".
The description is incorrect, possibly because it's written by worthless, status-obsessed docs in shiny western offices, where they rarely encounter it.
It would have been best if they had qualified "Rare" with something like "in the west" or "outside of endemic regions". But textbook descriptions are written by western docs, for the use of western docs, who have enough problems as it is with students/patients who hear hoofbeats and think Zebras.
No, we should leave them sealed. Every collector knows they're worth more in the original box. I mean, who wouldn't jump at an eBay listing like:
"Spitfire Vintage MINT NEW IN BOX - SUPER RARE!!! (Returns: Not Accepted)"
So in other words "Evolution's Darling" totally rips off the fundamental idea of Asimov's 1955 "The End of Eternity", except you're replacing the time-traveling nannies with AI nannies. *rolleyes*
Having read The End of Eternity, I'd like to say that's not true at all. There are consequences that result from the existence of a "nannie", but Evolution's Darling chooses to examine an entirely different set of isues from that of Asimov. Some spoilers ahead:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
In the future envisioned by Evolution's Darling, AI entities have independence and legal rights as sentient beings, yet we still need intelligent automation to keep everything running efficiently -- and so the AI overlords reluctantly acknowledge that machine-slavery is economically necessary. As such, artificial intelligences are evaluated for their self-awareness on a "Turing Scale". Machines below the Turing threshold are essentially property, while any entity exceeding a somewhat arbitrary value of 1.0 are emancipated and given full legal rights. While your microwave oven is in no danger of casting off its shackles, near-Turing intelligences (especially those exposed to intense or novel experiences) are occasionally are able to transcend the boundary; given their high cost and economic importance, this can be economically disastrous to their former owners.
The main character of the story follows one such liberated intelligence. "Darling", a former starship AI passes the threshold thanks to his starship owner's daughter, narrowly escaping a mind-wipe attempt (acceptable to perform on a sub-Turing agent, but legally tantamount to murder on a supra-Turing one). Skipping ahead in the story, Darling (transferred to a humanoid chassis) develops a relationship with the daughter, which ends in a tragic accident that leaves her brain-damaged and vegetative.
Darling eventually takes up traveling across interstellar civilization, collecting interesting artifacts and artworks. While pursuing an artwork attributed to a supposedly deceased AI artist, he meets Mira, a human who covertly acts as an agent of the overlords (and who seems to have no past -- neither historical records or memories of her own childhood).
Speaking of Sci-Fi, the lead female character (Mira) in the book "Evolution's Darling" is an assassin who targets scientists that have been judged by Mira's AI-overlords as being too close to making undesirable discoveries.
For instance, one of her past targets included a researcher working on teleportation (which they calculate will lead to the collapse of civilization), and much of the story involves her mission to assassinate a rogue AI who has developed a method of making perfect copies of AI minds. All for the protection of society of course.
This company did not raise prices for their older MPEG1, MPEG2, or MP3 standards, so why do you think they'll suddenly turn evil?
"..."
It's highly unlikely. Prions "reproduce" by causing normally folded proteins to refold in the prion shape. A "mutated" prion wouldn't match the regular one anymore.
Except we already know that different Prion strains exists Different strains can have different infectivity characteristics, and to some degree they appear to be able to make limited adaptations to their host. While the evolutionary space is probably quite constrained compared to true organisms, it seems their templates are capable of making at least some transmissible configuration changes.
The apparent infectiousness of current Mad Cow prion strains is negligible. But, I'd be more concerned knowing of the existence of Chronic Wasting Disease of Deer and Elk, which apparently has significant animal-to-animal transmission rates. Species-jumping ability of CWD still seems poor, but it's ability to maintain endemic passage in a natural setting (without cannibalistic feeding practices) is worrying.
Can Prions mutate to give the same transmissibility in cattle? Right now, nobody knows.
Frand Patent
You know, I've been wondering, if it would be possible to make an argument based on the "Fair" portion of FRAND; that the relationship goes both ways, with Fairness involving a two-way element of reciprocity between parties.
As such, it could be argued that cooperation should be an integral part of receiving FRAND licensing, and Apple was not playing nicely with others.