How did they feed Tiangong-2 with supplies before this achievement?
With the cargo capacity of their manned capsules. Docking was performed manually, by the taikonaut on the spot. Mir was resupplied the same way by Russians using Soyuz capsules, and Skylab was resupplied the same way by Americans using Gemini capsules.
Speaking of Soyuz, the latest Soyuz docking with the ISS was yesterday, 2017-Apr-21, delivering one Russian, one American, and some supplies.
The President gets access to a whole lot of eye-opening cold hard reality and quickly finds that what they talked up on the trail is usually either impossible, a really terrible idea, or both.
Except this President declines to avail himself of that information and instead watches Fox and Friends for his news.
We're essentially operating on 2 branches out of 3. How long we'll coast with a massive power vacuum in the executive is yet to be seen.
We were. We aren't any longer. Ivanka Trump now has an office in the White House and a security clearance. As of about an hour ago, it was officially announced that she's hired a chief of staff to go with it. Guess who is going to be reading all those briefing books that Donald Trump literally doesn't have the patience or reading comprehension skills to read? That's right, his daughter. She will read them, and tell her daddy what he should do, and her daddy will do it, because he doesn't trust anyone who isn't related to him.
Feminists don't know it yet, but the US has its first woman President. Her name is Ivanka Trump. They could do worse.
The cost of a decent chair over its 10-20 year lifetime is even smaller.
Until Microsoft yanks my chair out from under me and tries to install a new one. While I'm standing, they tell me how great it will be when I finally get to sit down again.
Then, it will take me a few weeks to find where the new height and seat back tilt controls are.
And then you find out the height control is locked out by a domain policy and the tilt control is buggy, causing you to periodically flop back so far you stare at the ceiling, at which point you're supposed to reset the chair...
The headline and summary are the equivalent of saying "man travels through space safely without spacesuit on!", without mentioning he's inside a spaceship.
Man travels through space safely without spacesuit on! Fetched another beer from the kitchen....
It's amazing how quickly you can filter out folks just based on a few quick tests...
e.g. during an interview, give them a laptop with a terminal, and ask them to write a program to read in a number, and output a "yes" or "no" answer depending on whether the number is prime
And I can tell you why I would use primesieve and not primegen, the former fast prime searcher, but I'm damned if I'll reinvent that wheel, badly. (Hehe. Wheel. It's funny, 'cause both the sieve of Eratosthenes and Atkin's sieve are implemented with wheel factorization.)
Or we could talk about an implementation that simply looks up the number in a flat file that's a bit field of the primes marked. The first 100 million natural numbers take up 11.9MB uncompressed, and that can be deflated probably by a factor of 5 at least, maybe more. Uncompressed, you just mmap the file and read at the calculated offset. On a system equipped with an SSD, finding the answer is faster than actually printing the letters "y", "e", and "s" or the letters "n" and "o" to the terminal.
And I still won't write that code for you. (But I am job hunting. You hiring?)
Mine captures the condensate in a storage compartment that needs to be taken out and emptied into the sink, so it doesn't need to be connected to anything.
That's... weird. Every single person who has a clothes dryer also has a washing machine, which requires a drain. Surely the same drain can be used for the heat-pump dryer?
And all this time I thought it was IRC. My whole life is a lie
The article mentions a top five, then doesn't actually enumerate the top five. Piss poor reporting. IRC is probably in there, though it is never once mentioned in the article.
This is why we don't read the damn articles. They're useless.
At 0% taxation you get zero tax revenue. At 100% taxation (Communism) we get a certain amount of tax revenue. At an arbitrary % of taxation between those two points, we get an amount of tax revenue higher than at 100% taxation. If tax revenue is a continuous function of tax rate, then according to the mean value theorem there is a certain percentage between 0% and 100% at which tax revenue is maximized.
That doesn't make any damn sense at all. First, 100% taxation of income is not necessarily Communism. It may still include private ownership. Unless you mean 100% taxation of all types, including property tax, in which case yes, that's some approximation of Communism. But it also means all things of value adhere to the government, including all property and all revenue of any kind. There is no higher tax revenue than that. It's everything, by definition. So there is no arbitrary percent in between that could possibly produce higher tax revenue, all other things being equal.
Perhaps you left out a very important part of Laffer's theory, which is the theory that as government ownership of the economy approaches 100%, productivity declines, perhaps precipitously. There is historical evidence both for and against. In Soviet Russia, productivity was definitely miserable. Whether or not it actually declined, I don't know. I suspect it wasn't much worse than Czarist Russia, which it very closely resembled. It might have been better. They did manage to put the first satellite and the first human into space, after all. Meanwhile in ancient Egypt, where the pharaohs ruled as gods and owned not just the economy, but the people, body and soul, productivity was fantastically high. The Great Pyramids at Giza are the physical embodiment of that productivity, so huge and so durable that they're still standing thousands of years later.
US taxes specifically are below m%. Bush Jr. cut taxes. Revenue went down. That's pretty much the end of the discussion right there, but there's more. Historically, the peak nominal income tax rate in the US was 94% in 1944 and it was over 90% throughout the 1950s, while the US economy absolutely boomed, both during and after the war, so the destruction of Europe's industrial base contributed some, but not all. The effective rate was approximately 70%. Since you're so fond of calculus, let's look at the first derivative of GDP. It varies quite a bit, but there's a clear trend. All years with greater than 10% GDP growth happened before the Nixon era tax cuts. In the past 40 years of continuing low taxes and additional tax cuts, there has not been a single year of > 10% growth in GDP. This is historical evidence within the past century that m% is somewhere above 70%, if in fact it exists at all.
In short, the fundamental theorem of calculus and Laffer's theory are irrelevant in the face of the vagaries of human motivation, which have been and still are all over the map, and Laffer's fundamental assumption is flat wrong.
The "problems that were not being adequately handled before those programs were created" were Democrats not having permanent mandatory control over every person in the country.
This stupid-ass meme just won't die.
57,997,000 people received Social Security benefits in February of 2017. 43,425,000 of those people were age 65 or older. 74.87% of Social Security beneficiaries are old people.[1]
Old people skew heavily Republican when voting.[2] The margin is as high as 9% for people in their early 80s. For Donald Trump's election, it was 8%.
If Social Security, by far the largest Democratic entitlement program, was supposed to gain control of those old people, it was a miserable failure. Or maybe this is just a stupid-ass meme that needs to die because it was never true.
The AI does not outperform a doctor. Does not outperform any doctor period.
It has managed to perform better than guidelines.
Now let's consider that the AI is basing this on data gathered by medical science. What it's outperforming in actuality is thus old prediction models.
Yes it does, because a good many doctors don't actually apply the old prediction model. They "go with their gut" because "it's usually right." When you look at the statistics, a good many doctors underperform vs the prediction model, but don't know it, because they only remember their successes, not their failures. It's a survival mechanism of human memory. If they remembered their failures accurately, they'd be crushed under the load of guilt.
What's odd about all these medical diagnostics by machine stories is how they're all implying that any of this is new. It's not. It's the late '80s and early '90s, computers could already outperform human doctors with the accuracy of their diagnoses. It was called an "expert system," and they were already statistically more accurate than doctors 30 years ago. The machine could be wrong, but it was less often wrong because of its infallible memory, because it was pre-programmed by people who were not stuck in the stress of the moment, and because it could never decide to guess against all of the evidence.
The doctors of the AMA successfully quashed those early efforts simply by refusing to allow hospitals to buy them and by refusing to buy them for their own practices. They will do so again with this round, even though outcomes are guaranteed to be worse. It's not a very large number of worse, and even if it was, how could patients tell? They won't be allowed to ask the machine for its diagnosis.
Has anybody checked the radar at Pearl Harbor? 'cause this is a Japanese national crisis. And everybody knows where the most chips per capita are in the world. That's right, 7-11.
In TFA the guy hope Trump will win the future election, hello?
And then Trump did win and promptly appointed an FCC chair who is trying to gut the net neutrality rules he so highly values in the rest of the article. Trump's campaign and subsequent election, in a nutshell.
Moreover, if I can't buy it, who am I harming by making an illicit copy? The complaint about piracy is that it results in reduced sales. If they're already zero, and projected to be zero forever, I can't possibly reduce its sales. Not by piracy, not by giving it a bad review, not by threatening to shoot anyone who buys a copy.
Yes, but if we're talking about Doom, you should still be doing all of those things, just to be on the safe side.
Exactly this. Verizon owns all of the old analog TV spectrum also. Sitting on it to prevent startup competition.
Er, no they don't. Verizon sold that 700 MHz spectrum to T-Mobile for $2.4 billion in 2014. T-Mobile is buying even more of what they already own. It's called LTE Band 12, and it's supported by the Nexus 6 and the Samsung Galaxy S6, among others. They've put up dozens of towers that use that spectrum, mostly in California and the northeast, but also Minnesota, Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, east Texas, and the southern tip of Florida.
T-Mobile's network actually IS getting better, specifically because of this spectrum, but of course it's a painfully slow process. Siting and constructing a cellular tower is difficult, especially when the country is littered with lunatics so bored they have to invent psychosomatic allergies to radio waves.
"Make the switch"?? My car is a 2006 model, and it seems to be running fine. I will buy another like it when it quits working. How am I going to be 'crushed in the collapse?' You make no sense.
Presumably when all the gas stations disappear overnight. Or something. Rubble rubble...
I'm skeptical that Tesla can deliver the reliability expected in this market. The Model S just got off Consumer Reports's shit list, and the Model X is still on it.
I think Tesla (or any manufacturer) has an easier time making a reliable semi tractor than any luxury car or crossover. They're very much brute force vehicles, with size, weight, and performance constraints so broad, they're barely constraints at all. There aren't going to be any happy, slappy self-extruding door handles or falcon-wing doors (the downfall of the Model X) on this thing. It'll be a thin wrapper around a gigantic pile of batteries and one or two ridiculously powerful electric motors. Admittedly the diesel engines in a semi tractor are darn simple already, especially compared to their automotive brethren, but going from diesel to pure electric means going from several dozen moving parts to one, maybe two, and the kind of industrial strength motors we're talking about here are absurdly reliable. Big motors work for 20, 30, even 40 years without servicing.
We'll have a better idea after the unveiling. With luck, Elon Musk kept a lid on the urges of his designers to get cute.
I work in a primary school (up to age 11) and you wouldn't be able to do that to our systems without alarm bells going off.
In a "secure" environment like a prison, and especially on secure services that can create access cards and open door, the IT department were doing NOTHING LIKE their job.
Sure, but be fair. Your job is much harder than theirs is. You have to deal with all the little criminals, not just the ones dumb enough to get caught.
the prize money will go to Strategic Machine, a firm founded by the duo.
That seems a little unfair. If I had won, the prize money would not have been given directly to my parents. If a machine wins, it should receive the prize. If it cannot actually spend it, then that would appear to be a rather basic limitation to its AI-ness. But it wouldn't be a problem for the competition or whoever awarded the prize.
You would also hope that the authorities would keep an eye on the money to ensure that whoever had access to the AI didn't defraud it of its winnings. Maybe it is time for machines to have property rights.
So you're saying the poker playing computer needs to have a module added that will let it shitpost "Muh Freedums!" on Twitter? And order vast quantities of alcohol online, of course. 'cause that's its fuel. I saw it on a documentary so it must be true.
You have a point. Aside from the part where the Democrat-appointed FCC chairman fought this sort of behavior. Wheeler had zero interest in supporting the incumbent telecoms.
Tom Wheeler's behavior was radically unexpected. A former telco lobbyist who actually tried to do things for the citizens instead of corporations. I myself wrote Slashdot posts assuming he would never do such a thing. It's still astonishing. We will miss him. Far more than most people think.
I like how you get to decide what people are forced to spend money on, then make a complaint about Comcast.
Comcast never threatened to jail someone for not buying their service. You propose totalitarianism.
He didn't decide what the people of Chatanooga are forced to spend money on. The people of Chatanooga decided what they all, collectively, would spend money on. It's called representative democracy, you blithering idiot.
Meanwhile AT&T and Comcast have proven that at the state level, where money talks far louder than votes, they have much more "representation" than the citizens. There's your totalitarianism.
As states outlaw municipal broadband it seems to me that this kind of institution is one that they can't sensibly outlaw. They could try, of course, an no doubt will.
You damn betcha they will. And they'll succeed, too. I'm a member-owner of an electricity co-op. My average monthly bill is 1/3rd that of people who are in the service area of the for-profit company in the region, for the same size house. The for-profit company successfully lobbied the state government to forbid the co-op from servicing any city in the state (decades ago). So for higher reliability and a vastly lower rate, my rural co-op provides me power at a dramatically lower meter-per-mile density than the for-profit power company. They are by definition more efficient than the for-profit company, and far better for the citizens. So why can't all the citizens have access to their service? Lobbyists and their deep, deep pockets full of campaign donations.
In first world nations with growing economies corporate taxes + capital gains taxes on investments are about 45%. Those who claim capital gains taxes are too low all forget to count the corporate taxes already paid on the same income (in the case of stocks).
Nonsense. Big multinationals pay little or no income tax. GE is notorious for paying 0% most years for many years now, and they're far from alone. Shit, Walmart manages to not even pay local property taxes on its stores by leasing stores from itself in a complex web of wholly owned subsidiaries. That's the two major types of taxes that a person has to pay and corporations don't, and frankly it needs to stop.
Corporations are so accustomed to being able to dodge income and property taxes completely that the undodgeable Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes really piss off the executives. I've no doubt that it contributes to their willingness to lay off employees at the drop of a hat. If they started having to pay income taxes the way I have to (why aren't my electric bill, gas bill, water bill, sewer bill, phone bill, and insurance bills deductible?), maybe they'd be less sensitive to payroll taxes.
For instance, Scandanavian taxes are not exactly low, but there is quite a lot of service provided.
I'd put forth the proposition that on a value basis, U.S. taxes are high.
That depends on what you value. If you value having 19 nuclear aircraft carrier groups which enable the ability to interfere in anybody's business anywhere in the world pretty much at a moment's notice, US taxes are quite reasonable. Up until the election of Donald Trump, Americans hadn't paid any attention to anyone promoting isolationist polices since World War II, and as it turns out, Donald Trump isn't isolationist either, to the tune of 59 cruise missiles. Americans seem to like paying for the American Empire.
Slashdot Mirror
What is a raw through that has not been verbalized?
Emotion. Or "I need to pee." One of the two.
How did they feed Tiangong-2 with supplies before this achievement?
With the cargo capacity of their manned capsules. Docking was performed manually, by the taikonaut on the spot. Mir was resupplied the same way by Russians using Soyuz capsules, and Skylab was resupplied the same way by Americans using Gemini capsules.
Speaking of Soyuz, the latest Soyuz docking with the ISS was yesterday, 2017-Apr-21, delivering one Russian, one American, and some supplies.
The President gets access to a whole lot of eye-opening cold hard reality and quickly finds that what they talked up on the trail is usually either impossible, a really terrible idea, or both.
Except this President declines to avail himself of that information and instead watches Fox and Friends for his news.
We're essentially operating on 2 branches out of 3. How long we'll coast with a massive power vacuum in the executive is yet to be seen.
We were. We aren't any longer. Ivanka Trump now has an office in the White House and a security clearance. As of about an hour ago, it was officially announced that she's hired a chief of staff to go with it. Guess who is going to be reading all those briefing books that Donald Trump literally doesn't have the patience or reading comprehension skills to read? That's right, his daughter. She will read them, and tell her daddy what he should do, and her daddy will do it, because he doesn't trust anyone who isn't related to him.
Feminists don't know it yet, but the US has its first woman President. Her name is Ivanka Trump. They could do worse.
The cost of a decent chair over its 10-20 year lifetime is even smaller.
Until Microsoft yanks my chair out from under me and tries to install a new one. While I'm standing, they tell me how great it will be when I finally get to sit down again.
Then, it will take me a few weeks to find where the new height and seat back tilt controls are.
And then you find out the height control is locked out by a domain policy and the tilt control is buggy, causing you to periodically flop back so far you stare at the ceiling, at which point you're supposed to reset the chair...
The headline and summary are the equivalent of saying "man travels through space safely without spacesuit on!", without mentioning he's inside a spaceship.
Man travels through space safely without spacesuit on! Fetched another beer from the kitchen....
It's amazing how quickly you can filter out folks just based on a few quick tests...
e.g. during an interview, give them a laptop with a terminal, and ask them to write a program to read in a number, and output a "yes" or "no" answer depending on whether the number is prime
My answer is one line:
wget https://github.com/kimwalisch/...
And I can tell you why I would use primesieve and not primegen, the former fast prime searcher, but I'm damned if I'll reinvent that wheel, badly. (Hehe. Wheel. It's funny, 'cause both the sieve of Eratosthenes and Atkin's sieve are implemented with wheel factorization.)
Or we could talk about an implementation that simply looks up the number in a flat file that's a bit field of the primes marked. The first 100 million natural numbers take up 11.9MB uncompressed, and that can be deflated probably by a factor of 5 at least, maybe more. Uncompressed, you just mmap the file and read at the calculated offset. On a system equipped with an SSD, finding the answer is faster than actually printing the letters "y", "e", and "s" or the letters "n" and "o" to the terminal.
And I still won't write that code for you. (But I am job hunting. You hiring?)
Mine captures the condensate in a storage compartment that needs to be taken out and emptied into the sink, so it doesn't need to be connected to anything.
That's... weird. Every single person who has a clothes dryer also has a washing machine, which requires a drain. Surely the same drain can be used for the heat-pump dryer?
And all this time I thought it was IRC. My whole life is a lie
The article mentions a top five, then doesn't actually enumerate the top five. Piss poor reporting. IRC is probably in there, though it is never once mentioned in the article.
This is why we don't read the damn articles. They're useless.
At 0% taxation you get zero tax revenue.
At 100% taxation (Communism) we get a certain amount of tax revenue.
At an arbitrary % of taxation between those two points, we get an amount of tax revenue higher than at 100% taxation.
If tax revenue is a continuous function of tax rate, then according to the mean value theorem there is a certain percentage between 0% and 100% at which tax revenue is maximized.
That doesn't make any damn sense at all. First, 100% taxation of income is not necessarily Communism. It may still include private ownership. Unless you mean 100% taxation of all types, including property tax, in which case yes, that's some approximation of Communism. But it also means all things of value adhere to the government, including all property and all revenue of any kind. There is no higher tax revenue than that. It's everything, by definition. So there is no arbitrary percent in between that could possibly produce higher tax revenue, all other things being equal.
Perhaps you left out a very important part of Laffer's theory, which is the theory that as government ownership of the economy approaches 100%, productivity declines, perhaps precipitously. There is historical evidence both for and against. In Soviet Russia, productivity was definitely miserable. Whether or not it actually declined, I don't know. I suspect it wasn't much worse than Czarist Russia, which it very closely resembled. It might have been better. They did manage to put the first satellite and the first human into space, after all. Meanwhile in ancient Egypt, where the pharaohs ruled as gods and owned not just the economy, but the people, body and soul, productivity was fantastically high. The Great Pyramids at Giza are the physical embodiment of that productivity, so huge and so durable that they're still standing thousands of years later.
US taxes specifically are below m%. Bush Jr. cut taxes. Revenue went down. That's pretty much the end of the discussion right there, but there's more. Historically, the peak nominal income tax rate in the US was 94% in 1944 and it was over 90% throughout the 1950s, while the US economy absolutely boomed, both during and after the war, so the destruction of Europe's industrial base contributed some, but not all. The effective rate was approximately 70%. Since you're so fond of calculus, let's look at the first derivative of GDP. It varies quite a bit, but there's a clear trend. All years with greater than 10% GDP growth happened before the Nixon era tax cuts. In the past 40 years of continuing low taxes and additional tax cuts, there has not been a single year of > 10% growth in GDP. This is historical evidence within the past century that m% is somewhere above 70%, if in fact it exists at all.
In short, the fundamental theorem of calculus and Laffer's theory are irrelevant in the face of the vagaries of human motivation, which have been and still are all over the map, and Laffer's fundamental assumption is flat wrong.
The "problems that were not being adequately handled before those programs were created" were Democrats not having permanent mandatory control over every person in the country.
This stupid-ass meme just won't die.
57,997,000 people received Social Security benefits in February of 2017. 43,425,000 of those people were age 65 or older. 74.87% of Social Security beneficiaries are old people.[1]
Old people skew heavily Republican when voting.[2] The margin is as high as 9% for people in their early 80s. For Donald Trump's election, it was 8%.
If Social Security, by far the largest Democratic entitlement program, was supposed to gain control of those old people, it was a miserable failure. Or maybe this is just a stupid-ass meme that needs to die because it was never true.
The AI does not outperform a doctor. Does not outperform any doctor period.
It has managed to perform better than guidelines.
Now let's consider that the AI is basing this on data gathered by medical science. What it's outperforming in actuality is thus old prediction models.
Yes it does, because a good many doctors don't actually apply the old prediction model. They "go with their gut" because "it's usually right." When you look at the statistics, a good many doctors underperform vs the prediction model, but don't know it, because they only remember their successes, not their failures. It's a survival mechanism of human memory. If they remembered their failures accurately, they'd be crushed under the load of guilt.
What's odd about all these medical diagnostics by machine stories is how they're all implying that any of this is new. It's not. It's the late '80s and early '90s, computers could already outperform human doctors with the accuracy of their diagnoses. It was called an "expert system," and they were already statistically more accurate than doctors 30 years ago. The machine could be wrong, but it was less often wrong because of its infallible memory, because it was pre-programmed by people who were not stuck in the stress of the moment, and because it could never decide to guess against all of the evidence.
The doctors of the AMA successfully quashed those early efforts simply by refusing to allow hospitals to buy them and by refusing to buy them for their own practices. They will do so again with this round, even though outcomes are guaranteed to be worse. It's not a very large number of worse, and even if it was, how could patients tell? They won't be allowed to ask the machine for its diagnosis.
Has anybody checked the radar at Pearl Harbor? 'cause this is a Japanese national crisis. And everybody knows where the most chips per capita are in the world. That's right, 7-11.
Stay awake tonight, guys.
In TFA the guy hope Trump will win the future election, hello?
And then Trump did win and promptly appointed an FCC chair who is trying to gut the net neutrality rules he so highly values in the rest of the article. Trump's campaign and subsequent election, in a nutshell.
Moreover, if I can't buy it, who am I harming by making an illicit copy? The complaint about piracy is that it results in reduced sales. If they're already zero, and projected to be zero forever, I can't possibly reduce its sales. Not by piracy, not by giving it a bad review, not by threatening to shoot anyone who buys a copy.
Yes, but if we're talking about Doom, you should still be doing all of those things, just to be on the safe side.
Exactly this. Verizon owns all of the old analog TV spectrum also. Sitting on it to prevent startup competition.
Er, no they don't. Verizon sold that 700 MHz spectrum to T-Mobile for $2.4 billion in 2014. T-Mobile is buying even more of what they already own. It's called LTE Band 12, and it's supported by the Nexus 6 and the Samsung Galaxy S6, among others. They've put up dozens of towers that use that spectrum, mostly in California and the northeast, but also Minnesota, Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, east Texas, and the southern tip of Florida.
T-Mobile's network actually IS getting better, specifically because of this spectrum, but of course it's a painfully slow process. Siting and constructing a cellular tower is difficult, especially when the country is littered with lunatics so bored they have to invent psychosomatic allergies to radio waves.
"Make the switch"?? My car is a 2006 model, and it seems to be running fine. I will buy another like it when it quits working. How am I going to be 'crushed in the collapse?' You make no sense.
Presumably when all the gas stations disappear overnight. Or something. Rubble rubble...
I'm skeptical that Tesla can deliver the reliability expected in this market. The Model S just got off Consumer Reports's shit list, and the Model X is still on it.
I think Tesla (or any manufacturer) has an easier time making a reliable semi tractor than any luxury car or crossover. They're very much brute force vehicles, with size, weight, and performance constraints so broad, they're barely constraints at all. There aren't going to be any happy, slappy self-extruding door handles or falcon-wing doors (the downfall of the Model X) on this thing. It'll be a thin wrapper around a gigantic pile of batteries and one or two ridiculously powerful electric motors. Admittedly the diesel engines in a semi tractor are darn simple already, especially compared to their automotive brethren, but going from diesel to pure electric means going from several dozen moving parts to one, maybe two, and the kind of industrial strength motors we're talking about here are absurdly reliable. Big motors work for 20, 30, even 40 years without servicing.
We'll have a better idea after the unveiling. With luck, Elon Musk kept a lid on the urges of his designers to get cute.
I work in a primary school (up to age 11) and you wouldn't be able to do that to our systems without alarm bells going off.
In a "secure" environment like a prison, and especially on secure services that can create access cards and open door, the IT department were doing NOTHING LIKE their job.
Sure, but be fair. Your job is much harder than theirs is. You have to deal with all the little criminals, not just the ones dumb enough to get caught.
the prize money will go to Strategic Machine, a firm founded by the duo.
That seems a little unfair. If I had won, the prize money would not have been given directly to my parents. If a machine wins, it should receive the prize. If it cannot actually spend it, then that would appear to be a rather basic limitation to its AI-ness. But it wouldn't be a problem for the competition or whoever awarded the prize.
You would also hope that the authorities would keep an eye on the money to ensure that whoever had access to the AI didn't defraud it of its winnings. Maybe it is time for machines to have property rights.
So you're saying the poker playing computer needs to have a module added that will let it shitpost "Muh Freedums!" on Twitter? And order vast quantities of alcohol online, of course. 'cause that's its fuel. I saw it on a documentary so it must be true.
You have a point. Aside from the part where the Democrat-appointed FCC chairman fought this sort of behavior. Wheeler had zero interest in supporting the incumbent telecoms.
Tom Wheeler's behavior was radically unexpected. A former telco lobbyist who actually tried to do things for the citizens instead of corporations. I myself wrote Slashdot posts assuming he would never do such a thing. It's still astonishing. We will miss him. Far more than most people think.
I like how you get to decide what people are forced to spend money on, then make a complaint about Comcast.
Comcast never threatened to jail someone for not buying their service. You propose totalitarianism.
He didn't decide what the people of Chatanooga are forced to spend money on. The people of Chatanooga decided what they all, collectively, would spend money on. It's called representative democracy, you blithering idiot.
Meanwhile AT&T and Comcast have proven that at the state level, where money talks far louder than votes, they have much more "representation" than the citizens. There's your totalitarianism.
As states outlaw municipal broadband it seems to me that this kind of institution is one that they can't sensibly outlaw. They could try, of course, an no doubt will.
You damn betcha they will. And they'll succeed, too. I'm a member-owner of an electricity co-op. My average monthly bill is 1/3rd that of people who are in the service area of the for-profit company in the region, for the same size house. The for-profit company successfully lobbied the state government to forbid the co-op from servicing any city in the state (decades ago). So for higher reliability and a vastly lower rate, my rural co-op provides me power at a dramatically lower meter-per-mile density than the for-profit power company. They are by definition more efficient than the for-profit company, and far better for the citizens. So why can't all the citizens have access to their service? Lobbyists and their deep, deep pockets full of campaign donations.
In first world nations with growing economies corporate taxes + capital gains taxes on investments are about 45%. Those who claim capital gains taxes are too low all forget to count the corporate taxes already paid on the same income (in the case of stocks).
Nonsense. Big multinationals pay little or no income tax. GE is notorious for paying 0% most years for many years now, and they're far from alone. Shit, Walmart manages to not even pay local property taxes on its stores by leasing stores from itself in a complex web of wholly owned subsidiaries. That's the two major types of taxes that a person has to pay and corporations don't, and frankly it needs to stop.
Corporations are so accustomed to being able to dodge income and property taxes completely that the undodgeable Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes really piss off the executives. I've no doubt that it contributes to their willingness to lay off employees at the drop of a hat. If they started having to pay income taxes the way I have to (why aren't my electric bill, gas bill, water bill, sewer bill, phone bill, and insurance bills deductible?), maybe they'd be less sensitive to payroll taxes.
For instance, Scandanavian taxes are not exactly low, but there is quite a lot of service provided.
I'd put forth the proposition that on a value basis, U.S. taxes are high.
That depends on what you value. If you value having 19 nuclear aircraft carrier groups which enable the ability to interfere in anybody's business anywhere in the world pretty much at a moment's notice, US taxes are quite reasonable. Up until the election of Donald Trump, Americans hadn't paid any attention to anyone promoting isolationist polices since World War II, and as it turns out, Donald Trump isn't isolationist either, to the tune of 59 cruise missiles. Americans seem to like paying for the American Empire.
You get FOOD on your flights!! All we get are beatings at United Airlines!
And the beatings will continue until morale improves.