In terms of the care (or lack thereof) the average person receives you are right, but in terms of top-end care the U.S is pretty much #1 and where rich people go for expensive and semi-experimental. Don't get me wrong, the current system is bad for just about everyone, but it is the expected end result for a plutocracy like the U.S.
On the other hand I most certainly wouldn't lay anything even close to full responsibility on the U.S healthcare system considering all the other things that are wrong in U.S society relating to heath. First and foremost there's the food as most of the big peddlers of unhealthy food are U.S companies best established in their home market. After this there's the typical attitude to healthcare and sickness, rather than simply getting time off when you're sick you have "sick days" you get to spend, but are implicitly encouraged not to spend, meaning that you probably won't go see a doctor until something gets really bad. Furthermore there's also the work culture that encourages working long hours with little time left over for non-essential things, including exercise. Continuing on there's also the fetishism of the car and the need to use it whenever possible that increases time sitting down and exercise that happens as a result of everyday activity.
Thus I really wouldn't be too surprised if the U.S health figures wouldn't improve by all that much after the current system is replaced by system like most of Europe has...
I know the crowd you're talking about, but these days they're not anywhere near as hard in the paint about the U.S being such a fantastic place compared to the rest of the world after they got Trump and an outlet for their complaints about the bad aspects of the country.
There's still a number of things like friendliness to entrepreneurship, food, culture and gun ownership that they're super proud of, but they're now pretty angry about the state of education and healthcare. They commonly think the sorry state of these things in the U.S today is because of established politicians destroying those things at the behest of their corporate paymasters and that Trump's swamp draining is going to get rid of these people and fix what they destroyed. However with education there's also the contingent that blames blacks for the poor OECD ratings and use race-specific figures that do show a significant improvement, but not for the reasons they think are behind it.
He still has a point so your thinly veiled insult was just completely unnecessary. China is known to embellish figures (economic growth, industrial output, emissions and other environmental figures, etc.) and he's not disputing that U.S health figures are not going in a positive direction.
Even when not factoring in embellished figures you should to remember that outside of extreme examples (like Spurlock's McDiet) unhealthy lifestyles take time to really catch up with you and Chinese people have only been exposed to western diets en masse for a relatively short time. The delayed onset of health issues stemming from eating bad western diets is pretty well demonstrated in Japan's figures and how it took quite a while from McDonalds & Co making landfall until their presence really started to show itself in heath statistics.
Maybe they just concluded that they didn't specifically need their most experienced Perl programmer to maintain that script? Experience tends to lead to higher salaries and it's kind of expected that the higher your salary, the more likely you are to find yourself on the chopping block when management starts looking for how to reduce costs. Looking hardest at the most expensive things when you're trying to save money is just plain sense when it comes down to it. Having worked with plenty of people considerably older than myself it's become very clear to me that experience and effectiveness as a developer are nowhere near as well correlated as experience and salaries.
When you have a set savings goal or need to maximize your cost efficiency it's only natural for management to try to minimize the number of people actually laid off and that's obviously going to lead to the most expensive employees, who tend to be older, to be given the most attention. I have a hard time believing that as an employee the average gopher is actually worth the 2-3 recent college graduates their salary could be used to hire/retain.
It's not just the money aspect, I have a feeling a lot of managers do this just to minimize the number of people they actually have to lay off as there's both PR and human reasons to want to do that. Thus all in all, if you consider the actual goals of management and the related circumstances, getting rid of older workers first does kind of make a whole lot of sense.
Apparently some of the side materials (books, comics, etc.), this franchise has always been merchandised half to death, explain that the new republic government that took over after the empire fell was pretty pacifist and preferred to spend it's money on things other than a big army after the empire spent so much on it. Not sure if this is intentional, but you do get the impression the Disney Star Wars movies are advocating for the same kind of mentality as Benjamin Franklin did when he famously said "Those who beat their swords into plowshares usually end up plowing for those who kept their swords."
Don't get me wrong, more likely than not the writers really just loved the underdog heroes of the original trilogy and just left in this massive plot hole without even realizing it and the writers of the side material had to fill it rather than this pacifist incompetency being intentional.
I'm not even american, I've never owned an iPhone nor do I plan on getting one, but that's a pretty gross mis-characterization of the design patent in question.
The patent contains multiple drawings ranging in detail from very abstract ones like the "rounded rectangles" one that quite often gets thrown around to ones that present the design of the iPhone is great detail with exact proportions. Apple being able to show that they copies what was described in the detailed drawings with very high accuracy proved to the jury that it was a clear case of Samsung copying Apple's design very closely rather than Samsung's claim of independently arriving at a similar design.
That may have been the case when Jobs was still alive, but modern day Apple fanboys (if you can even call them that anymore) are openly scornful towards Tim Cook and have been very critical of many products and product flaws over the last few years. Even on macrumors, once a bastion of Apple evangelism, you're way more likely to see people openly call for Cook's resignation than commending him for anything he's done or achieved over the last couple of years.
Another thing that's not mentioned very much - what will governments do when they see their gas taxes dropping but the roads are still being used? Expect interesting reshuffling of the road tax regimen to handle this.
Considering how badly people have over the last few years freaked out over just the talk of raising the gas tax I'm not so sure they are actually going to raise the gas tax, particularly not under a republican administration. The republicans have been talking up an alternative plan for getting the money for catching up on the maintenance debt that doesn't involve raising the gas tax since 2010 (IIRC) and they've yet to figure out anything they dare to make public.
No, if they are actually going to go ahead and start with catching up on the maintenance debt that's built up over the last couple of decades it's pretty clear the money for it is going to come from something other than an inflation-adjusted gas tax. My personal guess is that it's either going to be borrowed money or then they're earmarking the revenue from the planned import tariffs on foreign made cars for this.
Even the most pessimistic figures we have today would suggest that self-driving cars are safer than the average driver.
As for why people still distrust self-driving cars, educated guess is that it's due to the way mass media tends to end up pushing the stores that pull in the biggest audience rather than the ones most relevant or truthful ones. We saw this back in the 80s and 90s when the reporting about violent crime went up significantly while actual crime statistics were showing a downward trend that started in the 1970s and had a big drop-off starting in the early 90s.
Worse yet, even if people know it's really just the media acting out the worst tendencies of the yellow paper press, people's self-preservation instincts are so strong that they'll still behave like they didn't know better. We saw this and still see this with how there's still people, particularly white women, who are genuinely afraid of black men because of how many "Black man commits shocking crime X!! He's on the loose and you may be next!!"-type "news" stores they were subject to back when media went hard in the paint for black people committing crimes.
I'm pretty sure those reservations are still valid, so the only mis-selling here is that they're delaying delivery. If you've paid any attention to Tesla's history, you'll know that they've never really delivered any of their cars on time so would actually be unexpected if they had started delivering $35.000 Model 3s on schedule.
Not me... There's more than enough legitimate things you can criticize Musk and Tesla for, but this really isn't one of them. It's kind of funny how heavily people are divided into either doomsayers and evangelists on Tesla (and it would seem like the doomsayers are a considerably larger group). Anyone with even cursory knowledge of how mass production of goods like cars works will have known that lower margin cars will have much lower priority when it comes to how limited production is allocated.
Still, I'm genuinely curious as to how many more cars per week they're going to produce after they've shut down the production line for about a week starting this Saturday. If they can actually reach the goal of 6000 cars per week by the end of June it shouldn't be too long before they can start making the low-end cars and break even on them thanks to considerably lower per-car overhead costs.
Way to completely miss the point... My point was that these systems may appear unfair from afar, but when you look at how they operate and the data they operate based on you'll see that they're just brutally fair. As much as you'd like to believe everyone is the same, there are population-level differences and some of them are big and come with significant consequences for those they apply to.
No, you really are doing just that. A person of any race will have their credit application judged based on the exact same criteria and none of these criteria are race. A system like this where everyone is treated exactly the same way regardless of race simply cannot be described as "racist" by anyone except someone trying to insist equal treatment is somehow racist ("War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength"-style).
A 100% human system is however obviously going to be worse in this regard as people do have certain inherent biases they may or may not act upon or over-compensate for. Because of this, a human-run system is provably worse than a machine-run system that can't even try to be racist.
Your knowledge is flawed, and that's not even limited to your initial presumption, since it turns out that the software wasn't limited to those particular incidences of crime.
The fact that it's not just limited to serious forms of crime like those black people are over-represented in (both as perpetrators and incidentally victims) really doesn't mean that these types of crimes won't skew things in a way that looks like the whole system is racist towards black people. Optics are rarely the whole truth and this is no exception to that.
You mean the system ends up biased against black people, given that it's actually discriminating against them by imposing greater sentences.
No, black people just commit a disproportionately large share of the kinds of crimes that come with tough sentences and high rates of recidivism. You're going to have to show figures where non-blacks are given more lenient sentences for the same crimes, but this is really not it.
Sure man, keep telling yourself that, make excuses.
Excuses? I just explained how the exact same kind of system will end up appearing to be biased against white people, thus showing how ridiculous the accusations of racism are.
Yes, people's "ethics" are often flawed out of ignorance and incompetence.
People are fundamentally way more flawed in their judgment than any system that hasn't been intentionally set up to reflect these flaws in judgment. The system in question is no more "racist" than the sun is in how it's causing sunburns and skin cancer.
Except we already told you that said systems do factor in such a penalty towards black people
No, they appear to be biased against black people and there's a very important difference between something actually being racist and people misinterpreting something as being racist.
I can see you're very invested in this idea that any system that appears to be biased for or against different groups has to be that because of some fundamental flaw in the system and not just a consequence of the population level choices and preferences of the different groups. However sometimes you just have to take a step back or closer and examine if your prejudices might be wrong. In this case you are wrong and there's really no doubt about it.
I get the feeling that like with flat earth theories, conclusively disproving the EM drive will only spur on it's supporters and the (justifiably) flippant Ars Technica article on this paper will be a downright rallying call for them.
Don't get me wrong, this is stupid and any remaining supporters of the EM drive after this have to be stupid or ignorant of the very basic laws of physics. Sadly there really is no cure for stupidity (other than maybe the kind of stuff Stalin & Co would use).
You're projecting way too much malice into all of this... Most cases of "bias" by machine learning, which is really just branch of statistical analysis, systems tends to be the developers intentionally skewing the result or then, in the vast majority of cases, population level differences that cause something that appears to be racist if you don't understand the data the system is making decisions based on or how it actually makes those decisions.
A good example of this is how black people are on average worse off financially than whites and particularly asians, which leads to systems that determine if credit should be given will appear to be biased against black people when they actually treats black, white and asian people with the same financial history and other factors exactly the same. A system for this kind of purpose which is "non-racist" based on purely it's output and not the data it uses will have to be explicitly racist and favor black people over whites and asians.
The first example does sound like it was just doing it's job seeing how black people do to my knowledge commit a disproportionately large portion of the kinds of crimes that have a relatively high rate of recidivism (rapes, peddling drugs, gang violence, etc.). Any correctly working system would naturally end up looking like it's biased against black people even if it's not given the defendants' race or even capable of even understanding the concept. It's basically the same "issue" as how a system that's supposed to assess the risk of hockey-related injuries, say for determining insurance rates, would determine that white men are more at risk of them and act accordingly.
As for the second example, if you actually look at employment statistics you are going to see men being the clear majority of those working in high stress, high risk, physically demanding and very high salary jobs, which tend to require skills men are more likely to have. Similarly to the recidivism system, determining of who gets shown what ads is not actually based on the supposedly discriminating characteristic, but various peripheral characteristics that end up giving the illusion of discrimination. Thus it's again really not surprising to see a system meant to display ads to those most interested in what they're advertising show these kinds of jobs to men more often than women and changing the system to display more "male-centric" ads to women is merely making the system less accurate.
Finally, the third and fourth examples are just examples of a maliciously and incompetently coded system respectively and not really relevant here. An "ethically" set up machine learning system could be just as flawed if not worse for very similar reasons. I can see why people would get upset over the first and second examples if they didn't understand how systems like them actually work or the data they work based on, but "non-racist" and "non-sexist" version of the system would actually have to be explicitly racist and factor in a bonus when computing the risk of recidivism for black people and explicitly sexist and factor in gender when determining what ads to show rather than just skills and interests.
Redefined? When has "free" ever meant "at no cost to anyone" or something similar? Because it obviously never has and has always meant that it's without direct cost to the recipient of the service or good.
However this type of whining about Lucky Ducky's isn't exactly anything new...
It's that he has little interest in actually becoming informed
Can you really blame him for that in this era of political polarization where just about everyone on both sides of the political spectrum dig themselves into foxholes on "their" side and label anyone on "their" side that refuses to dig themselves into a foxhole a member of the "other" side? With narcissistic personality traits being on the rise over the last few decades (one study on first year college students that started in the 1980s was forced to change the scale in the 2010) you could even argue that the man is just a ahead of the curve when it comes to what kinds of people the American people are becoming.
Seriously thou, my experience as a traditional liberal (pro meritocracy, gun control, science over feelings and religion, gay and minority equality) arguing with people on a variety of topics, many of them political, is that refusing to learn or accept anything that may disprove your prejudices is a trait shared by people on the right and the left in about equal measure.
I'm pretty particularly Facebook, who is known to censor all kinds of things for various autocratic governments, has provided their services to conservatives and are just more hush-hush about it than Cambridge Analythica was.
One of the things that struck me most about all the panic around Cambridge Analythica is that what they did wasn't all that different from what much bigger companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter have been doing for well over a decade and making quite a lot of money on. Only significant differences I can think of are that they were much smaller, didn't actually collect the data themselves and analyzed the data just for external clients rather than their own gain.
Particularly Facebook behaving the way they did, acting like they're not in the exact same business, absolutely reeked of hypocrisy.
Tried of his publicity stunts? You do know that's the only thing he's really good at? Asking Musk to cut it out with the publicity stunts is like asking Trump to cut it out with the twitter tirades.
I intentionally left out the diminishing returns in manufacturing-related R n' D because this applies to their competition just as much as it applies to Intel. As for the dead end that was the NetBurst microarchitecture, that was first and foremost them thinking they could build a really inefficient architecture (massive 20-something stage pipeline running at a frequency way higher than anyone else) and make it work by having a way better manufacturing process.
In the end Intel was able to stay competitive during the Netburst days and in the mobile space where efficiency was paramount they had a separate, much more efficient, architecture (Pentium M) that they later used as basis for the Core 2 series.
Intel supposedly dropping the ball like this to the point where it seems like TSMC, GF and Samsung are seemingly catching up genuinely causes me to scratch my head thinking how it's even possible. We're talking about the company with the best foundry facilities and some of the most talented people so I can't imagine this could be just plain incompetence or Intel just not bothering to invest sufficiently.
I can think of multiple reasons for this, but there isn't anything substantial in the public domain to substantiate any of them. First thing that comes to mind is that Intel has just ended up making some bad design decisions like how GlobalFoundries tried to use traditional planar transistors in their 22nm process that never reached production-acceptable yields and have simply had to go back to the drawing board, but doesn't want to admit it. The second explanation that comes to mind, which is my gut feeling, is that Intel with it's lead has just hit mass production-related snags before their competitors and that their competitors' time roadmaps are thus just unrealistic. Finally, the third and rather cynical explanation that I can think of is that their competitors' management is just over-promising what their engineers can actually deliver in an effort to drive up their stock price and thus also their bonuses.
Then your recollection is in conflict with mine as I've also been using GMail since the invite-only beta (autumn of 2004 to be specific) and the final admission that they do actually read your email didn't happen until years after it came out of beta.
Slashdot Mirror
In terms of the care (or lack thereof) the average person receives you are right, but in terms of top-end care the U.S is pretty much #1 and where rich people go for expensive and semi-experimental. Don't get me wrong, the current system is bad for just about everyone, but it is the expected end result for a plutocracy like the U.S.
On the other hand I most certainly wouldn't lay anything even close to full responsibility on the U.S healthcare system considering all the other things that are wrong in U.S society relating to heath. First and foremost there's the food as most of the big peddlers of unhealthy food are U.S companies best established in their home market. After this there's the typical attitude to healthcare and sickness, rather than simply getting time off when you're sick you have "sick days" you get to spend, but are implicitly encouraged not to spend, meaning that you probably won't go see a doctor until something gets really bad. Furthermore there's also the work culture that encourages working long hours with little time left over for non-essential things, including exercise. Continuing on there's also the fetishism of the car and the need to use it whenever possible that increases time sitting down and exercise that happens as a result of everyday activity.
Thus I really wouldn't be too surprised if the U.S health figures wouldn't improve by all that much after the current system is replaced by system like most of Europe has...
I know the crowd you're talking about, but these days they're not anywhere near as hard in the paint about the U.S being such a fantastic place compared to the rest of the world after they got Trump and an outlet for their complaints about the bad aspects of the country.
There's still a number of things like friendliness to entrepreneurship, food, culture and gun ownership that they're super proud of, but they're now pretty angry about the state of education and healthcare. They commonly think the sorry state of these things in the U.S today is because of established politicians destroying those things at the behest of their corporate paymasters and that Trump's swamp draining is going to get rid of these people and fix what they destroyed. However with education there's also the contingent that blames blacks for the poor OECD ratings and use race-specific figures that do show a significant improvement, but not for the reasons they think are behind it.
He still has a point so your thinly veiled insult was just completely unnecessary. China is known to embellish figures (economic growth, industrial output, emissions and other environmental figures, etc.) and he's not disputing that U.S health figures are not going in a positive direction.
Even when not factoring in embellished figures you should to remember that outside of extreme examples (like Spurlock's McDiet) unhealthy lifestyles take time to really catch up with you and Chinese people have only been exposed to western diets en masse for a relatively short time. The delayed onset of health issues stemming from eating bad western diets is pretty well demonstrated in Japan's figures and how it took quite a while from McDonalds & Co making landfall until their presence really started to show itself in heath statistics.
Maybe they just concluded that they didn't specifically need their most experienced Perl programmer to maintain that script? Experience tends to lead to higher salaries and it's kind of expected that the higher your salary, the more likely you are to find yourself on the chopping block when management starts looking for how to reduce costs. Looking hardest at the most expensive things when you're trying to save money is just plain sense when it comes down to it. Having worked with plenty of people considerably older than myself it's become very clear to me that experience and effectiveness as a developer are nowhere near as well correlated as experience and salaries.
When you have a set savings goal or need to maximize your cost efficiency it's only natural for management to try to minimize the number of people actually laid off and that's obviously going to lead to the most expensive employees, who tend to be older, to be given the most attention. I have a hard time believing that as an employee the average gopher is actually worth the 2-3 recent college graduates their salary could be used to hire/retain.
It's not just the money aspect, I have a feeling a lot of managers do this just to minimize the number of people they actually have to lay off as there's both PR and human reasons to want to do that. Thus all in all, if you consider the actual goals of management and the related circumstances, getting rid of older workers first does kind of make a whole lot of sense.
Apparently some of the side materials (books, comics, etc.), this franchise has always been merchandised half to death, explain that the new republic government that took over after the empire fell was pretty pacifist and preferred to spend it's money on things other than a big army after the empire spent so much on it. Not sure if this is intentional, but you do get the impression the Disney Star Wars movies are advocating for the same kind of mentality as Benjamin Franklin did when he famously said "Those who beat their swords into plowshares usually end up plowing for those who kept their swords."
Don't get me wrong, more likely than not the writers really just loved the underdog heroes of the original trilogy and just left in this massive plot hole without even realizing it and the writers of the side material had to fill it rather than this pacifist incompetency being intentional.
I'm not even american, I've never owned an iPhone nor do I plan on getting one, but that's a pretty gross mis-characterization of the design patent in question.
The patent contains multiple drawings ranging in detail from very abstract ones like the "rounded rectangles" one that quite often gets thrown around to ones that present the design of the iPhone is great detail with exact proportions. Apple being able to show that they copies what was described in the detailed drawings with very high accuracy proved to the jury that it was a clear case of Samsung copying Apple's design very closely rather than Samsung's claim of independently arriving at a similar design.
That may have been the case when Jobs was still alive, but modern day Apple fanboys (if you can even call them that anymore) are openly scornful towards Tim Cook and have been very critical of many products and product flaws over the last few years. Even on macrumors, once a bastion of Apple evangelism, you're way more likely to see people openly call for Cook's resignation than commending him for anything he's done or achieved over the last couple of years.
Another thing that's not mentioned very much - what will governments do when they see their gas taxes dropping but the roads are still being used? Expect interesting reshuffling of the road tax regimen to handle this.
Considering how badly people have over the last few years freaked out over just the talk of raising the gas tax I'm not so sure they are actually going to raise the gas tax, particularly not under a republican administration. The republicans have been talking up an alternative plan for getting the money for catching up on the maintenance debt that doesn't involve raising the gas tax since 2010 (IIRC) and they've yet to figure out anything they dare to make public.
No, if they are actually going to go ahead and start with catching up on the maintenance debt that's built up over the last couple of decades it's pretty clear the money for it is going to come from something other than an inflation-adjusted gas tax. My personal guess is that it's either going to be borrowed money or then they're earmarking the revenue from the planned import tariffs on foreign made cars for this.
Even the most pessimistic figures we have today would suggest that self-driving cars are safer than the average driver.
As for why people still distrust self-driving cars, educated guess is that it's due to the way mass media tends to end up pushing the stores that pull in the biggest audience rather than the ones most relevant or truthful ones. We saw this back in the 80s and 90s when the reporting about violent crime went up significantly while actual crime statistics were showing a downward trend that started in the 1970s and had a big drop-off starting in the early 90s.
Worse yet, even if people know it's really just the media acting out the worst tendencies of the yellow paper press, people's self-preservation instincts are so strong that they'll still behave like they didn't know better. We saw this and still see this with how there's still people, particularly white women, who are genuinely afraid of black men because of how many "Black man commits shocking crime X!! He's on the loose and you may be next!!"-type "news" stores they were subject to back when media went hard in the paint for black people committing crimes.
I'm pretty sure those reservations are still valid, so the only mis-selling here is that they're delaying delivery. If you've paid any attention to Tesla's history, you'll know that they've never really delivered any of their cars on time so would actually be unexpected if they had started delivering $35.000 Model 3s on schedule.
Not me... There's more than enough legitimate things you can criticize Musk and Tesla for, but this really isn't one of them. It's kind of funny how heavily people are divided into either doomsayers and evangelists on Tesla (and it would seem like the doomsayers are a considerably larger group). Anyone with even cursory knowledge of how mass production of goods like cars works will have known that lower margin cars will have much lower priority when it comes to how limited production is allocated.
Still, I'm genuinely curious as to how many more cars per week they're going to produce after they've shut down the production line for about a week starting this Saturday. If they can actually reach the goal of 6000 cars per week by the end of June it shouldn't be too long before they can start making the low-end cars and break even on them thanks to considerably lower per-car overhead costs.
Way to completely miss the point... My point was that these systems may appear unfair from afar, but when you look at how they operate and the data they operate based on you'll see that they're just brutally fair. As much as you'd like to believe everyone is the same, there are population-level differences and some of them are big and come with significant consequences for those they apply to.
I project absolutely no malice into this at all.
No, you really are doing just that. A person of any race will have their credit application judged based on the exact same criteria and none of these criteria are race. A system like this where everyone is treated exactly the same way regardless of race simply cannot be described as "racist" by anyone except someone trying to insist equal treatment is somehow racist ("War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength"-style).
A 100% human system is however obviously going to be worse in this regard as people do have certain inherent biases they may or may not act upon or over-compensate for. Because of this, a human-run system is provably worse than a machine-run system that can't even try to be racist.
Your knowledge is flawed, and that's not even limited to your initial presumption, since it turns out that the software wasn't limited to those particular incidences of crime.
The fact that it's not just limited to serious forms of crime like those black people are over-represented in (both as perpetrators and incidentally victims) really doesn't mean that these types of crimes won't skew things in a way that looks like the whole system is racist towards black people. Optics are rarely the whole truth and this is no exception to that.
You mean the system ends up biased against black people, given that it's actually discriminating against them by imposing greater sentences.
No, black people just commit a disproportionately large share of the kinds of crimes that come with tough sentences and high rates of recidivism. You're going to have to show figures where non-blacks are given more lenient sentences for the same crimes, but this is really not it.
Sure man, keep telling yourself that, make excuses.
Excuses? I just explained how the exact same kind of system will end up appearing to be biased against white people, thus showing how ridiculous the accusations of racism are.
Yes, people's "ethics" are often flawed out of ignorance and incompetence.
People are fundamentally way more flawed in their judgment than any system that hasn't been intentionally set up to reflect these flaws in judgment. The system in question is no more "racist" than the sun is in how it's causing sunburns and skin cancer.
Except we already told you that said systems do factor in such a penalty towards black people
No, they appear to be biased against black people and there's a very important difference between something actually being racist and people misinterpreting something as being racist.
I can see you're very invested in this idea that any system that appears to be biased for or against different groups has to be that because of some fundamental flaw in the system and not just a consequence of the population level choices and preferences of the different groups. However sometimes you just have to take a step back or closer and examine if your prejudices might be wrong. In this case you are wrong and there's really no doubt about it.
I get the feeling that like with flat earth theories, conclusively disproving the EM drive will only spur on it's supporters and the (justifiably) flippant Ars Technica article on this paper will be a downright rallying call for them.
Don't get me wrong, this is stupid and any remaining supporters of the EM drive after this have to be stupid or ignorant of the very basic laws of physics. Sadly there really is no cure for stupidity (other than maybe the kind of stuff Stalin & Co would use).
You're projecting way too much malice into all of this... Most cases of "bias" by machine learning, which is really just branch of statistical analysis, systems tends to be the developers intentionally skewing the result or then, in the vast majority of cases, population level differences that cause something that appears to be racist if you don't understand the data the system is making decisions based on or how it actually makes those decisions.
A good example of this is how black people are on average worse off financially than whites and particularly asians, which leads to systems that determine if credit should be given will appear to be biased against black people when they actually treats black, white and asian people with the same financial history and other factors exactly the same. A system for this kind of purpose which is "non-racist" based on purely it's output and not the data it uses will have to be explicitly racist and favor black people over whites and asians.
The first example does sound like it was just doing it's job seeing how black people do to my knowledge commit a disproportionately large portion of the kinds of crimes that have a relatively high rate of recidivism (rapes, peddling drugs, gang violence, etc.). Any correctly working system would naturally end up looking like it's biased against black people even if it's not given the defendants' race or even capable of even understanding the concept. It's basically the same "issue" as how a system that's supposed to assess the risk of hockey-related injuries, say for determining insurance rates, would determine that white men are more at risk of them and act accordingly.
As for the second example, if you actually look at employment statistics you are going to see men being the clear majority of those working in high stress, high risk, physically demanding and very high salary jobs, which tend to require skills men are more likely to have. Similarly to the recidivism system, determining of who gets shown what ads is not actually based on the supposedly discriminating characteristic, but various peripheral characteristics that end up giving the illusion of discrimination. Thus it's again really not surprising to see a system meant to display ads to those most interested in what they're advertising show these kinds of jobs to men more often than women and changing the system to display more "male-centric" ads to women is merely making the system less accurate.
Finally, the third and fourth examples are just examples of a maliciously and incompetently coded system respectively and not really relevant here. An "ethically" set up machine learning system could be just as flawed if not worse for very similar reasons. I can see why people would get upset over the first and second examples if they didn't understand how systems like them actually work or the data they work based on, but "non-racist" and "non-sexist" version of the system would actually have to be explicitly racist and factor in a bonus when computing the risk of recidivism for black people and explicitly sexist and factor in gender when determining what ads to show rather than just skills and interests.
Redefined? When has "free" ever meant "at no cost to anyone" or something similar? Because it obviously never has and has always meant that it's without direct cost to the recipient of the service or good.
However this type of whining about Lucky Ducky's isn't exactly anything new...
It's that he has little interest in actually becoming informed
Can you really blame him for that in this era of political polarization where just about everyone on both sides of the political spectrum dig themselves into foxholes on "their" side and label anyone on "their" side that refuses to dig themselves into a foxhole a member of the "other" side? With narcissistic personality traits being on the rise over the last few decades (one study on first year college students that started in the 1980s was forced to change the scale in the 2010) you could even argue that the man is just a ahead of the curve when it comes to what kinds of people the American people are becoming.
Seriously thou, my experience as a traditional liberal (pro meritocracy, gun control, science over feelings and religion, gay and minority equality) arguing with people on a variety of topics, many of them political, is that refusing to learn or accept anything that may disprove your prejudices is a trait shared by people on the right and the left in about equal measure.
I'm pretty particularly Facebook, who is known to censor all kinds of things for various autocratic governments, has provided their services to conservatives and are just more hush-hush about it than Cambridge Analythica was.
One of the things that struck me most about all the panic around Cambridge Analythica is that what they did wasn't all that different from what much bigger companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter have been doing for well over a decade and making quite a lot of money on. Only significant differences I can think of are that they were much smaller, didn't actually collect the data themselves and analyzed the data just for external clients rather than their own gain.
Particularly Facebook behaving the way they did, acting like they're not in the exact same business, absolutely reeked of hypocrisy.
Tried of his publicity stunts? You do know that's the only thing he's really good at? Asking Musk to cut it out with the publicity stunts is like asking Trump to cut it out with the twitter tirades.
I intentionally left out the diminishing returns in manufacturing-related R n' D because this applies to their competition just as much as it applies to Intel. As for the dead end that was the NetBurst microarchitecture, that was first and foremost them thinking they could build a really inefficient architecture (massive 20-something stage pipeline running at a frequency way higher than anyone else) and make it work by having a way better manufacturing process.
In the end Intel was able to stay competitive during the Netburst days and in the mobile space where efficiency was paramount they had a separate, much more efficient, architecture (Pentium M) that they later used as basis for the Core 2 series.
Intel supposedly dropping the ball like this to the point where it seems like TSMC, GF and Samsung are seemingly catching up genuinely causes me to scratch my head thinking how it's even possible. We're talking about the company with the best foundry facilities and some of the most talented people so I can't imagine this could be just plain incompetence or Intel just not bothering to invest sufficiently.
I can think of multiple reasons for this, but there isn't anything substantial in the public domain to substantiate any of them. First thing that comes to mind is that Intel has just ended up making some bad design decisions like how GlobalFoundries tried to use traditional planar transistors in their 22nm process that never reached production-acceptable yields and have simply had to go back to the drawing board, but doesn't want to admit it. The second explanation that comes to mind, which is my gut feeling, is that Intel with it's lead has just hit mass production-related snags before their competitors and that their competitors' time roadmaps are thus just unrealistic. Finally, the third and rather cynical explanation that I can think of is that their competitors' management is just over-promising what their engineers can actually deliver in an effort to drive up their stock price and thus also their bonuses.
Then your recollection is in conflict with mine as I've also been using GMail since the invite-only beta (autumn of 2004 to be specific) and the final admission that they do actually read your email didn't happen until years after it came out of beta.