He had a consensual relationship with someone. He was deemed to have never interacted inappropriately or caused any harassment. Their relationship violated a company policy that saw him requested to part. This isnâ(TM)t sexual harassment. You people on a witch hunt are going to seriously screw up a lot of lives before you finally stop this. It helps to read.
The word consensual should always be air-quoted when describing an inherently superior-subordinate relationship. That's why statutory rape is a law, even if the relationship is claimed to be consensual. That's why the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits an officer from having sexual relationships with an enlisted member in all circumstances. That's why some companies have rules against these types of relationships. There is an implicit inability to freely consent for someone in a subordinate position.
If a self-driving car costs several thousand dollars more
Very unlikely. Sensors are cheap. Actuators cost less than a steering column. Once you add in the insurance, SDCs will almost certainly be less expensive once they are mass produced.
No, Lidar is not cheap. Compute is not cheap. We're talking thousands that might hopefully come down to around a thousand or so with extreme volumes, but maybe not. Self-driving cars will never be as cheap as the apples-to-apples comparison to the equivalent manual car (similar to how hybrid cars will never come close to the equivalent non-hybrid car).
Why should my tax dollars subsidize your hobby? If you want to drive, do it on a private track.
If a self-driving car costs several thousand dollars more and furthermore requires cheaper cars to be outlawed for full safety functionality, wouldn't it be the self-driving car that is actually being subsidized (through laws that prohibit cheaper cars)?
I can see how Google Location can record the times of arrival and departure at an address. However, how would they know when a patron is seated? Does the phone user have to push a button? Or does Google have knowledge of the interior layout of the restaurant along with a method for determining interior location? Aside from the difficulty in obtaining interior table mapping, many restaurants have waiting areas within a few feet of the nearest table, necessitating location tracking to a resolution of a few feet. If explicit user input is required, then the times are likely biased across the population of restaurants due to the distribution of opt-in tendencies of phone users.
Or does Google simply assume that the wait time is a function of the total sojourn time at the restaurant? I.e., that the average eating time across all restaurants is constant or at least can be estimated?
Restaurant-queuing seems to be a cultural phenomenon associated mostly with America. It's not unusual to see a mile-long queue for a restaurant in America but in other parts of the world if there's a few waiting by the door people deem it to be busy and quickly move on to the next place.
In certain countries, especially in Europe, restaurant patrons often spend the entire evening eating dinner, i.e., there is no turnover. For those situations, queues obviously wouldn't exist. In contrast in the US, the restaurants try to encourage turnover.
Consumer Reports bases their numbers on surveys of Surface owners. Criteria from MS seems less reliable as feedback from telemetry and customers which is different.
I'm not saying that the Consumer Reports data is not trustworthy, but it's important to ascertain how the survey information is obtained. All surveys are statistical samples, and the sampling methodology necessarily biases the results. Just how much the sampled data differs from the actual target population is a necessary question.
There are two main ways in which the Consumer Reports data may depart from the actual population of all Surface owners/users: Only magazine subscribers are in the potentially sampled, and only subscribers who opt-in to respond are sampled. It's possible that these and other biases still allow relative comparisons of various Consumer Reports data, but that shouldn't necessarily be assumed as true.
I think that Consumer Reports could bolster confidence in their results with greater transparency in metrics that describe their sampling, e.g., the number of respondents for a particular result.
Similarly, the Microsoft returns data also needs to be scrutinized for sampling bias.
The average selling prices in India are far lower than in many other countries, so India still has quite a ways (i.e., many years) to catch the US in terms of revenue. See this link for some idea of the units and revenues. [The link shows stats per region, but North America is dominated by the US, and emerging Asia is dominated by India.] The average selling prices in India, China, and the US are $180, $332, and $400, respectively.
quote: "The governor has certainly indicated an interest in why China can do this and not California."
Well, there's an easy answer for that: dictatorship (or at least dictatorial or authoritarian power). If Jerry Brown had dictatorial power, he could get this done today. Unfortunately, he has to contend with established law, real elections, an independent legislature, an independent judiciary with effective veto power, an independent press, and citizenry who can publicly protest.
When it comes to consciousness, intelligence and free will, the scientific state-of-the art is "nobody has a clue". Anybody actually thinking scientifically is able to live with that, but that approach is beyond a great many people. Hence they invent stupid pseudo-explanations.
Accepting that "nobody has a clue" is not scientific at all because the basis of science is questioning in a systematic manner. That some or many people believe in religion, philosophy, etc. is a direct result of the utter failure of the scientific method to produce answers to how and why the world and life exists. Many of these questions fundamentally deal with past events, and many scientific textbook statements cannot be tested by strong scientific methods, leading to dogmatic belief under the nomenclature of religion or science. How is science sometimes dogma? As an engineer, I know enough to ask about confidence in assertions, but the language of science textbooks overwhelmingly dogmatically asserts the textbook view of truth as simply true without uncertainty, i.e., dogma.
Uh, not really. White people were the customers. Islamics are the ones who made the money off the slave trade- and still are in sub-Sahara Africa.
This is mostly incorrect. Africans, including mostly non-Muslim Africans, captures slaves who were then sold to European slave traders. The traders transported the slaves to the Western Hemisphere and sold them to the eventual slave owners. The vast majority of the money made off the slave trade and slave economy went into white hands.
Tesla's ability to remotely adjust battery capacity (and other car parameters) scares me. Even though Tesla is a force for goodness and non-evilness in today's world, what happens when the company is confronted with a government request to boost capacity to zero for undesirable people? Or when the company finds that artificially decreasing capacity over time leads to greater corporate profits? Or when someone cracks the security code and starts blackmailing car owners.
Racial inequality exists because we define a person as a race and not a person. If people want to see racial inequality disappear then, IMHO at least, we should stop asking for race on applications to university and jobs.
If the problem's existence is based on human perception, then ignoring the problem may indeed make it go away. However, if there are endemic economic causes, then ignoring the problem or ceasing to ask questions about it simply makes diagnoses disappear, but the actual problems will be perpetuated.
Such as stop teaching children in school that the "white man" spread disease among the First Nations with blankets tainted with disease. The germ theory wasn't established then.
This is a diversionary strawman. I doubt that the colonial Europeans in North America were so technologically advanced to intentionally wage biological warfare. However, their ignorance doesn't eliminate culpability or the effects of the unintentional germ warfare.
White men didn't "invent" slavery, they ended it.
I'm not sure who held the first patent on slavery, but it doesn't really matter. In terms of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, white people nurtured slavery into a massive economic and social system. Of course, white people also ended slavery, because ending slavery through slave revolts is extremely rare.
Given that the person's Tesla will have a 8 year / unlimited mileage warranty on the battery pack and drive unit....
[...]
In case you're curious, the battery packs have held up amazingly well - even in heavy service like taxi duty in harsh climates.
Wow, there are Teslas doing taxi duty in harsh climates? Can I request a Tesla for my next Uber ride?... Yes, the Bay Area counts as a harsh climate.:)
"most contributions toward health insurance and pension plans (excluding Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) are not obligatory payments to the government and therefore are not included in the figures"
Shouldn't "what you get for your money" be part of the comparison?
The footnote quoted above was only for Section 1. The charts in Section 7 show the impact of these payments, including both direct employee payments and payments made by the company on behalf of the employee. Including these payments shows that German payments are quite a bit higher than in the US.
If this is true, it begs the question: why is the NSA looking for Satoshi? Where are the warrants to do this kind of search? This is a fairly involved process, even if the software was already written, collecting the entirety of Satoshi's writing for input is time consuming work.
As a taxpayer, there be something pretty fuckin important they need to ask Satoshi personally to justify this waste of my tax money.
Maybe finding Satoshi is as important as landing a man on the moon. The task at hand may not be that important, but developing the technology in the process yields capabilities that may prove to be significant for future tasks.
Total tax rate for average person in the US is lower than most European countries... but not by much.
A recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago that compares tax rates in the US and Germany shows that the difference is quite a bit more than "not by much". By almost any measure of tax burden (other than corporate taxes), Americans have a significantly lower tax burden.
As always, there is no free lunch (unless someone else is paying for it).
Part of what you pay an engineer to do is take responsibility for things. That's why you need a cert to call yourself a "Professional Engineer" Same concept as a bridge falling. Some technical person put his approval on it as the end-all, so that technical person takes responsibility. It's part of his/her job. I think the execs should all get smacked a little harder too, but this is fitting.
I totally agree with this as long as the engineer receives financial compensation commensurate with the legal liabilities. However, in contrast to licensed professional engineers, other engineers don't have similar compensation, liability, or certifications.
All engineers should strive to perform their duties in an ethical manner, but that's not the same as assuming liability.
Some idiot was making the same argument about petrol stations at some point as well "why these gasoline cars will require a filling station on every major thoroughfare, that will never compare to the efficiency of feeding one's horse on the grass at the roadside"...
Well, a huge number of horses can generally eat grass in parallel. The relevant analogy for electric car fueling would be setting up a very large number of superchargers so that all electric cars could charge in parallel. That would actually be one of the ways to make superchargers practical. Either the number of available stations needs to dramatically increase or the efficiency of each charger needs to dramatically increase. The third solution is to simply keep the status quo of allowing only a limited number of electric cars on the road that need superchargers.
Have you every seen a Costco on a Saturday afternoon or some highway truck stops during busy times? The lines are long, and that's with a 3-5 minute fill-up time.
Did you ever bother to check whether that ever happens with Superchargers? (Answer: very rarely, and for most superchargers, never). Tesla maintains market forecasts to ensure that it doesn't.
The reason that gas stations fill up is - and I can't believe I have to make this point yet again - gas cars have to detour from their everyday lives at regular intervals to go to them; EVs don't. For EVs, superchargers are only for trips.
The only reason superchargers currently work for long trips is that there are very few electric cars that need them. Take a look at truck stops on busy highways. There are often lines at those gas stations. If all cars on highways were electric, there would be huge lines at those stations. The only solutions would be to either install a huge number of superchargers (an order of magnitude more than current gas pumps) or increase the fueling efficiency of superchargers (by an order of magnitude).
90 minutes? What year is this, 2005? Supercharging is half an hour to 80%. And herp, derp, humans have to eat at some point.
Have you every seen a Costco on a Saturday afternoon or some highway truck stops during busy times? The lines are long, and that's with a 3-5 minute fill-up time. Imagine a 30-minute or even 15-minute service time. 30 minutes is a long time to wait for a fill-up, but it would be nothing compared to the much longer wait time just to get to a charging plug. If the majority of cars were electric, the only way to avoid long service station lines would be to offer a huge number of simultaneously usable charging stations. Currently we get around this problem by having only a relatively few electric cars on the road and giving those cars exclusive use of home chargers, which works because these electric cars are still mostly commute cars.
For such an "inclusive" and "tolerant" company, they sure are quite Soviet in their treatment of dissent.
Being tolerant doesn't mean rolling over and accepting absolutely everything. It's entirely reasonable to expect people to tolerate things which cause no harm. Putting forth "tolerance" as a good thing never included tolerating arbitrarily shitty behaviour.
What you just said is exactly what the Soviets and Chinese also believe. The underlying mantra is exactly the same. The only difference lies in what is considered harm, and Google's definition of harm in this case is what many people disagree with. Should publicly expressing ideas that do not toe the party line be considered harmful?
Perhaps the Popular Mechanics reporter is just showing what happens when previously common skills are allowed to atrophy in favor of new convenient tools. This is a common occurrence, e.g., driving a stick shift.
I still remember planning out cross-country road trips using just a road atlas. I wrote down turn-by-turn instructions along with mileage hints that I would use by mentally keeping track of the last odometer reading (back when my odometer showed tenths of miles). Because I had to actually keep alert watching out for road signs and odometer readings, I found that I actually missed fewer turns than I do now by relying solely on the GPS.
Slashdot Mirror
He had a consensual relationship with someone. He was deemed to have never interacted inappropriately or caused any harassment. Their relationship violated a company policy that saw him requested to part. This isnâ(TM)t sexual harassment. You people on a witch hunt are going to seriously screw up a lot of lives before you finally stop this. It helps to read.
The word consensual should always be air-quoted when describing an inherently superior-subordinate relationship. That's why statutory rape is a law, even if the relationship is claimed to be consensual. That's why the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits an officer from having sexual relationships with an enlisted member in all circumstances. That's why some companies have rules against these types of relationships. There is an implicit inability to freely consent for someone in a subordinate position.
If a self-driving car costs several thousand dollars more
Very unlikely. Sensors are cheap. Actuators cost less than a steering column. Once you add in the insurance, SDCs will almost certainly be less expensive once they are mass produced.
No, Lidar is not cheap. Compute is not cheap. We're talking thousands that might hopefully come down to around a thousand or so with extreme volumes, but maybe not. Self-driving cars will never be as cheap as the apples-to-apples comparison to the equivalent manual car (similar to how hybrid cars will never come close to the equivalent non-hybrid car).
Why should my tax dollars subsidize your hobby? If you want to drive, do it on a private track.
If a self-driving car costs several thousand dollars more and furthermore requires cheaper cars to be outlawed for full safety functionality, wouldn't it be the self-driving car that is actually being subsidized (through laws that prohibit cheaper cars)?
I can see how Google Location can record the times of arrival and departure at an address. However, how would they know when a patron is seated? Does the phone user have to push a button? Or does Google have knowledge of the interior layout of the restaurant along with a method for determining interior location? Aside from the difficulty in obtaining interior table mapping, many restaurants have waiting areas within a few feet of the nearest table, necessitating location tracking to a resolution of a few feet. If explicit user input is required, then the times are likely biased across the population of restaurants due to the distribution of opt-in tendencies of phone users.
Or does Google simply assume that the wait time is a function of the total sojourn time at the restaurant? I.e., that the average eating time across all restaurants is constant or at least can be estimated?
Restaurant-queuing seems to be a cultural phenomenon associated mostly with America. It's not unusual to see a mile-long queue for a restaurant in America but in other parts of the world if there's a few waiting by the door people deem it to be busy and quickly move on to the next place.
In certain countries, especially in Europe, restaurant patrons often spend the entire evening eating dinner, i.e., there is no turnover. For those situations, queues obviously wouldn't exist. In contrast in the US, the restaurants try to encourage turnover.
Consumer Reports bases their numbers on surveys of Surface owners. Criteria from MS seems less reliable as feedback from telemetry and customers which is different.
I'm not saying that the Consumer Reports data is not trustworthy, but it's important to ascertain how the survey information is obtained. All surveys are statistical samples, and the sampling methodology necessarily biases the results. Just how much the sampled data differs from the actual target population is a necessary question.
There are two main ways in which the Consumer Reports data may depart from the actual population of all Surface owners/users: Only magazine subscribers are in the potentially sampled, and only subscribers who opt-in to respond are sampled. It's possible that these and other biases still allow relative comparisons of various Consumer Reports data, but that shouldn't necessarily be assumed as true.
I think that Consumer Reports could bolster confidence in their results with greater transparency in metrics that describe their sampling, e.g., the number of respondents for a particular result.
Similarly, the Microsoft returns data also needs to be scrutinized for sampling bias.
The average selling prices in India are far lower than in many other countries, so India still has quite a ways (i.e., many years) to catch the US in terms of revenue. See this link for some idea of the units and revenues. [The link shows stats per region, but North America is dominated by the US, and emerging Asia is dominated by India.] The average selling prices in India, China, and the US are $180, $332, and $400, respectively.
No! Are you crazy? I won't delete my Facebook account.
I'll keep it in the empty state it is now, lest someone creates one in my name and abuses it to slander me.
How does this help? Isn't it trivial to impersonate someone on Facebook, given that names are not required to be unique and identity is not verified?
quote: "The governor has certainly indicated an interest in why China can do this and not California."
Well, there's an easy answer for that: dictatorship (or at least dictatorial or authoritarian power). If Jerry Brown had dictatorial power, he could get this done today. Unfortunately, he has to contend with established law, real elections, an independent legislature, an independent judiciary with effective veto power, an independent press, and citizenry who can publicly protest.
When it comes to consciousness, intelligence and free will, the scientific state-of-the art is "nobody has a clue". Anybody actually thinking scientifically is able to live with that, but that approach is beyond a great many people. Hence they invent stupid pseudo-explanations.
Accepting that "nobody has a clue" is not scientific at all because the basis of science is questioning in a systematic manner. That some or many people believe in religion, philosophy, etc. is a direct result of the utter failure of the scientific method to produce answers to how and why the world and life exists. Many of these questions fundamentally deal with past events, and many scientific textbook statements cannot be tested by strong scientific methods, leading to dogmatic belief under the nomenclature of religion or science. How is science sometimes dogma? As an engineer, I know enough to ask about confidence in assertions, but the language of science textbooks overwhelmingly dogmatically asserts the textbook view of truth as simply true without uncertainty, i.e., dogma.
Uh, not really. White people were the customers. Islamics are the ones who made the money off the slave trade- and still are in sub-Sahara Africa.
This is mostly incorrect. Africans, including mostly non-Muslim Africans, captures slaves who were then sold to European slave traders. The traders transported the slaves to the Western Hemisphere and sold them to the eventual slave owners. The vast majority of the money made off the slave trade and slave economy went into white hands.
Tesla's ability to remotely adjust battery capacity (and other car parameters) scares me. Even though Tesla is a force for goodness and non-evilness in today's world, what happens when the company is confronted with a government request to boost capacity to zero for undesirable people? Or when the company finds that artificially decreasing capacity over time leads to greater corporate profits? Or when someone cracks the security code and starts blackmailing car owners.
Racial inequality exists because we define a person as a race and not a person. If people want to see racial inequality disappear then, IMHO at least, we should stop asking for race on applications to university and jobs.
If the problem's existence is based on human perception, then ignoring the problem may indeed make it go away. However, if there are endemic economic causes, then ignoring the problem or ceasing to ask questions about it simply makes diagnoses disappear, but the actual problems will be perpetuated.
Such as stop teaching children in school that the "white man" spread disease among the First Nations with blankets tainted with disease. The germ theory wasn't established then.
This is a diversionary strawman. I doubt that the colonial Europeans in North America were so technologically advanced to intentionally wage biological warfare. However, their ignorance doesn't eliminate culpability or the effects of the unintentional germ warfare.
White men didn't "invent" slavery, they ended it.
I'm not sure who held the first patent on slavery, but it doesn't really matter. In terms of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, white people nurtured slavery into a massive economic and social system. Of course, white people also ended slavery, because ending slavery through slave revolts is extremely rare.
Well, there's this - showing a 2007 Android phone's interface versus that of a post-iPhone Android G1:
https://www.technobuffalo.com/...
That post-iPhone photo reminds me a lot more of other then existing PDAs than the iPhone, especially looking at the row of buttons at the bottom.
Then again, the corners are more rounded, so maybe there is something to this copying idea ...
Given that the person's Tesla will have a 8 year / unlimited mileage warranty on the battery pack and drive unit....
[...]
In case you're curious, the battery packs have held up amazingly well - even in heavy service like taxi duty in harsh climates.
Wow, there are Teslas doing taxi duty in harsh climates? Can I request a Tesla for my next Uber ride? ... Yes, the Bay Area counts as a harsh climate. :)
From the ChicagoFed report:
"most contributions toward health insurance and pension plans (excluding Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) are not obligatory payments to the government and therefore are not included in the figures"
Shouldn't "what you get for your money" be part of the comparison?
The footnote quoted above was only for Section 1. The charts in Section 7 show the impact of these payments, including both direct employee payments and payments made by the company on behalf of the employee. Including these payments shows that German payments are quite a bit higher than in the US.
If this is true, it begs the question: why is the NSA looking for Satoshi? Where are the warrants to do this kind of search? This is a fairly involved process, even if the software was already written, collecting the entirety of Satoshi's writing for input is time consuming work.
As a taxpayer, there be something pretty fuckin important they need to ask Satoshi personally to justify this waste of my tax money.
Maybe finding Satoshi is as important as landing a man on the moon. The task at hand may not be that important, but developing the technology in the process yields capabilities that may prove to be significant for future tasks.
Total tax rate for average person in the US is lower than most European countries... but not by much.
A recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago that compares tax rates in the US and Germany shows that the difference is quite a bit more than "not by much". By almost any measure of tax burden (other than corporate taxes), Americans have a significantly lower tax burden.
As always, there is no free lunch (unless someone else is paying for it).
Part of what you pay an engineer to do is take responsibility for things. That's why you need a cert to call yourself a "Professional Engineer" Same concept as a bridge falling. Some technical person put his approval on it as the end-all, so that technical person takes responsibility. It's part of his/her job. I think the execs should all get smacked a little harder too, but this is fitting.
I totally agree with this as long as the engineer receives financial compensation commensurate with the legal liabilities. However, in contrast to licensed professional engineers, other engineers don't have similar compensation, liability, or certifications.
All engineers should strive to perform their duties in an ethical manner, but that's not the same as assuming liability.
Some idiot was making the same argument about petrol stations at some point as well "why these gasoline cars will require a filling station on every major thoroughfare, that will never compare to the efficiency of feeding one's horse on the grass at the roadside"...
Well, a huge number of horses can generally eat grass in parallel. The relevant analogy for electric car fueling would be setting up a very large number of superchargers so that all electric cars could charge in parallel. That would actually be one of the ways to make superchargers practical. Either the number of available stations needs to dramatically increase or the efficiency of each charger needs to dramatically increase. The third solution is to simply keep the status quo of allowing only a limited number of electric cars on the road that need superchargers.
Did you ever bother to check whether that ever happens with Superchargers? (Answer: very rarely, and for most superchargers, never). Tesla maintains market forecasts to ensure that it doesn't.
The reason that gas stations fill up is - and I can't believe I have to make this point yet again - gas cars have to detour from their everyday lives at regular intervals to go to them; EVs don't. For EVs, superchargers are only for trips.
The only reason superchargers currently work for long trips is that there are very few electric cars that need them. Take a look at truck stops on busy highways. There are often lines at those gas stations. If all cars on highways were electric, there would be huge lines at those stations. The only solutions would be to either install a huge number of superchargers (an order of magnitude more than current gas pumps) or increase the fueling efficiency of superchargers (by an order of magnitude).
90 minutes? What year is this, 2005? Supercharging is half an hour to 80%. And herp, derp, humans have to eat at some point.
Have you every seen a Costco on a Saturday afternoon or some highway truck stops during busy times? The lines are long, and that's with a 3-5 minute fill-up time. Imagine a 30-minute or even 15-minute service time. 30 minutes is a long time to wait for a fill-up, but it would be nothing compared to the much longer wait time just to get to a charging plug. If the majority of cars were electric, the only way to avoid long service station lines would be to offer a huge number of simultaneously usable charging stations. Currently we get around this problem by having only a relatively few electric cars on the road and giving those cars exclusive use of home chargers, which works because these electric cars are still mostly commute cars.
For such an "inclusive" and "tolerant" company, they sure are quite Soviet in their treatment of dissent.
Being tolerant doesn't mean rolling over and accepting absolutely everything. It's entirely reasonable to expect people to tolerate things which cause no harm. Putting forth "tolerance" as a good thing never included tolerating arbitrarily shitty behaviour.
What you just said is exactly what the Soviets and Chinese also believe. The underlying mantra is exactly the same. The only difference lies in what is considered harm, and Google's definition of harm in this case is what many people disagree with. Should publicly expressing ideas that do not toe the party line be considered harmful?
For such an "inclusive" and "tolerant" company, they sure are quite Soviet in their treatment of dissent.
Google seems to believe in free speech in the same way that China believes in free speech, i.e., freedom to express all the speech that is approved.
Perhaps the Popular Mechanics reporter is just showing what happens when previously common skills are allowed to atrophy in favor of new convenient tools. This is a common occurrence, e.g., driving a stick shift.
I still remember planning out cross-country road trips using just a road atlas. I wrote down turn-by-turn instructions along with mileage hints that I would use by mentally keeping track of the last odometer reading (back when my odometer showed tenths of miles). Because I had to actually keep alert watching out for road signs and odometer readings, I found that I actually missed fewer turns than I do now by relying solely on the GPS.