And if ad targeting is discriminatory for a specific product, then it's the advertiser, not the publisher, that's at fault.
I'm not sure this distinction would hold legally, given that the "publisher" (Facebook, in this instance) is specifically including a mechanism to do discriminatory ad targeting (if indeed the ad targeting is ruled discriminatory).
It's kinda like arguing that a hit man isn't "at fault" for targeting a person for assassination. After all, the employer hired the hit man. Moreover, the hit man gave him a run down of his services, even specifically offering to assassinate A or B or C to help the employer achieve his goals.
Is the employer responsible for ordering the hit? Sure. But the guy who actually killed somebody and even enabled the process by suggesting targets will surely be found culpable too.
Also, by the way, I'm assuming you would make a comparison between ad targeting and physical publishers (like magazines) that market to a specific audience. In that case, though, nobody's prohibiting a white guy from buying a copy of Ebony Magazine and viewing its ads. Advertisers may recognize that Ebony primarily sells to African Americans, and the publishers of Ebony may recognize that too. But it's not like when the white customer walks into the store, the clerk puts all the copies of Ebony behind the counter.
However, with Facebook's ad targeting, it can be like that. And that is potentially an issue, morally even if not legally. But I suppose it depends precisely on Facebook's targeting system. Suppose I'm a gay Asian woman. If there were a transparent way in Facebook's system for me to see that Facebook knows this and deliberately targets ads to me for that, and if I wanted to, I could choose instead to receive ads for straight Afro-Cuban men, then that seems easy enough. But Facebook isn't like that at all -- it deliberately shows or hides ads from me in a non-transparent fashion based on factors I can't know.
My guess is that this is just the beginning of lawsuits to come for such a system, particularly if it can be ever shown that some "deal" was offered to one race, but never offered to another or something.
The "king of the hill" model you describe has built an AMAZING encyclopedia... a fact that you ignore and shows you are willing to throw the baby away with the bath water.
Huh? At no point did I see GP saying that Wikipedia wasn't a significant accomplishment. He was pointing out a flaw. Are people not allowed to criticize something without bowing before it first and acknowledging how "great and mighty" it is?
And please cite where GP said we should throw Wikipedia away. He said it has some problems, and he's not willing to waste his time editing because of those problems. I don't see anything where GP suggested that we get rid of Wikipedia -- he's noting something's wrong. The rational response would be to say, "Hey, yeah, sometimes that happens -- how can we improve?"
If you think Wikipedia sucks, then don't use it or you are hypocritical.
What's funny is that you accuse GP of taking a "my way or the highway approach" when GP didn't, but then you turn around a second later do exactly what you accuse GP of doing -- taking a completely irrational stance and making false dichotomies.
What -- if you recognize flaws in Wikipedia, you're hypocritical to ever use it?? Huh? In what universe do people only ever make use of absolutely perfect products or resources? Are they all just supposed to keep their mouths shut when something's wrong (but not necessarily terrible enough to "throw the baby out with the bathwater," which you just said was bad).
Second, your characterization for the most part is inaccurate. Wikipedia does NOT work on a "king of the hill" model. It works based on a set of policies and guidelines that focus on writing a good, free encyclopedia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). Sometimes you do get people that are too heavy-handed but there are ways of dealing with that. More likely is that your edits were problematic but you couldn't understand why.
TL;DR -- you didn't learn to Wikilawyer, like me.
Plus, your comment above already shows YOU are violating some of the established rules: you are not assuming good faith when you write "undone by some self-important busybody whose only credentials were the ones they defined when they signed up for an account on Wikipedia". It's clear that you didn't even try to discuss the changes but just got upset that your changes were removed and rage quit because you didn't get your way. That's the kind of uncollaborative person that is poison to a group project.
How is it that you know so much about this editor but know GP was being a jerk and didn't know what he wasn't talking about?
Pretty sure you're the one NOT "assuming good faith."
Without seeing the particular edits you are upset about I cannot say for sure
Oh, oops... I guess it's actually CERTAIN that you're the one who doesn't know anything about the situation and is just not "assuming good faith."
but in my experience, basically ALL people who make the complaints you are making were making SHITTY edits that lowered the quality of the articles but through either ignorance of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or sheer inability and incompetence were unable to realize it.
And in my experience, basically Wikipedia has a major vandalism and troll problem that only gets worse every day. That causes editors to reflexively overreact to any changes on an article they're "sitting on" as "klng of the hill" and revert. That doesn't mean those reversions are always unjustified, or even than these people are acting badly.
What it does mean is that Wikipedia's vandalism and poor edit problem is so bad from fighting bad the idiots and the trolls that good, well-meaning editors don't have time to make reasonable evaluations.
Time to check out SoylentNews? Similar comment system but generally sane modding, more responsive editors, less clickbait, no ads, no commercial interest at forcing crap on you. Smaller community so far, but a better chance of having good comments noticed.
And when they're so petulant that they'll pull out of a municipality instead of complying with the laws there, well... That just makes it clear that those whiners think they're special snowflakes, and have no qualms about punishing their customers in an attempt to obtain the special treatment they think they deserve.
I think Uber has been disingenuous and is asking for "special treatment" in various ways too, but I think this characterization is a little off.
It's probably not Uber saying "we're special snowflakes and we're going to take our toys and go home rather than playing by your rules" and more like Uber's lawyers saying, "Well, if you give in to this demand in X city, then cities Y and Z are probably going to expect you to give into their new systems too."
Whereas by actually pulling out of a municipality, they are sending a message to other city councils -- "Mess with us, and we'll just leave." Given that Uber has a lot of fans in major cities these days, most city councils don't want to deal with that bad press, so they may think twice about demanding too much of Uber.
Or at least I imagine that's Uber's logic. Taxi companies mostly don't tend to have this problem, because they are often locally owned fleet companies (and sometimes even individually operated), so they pretty much have to deal with local government demands. Uber is more centrally structured, so its behavior in one city may impact how it's treated elsewhere.
I agree with the fact that strong social connections is NOT generally the same as Facebook friends.
But there's so much more, I don't even know what to say about TFS. Basically, if they're looking at people who have a high chance of dying, they're looking at folks above the age of 70 or so, and these people likely didn't start using Facebook until they were in their late 60s. Automatically, somebody who is that old but active on Facebook (note TFS mentions things like "posting pictures") is probably more tech-savvy and thus probably in better mental health than lots of folks that age. (My experience with my parents and others in that age group is that many can barely figure out how to turn a computer or tablet on or off.)
And then you need to consider what active Facebook participation probably means about health in general. If you're dying of cancer and have lost your hair, or if you're wasting away due to a long-term degenerative disease making you look like a skeleton, or you have uncontrollable drooling, or whatever... are you seriously going to be posting Facebook photos? Lots of people still have some sense of pride about themselves when they get old, and they get depressed and withdrawn if they deteriorate physically enough. If they're actively posting photos on Facebook, they're probably less likely to be dying of something soon.
And then you have this nonsense:
"The fact that we found such a strong positive relationship between health and social networks speaks against the hypothesis that they're making us unhealthy in some way," he said.
Well, most of the claims about why Facebook is "unhealthy" has to do with things like (1) it takes up spare time so you're not as likely to do stuff like be active, do something better for your body or brain, etc., or (2) Facebook substitutes for more personal interactions like seeing and talking face-to-face, etc.
Except with people who are likely to die (mostly older people), they're probably sitting around in their recliners anyway for a lot of the day, so ANYTHING that gets their brain a little more active is probably better. And for those who have difficulty moving around (again, a lot of old people), this may actually be a good way for them to have both intellectual stimulation and social contact that they might have no other easy way of getting.
Or, to put it more starkly -- for an 18-year-old, Facebook might keep them isolated in a room doing no exercise or other mentally stimulating activity, which might be bad. For an 80-year-old, they're already stuck in a room and unable to do exercise or socialize, so having Facebook is BETTER than default for them.
I don't know. I'm not saying social media is evil either. But even if this study found correlations, they could mean just about anything. They certainly can't be applied to "debunk some of the negative associations people have with social media," which aren't generally about its use for geriatric social therapy.
Seriously, anybody who believes ANY media source 100% without questioning -- even a "debunking" one -- is silly. Everyone has biases.
And while I truly don't care enough about this story to actually read it and see whether your complaints stand up -- not because I like or trust Hillary Clinton... FAR from it! -- I also don't really think everything is as insidious as you make it sound.
I doubt the folks at Snopes are "massaging" the facts deliberately, where there is an "intent to mislead." I think they're just stating what they think are reasonable opinions on stuff, based on the evidence they see and their evaluation of it. Maybe they're more likely to excuse person X than person Y, but I doubt they're being deliberately manipulative here. At best, they might work a bit harder to argue in favor of someone they like, but I really doubt they're even conscious of whether something might seem subtly "spun" to others.
(And yeah, I've had run-ins with the Snopes folks in the past too. I sent in a complaint once on a science issue, where they didn't really investigate thoroughly. I was basically told that I was overreacting and that their sources were more authoritative, even though I actually was pointing to very recent actual real-world studies, while they were pointing to government agency stuff that was out-of-date and based on old speculation before the studies had really been done. I don't think they were trying to deliberately mislead either... everybody makes mistakes. And everybody's biased, often unaware of it too.)
Of course, if Amazon wanted to stay away from all these shitty products, they would've created the Marketplace as a separate thing. But it's obvious that they wanted people not to notice the difference.
To be fair, Amazon first started allowing 3rd-party sellers a long time ago, back when many people thought of it as primarily a bookstore. Back then, it was a decent way of finding products from sellers of used books (since Amazon never seemed to interested in getting into that market directly), and since there are so many out-of-print books, that was the only option Amazon had to make them available.
And to this day I still buy used books on Amazon (particularly out-of-print titles), and over the years in many dozens of purchases I've only had one bad experience buying a book from a 3rd-party book merchant. In fact, most of them seem to offer superior service to Amazon, actually bothering to wrap up the book in a reasonable fashion to prevent damage during shipping. Whereas Amazon just tends to throw books along with other stuff in a giant box where everything knocks around and just "hopes for the best."
Things like used books aren't generally profitable to counterfeit, though. Whereas with all the other stuff Amazon sells from 3rd parties, there's a lot of motivation to sell knock-offs.
And I agree that once they started moving beyond the basic bookstore with used books, they needed to start differentiating these 3rd-party sellers. (I do realize that Amazon was more than a bookstore even back in the beginning, but books used to be a dominant portion of their business.)
And Amazon also does a shit job of letting costumers know about the reputation and quality of products sold by their shitty selected vendors.
What they really need to do is allow customers an easy way to separate reviews for products based on vendor. The main issue right now is that you have one product page, and perhaps thousands of reviews for popular products. But they're all jumbled together, and it's difficult to tell whether those 50 reviews complaining about defective or counterfeit products might apply to the vendor you're looking at.
Obviously it's a very imperfect idea, because we all know how Amazon reviews are faked all the time now too. But if you could at least have a box to click saying, "Show me ONLY reviews for this battery for 'verified purchases' from X vendor," and you see a lot of reviews saying, "This is a SCAM!" you might have a chance of realizing the problem before purchase.
And of course there should also just be a more transparent acknowledgement that you're purchasing from a 3rd-party in the first place. You shouldn't be able to use the same purchase button or "add to cart" as if you're buying direct from Amazon. It should require at least an extra step, or look clearly different in some way.
Otherwise, Amazon is opening itself up to lawsuits just like in TFS.
GP: I have tried Linux on laptops many times, and it was always painful.
Parent: I have used linux on an IBM Thinkpad, a Dell Inspiron, and 4 HP laptops of various lines, and this is the full list of hardware that didn't work: [followed by very minimal list]
These sorts of arguments always degenerate into a war of anecdotes. "I installed Linux on 10 machines and nothing worked!" "No, I installed Linux on 20 machines while walking in snow uphill both ways, and it always works!" Etc.
Here's the more reasonable reality: Linux works better on both desktops and laptops than it did even a few years ago. Compare it to installing Linux on most laptops a decade ago, and the difference is night and day.
On the other hand, hardware support is hard, particularly when many vendors have little incentive to spend time supporting Linux and a lot more incentive to make sure their machines have a working Windows driver. On laptops this is an obvious bigger issue, since with a desktop you can often swap out a part for one that's guaranteed Linux compatible, but laptops generally are a "finished package" with a lot of stuff that's hard to swap out.
So, those who can say, "Linux is working better than ever!" are correct, but those who come out saying, "I've run Linux on more laptops than I can count and have never had a problem with suspend" or whatever are either (1) lucky, (2) chose their purchases to avoid these problems in the first place, or (3) are in a state of denial about how things don't quite work right. (I have to admit I'm myself guilty of the last one sometimes -- we all adjust when our machines don't quite work the way we want them to, and we forget how those problems might seem instantly weird or annoying when another person tries to use it.)
The reality is that Linux does work fine "out of the box" on a lot of common laptops these days. But everyone should look around online first for reviews from folks trying to get Linux working before assuming that's the case for any given laptop.
Frankly, though, I'm not especially bothered by the current state of affairs, nor do I think it makes Linux a "problem" for laptops. Laptops are finicky things hardware-wise to begin with, and I've encountered my share of weird hardware issues even on stock Macs and PCs with Windows pre-installed.
For the present story, though, the point is that they had a bunch of laptops donated, and Linux made it easier to make them available for student use. Shouldn't that be a good thing?!? Maybe some of them had installs that worked "out of the box," while others required some tweaking by "school's Linux club" to get working perfectly. Who cares? You had a school without enough laptops, and now they have donated laptops that they can put to use without paying huge licensing fees just to use an OS.
Is it "the year of the Linux laptop"? I don't know. I don't really care. But I'm happy these kids have working computers when they didn't before.
However, there is still an unproven assumption in the above logic. Finding it is left as an exercise for the reader.
Oo, ooh, can I play? Is it here?
Given the non-zero probability for the occurrence of intelligent life, it is utterly incongruous that given the sheer vastness of the universe the likelihood of such life occurring elsewhere in the cosmos should not approach mathematical certainty. Therefore, intelligent life must almost certainly exist elsewhere.
Is it that "sheer vastness" is not an argument, and ultimately we're comparing one number -- p(intelligent live evolves on random planet around random star) -- to another number (planets in universe), and orders of magnitude might actually matter??
This argument can be similarly used to argue for the existence of ANYTHING repeated in the universe. E.g.:
"Given the non-zero probability for the occurrence of humans, it is utterly incongruous that given the sheer vastness of the universe the likelihood of humans occurring elsewhere in the cosmos should not approach mathematical certainty."
"Given the non-zero probability for the occurrence of Shakespeare's Hamlet, it is utterly incongruous that given the sheer vastness of the universe the likelihood of such play occurring elsewhere in the cosmos should not approach mathematical certainty."
Ad infinitum.
I think most of us here would think that even if alien civilizations exist on numerous worlds in the universe, it's pretty unlikely that any of them speak English, let alone have produced a play identical to the text of Shakespeare.
Cosmically unlikely events like that occur trivially every moment. I can shuffle a deck of cards, and even if there were aliens with similar decks of cards shuffling around every star in the universe, it's exceedingly unlikely that any of them would ever have encountered my particular order before.
If the evolutionary road to intelligent life has just one roadblock like that, it could be enough to make us very rare or unique in the cosmos. Of course, we have no good reason to think the probability is that low. Nor do we have any good reason to think the probability is high(er). We have one data point, which can't be used to estimate a probability (even the relative order of magnitude of one).
I doubt if ETL would have much negative effect on religion. I know plenty of religious people, and they are MORE likely to believe in aliens than the non-religious people that I know.
Not only that, but most religions have been dealing with finding new groups of "unknown people" for centuries. Finding native American folks in the "New World" in the 15th and 16th centuries who had never heard of Jesus or the Christian God didn't cause Jesuit missionaries to say, "Oh, maybe there is no God!?! Shouldn't we have known of these people? Why have they not heard of God?"
No -- far from it. Instead, it was viewed as an OPPORTUNITY. Get more people "into the fold." Does anyone think it would be any different if we encountered aliens? Wouldn't the evangelicals just be ready with their baptismal font, itching to get new recruits and for the chance of telling the gospel of "Our Lord Jesus" to ET?
Sure, it might shake the beliefs of some, particularly if the aliens displayed "God-like" abilities through advanced tech, or if the aliens had their own rival religion that was aimed at converting humans. But for many religious folks, ET would be viewed as "just another part of God's creation" by many religious folks, just as the universe now is viewed for them.
I believe it has still yet to be proven that the level of screening currently in place is doing much good.
It depends on how you define "doing much good." If you expect the TSA to detect terrorists or contraband, then no, its performance is terrible.
But if you define good as its actual goals -- i.e., (1) make it look like the government is doing something ("security theatre"), (2) line the pockets of contractors who provide fancy unnecessary scanners and other equipment, (3) teach people to obey government officials and get them used to accepting invasive tests and requests, and (4) keep the population suitably scared of nearly nonexistent terrorists so that any new government power grab or rights denial can be justified -- well, then the screening is doing a LOT of "good."
subject says it all... stop using AI to describe everything...
While this may or may not qualify as artificial "intelligence," it almost has to perform better than the TSA does now whenever they run a benchmark test (and generally find something like 90% of bad stuff gets through). You could probably hook up a metal detector to a Commodore 64 powered by a BASIC program created by a 4th grader and get better results than the current TSA.
The popularity of these among upper management is typically because of cost or control reasons. They're much cheaper than closed offices, and management can walk by to see exactly what you're doing.
It's not only that. There is this myth floating around for the past couple decades that "collaboration" is the cool new workplace thing. People read stories about Google or Apple and tales of workers just randomly meeting in some common room and brainstorming the next new cool thing, and managers start drooling and saying, "Yeah -- let's get rid of the office walls. Get rid of the cubes! Break down the barriers, and we'll get better collaboration, which means more creative and efficient work!"
Yeah, except that doesn't actually work. It's true that chance encounters with coworkers can be beneficial for brainstorming or bouncing ideas or whatever, but that happens best when you're OPEN TO THAT, which means you're not deeply focused on some specific task at your desk or whatever. More recent studies are showing (surprise!) that workers actually need lack of distractions, and a more isolated environment is often easier for that. The best office approach would be to offer both options -- closed offices for when you're focused on a task... and then open spaces, or tables, or common areas, or whatever when you're less focused and are open for random contact and collaboration.
Actually, those people who have real, actual offices already have those options -- because they have a door. If you are working intently, you shut your door. If you want to be open for other random communication, you keep your door open.
Typical penny wise & pound foolish mentality. The constant interruptions that occur end up costing them much more in the long run.
True. Studies show that workers in "open plan" offices are less productive, tend to be more distracted, have more health issues and stress, take more sick days, etc., etc. It was a terrible idea, and probably never saved money in the long run.
Is the recipient of a mix CD a copyright infringer? If not, it doesn't make any sense that a downloader would be either.
Your argument relies on some sort of distinction between "who makes the copy." In the mix CD case, where it's given to you, yes, you obviously didn't make a copy.
However, if you load up your torrent manager and say "download please!" you are making your own copy, which is then stored locally, just like pushing the button on a copy machine.
The one who started out in possession of the media, made and distributed a copy of it, is violating the right to control copying and distribution, i.e. copyright.
To continue the analogy, it's like a library places a book on a public shelf. You are the one choosing to take it off that shelf, walk over to the copy machine, push the button, and then take the photocopy home with you.
It seems you may also be trying to make the argument that the person who originally ripped the copy or whatever was infringing, but you're not by making a copy of that copy. Except that doesn't work in the analogy either. If you go to an office where somebody has made an illegal photocopy of a book, and you take that photocopy and make your own photocopy, you're still violating copyright.
If that's weren't true, I could just download a (legal) PDF that was made from a print journal from a library, and then place that PDF on my own public website for anyone else to download, and I wouldn't be guilty of infringement. After all, I didn't make the PDF myself -- I didn't "rip" the media, so why should I be guilty of anything?
Someone who started out with nothing, copied nothing, distributed nothing, but ends up in possession of something that someone else illegally copied and distributed, has done what exactly that violates what law?
You are correct that you "distributed nothing," which is why GP argues that the case is harder to make, and excessive damages are harder to justify. But you're wrong about the fact that you "copied nothing," since you ordered your computer to do precisely that, just as if you'd press the "copy" button on a copy machine.
"Mere" data analysis is when a human looks at the data and tries to find patterns. But it is "AI" when the algorithm is open ended, and finds it's own patterns and correlations.
I certainly agree that this falls under the classification of "AI" as a field. I'm guessing that part of the concern is also whether what was done here qualifies as "intelligence" rather than just a slightly more advanced algorithm for processing data.
Most research studies these days use fairly complex statistical computations -- often, lamentably, that the researchers themselves don't fully understand (or at least don't fully understand the limitations of). So, basically by the time many researchers are looking at the "data" to search for correlations, the raw data has already been processed in rather non-transparent ways. Relatively few people are staring at the raw data and saying, "Hmm... there's a lot of high X values here -- let's run a test to see whether X correlates with Y." Instead, they either decided they were already going to run that correlation before the test already began, or they do the p-hacking thing where they just run dozens of different statistical tests and see whether anything "shakes out."
Either way, humans are rarely DIRECTLY finding their own "patterns and correlations" anymore. They throw a bunch of stuff into a statistical package and see what pops out. The "AI" algorithms used in the present paper are certainly putting an extra layer of processing on top of that, but ultimately they're just doing a few more steps of statistical analysis and spitting out the patterns that emerge. The algorithms just tend to emphasize and weight certain things in the dataset a little more to make patterns pop out more easily.
So, yeah, it's automating pattern-finding a bit more. But I can also see the point that it's really an extension of data analysis... ultimately the patterns that come out of this system aren't really meaningful. For example, according to the top-rated clusters of topics, judgments for one of the rights are highly likely to depend on whether the word "July" is found -- good for your chances! -- vs. whether "June" or "June applicant" or "dated June" is found -- which apparently causes you to be more likely to lose the case!
Obviously that's ridiculous, but it shows the similarity in this sort of analysis to what you might get with a simpler statistical package that just tries out dozens of correlations. In both cases, the computer is just weighting the patterns it finds -- using algorithms dictated by humans -- and then spitting out a lot of nonsense and some things that look more interesting. It's then up to the humans to determine which are the interesting bits.
While I know the term AI is used for this stuff, personally I'll reserve the term "artificial intelligence" for a system that actually has some fairly sophisticated threshold for realizing when the output is nonsense vs. when it's likely to be more interesting, and that determination isn't just a hard-coded aspect of the algorithm in question. Then the system would actually be doing something akin to "judgment," which implies "intelligence," rather than just being a more sophisticated pattern-finding stats package.
Which is why it's called an "Escape" key. You use it under exceptional conditions. You don't want it underfoot, but when you need it, it needs to be there.
First they came for my floppy drive, and I did not speak out, because floppies were slow and I was glad to be rid of them anyway.
Then they came for my CD-ROM drive, and I did not speak out, because I appreciated a lighter, more compact laptop.
Then they came for my headphone jack, and I did not speak out, because I use my damn phone as a phone, not a stereo.
Then they came for my escape key, and I knew there was no way out.
They they came for my power button, and there was no one left to hear the perpetual screams.
And my MacBook, never flickering, still is sitting, still is sitting
By the pallid bust of Steve Jobs just above my basement door;
And its screen has all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the process o'er it streaming throws exceptions galore;
And my soul from out that process started back in days of yore
Shall be turned off -- nevermore!
Honestly if you are not passing by at least 4mph dont pass. they should let cops ticket truckers for passing without using their gas pedal.
Uh, have you ever been behind a truck going up a long hill? You know how they slow down? That's because they have the "pedal to the floor" and yet the engine pulling that much weight can only manage so much going up a long incline.
Now, put that same truck on a straightaway where they're stuck behind some idiot or they're forced to get out of the right lane to avoid some idiot who doesn't know how to merge on an on-ramp or whatever. But then the road suddenly starts to slope up A BIT. Doesn't have to be a lot to make acceleration on a truck that size quite slow if not non-existent.
Couple that with a guy in a car in the right lane who starts going up the incline and starts pressing down the accelerator a bit more, and suddenly the truck can't even keep up, let alone pass.
I've never driven a semi. But I've driven large trucks a couple times. It's a MUCH different experience than driving a car. Heck, it's even a different experience than driving a mid-size moving truck, which might still be able to accelerate up a hill.
Obviously some truckers do stupid or annoying things sometimes. But having been in a situation myself on the highway when I thought I was going to be able to pass, but then the truck just couldn't accelerate because of a mild change in slope... I have an appreciation for the problems truckers have to deal with. It's easy in most cars to accelerate another 10-15 mph to pass reasonably fast; in trucks this may only be possible to do quickly going downhill.
A final note is that when driving a vehicle that large, quick changes in general are harder and potentially dangerous. Thus, truckers often don't like to change lanes as much and they tend to go at constant speeds when possible. So, depending on the exact situations you're talking about, in some cases it may not have been that the trucker was even trying to "pass" but was simply trying to drive in a reasonable consistent fashion (rather than a lot of car drivers who tend to be a lot more aggressive and needlessly maneuver around a lot).
Currently, FB and Twitter are free to censor political speech and push political agenda.
As private corporations who own, operate, and maintain these services, that generally is the default. Yes.
You could argue that in 2016 as a politician you are effectively censored if you don't have access to FB and Twitter. This shouldn't be the case, insofar politics these should be considered virtual public spaces and any censorship of this kind should be disallowed.
I'm sympathetic to this argument, and in fact I've argued similarly that we need to consider how these things work in "virtual spaces" (these simply aren't "public," any more than than Facebook's headquarters is a "public space").
The closest analogy that some people have made is to public utilities, like phone service. A phone service that tried to refuse service to someone on the basis of the speech content of phone calls likely wouldn't get very far... unless there was a court order from a proven record of harassment or something like that.
But a number of issues arise when you try to extend that analogy to a service like Facebook or Twitter. First, phone calls are by nature ephemeral and generally not recorded for permanent record (except by the NSA, I suppose), and they're generally not audible/visible publicly. Facebook and Twitter posts are frequently VERY visible (often to millions of people) and there's a record that people can reference immediately.
A process like going through a court to get a restraining order against someone to disallow them service is just not set up for the kind of visible, persistent record that services like this provide.
And before you say, "Well, just allow all speech on these services then!" But the very nature of social media is that stuff can spread like wildfire, and the drumbeat for action will often continue until something happens. If you have people actively advocating terrorism or other violent actions or whatever and actual records that thousands of people are "liking" and agreeing with such things, there's going to be backlash from users. There's going to be media attention. And if some horrific event transpires that there's a permanent record of where these things were planned and encouraged, there will be lawsuits. And if stuff like this happens repeatedly, you can bet there will be calls for government officials to IMPOSE censorship.
That sort of thing just doesn't normally apply to things like phone services. So even if the government passed a law requiring "free speech" on such "virtual spaces," I doubt it would last very long. Even with court mechanisms to remove user access under extreme cases, it simply won't be fast enough for the outcry of social media waves of interest. And what about foreign users? Do they have the same "free speech rights?" What about anonymous users? Or do you only qualify for rights if you have a registered account with a verified real name and address?
And even if you magically came up with a way of making this work that users, companies, and government officials were satisfied with, just how do you determine which services qualify for this sort of speech protection?
Facebook and Twitter may seem obvious choices. But what about the "up and coming" social media service? Or the declining one? Or the random internet forum? Is Slashdot a "virtual public space"? How many active users do you need before these protections kick in? And how do we determine that threshold?
Again, with phone service there was one standard fairly early on, and interconnectivity was essential. Interconnectivity between different social media services is rarely the same -- even if data can be transferred between them (not always the case), they tend to have different use cases. So again, you're looking at potentially protecting a multitude of different KINDS of "virtual spaces." Where does it stop? How do you determine that?
I'm not saying this is impossible. But it's a legal and regulatory nightmare to even imagine how to do it.
Why isn't there a similar push to get men into kindergarten education or nursing?
Well, there are actually. There are advocacy groups like the American Assembly for Men in Nursing and there are loads of groups who think it would be good to encourage more men in teaching (e.g., look here).
Now, these groups don't tend to get as much media coverage. You're correct. And that you may legitimately wonder about. I don't think it's any mystery why you don't hear about such groups on Slashdot -- a piece on that stuff wouldn't get much response, but put up an article about women and tech, and you're bound to get hundreds of screaming comments (=pageviews = ad revenue).
But there ARE people out there who are concerned about getting men in other professions -- particularly because we have a shortage of good nurses and good teachers (though for teaching the biggest shortage areas are places like high school math and science, a place where a lot of men happen to have qualifications).
As to why we don't see a specific push for male kindergarten teachers, I think it has to do with a much more disconcerting gender bias these days, which is the suspicion of any contact between men and small children likely means "pedophile." Seriously, there was a daycare near where I lived a few years back that hired a man to work with the preschool kids, and I heard parents talking and wondering things like, "Why would a MAN want to spend so much time with such young kids??" Or even "I'm okay with him being around to help out, but he shouldn't be doing things like changing kids or taking them to the toilet alone!"
From my perspective, the current pedophile hysteria is a much more disturbing gender issue than a lot of stuff we talk about... and it's largely targeted at males. (Note that child abduction and abuse rates are much lower than in the past; we just tend to hear about them a lot more often nowadays. Also, note that stats show the vast majority of sexual abuse has always been targeted at underage teens. Those cases make up most "sex offenders." The number of true PEDOphiles who are going to abuse preschool kids is orders of magnitude smaller, yet that seems to be what most people worry about. What they should be concerned about is inappropriate contact with their teenage son or daughter.)
Anyhow, all of this concern about young kids and men reinforces traditional stereotypical gender roles within the family, who is the "caregiver" in the family, etc.., which ultimately influences stuff like the fact that most men don't want to do nursing. (Where would a man have the kind of nursing "caregiver" role modeled for him by another man, unless his dad was unusual in taking a more active role in the family or something?) So personally I'm not so much concerned about trying to shoehorn more men into nursing and kindergarten, but I am somewhat concerned about the societal implications of why there are so few.
And personally I'm really glad that my son had the privilege to have a male kindergarten teacher, who by all accounts seemed to be an excellent teacher and role model.
(I'm not going to comment on the whole women in tech thing, just noting that there are issues are men and careers too.)
When you're pushing the boundaries, anything over 50% is good.
Is it? It depends on the data, the model, the thresholds for "correct forecast," etc. There are lots of places in the world where a "persistence" forecast (i.e., today will be the same as yesterday) will net you a greater than 50% accuracy within a reasonable margin of error. And one should also always consider forecasting models against general predicted climate averages. Again, taking those into account, a forecast system just using climate averages might do pretty well too.
It really depends on what the percentage "accuracy" means in this case and how it was measured. I'm guessing they wouldn't bother reporting it if it weren't significant, but just how significant is difficult to tell without the details (and it seems the full research paper is behind a paywall).
Otherwise citing a number like "62% accuracy" is utterly meaningless. If you had a task like, "Guess how tall the next person to walk into the building will be," and I achieved 62% accuracy, that could be remarkable and improbable if the margin of error was 1/8 of an inch. But if I instead was guessing "Taller than 1 foot or shorter than 1 foot," then 62% accuracy might mean I'm mentally retarded.
Donald Trump is an anti tyrant. He's more like a little boy who has no idea what to do or how to do it.
Actually, I'm pretty sure Donald Trump has "ideas" about "what to do." He's pretty famous for them. They may be wacky or unrealistic or even impossible, but he has ideas. Some of which could have major political ramifications if he even attempts to follow through.
Anyhow, I think you may not realize that "tyrants" in world history take many forms. Relatively few of them throughout history started out as clear "twirling the mustache" evil dudes who had a Machiavellian plan to become a "tyrant." Much more common are situations where you take a somewhat average guy, put him in a leadership position, create some tough choices, and watch him choose the bad ones. A lot of "tyrants" throughout history very gradually slipped into tyranny, often with the support of the public along the way, cheered along by their fears and promises of "security" from a well-meaning leader.
You know what prevents that sort of thing? Knowledge. Knowledge of history. Knowledge of politics. Realizations that paths others have taken before have led to badness. History has shown again and again that the most ignorant "nice" folks who end up leadership positions can turn out to be the worst... they don't know any better, so they can be swayed into all sorts of bad acts.
And Donald Trump doesn't even have that "niceness" to go along with his ignorance.
In some ways having a child who doesn't understand politics at the top of what is shown to be an institutionalised assault on the rights of all may actually be a good thing.
Maybe. Or it could be even a faster track to a dictatorship. The problem is that it's completely unpredictable.
None of this should be viewed as an argument in favor of Clinton, who is also a terrible candidate. But acting like things are likely to be better because Trump is an "outsider" and less corrupt (at least by the political establishment) is just not a safe bet.
Those parts of the emails are valid to report on. Stuff like a staffer thinking Lessig is smug is not valid to report on.
Who determines what is "valid" to report on?
Good reporters report on the part that matters, bad reporters just try to find something salacious to poke a bee hive.
Yeah, except "the part that matters" is never some objective category valid for all places, times, and people. This site used to have a tagline about "stuff that matters," but the reality is that a lot of the stuff posted here didn't "matter" to the vast majority of people in the world. Meanwhile, a lot of stuff that "matters" to the vast majority of the world wouldn't be of interest to a significant portion of the audience here (e.g., sports, celebrity gossip).
Here's the reality of journalism -- the "news" is mostly about selling stuff, NOT informing people. Yes, "good journalists" who want to be respected generally tend to focus on certain topics and ignore others, but they are conscious of the "bottom line" like everyone else. And if some reporter claims to be completely oblivious to stuff like that, you can darn well bet their editor isn't.
So, the question is rarely "Is this too salacious to be 'legitimate' news, or does it 'matter'?" The question is usually, "We know that this will get a lot of clicks/sell a lot of ads/papers/whatever. But will it piss off our readership or advertisers if we do so?" Somewhere down the list, far below that set of concerns about revenue, maintaining readers and advertisers, etc., are things like, "Is this 'respectable journalism'?" Or, "Does this matter?"
Because, let's be honest here -- even if something appears to be "too salacious" to be a story, if it gets caught up by SOME major media source, eventually most of the other major media will start reporting on it. You don't want to be the newspaper or whatever who steps "out of line" and starts looking like a cheap tabloid, but as long as everybody else is writing about it, it's gonna be fair game.
What really "matters"? Human life? Well, most Americans (even educated liberal well-meaning and loving ones) don't really have much interest in African news. I mean, some say they do -- but they really don't care about reading about that stuff every day, even if every day is pretty much a bad day for millions of people in Africa.
Meanwhile, is the Queen of England having another great-grandchild?!? Let's devote weeks of news for that. Does that "matter"? I don't mean to pick on the royals -- any celebrity gossip will do. Or what about sports? Does that really "matter"? It's certainly not going to have as much of an impact as that genocidal African dictator, but editors know that there are loads of people who basically pull the "sports section" out a newspaper (or do the equivalent online) and ignore most of the rest.
But to bring this back to the current political stuff and scandals, we basically end up in a situation where fans of politician A think stuff "doesn't matter" and publishing it is "salacious" but people who don't like politician A definitely think it matters. To many fans of Bill Clinton, the various scandals about possible affairs and interns "didn't matter" compared to his leadership capabilities as President. To some Trump fans, clearly his views on women also "don't matter" to the evaluation of his leadership abilities. (I'm not equating these two people or their actions by any means, just noting similar reactions I've noted among fans.)
To those fans, publishing a bunch of stories about such stuff is just "salacious" and yellow journalism, which is targeting stuff that should be irrelevant to their political life. To others, this "matters" deeply and it's irresponsible NOT to publish something that tells you something about their "character."
Anyhow, getting to TFA, the question of where information came from is WAY down the list, far below other ethical concerns about jour
But the things you listed aren't features of intelligence, they're bugs in our brains (or simply, things that natural selection de-emphasized out of comparative irrelevance in your basic cave man survival scenario).
Nope, they aren't "bugs." Learning is fundamentally about prioritizing information, making "higher-level connections," creating abstractions that lead to "understanding," etc. No AI system can do this on even the level of a small human child. But a fundamental process necessary to this stuff is being able to prioritize information, which necessarily entails de-emphasizing most of input that's less relevant. It doesn't NEED to be forgotten, but these "bugs" are probably the most efficient way of dealing with the problem.
If those short term memories were more reliably committed to long-term, or there was no real distinction between those things, would that really be a disqualifyier for intelligence?
Yes, if the "long-term" commitment was not accompanied by an incredibly complex (by current AI standards) abstraction process that effectively renders most of the irrelevant "long-term" data as "background" that would rarely or never be accessed anyway. "Forgetting" again is not essential to the process of intelligence, but it likely makes it a lot more efficient and easier for the algorithms in our brains to work. A computer AI which refuses to prioritize information in this way is always going to lag way behind human comprehension.
Brazil has movies that those of us in America could only dream of streaming, like The Godfather Part II, Fight Club, and The Empire Strikes Back.
While this is a list of good movies, I'm not sure this is the sort of stuff I'd like Netflix to prioritize. Some people like the new content showing up on streaming services, especially "original" content. I like some of that, but what first made me love Netflix's DVD service years ago was the more obscure stuff -- discovering good movies I hadn't seen before. Even Netflix's streaming service when it first came out had a great selection of old films (usually "classics," but not the most popular ones) as well as really great more recent ones (though not many new releases). I first watched films like Pan's Labyrinth and The Orphanage on Netflix "Instant watch," while rediscovering old classics from more obscure Buster Keaton and Chaplin films to old TV series like Yes, Minister and the classic Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett.
Most of that stuff is gone. And frankly, I don't really want to watch this stuff again. People who love these movies probably already have purchased them either on DVD or through some streaming, so they'll permanently have them available.
And actually, do I really want to watch Godfather Part II again? Sorry, I think it's overrated. (Yes, this is just my opinion.) The two narratives are disconnected, and while I love the early De Niro period piece, the other story is too dark. I love the original Godfather (and have watched it quite a few times), but I sometimes wish I could just except the early period stuff from part II and watch that separately. Fight Club? Are there lots of people who actually WANT to watch that repeatedly? It's a fantastic movie, but it goes in the category of things that are just not pleasant to watch again. And, sorry, but if you're a fan who wants to see The Empire Strikes Back over and over, you probably already own some special collector's edition. (Or, if you're a TRUE fan, you've probably sought out the "Despecialized" version before Lucas messed with it.)
I'm not saying it wouldn't be good to have such classic films as options on Netflix. But I know they'd be really expensive to have available, and they wouldn't be my priority.
Let's remember that coral is - literally - one of the oldest life forms on the planet.
They existed in much warmer, higher CO2 environments for hundreds of millions of years.
First, let's also remember that we've seen sudden significant die-offs in coral in the past couple decades (and especially in recent years). So something verifiable is happening that seems to be having a widespread and large-scale effect on coral. The question is the magnitude and ramifications.
Second, the question I'd have to ask is why exactly many of the world's experts in coral would be sounding an alarm if there was nothing to worry about. What exactly do these folks have to gain by lying about that? There's still a LOT more lobbying money available for paid shills from fossil fuel companies than there is from environmental groups. What's the benefit for all of these scientists to lie? (And if they actually believe what they say, then perhaps they likely know something more about why things are happening and the flexibility/adaptability of coral than some random guy posting on Slashdot.)
Finally, I'd just note that I could survive quite well living at sea level. I could also survive quite well living on a submarine, or on a high mountain. But if you transported me rapidly from one of those areas to another, I might suffer from severe reactions to altitude or pressure effects on the human body. The rate of change matters. And if the mountain was livable but gradually started cooling down, I've have plenty of time to migrate down. But if a rapid storm came up and plunged the temperature to well below zero unexpectedly, I might not survive.
The question really has to do with RATE of change here. Yes, coral have lived through all sorts of conditions on earth over hundreds of millions of years. But unlike humans, they can't just get up and move a hundred miles away when the weather turns. Migrating and rebuilding takes long periods of time. And they're not good with handling rapid temperature fluctuations.
The acidification is relevant because (as I understand it) it makes it even slower to build and repair damage to coral. Again, it's not necessarily about whether they could survive a CONSTANT pH level once they were established and adapted to those conditions. The question is whether the changing pH will make it even harder for adaptation to occur, on top of more rapidly changing temperatures.
Sure, we don't know everything, and we're extrapolating a lot of stuff about the way we think things happened in the past vs. the way things happen today. But simply saying, "These things have been around forever, so obviously they're going to survive and anyone else is an idiot!" doesn't make it true.
Slashdot Mirror
And if ad targeting is discriminatory for a specific product, then it's the advertiser, not the publisher, that's at fault.
I'm not sure this distinction would hold legally, given that the "publisher" (Facebook, in this instance) is specifically including a mechanism to do discriminatory ad targeting (if indeed the ad targeting is ruled discriminatory).
It's kinda like arguing that a hit man isn't "at fault" for targeting a person for assassination. After all, the employer hired the hit man. Moreover, the hit man gave him a run down of his services, even specifically offering to assassinate A or B or C to help the employer achieve his goals.
Is the employer responsible for ordering the hit? Sure. But the guy who actually killed somebody and even enabled the process by suggesting targets will surely be found culpable too.
Also, by the way, I'm assuming you would make a comparison between ad targeting and physical publishers (like magazines) that market to a specific audience. In that case, though, nobody's prohibiting a white guy from buying a copy of Ebony Magazine and viewing its ads. Advertisers may recognize that Ebony primarily sells to African Americans, and the publishers of Ebony may recognize that too. But it's not like when the white customer walks into the store, the clerk puts all the copies of Ebony behind the counter.
However, with Facebook's ad targeting, it can be like that. And that is potentially an issue, morally even if not legally. But I suppose it depends precisely on Facebook's targeting system. Suppose I'm a gay Asian woman. If there were a transparent way in Facebook's system for me to see that Facebook knows this and deliberately targets ads to me for that, and if I wanted to, I could choose instead to receive ads for straight Afro-Cuban men, then that seems easy enough. But Facebook isn't like that at all -- it deliberately shows or hides ads from me in a non-transparent fashion based on factors I can't know.
My guess is that this is just the beginning of lawsuits to come for such a system, particularly if it can be ever shown that some "deal" was offered to one race, but never offered to another or something.
The "king of the hill" model you describe has built an AMAZING encyclopedia... a fact that you ignore and shows you are willing to throw the baby away with the bath water.
Huh? At no point did I see GP saying that Wikipedia wasn't a significant accomplishment. He was pointing out a flaw. Are people not allowed to criticize something without bowing before it first and acknowledging how "great and mighty" it is?
And please cite where GP said we should throw Wikipedia away. He said it has some problems, and he's not willing to waste his time editing because of those problems. I don't see anything where GP suggested that we get rid of Wikipedia -- he's noting something's wrong. The rational response would be to say, "Hey, yeah, sometimes that happens -- how can we improve?"
If you think Wikipedia sucks, then don't use it or you are hypocritical.
What's funny is that you accuse GP of taking a "my way or the highway approach" when GP didn't, but then you turn around a second later do exactly what you accuse GP of doing -- taking a completely irrational stance and making false dichotomies.
What -- if you recognize flaws in Wikipedia, you're hypocritical to ever use it?? Huh? In what universe do people only ever make use of absolutely perfect products or resources? Are they all just supposed to keep their mouths shut when something's wrong (but not necessarily terrible enough to "throw the baby out with the bathwater," which you just said was bad).
Second, your characterization for the most part is inaccurate. Wikipedia does NOT work on a "king of the hill" model. It works based on a set of policies and guidelines that focus on writing a good, free encyclopedia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). Sometimes you do get people that are too heavy-handed but there are ways of dealing with that. More likely is that your edits were problematic but you couldn't understand why.
TL;DR -- you didn't learn to Wikilawyer, like me.
Plus, your comment above already shows YOU are violating some of the established rules: you are not assuming good faith when you write "undone by some self-important busybody whose only credentials were the ones they defined when they signed up for an account on Wikipedia". It's clear that you didn't even try to discuss the changes but just got upset that your changes were removed and rage quit because you didn't get your way. That's the kind of uncollaborative person that is poison to a group project.
How is it that you know so much about this editor but know GP was being a jerk and didn't know what he wasn't talking about?
Pretty sure you're the one NOT "assuming good faith."
Without seeing the particular edits you are upset about I cannot say for sure
Oh, oops... I guess it's actually CERTAIN that you're the one who doesn't know anything about the situation and is just not "assuming good faith."
but in my experience, basically ALL people who make the complaints you are making were making SHITTY edits that lowered the quality of the articles but through either ignorance of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or sheer inability and incompetence were unable to realize it.
And in my experience, basically Wikipedia has a major vandalism and troll problem that only gets worse every day. That causes editors to reflexively overreact to any changes on an article they're "sitting on" as "klng of the hill" and revert. That doesn't mean those reversions are always unjustified, or even than these people are acting badly.
What it does mean is that Wikipedia's vandalism and poor edit problem is so bad from fighting bad the idiots and the trolls that good, well-meaning editors don't have time to make reasonable evaluations.
What it does mean is that Wi
Time to check out SoylentNews? Similar comment system but generally sane modding, more responsive editors, less clickbait, no ads, no commercial interest at forcing crap on you. Smaller community so far, but a better chance of having good comments noticed.
And when they're so petulant that they'll pull out of a municipality instead of complying with the laws there, well... That just makes it clear that those whiners think they're special snowflakes, and have no qualms about punishing their customers in an attempt to obtain the special treatment they think they deserve.
I think Uber has been disingenuous and is asking for "special treatment" in various ways too, but I think this characterization is a little off.
It's probably not Uber saying "we're special snowflakes and we're going to take our toys and go home rather than playing by your rules" and more like Uber's lawyers saying, "Well, if you give in to this demand in X city, then cities Y and Z are probably going to expect you to give into their new systems too."
Whereas by actually pulling out of a municipality, they are sending a message to other city councils -- "Mess with us, and we'll just leave." Given that Uber has a lot of fans in major cities these days, most city councils don't want to deal with that bad press, so they may think twice about demanding too much of Uber.
Or at least I imagine that's Uber's logic. Taxi companies mostly don't tend to have this problem, because they are often locally owned fleet companies (and sometimes even individually operated), so they pretty much have to deal with local government demands. Uber is more centrally structured, so its behavior in one city may impact how it's treated elsewhere.
I agree with the fact that strong social connections is NOT generally the same as Facebook friends.
But there's so much more, I don't even know what to say about TFS. Basically, if they're looking at people who have a high chance of dying, they're looking at folks above the age of 70 or so, and these people likely didn't start using Facebook until they were in their late 60s. Automatically, somebody who is that old but active on Facebook (note TFS mentions things like "posting pictures") is probably more tech-savvy and thus probably in better mental health than lots of folks that age. (My experience with my parents and others in that age group is that many can barely figure out how to turn a computer or tablet on or off.)
And then you need to consider what active Facebook participation probably means about health in general. If you're dying of cancer and have lost your hair, or if you're wasting away due to a long-term degenerative disease making you look like a skeleton, or you have uncontrollable drooling, or whatever... are you seriously going to be posting Facebook photos? Lots of people still have some sense of pride about themselves when they get old, and they get depressed and withdrawn if they deteriorate physically enough. If they're actively posting photos on Facebook, they're probably less likely to be dying of something soon.
And then you have this nonsense:
"The fact that we found such a strong positive relationship between health and social networks speaks against the hypothesis that they're making us unhealthy in some way," he said.
Well, most of the claims about why Facebook is "unhealthy" has to do with things like (1) it takes up spare time so you're not as likely to do stuff like be active, do something better for your body or brain, etc., or (2) Facebook substitutes for more personal interactions like seeing and talking face-to-face, etc.
Except with people who are likely to die (mostly older people), they're probably sitting around in their recliners anyway for a lot of the day, so ANYTHING that gets their brain a little more active is probably better. And for those who have difficulty moving around (again, a lot of old people), this may actually be a good way for them to have both intellectual stimulation and social contact that they might have no other easy way of getting.
Or, to put it more starkly -- for an 18-year-old, Facebook might keep them isolated in a room doing no exercise or other mentally stimulating activity, which might be bad. For an 80-year-old, they're already stuck in a room and unable to do exercise or socialize, so having Facebook is BETTER than default for them.
I don't know. I'm not saying social media is evil either. But even if this study found correlations, they could mean just about anything. They certainly can't be applied to "debunk some of the negative associations people have with social media," which aren't generally about its use for geriatric social therapy.
TL;DR -- Everybody's biased, News at 11.
Seriously, anybody who believes ANY media source 100% without questioning -- even a "debunking" one -- is silly. Everyone has biases.
And while I truly don't care enough about this story to actually read it and see whether your complaints stand up -- not because I like or trust Hillary Clinton... FAR from it! -- I also don't really think everything is as insidious as you make it sound.
I doubt the folks at Snopes are "massaging" the facts deliberately, where there is an "intent to mislead." I think they're just stating what they think are reasonable opinions on stuff, based on the evidence they see and their evaluation of it. Maybe they're more likely to excuse person X than person Y, but I doubt they're being deliberately manipulative here. At best, they might work a bit harder to argue in favor of someone they like, but I really doubt they're even conscious of whether something might seem subtly "spun" to others.
(And yeah, I've had run-ins with the Snopes folks in the past too. I sent in a complaint once on a science issue, where they didn't really investigate thoroughly. I was basically told that I was overreacting and that their sources were more authoritative, even though I actually was pointing to very recent actual real-world studies, while they were pointing to government agency stuff that was out-of-date and based on old speculation before the studies had really been done. I don't think they were trying to deliberately mislead either... everybody makes mistakes. And everybody's biased, often unaware of it too.)
Of course, if Amazon wanted to stay away from all these shitty products, they would've created the Marketplace as a separate thing. But it's obvious that they wanted people not to notice the difference.
To be fair, Amazon first started allowing 3rd-party sellers a long time ago, back when many people thought of it as primarily a bookstore. Back then, it was a decent way of finding products from sellers of used books (since Amazon never seemed to interested in getting into that market directly), and since there are so many out-of-print books, that was the only option Amazon had to make them available.
And to this day I still buy used books on Amazon (particularly out-of-print titles), and over the years in many dozens of purchases I've only had one bad experience buying a book from a 3rd-party book merchant. In fact, most of them seem to offer superior service to Amazon, actually bothering to wrap up the book in a reasonable fashion to prevent damage during shipping. Whereas Amazon just tends to throw books along with other stuff in a giant box where everything knocks around and just "hopes for the best."
Things like used books aren't generally profitable to counterfeit, though. Whereas with all the other stuff Amazon sells from 3rd parties, there's a lot of motivation to sell knock-offs.
And I agree that once they started moving beyond the basic bookstore with used books, they needed to start differentiating these 3rd-party sellers. (I do realize that Amazon was more than a bookstore even back in the beginning, but books used to be a dominant portion of their business.)
And Amazon also does a shit job of letting costumers know about the reputation and quality of products sold by their shitty selected vendors.
What they really need to do is allow customers an easy way to separate reviews for products based on vendor. The main issue right now is that you have one product page, and perhaps thousands of reviews for popular products. But they're all jumbled together, and it's difficult to tell whether those 50 reviews complaining about defective or counterfeit products might apply to the vendor you're looking at.
Obviously it's a very imperfect idea, because we all know how Amazon reviews are faked all the time now too. But if you could at least have a box to click saying, "Show me ONLY reviews for this battery for 'verified purchases' from X vendor," and you see a lot of reviews saying, "This is a SCAM!" you might have a chance of realizing the problem before purchase.
And of course there should also just be a more transparent acknowledgement that you're purchasing from a 3rd-party in the first place. You shouldn't be able to use the same purchase button or "add to cart" as if you're buying direct from Amazon. It should require at least an extra step, or look clearly different in some way.
Otherwise, Amazon is opening itself up to lawsuits just like in TFS.
GP: I have tried Linux on laptops many times, and it was always painful.
Parent: I have used linux on an IBM Thinkpad, a Dell Inspiron, and 4 HP laptops of various lines, and this is the full list of hardware that didn't work: [followed by very minimal list]
These sorts of arguments always degenerate into a war of anecdotes. "I installed Linux on 10 machines and nothing worked!" "No, I installed Linux on 20 machines while walking in snow uphill both ways, and it always works!" Etc.
Here's the more reasonable reality: Linux works better on both desktops and laptops than it did even a few years ago. Compare it to installing Linux on most laptops a decade ago, and the difference is night and day.
On the other hand, hardware support is hard, particularly when many vendors have little incentive to spend time supporting Linux and a lot more incentive to make sure their machines have a working Windows driver. On laptops this is an obvious bigger issue, since with a desktop you can often swap out a part for one that's guaranteed Linux compatible, but laptops generally are a "finished package" with a lot of stuff that's hard to swap out.
So, those who can say, "Linux is working better than ever!" are correct, but those who come out saying, "I've run Linux on more laptops than I can count and have never had a problem with suspend" or whatever are either (1) lucky, (2) chose their purchases to avoid these problems in the first place, or (3) are in a state of denial about how things don't quite work right. (I have to admit I'm myself guilty of the last one sometimes -- we all adjust when our machines don't quite work the way we want them to, and we forget how those problems might seem instantly weird or annoying when another person tries to use it.)
The reality is that Linux does work fine "out of the box" on a lot of common laptops these days. But everyone should look around online first for reviews from folks trying to get Linux working before assuming that's the case for any given laptop.
Frankly, though, I'm not especially bothered by the current state of affairs, nor do I think it makes Linux a "problem" for laptops. Laptops are finicky things hardware-wise to begin with, and I've encountered my share of weird hardware issues even on stock Macs and PCs with Windows pre-installed.
For the present story, though, the point is that they had a bunch of laptops donated, and Linux made it easier to make them available for student use. Shouldn't that be a good thing?!? Maybe some of them had installs that worked "out of the box," while others required some tweaking by "school's Linux club" to get working perfectly. Who cares? You had a school without enough laptops, and now they have donated laptops that they can put to use without paying huge licensing fees just to use an OS.
Is it "the year of the Linux laptop"? I don't know. I don't really care. But I'm happy these kids have working computers when they didn't before.
However, there is still an unproven assumption in the above logic. Finding it is left as an exercise for the reader.
Oo, ooh, can I play? Is it here?
Given the non-zero probability for the occurrence of intelligent life, it is utterly incongruous that given the sheer vastness of the universe the likelihood of such life occurring elsewhere in the cosmos should not approach mathematical certainty. Therefore, intelligent life must almost certainly exist elsewhere.
Is it that "sheer vastness" is not an argument, and ultimately we're comparing one number -- p(intelligent live evolves on random planet around random star) -- to another number (planets in universe), and orders of magnitude might actually matter??
This argument can be similarly used to argue for the existence of ANYTHING repeated in the universe. E.g.:
"Given the non-zero probability for the occurrence of humans, it is utterly incongruous that given the sheer vastness of the universe the likelihood of humans occurring elsewhere in the cosmos should not approach mathematical certainty."
"Given the non-zero probability for the occurrence of Shakespeare's Hamlet, it is utterly incongruous that given the sheer vastness of the universe the likelihood of such play occurring elsewhere in the cosmos should not approach mathematical certainty."
Ad infinitum.
I think most of us here would think that even if alien civilizations exist on numerous worlds in the universe, it's pretty unlikely that any of them speak English, let alone have produced a play identical to the text of Shakespeare.
Cosmically unlikely events like that occur trivially every moment. I can shuffle a deck of cards, and even if there were aliens with similar decks of cards shuffling around every star in the universe, it's exceedingly unlikely that any of them would ever have encountered my particular order before.
If the evolutionary road to intelligent life has just one roadblock like that, it could be enough to make us very rare or unique in the cosmos. Of course, we have no good reason to think the probability is that low. Nor do we have any good reason to think the probability is high(er). We have one data point, which can't be used to estimate a probability (even the relative order of magnitude of one).
I doubt if ETL would have much negative effect on religion. I know plenty of religious people, and they are MORE likely to believe in aliens than the non-religious people that I know.
Not only that, but most religions have been dealing with finding new groups of "unknown people" for centuries. Finding native American folks in the "New World" in the 15th and 16th centuries who had never heard of Jesus or the Christian God didn't cause Jesuit missionaries to say, "Oh, maybe there is no God!?! Shouldn't we have known of these people? Why have they not heard of God?"
No -- far from it. Instead, it was viewed as an OPPORTUNITY. Get more people "into the fold." Does anyone think it would be any different if we encountered aliens? Wouldn't the evangelicals just be ready with their baptismal font, itching to get new recruits and for the chance of telling the gospel of "Our Lord Jesus" to ET?
Sure, it might shake the beliefs of some, particularly if the aliens displayed "God-like" abilities through advanced tech, or if the aliens had their own rival religion that was aimed at converting humans. But for many religious folks, ET would be viewed as "just another part of God's creation" by many religious folks, just as the universe now is viewed for them.
I believe it has still yet to be proven that the level of screening currently in place is doing much good.
It depends on how you define "doing much good." If you expect the TSA to detect terrorists or contraband, then no, its performance is terrible.
But if you define good as its actual goals -- i.e., (1) make it look like the government is doing something ("security theatre"), (2) line the pockets of contractors who provide fancy unnecessary scanners and other equipment, (3) teach people to obey government officials and get them used to accepting invasive tests and requests, and (4) keep the population suitably scared of nearly nonexistent terrorists so that any new government power grab or rights denial can be justified -- well, then the screening is doing a LOT of "good."
subject says it all... stop using AI to describe everything...
While this may or may not qualify as artificial "intelligence," it almost has to perform better than the TSA does now whenever they run a benchmark test (and generally find something like 90% of bad stuff gets through). You could probably hook up a metal detector to a Commodore 64 powered by a BASIC program created by a 4th grader and get better results than the current TSA.
The popularity of these among upper management is typically because of cost or control reasons. They're much cheaper than closed offices, and management can walk by to see exactly what you're doing.
It's not only that. There is this myth floating around for the past couple decades that "collaboration" is the cool new workplace thing. People read stories about Google or Apple and tales of workers just randomly meeting in some common room and brainstorming the next new cool thing, and managers start drooling and saying, "Yeah -- let's get rid of the office walls. Get rid of the cubes! Break down the barriers, and we'll get better collaboration, which means more creative and efficient work!"
Yeah, except that doesn't actually work. It's true that chance encounters with coworkers can be beneficial for brainstorming or bouncing ideas or whatever, but that happens best when you're OPEN TO THAT, which means you're not deeply focused on some specific task at your desk or whatever. More recent studies are showing (surprise!) that workers actually need lack of distractions, and a more isolated environment is often easier for that. The best office approach would be to offer both options -- closed offices for when you're focused on a task... and then open spaces, or tables, or common areas, or whatever when you're less focused and are open for random contact and collaboration.
Actually, those people who have real, actual offices already have those options -- because they have a door. If you are working intently, you shut your door. If you want to be open for other random communication, you keep your door open.
Typical penny wise & pound foolish mentality. The constant interruptions that occur end up costing them much more in the long run.
True. Studies show that workers in "open plan" offices are less productive, tend to be more distracted, have more health issues and stress, take more sick days, etc., etc. It was a terrible idea, and probably never saved money in the long run.
Is the recipient of a mix CD a copyright infringer? If not, it doesn't make any sense that a downloader would be either.
Your argument relies on some sort of distinction between "who makes the copy." In the mix CD case, where it's given to you, yes, you obviously didn't make a copy.
However, if you load up your torrent manager and say "download please!" you are making your own copy, which is then stored locally, just like pushing the button on a copy machine.
The one who started out in possession of the media, made and distributed a copy of it, is violating the right to control copying and distribution, i.e. copyright.
To continue the analogy, it's like a library places a book on a public shelf. You are the one choosing to take it off that shelf, walk over to the copy machine, push the button, and then take the photocopy home with you.
It seems you may also be trying to make the argument that the person who originally ripped the copy or whatever was infringing, but you're not by making a copy of that copy. Except that doesn't work in the analogy either. If you go to an office where somebody has made an illegal photocopy of a book, and you take that photocopy and make your own photocopy, you're still violating copyright.
If that's weren't true, I could just download a (legal) PDF that was made from a print journal from a library, and then place that PDF on my own public website for anyone else to download, and I wouldn't be guilty of infringement. After all, I didn't make the PDF myself -- I didn't "rip" the media, so why should I be guilty of anything?
Someone who started out with nothing, copied nothing, distributed nothing, but ends up in possession of something that someone else illegally copied and distributed, has done what exactly that violates what law?
You are correct that you "distributed nothing," which is why GP argues that the case is harder to make, and excessive damages are harder to justify. But you're wrong about the fact that you "copied nothing," since you ordered your computer to do precisely that, just as if you'd press the "copy" button on a copy machine.
"Mere" data analysis is when a human looks at the data and tries to find patterns. But it is "AI" when the algorithm is open ended, and finds it's own patterns and correlations.
I certainly agree that this falls under the classification of "AI" as a field. I'm guessing that part of the concern is also whether what was done here qualifies as "intelligence" rather than just a slightly more advanced algorithm for processing data.
Most research studies these days use fairly complex statistical computations -- often, lamentably, that the researchers themselves don't fully understand (or at least don't fully understand the limitations of). So, basically by the time many researchers are looking at the "data" to search for correlations, the raw data has already been processed in rather non-transparent ways. Relatively few people are staring at the raw data and saying, "Hmm... there's a lot of high X values here -- let's run a test to see whether X correlates with Y." Instead, they either decided they were already going to run that correlation before the test already began, or they do the p-hacking thing where they just run dozens of different statistical tests and see whether anything "shakes out."
Either way, humans are rarely DIRECTLY finding their own "patterns and correlations" anymore. They throw a bunch of stuff into a statistical package and see what pops out. The "AI" algorithms used in the present paper are certainly putting an extra layer of processing on top of that, but ultimately they're just doing a few more steps of statistical analysis and spitting out the patterns that emerge. The algorithms just tend to emphasize and weight certain things in the dataset a little more to make patterns pop out more easily.
So, yeah, it's automating pattern-finding a bit more. But I can also see the point that it's really an extension of data analysis... ultimately the patterns that come out of this system aren't really meaningful. For example, according to the top-rated clusters of topics, judgments for one of the rights are highly likely to depend on whether the word "July" is found -- good for your chances! -- vs. whether "June" or "June applicant" or "dated June" is found -- which apparently causes you to be more likely to lose the case!
Obviously that's ridiculous, but it shows the similarity in this sort of analysis to what you might get with a simpler statistical package that just tries out dozens of correlations. In both cases, the computer is just weighting the patterns it finds -- using algorithms dictated by humans -- and then spitting out a lot of nonsense and some things that look more interesting. It's then up to the humans to determine which are the interesting bits.
While I know the term AI is used for this stuff, personally I'll reserve the term "artificial intelligence" for a system that actually has some fairly sophisticated threshold for realizing when the output is nonsense vs. when it's likely to be more interesting, and that determination isn't just a hard-coded aspect of the algorithm in question. Then the system would actually be doing something akin to "judgment," which implies "intelligence," rather than just being a more sophisticated pattern-finding stats package.
Which is why it's called an "Escape" key. You use it under exceptional conditions. You don't want it underfoot, but when you need it, it needs to be there.
First they came for my floppy drive, and I did not speak out, because floppies were slow and I was glad to be rid of them anyway.
Then they came for my CD-ROM drive, and I did not speak out, because I appreciated a lighter, more compact laptop.
Then they came for my headphone jack, and I did not speak out, because I use my damn phone as a phone, not a stereo.
Then they came for my escape key, and I knew there was no way out.
They they came for my power button, and there was no one left to hear the perpetual screams.
And my MacBook, never flickering, still is sitting, still is sitting
By the pallid bust of Steve Jobs just above my basement door;
And its screen has all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the process o'er it streaming throws exceptions galore;
And my soul from out that process started back in days of yore
Shall be turned off -- nevermore!
Honestly if you are not passing by at least 4mph dont pass. they should let cops ticket truckers for passing without using their gas pedal.
Uh, have you ever been behind a truck going up a long hill? You know how they slow down? That's because they have the "pedal to the floor" and yet the engine pulling that much weight can only manage so much going up a long incline.
Now, put that same truck on a straightaway where they're stuck behind some idiot or they're forced to get out of the right lane to avoid some idiot who doesn't know how to merge on an on-ramp or whatever. But then the road suddenly starts to slope up A BIT. Doesn't have to be a lot to make acceleration on a truck that size quite slow if not non-existent.
Couple that with a guy in a car in the right lane who starts going up the incline and starts pressing down the accelerator a bit more, and suddenly the truck can't even keep up, let alone pass.
I've never driven a semi. But I've driven large trucks a couple times. It's a MUCH different experience than driving a car. Heck, it's even a different experience than driving a mid-size moving truck, which might still be able to accelerate up a hill.
Obviously some truckers do stupid or annoying things sometimes. But having been in a situation myself on the highway when I thought I was going to be able to pass, but then the truck just couldn't accelerate because of a mild change in slope... I have an appreciation for the problems truckers have to deal with. It's easy in most cars to accelerate another 10-15 mph to pass reasonably fast; in trucks this may only be possible to do quickly going downhill.
A final note is that when driving a vehicle that large, quick changes in general are harder and potentially dangerous. Thus, truckers often don't like to change lanes as much and they tend to go at constant speeds when possible. So, depending on the exact situations you're talking about, in some cases it may not have been that the trucker was even trying to "pass" but was simply trying to drive in a reasonable consistent fashion (rather than a lot of car drivers who tend to be a lot more aggressive and needlessly maneuver around a lot).
Currently, FB and Twitter are free to censor political speech and push political agenda.
As private corporations who own, operate, and maintain these services, that generally is the default. Yes.
You could argue that in 2016 as a politician you are effectively censored if you don't have access to FB and Twitter. This shouldn't be the case, insofar politics these should be considered virtual public spaces and any censorship of this kind should be disallowed.
I'm sympathetic to this argument, and in fact I've argued similarly that we need to consider how these things work in "virtual spaces" (these simply aren't "public," any more than than Facebook's headquarters is a "public space").
The closest analogy that some people have made is to public utilities, like phone service. A phone service that tried to refuse service to someone on the basis of the speech content of phone calls likely wouldn't get very far... unless there was a court order from a proven record of harassment or something like that.
But a number of issues arise when you try to extend that analogy to a service like Facebook or Twitter. First, phone calls are by nature ephemeral and generally not recorded for permanent record (except by the NSA, I suppose), and they're generally not audible/visible publicly. Facebook and Twitter posts are frequently VERY visible (often to millions of people) and there's a record that people can reference immediately.
A process like going through a court to get a restraining order against someone to disallow them service is just not set up for the kind of visible, persistent record that services like this provide.
And before you say, "Well, just allow all speech on these services then!" But the very nature of social media is that stuff can spread like wildfire, and the drumbeat for action will often continue until something happens. If you have people actively advocating terrorism or other violent actions or whatever and actual records that thousands of people are "liking" and agreeing with such things, there's going to be backlash from users. There's going to be media attention. And if some horrific event transpires that there's a permanent record of where these things were planned and encouraged, there will be lawsuits. And if stuff like this happens repeatedly, you can bet there will be calls for government officials to IMPOSE censorship.
That sort of thing just doesn't normally apply to things like phone services. So even if the government passed a law requiring "free speech" on such "virtual spaces," I doubt it would last very long. Even with court mechanisms to remove user access under extreme cases, it simply won't be fast enough for the outcry of social media waves of interest. And what about foreign users? Do they have the same "free speech rights?" What about anonymous users? Or do you only qualify for rights if you have a registered account with a verified real name and address?
And even if you magically came up with a way of making this work that users, companies, and government officials were satisfied with, just how do you determine which services qualify for this sort of speech protection?
Facebook and Twitter may seem obvious choices. But what about the "up and coming" social media service? Or the declining one? Or the random internet forum? Is Slashdot a "virtual public space"? How many active users do you need before these protections kick in? And how do we determine that threshold?
Again, with phone service there was one standard fairly early on, and interconnectivity was essential. Interconnectivity between different social media services is rarely the same -- even if data can be transferred between them (not always the case), they tend to have different use cases. So again, you're looking at potentially protecting a multitude of different KINDS of "virtual spaces." Where does it stop? How do you determine that?
I'm not saying this is impossible. But it's a legal and regulatory nightmare to even imagine how to do it.
Why isn't there a similar push to get men into kindergarten education or nursing?
Well, there are actually. There are advocacy groups like the American Assembly for Men in Nursing and there are loads of groups who think it would be good to encourage more men in teaching (e.g., look here).
Now, these groups don't tend to get as much media coverage. You're correct. And that you may legitimately wonder about. I don't think it's any mystery why you don't hear about such groups on Slashdot -- a piece on that stuff wouldn't get much response, but put up an article about women and tech, and you're bound to get hundreds of screaming comments (=pageviews = ad revenue).
But there ARE people out there who are concerned about getting men in other professions -- particularly because we have a shortage of good nurses and good teachers (though for teaching the biggest shortage areas are places like high school math and science, a place where a lot of men happen to have qualifications).
As to why we don't see a specific push for male kindergarten teachers, I think it has to do with a much more disconcerting gender bias these days, which is the suspicion of any contact between men and small children likely means "pedophile." Seriously, there was a daycare near where I lived a few years back that hired a man to work with the preschool kids, and I heard parents talking and wondering things like, "Why would a MAN want to spend so much time with such young kids??" Or even "I'm okay with him being around to help out, but he shouldn't be doing things like changing kids or taking them to the toilet alone!"
From my perspective, the current pedophile hysteria is a much more disturbing gender issue than a lot of stuff we talk about... and it's largely targeted at males. (Note that child abduction and abuse rates are much lower than in the past; we just tend to hear about them a lot more often nowadays. Also, note that stats show the vast majority of sexual abuse has always been targeted at underage teens. Those cases make up most "sex offenders." The number of true PEDOphiles who are going to abuse preschool kids is orders of magnitude smaller, yet that seems to be what most people worry about. What they should be concerned about is inappropriate contact with their teenage son or daughter.)
Anyhow, all of this concern about young kids and men reinforces traditional stereotypical gender roles within the family, who is the "caregiver" in the family, etc.., which ultimately influences stuff like the fact that most men don't want to do nursing. (Where would a man have the kind of nursing "caregiver" role modeled for him by another man, unless his dad was unusual in taking a more active role in the family or something?) So personally I'm not so much concerned about trying to shoehorn more men into nursing and kindergarten, but I am somewhat concerned about the societal implications of why there are so few.
And personally I'm really glad that my son had the privilege to have a male kindergarten teacher, who by all accounts seemed to be an excellent teacher and role model.
(I'm not going to comment on the whole women in tech thing, just noting that there are issues are men and careers too.)
When you're pushing the boundaries, anything over 50% is good.
Is it? It depends on the data, the model, the thresholds for "correct forecast," etc. There are lots of places in the world where a "persistence" forecast (i.e., today will be the same as yesterday) will net you a greater than 50% accuracy within a reasonable margin of error. And one should also always consider forecasting models against general predicted climate averages. Again, taking those into account, a forecast system just using climate averages might do pretty well too.
It really depends on what the percentage "accuracy" means in this case and how it was measured. I'm guessing they wouldn't bother reporting it if it weren't significant, but just how significant is difficult to tell without the details (and it seems the full research paper is behind a paywall).
Otherwise citing a number like "62% accuracy" is utterly meaningless. If you had a task like, "Guess how tall the next person to walk into the building will be," and I achieved 62% accuracy, that could be remarkable and improbable if the margin of error was 1/8 of an inch. But if I instead was guessing "Taller than 1 foot or shorter than 1 foot," then 62% accuracy might mean I'm mentally retarded.
Donald Trump is an anti tyrant. He's more like a little boy who has no idea what to do or how to do it.
Actually, I'm pretty sure Donald Trump has "ideas" about "what to do." He's pretty famous for them. They may be wacky or unrealistic or even impossible, but he has ideas. Some of which could have major political ramifications if he even attempts to follow through.
Anyhow, I think you may not realize that "tyrants" in world history take many forms. Relatively few of them throughout history started out as clear "twirling the mustache" evil dudes who had a Machiavellian plan to become a "tyrant." Much more common are situations where you take a somewhat average guy, put him in a leadership position, create some tough choices, and watch him choose the bad ones. A lot of "tyrants" throughout history very gradually slipped into tyranny, often with the support of the public along the way, cheered along by their fears and promises of "security" from a well-meaning leader.
You know what prevents that sort of thing? Knowledge. Knowledge of history. Knowledge of politics. Realizations that paths others have taken before have led to badness. History has shown again and again that the most ignorant "nice" folks who end up leadership positions can turn out to be the worst... they don't know any better, so they can be swayed into all sorts of bad acts.
And Donald Trump doesn't even have that "niceness" to go along with his ignorance.
In some ways having a child who doesn't understand politics at the top of what is shown to be an institutionalised assault on the rights of all may actually be a good thing.
Maybe. Or it could be even a faster track to a dictatorship. The problem is that it's completely unpredictable.
None of this should be viewed as an argument in favor of Clinton, who is also a terrible candidate. But acting like things are likely to be better because Trump is an "outsider" and less corrupt (at least by the political establishment) is just not a safe bet.
Those parts of the emails are valid to report on. Stuff like a staffer thinking Lessig is smug is not valid to report on.
Who determines what is "valid" to report on?
Good reporters report on the part that matters, bad reporters just try to find something salacious to poke a bee hive.
Yeah, except "the part that matters" is never some objective category valid for all places, times, and people. This site used to have a tagline about "stuff that matters," but the reality is that a lot of the stuff posted here didn't "matter" to the vast majority of people in the world. Meanwhile, a lot of stuff that "matters" to the vast majority of the world wouldn't be of interest to a significant portion of the audience here (e.g., sports, celebrity gossip).
Here's the reality of journalism -- the "news" is mostly about selling stuff, NOT informing people. Yes, "good journalists" who want to be respected generally tend to focus on certain topics and ignore others, but they are conscious of the "bottom line" like everyone else. And if some reporter claims to be completely oblivious to stuff like that, you can darn well bet their editor isn't.
So, the question is rarely "Is this too salacious to be 'legitimate' news, or does it 'matter'?" The question is usually, "We know that this will get a lot of clicks/sell a lot of ads/papers/whatever. But will it piss off our readership or advertisers if we do so?" Somewhere down the list, far below that set of concerns about revenue, maintaining readers and advertisers, etc., are things like, "Is this 'respectable journalism'?" Or, "Does this matter?"
Because, let's be honest here -- even if something appears to be "too salacious" to be a story, if it gets caught up by SOME major media source, eventually most of the other major media will start reporting on it. You don't want to be the newspaper or whatever who steps "out of line" and starts looking like a cheap tabloid, but as long as everybody else is writing about it, it's gonna be fair game.
What really "matters"? Human life? Well, most Americans (even educated liberal well-meaning and loving ones) don't really have much interest in African news. I mean, some say they do -- but they really don't care about reading about that stuff every day, even if every day is pretty much a bad day for millions of people in Africa.
Meanwhile, is the Queen of England having another great-grandchild?!? Let's devote weeks of news for that. Does that "matter"? I don't mean to pick on the royals -- any celebrity gossip will do. Or what about sports? Does that really "matter"? It's certainly not going to have as much of an impact as that genocidal African dictator, but editors know that there are loads of people who basically pull the "sports section" out a newspaper (or do the equivalent online) and ignore most of the rest.
But to bring this back to the current political stuff and scandals, we basically end up in a situation where fans of politician A think stuff "doesn't matter" and publishing it is "salacious" but people who don't like politician A definitely think it matters. To many fans of Bill Clinton, the various scandals about possible affairs and interns "didn't matter" compared to his leadership capabilities as President. To some Trump fans, clearly his views on women also "don't matter" to the evaluation of his leadership abilities. (I'm not equating these two people or their actions by any means, just noting similar reactions I've noted among fans.)
To those fans, publishing a bunch of stories about such stuff is just "salacious" and yellow journalism, which is targeting stuff that should be irrelevant to their political life. To others, this "matters" deeply and it's irresponsible NOT to publish something that tells you something about their "character."
Anyhow, getting to TFA, the question of where information came from is WAY down the list, far below other ethical concerns about jour
But the things you listed aren't features of intelligence, they're bugs in our brains (or simply, things that natural selection de-emphasized out of comparative irrelevance in your basic cave man survival scenario).
Nope, they aren't "bugs." Learning is fundamentally about prioritizing information, making "higher-level connections," creating abstractions that lead to "understanding," etc. No AI system can do this on even the level of a small human child. But a fundamental process necessary to this stuff is being able to prioritize information, which necessarily entails de-emphasizing most of input that's less relevant. It doesn't NEED to be forgotten, but these "bugs" are probably the most efficient way of dealing with the problem.
If those short term memories were more reliably committed to long-term, or there was no real distinction between those things, would that really be a disqualifyier for intelligence?
Yes, if the "long-term" commitment was not accompanied by an incredibly complex (by current AI standards) abstraction process that effectively renders most of the irrelevant "long-term" data as "background" that would rarely or never be accessed anyway. "Forgetting" again is not essential to the process of intelligence, but it likely makes it a lot more efficient and easier for the algorithms in our brains to work. A computer AI which refuses to prioritize information in this way is always going to lag way behind human comprehension.
Brazil has movies that those of us in America could only dream of streaming, like The Godfather Part II, Fight Club, and The Empire Strikes Back.
While this is a list of good movies, I'm not sure this is the sort of stuff I'd like Netflix to prioritize. Some people like the new content showing up on streaming services, especially "original" content. I like some of that, but what first made me love Netflix's DVD service years ago was the more obscure stuff -- discovering good movies I hadn't seen before. Even Netflix's streaming service when it first came out had a great selection of old films (usually "classics," but not the most popular ones) as well as really great more recent ones (though not many new releases). I first watched films like Pan's Labyrinth and The Orphanage on Netflix "Instant watch," while rediscovering old classics from more obscure Buster Keaton and Chaplin films to old TV series like Yes, Minister and the classic Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett.
Most of that stuff is gone. And frankly, I don't really want to watch this stuff again. People who love these movies probably already have purchased them either on DVD or through some streaming, so they'll permanently have them available.
And actually, do I really want to watch Godfather Part II again? Sorry, I think it's overrated. (Yes, this is just my opinion.) The two narratives are disconnected, and while I love the early De Niro period piece, the other story is too dark. I love the original Godfather (and have watched it quite a few times), but I sometimes wish I could just except the early period stuff from part II and watch that separately. Fight Club? Are there lots of people who actually WANT to watch that repeatedly? It's a fantastic movie, but it goes in the category of things that are just not pleasant to watch again. And, sorry, but if you're a fan who wants to see The Empire Strikes Back over and over, you probably already own some special collector's edition. (Or, if you're a TRUE fan, you've probably sought out the "Despecialized" version before Lucas messed with it.)
I'm not saying it wouldn't be good to have such classic films as options on Netflix. But I know they'd be really expensive to have available, and they wouldn't be my priority.
Let's remember that coral is - literally - one of the oldest life forms on the planet.
They existed in much warmer, higher CO2 environments for hundreds of millions of years.
First, let's also remember that we've seen sudden significant die-offs in coral in the past couple decades (and especially in recent years). So something verifiable is happening that seems to be having a widespread and large-scale effect on coral. The question is the magnitude and ramifications.
Second, the question I'd have to ask is why exactly many of the world's experts in coral would be sounding an alarm if there was nothing to worry about. What exactly do these folks have to gain by lying about that? There's still a LOT more lobbying money available for paid shills from fossil fuel companies than there is from environmental groups. What's the benefit for all of these scientists to lie? (And if they actually believe what they say, then perhaps they likely know something more about why things are happening and the flexibility/adaptability of coral than some random guy posting on Slashdot.)
Finally, I'd just note that I could survive quite well living at sea level. I could also survive quite well living on a submarine, or on a high mountain. But if you transported me rapidly from one of those areas to another, I might suffer from severe reactions to altitude or pressure effects on the human body. The rate of change matters. And if the mountain was livable but gradually started cooling down, I've have plenty of time to migrate down. But if a rapid storm came up and plunged the temperature to well below zero unexpectedly, I might not survive.
The question really has to do with RATE of change here. Yes, coral have lived through all sorts of conditions on earth over hundreds of millions of years. But unlike humans, they can't just get up and move a hundred miles away when the weather turns. Migrating and rebuilding takes long periods of time. And they're not good with handling rapid temperature fluctuations.
The acidification is relevant because (as I understand it) it makes it even slower to build and repair damage to coral. Again, it's not necessarily about whether they could survive a CONSTANT pH level once they were established and adapted to those conditions. The question is whether the changing pH will make it even harder for adaptation to occur, on top of more rapidly changing temperatures.
Sure, we don't know everything, and we're extrapolating a lot of stuff about the way we think things happened in the past vs. the way things happen today. But simply saying, "These things have been around forever, so obviously they're going to survive and anyone else is an idiot!" doesn't make it true.