What's odd is that ECC is not routinely used in all hardware.
For a lot of systems and uses, the rate of error occurrence doesn't justify the area cost of ECC. For all fabrication processes in the last decade, error rates per SRAM bit have been decreasing faster than the increase in number of SRAM bits, meaning that the total error rates for most chip families have been decreasing. Furthermore, the vast majority of errors in SRAM never propagate to user-discernible outcomes. For these systems, the user is more interested in a lower initial price or better performance rather than a decrease in the failure rate from very infrequent to even more infrequent.
However, ECC is ubiquitous in data centers, supercomputers, control systems, and aeronautics (where the expected error rate per SRAM bit is at least two orders of magnitude higher than for terrestrial systems). For those systems, the users are willing to pay a premium for data integrity, availability, and safety.
Even if we assume that the Chinese have a backdoor into that equipment, it's better than the NSA/GCHQ having a backdoor into it.
Explain this reasoning.... how is a foreign backdoor preferable to a domestic one?
Furthermore, if you're the Germans, who do you trust the least, the Americans or the Chinese? The Germans already have over 30,000 US soldiers on its soil that it willing supports. Would the Germans be willing to do that with the Chinese? The US has been outed spying on Germans, including Merkel herself, and yet Merkel has still emphasized the importance of future US-German intelligence cooperation. Would the Germans have that same attitude toward the Chinese?
And this is only considering political and military implications. I assume that the Germans are just as concerned as the Americans about Chinese industrial espionage.
This isn't at all like buying stock based on knowledge of what a company is about to do.
This is sort of like insider stock trading in that non-public information was use for financial gain. However, it's not illegal in the same sense that insider stock trading wasn't illegal before SEC regulations made it illegal. When Kennedy made his fortune based on insider stock trading, it wasn't illegal. It only became illegal after he became the SEC head and made it illegal from that point onward.
"We're worried about our ability to stay in the neighborhood," Dixon said.
Then maybe you should allow more density. Restricting supply is a great way to make things unaffordable!
There's a reason that places like California have laws to encourage development of affordable housing, and that reason is that developers on their own will not build affordable housing unless they happen to be philanthropists. Simply building housing in non-affordable areas with no other constraints on that development often results in more units of unaffordable housing. While it's true that restricting supply often raises prices in a free, fluid market, increasing supply in constricted markets with other constraints (e.g., too many people with high incomes) may not put any downward pressure on prices.
We're talking about the list of *known* supercomputers. I'm sure various government agencies have supercomputers that are secret. In fact, it's highly probable that the most powerful in the world are not public knowledge.
Yes, absolutely. The Top-500 doesn't include systems from NSA and other US/non-US governmental agencies; corporate systems such as for oil exploration, etc.; or even some academic systems such as Blue Waters at UIUC.
The Top-500 list is mainly for governmental bragging rights, as even the non-government owned machines are largely government funded. However, this list does help to push forward the research for tackling the big problems of scalable cost, performance, power, reliability, and programmability. So, hopefully the aggregate endeavor advances the entire ocean of HPC, even if specific boats lay claim to superiority.
With regards to Chinese theft of American IP via espionage and Chinese laws that force the "lawful" handover of IP, what has Trump done? Tariffs do nothing to combat this theft. This IP theft is where China is trying to gain a competitive advantage that will last far into the future.
Thinking further about this topic, Trump's tariffs have no direct impact on Chinese theft of American IP. However, ironically Chinese retaliatory tariffs do help to blunt this theft by slightly disincentivizing American sales in China, the need to partner with Chinese companies, and the resulting required "lawful" technology transfer to Chinese companies. It's unclear which tech transfer mechanism is more helpful for the Chinese, outright theft or forced transfer via pay-to-play and forced partnership laws, but both seemed to have been helpful in the past.
China unlike Russia is real threat to us and all anyone in our government; with the occasional (and only occasional) exception being Trump cares to do anything about it.
The talking heads will cry about how important free trade is while we literally let all our industrial and defense secrets walk out the door.
Trump has imposed tariffs to try to gain more favorable import/export balances that hopefully will lead to greater US employment and economic activity. Time will tell whether this strategy will work, and it's quite possible that we'll never really know because there are other factors that affect employment and economic activity. Just as free trade results in economic winners and losers among American citizens, tariffs likewise dictate winners and losers among American citizens. There exists the possibility that the negative effects of the tariffs will outweigh the positive on a national basis.
With regards to Chinese theft of American IP via espionage and Chinese laws that force the "lawful" handover of IP, what has Trump done? Tariffs do nothing to combat this theft. This IP theft is where China is trying to gain a competitive advantage that will last far into the future.
I'll believe it when I see them actually enforcing this. Besides, the Chinese government doesn't consider it theft when they take it because they have laws that compel you to comply. Got a factory in China? Yeah, it's at least 51% owned by the Chinese so that (surprise!) they can insist that all IP be handed over.
Nothing is changing here, it's just words. The idea here is to fool Xi's US counterpart.
Exactly. Remember that on paper, China is the world's largest democracy. However, India is usually referred to as the world's largest democracy because democracy in China doesn't exist in reality.
Just as in the US, the court system is the key. Take a look at the East Texas courts for patent law. If judges always rule one way, the strongest laws don't matter. In fact, this could be a good way for China to legitimize IP theft, by leaving the imprimatur of Chinese law on IP that gets stolen and deposited in China. Before, the Chinese government could just leverage foreign greed for the mirage of Chinese markets. Now, they realize that it's better to adjudicate in their own courts and say that they are simply following established legal principles and mechanisms, i.e., IP laundering.
One of the articles in the summary said, "[China] is also increasingly being selected as a key venue for patent litigation by non-Chinese companies, as litigants feel they are treated fairly as foreign plaintiffs won the majority of their patent cases in 2015." However, that article references the Wall Street Journal which actually says, "Western lawyers say that as a result of China’s moves, the country is fairer to outsiders than a few years ago, but still far from a level playing field. Patent infringement remains rampant, and violators aren’t deterred by the small damage awards there, lawyers say. The U.S. State Department said last year that U.S. firms saw “serious obstacles” to protecting their intellectual property in China, including patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and drug-test results. The good news is China is interested in IP, and the bad news is China is interested in IP,” said Mark Cohen, who leads the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s China team."
To native speakers, I mean. I have noticed that (educated) foreigners who learnt English as a second language all too often seem to be able to write better English than native speakers. Learning English natively will give you an edge if you aspire to become a horse racing commentator for the BBC. For writing up research papers (or books) on physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, etc. not so much.
I have found that educated, non-native English speakers generally understand English very well, speak English fairly well, and write somewhat well. Grammar and diction are often challenging. For example, one very common challenge is knowing when to include an article such as "a" or "the", which is intuitive to a native speaker but is often difficult to describe precisely with a rule for those who are not linguists. I read and review a fair number of technical papers, and I have found that is it not uncommon for very intelligent authors that understand the subject matter and speak English fluently to use nonstandard grammar and diction. Of course, the general American on the street also would struggle with standard grammar and diction, but native English speakers who write technical papers generally struggle less in this regard, although this observation doesn't necessarily extend to other aspects of written composition.
The big question is how this extra detail is useful. In particular, is there any impact on the quality of navigation? I don't see how any of the examples mentioned in the article impact creation of routes. Perhaps there might be an impact in terms of choosing routing endpoints. For example, more accurate layouts for parking lots and access points might allow choosing a better destination point. However, this type of information is usually manually digested, and satellite and street-view information is probably much more detailed than even the enhanced Apple Maps information. So, it's not clear that this increased level of detail results in an improved usage scenario.
Treason is only applicable during war. We bandy that word around too much.
In the US, Article III of the Constitution says, "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."
So waging war against the US is one form of treason. The other is in "adhering to" or giving aid and comfort to the enemy. So, war is not explicitly required for all forms of treason.
Moreover, treason is often associated with sedition, and that opens up a whole broader can of worms.
The thing is, just recently LOTS of news orgs, and the government itself could find no evidence of what was reported - and both Apple and Amazon did not just give PR responses, but much stronger responses that would lead to large fines if they were lying.
Since everyone else on Earth is unable to verify the story, it's far more likely Bloomburg really screwed up.
Would Apple and Amazon be subjected to large fines if they were blatantly lying? Under what law? The SEC and stockholders/lawyers would only go after them if the stock price had been affected, and even in those cases, the fines are less than wrist-slaps. There is basically little real penalty for Apple and Amazon to vociferously deny everything. On the other hand, a less than full denial could result in a PR hit.
It's possible that Bloomberg reporters totally made up the story or substantially modified the facts. However, the barrage of corporate denials is just exactly what would be expected from these companies and doesn't provide much insight. What is much more surprising are the statements from government organizations. It's unclear what their motivations are, since there is nothing obvious to be gained by speaking up compared to saying nothing.
In the linked article, there is a button to get the full study, but downloading the study requires giving one's name, email, phone, company, and "contracts reviewed per month". Not exactly paywalled, but not exactly free.
The title of the Slashdot story says, "20 Top Lawyers Were Beaten By Legal AI", which is not true. The top AI and top human scores were identical at 94%. Furthermore, although the lowest human score was 67%, the average was 85%, indicating that the distribution is skewed toward higher human scores. There is a distribution of human scores, but just a single AI sample point, so it's not clear what the AI distribution would be.
There is also a comparison of AI vs. human time. Of course, that's a misleading comparison, similar to the misleading Jeopardy comparison from a few years back. Computers will always beat humans at text parsing and button pressing. That was true decades before AI.
The other aspect that I don't see in the article summary is whether the seeded risks were all in the AI training set or if any were deliberately left out of the training set. I'd expect the AI to do extremely well in detecting risks similar to the training set. However, I'd expect the humans to do better in risks that deviated from the training set.
The US government is in a position to do me far more harm. That's not even a joke.
The US federal government is unlikely to physically or financially harm most US citizens. The local police are also unlikely to harm most US citizens that aren't black or Hispanic, which excludes the overwhelming portion of slashdot-land. There is a non-zero probability that the federal or local government in the US may harm the typical slashdot reader, but I'd be shocked if that probability isn't orders of magnitude below 1% for the typical slashdot reader. In the US, the far more significant problem is that the government ignores too many citizens and their needs.
The Chinese government doesn't bomb people and invade nations.
The post-WWII Chinese government has historically only had minor skirmishes with the Indians, but they do have a huge number of missiles aimed at Taiwan that they promise to use to kill millions of people if these people say the wrong words. So far, the Chinese government in its short two-decade foray into imperialism has tried to restrict itself to economic imperialism because it realizes that its military buildup requires a little more time.
Their police don't murder POC on the streets.
There aren't many people of color in China, but there are Muslims that need "re-education" and, of course, this "re-education" is done off the streets. On the streets, they employ "unaffiliated" street thugs to carry out their physical intimidation and violence, similar to what the Russians do with their "unaffiliated" patriots in Ukraine.
Nobody kneels during the Chinese national anthem. All of these happen in America.
No one is stupid enough to kneel during the Chinese national anthem, and those that are so unpatriotic only make that mistake once. That this happens in the US is an indication of the tremendous difference in freedoms and rights.
Communist Party of China monitoring app is pre-installed.
So? What would the Chinese government possibly do with my data?
If my data is being uploaded to a government I'd rather have a government that's far away and has no personal interest in me. It's much better than having the NSA app preinstalled.
What could the foreign government of China do with the data of Americans? There are quite a few possibilities, including denying your visa request to visit China, punishing in various forms the Chinese and non-Chinese people that you are connected to, breaking into your accounts to observe personal and corporate information, gathering that information directly, implanting trojans to monitor and disrupt various infrastructure or financial networks, etc.
The Chinese government has absolutely no personal interest in any American on the street. However, it has a huge interest in leveraging the information and potential leverage points from any accessible American individual to gain military, political, commercial, and emotional advantages over the American nation.
TFA is based on the assumption that any consumer grade cell phone can be monitored at will by the Chinese and Russians.
This strawman argument is completely made up. This assumption never appears in the article. Instead the article says, "American spy agencies, the officials said, had learned that China and Russia were eavesdropping on the president’s cellphone calls from human sources inside foreign governments and intercepting communications between foreign officials." Of course, each reader is free to discount the competence of American intelligence agencies, like our President does.
The Chinese strategy is not to learn nuggets of classified information. Instead, "the officials said they have also determined that China is seeking to use what it is learning from the calls — how Mr. Trump thinks, what arguments tend to sway him and to whom he is inclined to listen — to keep a trade war with the United States from escalating further. In what amounts to a marriage of lobbying and espionage, the Chinese have pieced together a list of the people with whom Mr. Trump regularly speaks in hopes of using them to influence the president, the officials said."
Perhaps the most interesting idea from the article is "Russia is not believed to be running as sophisticated an influence effort as China because of Mr. Trump’s apparent affinity for President Vladimir V. Putin, a former official said." That is, Mr. Xi can only dream of being like Putin. So, instead Xi needs spy tactics to learn which Americans to taint, but Putin can talk to his American friend directly.
I'm waiting to hear how Tesla is losing money on each car it sells, such as some people have been saying around here (FALSELY) for months. If they lose money on each car they sell, how did they wildly beat all the analysts by selling more of them?
When everyone is telling you that you are wrong, sometimes it's a good idea to gain a little objectivity and at least examine the possibility that you actually are wrong.
Tesla had its best quarter in a while. Hopefully, it can continue to execute in manufacturing cars and meet future debt payments. It's not out of the wood yet, but the direction looks good. A strong, successful Tesla will be good for consumers, the car market, and even for other car companies.
However, since it's Tesla and Musk, the report stretches facts somewhat. "Model 3 was the best-selling car in the US in terms of revenue and the 5th best-selling car in terms of volume." Well, that's technically true, if you exclude the top-6(!) selling vehicles in the US. That is, if you exclude the 65-70% of the car market represented by trucks and SUVs, which are technically not cars, then the Model 3 is the top revenue seller. But, that doesn't sound as impressive, even though it actually is.
America doesn't build great infrastructure like this anymore. We're broke and getting more in debt every day.
The reason nothing is built in America is dysfunctional politics: Gridlock at the national level, combined with NIMBYism at the local level.
If something on this scale was attempted in America, we would spend $15B just on legal fees.
It's true that the American political system is not as efficient as the Chinese one. That's both good and bad. Capital-intensive projects take a long time and money in the US, which is bad. In China, grand projects like $17-billion bridges and $32-billion dams get fast-tracked, as do ghost cities and concentration camps.
The current big players in the car battery are in East Asia, with China rapidly becoming the dominant manufacturer. Some projections have China with 70% of the worldwide market within two years. With government subsidies and other cost advantages, batteries and especially EV batteries will be sourced largely from China. That other locales with cleaner energy exist won't matter that much. The question is how quickly China will ramp up their renewable energy availability. Estimates of renewable/nuclear energy production range from 20% to 50% by 2030.
Surveillance and collaborating with Chinese authorities to identify "undesirable" people is the problem. Google is being allowed to trade ratting out people in exchange for money.
That's a pretty strong claim. Got anything to support it?
From an article in The Intercept quoting Jack Poulson who probably knows a few things about Dragonfly:
"In his resignation letter, Poulson told his bosses: “Due to my conviction that dissent is fundamental to functioning democracies, I am forced to resign in order to avoid contributing to, or profiting from, the erosion of protection for dissidents.”
“I view our intent to capitulate to censorship and surveillance demands in exchange for access to the Chinese market as a forfeiture of our values and governmental negotiating position across the globe,” he wrote, adding: “There is an all-too-real possibility that other nations will attempt to leverage our actions in China in order to demand our compliance with their security demands.”
As an example of Dragonfly support for surveillance, many news outlets, such as Engadget, have claimed that Google will be forced to connect search queries with phone numbers, which will further the Chinese goal of having Google abet their surveillance. In China, phone numbers are linked to real names to avoid anonymity. Google is also likely to be required to both host their data on Chinese soil and to partner with a local Chinese firm, with both requirements intending to ensure Google compliance with Chinese demands.
Google isn't considering selling the censorship technology. Logically, any google search product can only add (however slightly) to the pool of information available to people in China. What's the sense of refusing to provide any information on the basis that they're not allowed to provide certain additional information? They already thoroughly tested whether packing up their bag and leaving would pressure China into changing laws -- it didn't.
Censorship is a red herring that Google and China hope the world focuses on. Censorship by Google in China is just a distraction, and as Google and friends would point out, any little bit of any information served up by Google technically constitutes breaking the technical censorship that Google's absence from the Chinese market represents. That such an argument makes sense to some people is literally quite perverse.
Surveillance and collaborating with Chinese authorities to identify "undesirable" people is the problem. Google is being allowed to trade ratting out people in exchange for money. That the Chinese government gets to see Google squirm with PR issues in the US is just icing on the cake.
The basic idea that eating less and raising fewer livestock animals should be beneficial for climate change is fairly intuitive. However, the numbers don't make sense, and unfortunately the Nature article is paywalled, so going off the Guardian article as a summary, how does the following statement make sense: "This flexitarian diet means the average world citizen needs to eat 75% less beef, 90% less pork and half the number of eggs.... This would halve emissions from livestock..." Assuming that eating 75-90% fewer animals results in the existence of 75-90% fewer animals, how does that reduce emissions from those animals by 50%? Do the remaining animals compensate by emitting more greenhouse gases? And why is it necessary for people in the US and UK to compensate for lower meat consumption with more beans and pulses? Lack of calories is not a prevailing problem in the US and UK. The article rightfully addresses the environmental effects of plant agriculture but doesn't discuss any of the tradeoffs of less animal farming and more plant farming. That's the interesting part, not the round numbers that are proposed and appear to be arbitrary without the underlying mathematical models.
The only interesting part about the Nature article are the details in the proposed models, which I can't see because I'm cheap and won't pay for the article.
Where did you get the idea that they were censored anyway. Maybe by using Chinese phones, but not the SIM card. The Smart and the Phone are quite distinct remember. All the SIM sees is encoded packets.
Because SIM cards act as credentials, they allow access to networks. That's why US SIM cards bypass the firewall in China and why Chinese SIM cards outside of China still censor access. The actual phone don't control access, the SIM cards do.
Once Google starts up in China, it is only a matter of time before someone accuses Google of censoring US search results to please China. It will be very hard to defend against such claims, especially as China will want something in return for allowing Google in.
Search results for Chinese roamers in the US are already censored. I doubt the Chinese care about the viewing habits of Americans. The Chinese only want two things from Google: block access to forbidden things for Chinese and rat out Chinese who are against the party.
Google will never become more than a niche player in China, they will simply not allow it.
Bing is already there.
I bet they are sipping Champagne at Duck Duck Go. Finally, a solid reason to exist.
Bing is nothing. Google is nothing. Baidu has a dominant share, and all non-Chinese search engines are bit players in China. The curious question is why the party is playing with Google at all. They will never allow Google to be a significant player in China, so why even talk to Google? Perhaps the appearance of subjugating a supposedly high-minded and powerful Western company? Perhaps the acquisition of technology that is de facto required of Western companies doing business in China?
Slashdot Mirror
What's odd is that ECC is not routinely used in all hardware.
For a lot of systems and uses, the rate of error occurrence doesn't justify the area cost of ECC. For all fabrication processes in the last decade, error rates per SRAM bit have been decreasing faster than the increase in number of SRAM bits, meaning that the total error rates for most chip families have been decreasing. Furthermore, the vast majority of errors in SRAM never propagate to user-discernible outcomes. For these systems, the user is more interested in a lower initial price or better performance rather than a decrease in the failure rate from very infrequent to even more infrequent.
However, ECC is ubiquitous in data centers, supercomputers, control systems, and aeronautics (where the expected error rate per SRAM bit is at least two orders of magnitude higher than for terrestrial systems). For those systems, the users are willing to pay a premium for data integrity, availability, and safety.
Explain this reasoning.... how is a foreign backdoor preferable to a domestic one?
Furthermore, if you're the Germans, who do you trust the least, the Americans or the Chinese? The Germans already have over 30,000 US soldiers on its soil that it willing supports. Would the Germans be willing to do that with the Chinese? The US has been outed spying on Germans, including Merkel herself, and yet Merkel has still emphasized the importance of future US-German intelligence cooperation. Would the Germans have that same attitude toward the Chinese?
And this is only considering political and military implications. I assume that the Germans are just as concerned as the Americans about Chinese industrial espionage.
This isn't at all like buying stock based on knowledge of what a company is about to do.
This is sort of like insider stock trading in that non-public information was use for financial gain. However, it's not illegal in the same sense that insider stock trading wasn't illegal before SEC regulations made it illegal. When Kennedy made his fortune based on insider stock trading, it wasn't illegal. It only became illegal after he became the SEC head and made it illegal from that point onward.
Then maybe you should allow more density. Restricting supply is a great way to make things unaffordable!
There's a reason that places like California have laws to encourage development of affordable housing, and that reason is that developers on their own will not build affordable housing unless they happen to be philanthropists. Simply building housing in non-affordable areas with no other constraints on that development often results in more units of unaffordable housing. While it's true that restricting supply often raises prices in a free, fluid market, increasing supply in constricted markets with other constraints (e.g., too many people with high incomes) may not put any downward pressure on prices.
We're talking about the list of *known* supercomputers. I'm sure various government agencies have supercomputers that are secret. In fact, it's highly probable that the most powerful in the world are not public knowledge.
Yes, absolutely. The Top-500 doesn't include systems from NSA and other US/non-US governmental agencies; corporate systems such as for oil exploration, etc.; or even some academic systems such as Blue Waters at UIUC.
The Top-500 list is mainly for governmental bragging rights, as even the non-government owned machines are largely government funded. However, this list does help to push forward the research for tackling the big problems of scalable cost, performance, power, reliability, and programmability. So, hopefully the aggregate endeavor advances the entire ocean of HPC, even if specific boats lay claim to superiority.
With regards to Chinese theft of American IP via espionage and Chinese laws that force the "lawful" handover of IP, what has Trump done? Tariffs do nothing to combat this theft. This IP theft is where China is trying to gain a competitive advantage that will last far into the future.
Thinking further about this topic, Trump's tariffs have no direct impact on Chinese theft of American IP. However, ironically Chinese retaliatory tariffs do help to blunt this theft by slightly disincentivizing American sales in China, the need to partner with Chinese companies, and the resulting required "lawful" technology transfer to Chinese companies. It's unclear which tech transfer mechanism is more helpful for the Chinese, outright theft or forced transfer via pay-to-play and forced partnership laws, but both seemed to have been helpful in the past.
China unlike Russia is real threat to us and all anyone in our government; with the occasional (and only occasional) exception being Trump cares to do anything about it.
The talking heads will cry about how important free trade is while we literally let all our industrial and defense secrets walk out the door.
Trump has imposed tariffs to try to gain more favorable import/export balances that hopefully will lead to greater US employment and economic activity. Time will tell whether this strategy will work, and it's quite possible that we'll never really know because there are other factors that affect employment and economic activity. Just as free trade results in economic winners and losers among American citizens, tariffs likewise dictate winners and losers among American citizens. There exists the possibility that the negative effects of the tariffs will outweigh the positive on a national basis.
With regards to Chinese theft of American IP via espionage and Chinese laws that force the "lawful" handover of IP, what has Trump done? Tariffs do nothing to combat this theft. This IP theft is where China is trying to gain a competitive advantage that will last far into the future.
I'll believe it when I see them actually enforcing this. Besides, the Chinese government doesn't consider it theft when they take it because they have laws that compel you to comply. Got a factory in China? Yeah, it's at least 51% owned by the Chinese so that (surprise!) they can insist that all IP be handed over.
Nothing is changing here, it's just words. The idea here is to fool Xi's US counterpart.
Exactly. Remember that on paper, China is the world's largest democracy. However, India is usually referred to as the world's largest democracy because democracy in China doesn't exist in reality.
Just as in the US, the court system is the key. Take a look at the East Texas courts for patent law. If judges always rule one way, the strongest laws don't matter. In fact, this could be a good way for China to legitimize IP theft, by leaving the imprimatur of Chinese law on IP that gets stolen and deposited in China. Before, the Chinese government could just leverage foreign greed for the mirage of Chinese markets. Now, they realize that it's better to adjudicate in their own courts and say that they are simply following established legal principles and mechanisms, i.e., IP laundering.
One of the articles in the summary said, "[China] is also increasingly being selected as a key venue for patent litigation by non-Chinese companies, as litigants feel they are treated fairly as foreign plaintiffs won the majority of their patent cases in 2015." However, that article references the Wall Street Journal which actually says, "Western lawyers say that as a result of China’s moves, the country is fairer to outsiders than a few years ago, but still far from a level playing field. Patent infringement remains rampant, and violators aren’t deterred by the small damage awards there, lawyers say. The U.S. State Department said last year that U.S. firms saw “serious obstacles” to protecting their intellectual property in China, including patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and drug-test results. The good news is China is interested in IP, and the bad news is China is interested in IP,” said Mark Cohen, who leads the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s China team."
To native speakers, I mean. I have noticed that (educated) foreigners who learnt English as a second language all too often seem to be able to write better English than native speakers. Learning English natively will give you an edge if you aspire to become a horse racing commentator for the BBC. For writing up research papers (or books) on physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, etc. not so much.
I have found that educated, non-native English speakers generally understand English very well, speak English fairly well, and write somewhat well. Grammar and diction are often challenging. For example, one very common challenge is knowing when to include an article such as "a" or "the", which is intuitive to a native speaker but is often difficult to describe precisely with a rule for those who are not linguists. I read and review a fair number of technical papers, and I have found that is it not uncommon for very intelligent authors that understand the subject matter and speak English fluently to use nonstandard grammar and diction. Of course, the general American on the street also would struggle with standard grammar and diction, but native English speakers who write technical papers generally struggle less in this regard, although this observation doesn't necessarily extend to other aspects of written composition.
The big question is how this extra detail is useful. In particular, is there any impact on the quality of navigation? I don't see how any of the examples mentioned in the article impact creation of routes. Perhaps there might be an impact in terms of choosing routing endpoints. For example, more accurate layouts for parking lots and access points might allow choosing a better destination point. However, this type of information is usually manually digested, and satellite and street-view information is probably much more detailed than even the enhanced Apple Maps information. So, it's not clear that this increased level of detail results in an improved usage scenario.
Treason is only applicable during war. We bandy that word around too much.
In the US, Article III of the Constitution says, "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."
So waging war against the US is one form of treason. The other is in "adhering to" or giving aid and comfort to the enemy. So, war is not explicitly required for all forms of treason.
Moreover, treason is often associated with sedition, and that opens up a whole broader can of worms.
The thing is, just recently LOTS of news orgs, and the government itself could find no evidence of what was reported - and both Apple and Amazon did not just give PR responses, but much stronger responses that would lead to large fines if they were lying.
Since everyone else on Earth is unable to verify the story, it's far more likely Bloomburg really screwed up.
Would Apple and Amazon be subjected to large fines if they were blatantly lying? Under what law? The SEC and stockholders/lawyers would only go after them if the stock price had been affected, and even in those cases, the fines are less than wrist-slaps. There is basically little real penalty for Apple and Amazon to vociferously deny everything. On the other hand, a less than full denial could result in a PR hit.
It's possible that Bloomberg reporters totally made up the story or substantially modified the facts. However, the barrage of corporate denials is just exactly what would be expected from these companies and doesn't provide much insight. What is much more surprising are the statements from government organizations. It's unclear what their motivations are, since there is nothing obvious to be gained by speaking up compared to saying nothing.
In the linked article, there is a button to get the full study, but downloading the study requires giving one's name, email, phone, company, and "contracts reviewed per month". Not exactly paywalled, but not exactly free.
The title of the Slashdot story says, "20 Top Lawyers Were Beaten By Legal AI", which is not true. The top AI and top human scores were identical at 94%. Furthermore, although the lowest human score was 67%, the average was 85%, indicating that the distribution is skewed toward higher human scores. There is a distribution of human scores, but just a single AI sample point, so it's not clear what the AI distribution would be.
There is also a comparison of AI vs. human time. Of course, that's a misleading comparison, similar to the misleading Jeopardy comparison from a few years back. Computers will always beat humans at text parsing and button pressing. That was true decades before AI.
The other aspect that I don't see in the article summary is whether the seeded risks were all in the AI training set or if any were deliberately left out of the training set. I'd expect the AI to do extremely well in detecting risks similar to the training set. However, I'd expect the humans to do better in risks that deviated from the training set.
The US government is in a position to do me far more harm. That's not even a joke.
The US federal government is unlikely to physically or financially harm most US citizens. The local police are also unlikely to harm most US citizens that aren't black or Hispanic, which excludes the overwhelming portion of slashdot-land. There is a non-zero probability that the federal or local government in the US may harm the typical slashdot reader, but I'd be shocked if that probability isn't orders of magnitude below 1% for the typical slashdot reader. In the US, the far more significant problem is that the government ignores too many citizens and their needs.
The Chinese government doesn't bomb people and invade nations.
The post-WWII Chinese government has historically only had minor skirmishes with the Indians, but they do have a huge number of missiles aimed at Taiwan that they promise to use to kill millions of people if these people say the wrong words. So far, the Chinese government in its short two-decade foray into imperialism has tried to restrict itself to economic imperialism because it realizes that its military buildup requires a little more time.
Their police don't murder POC on the streets.
There aren't many people of color in China, but there are Muslims that need "re-education" and, of course, this "re-education" is done off the streets. On the streets, they employ "unaffiliated" street thugs to carry out their physical intimidation and violence, similar to what the Russians do with their "unaffiliated" patriots in Ukraine.
Nobody kneels during the Chinese national anthem. All of these happen in America.
No one is stupid enough to kneel during the Chinese national anthem, and those that are so unpatriotic only make that mistake once. That this happens in the US is an indication of the tremendous difference in freedoms and rights.
Communist Party of China monitoring app is pre-installed.
So? What would the Chinese government possibly do with my data?
If my data is being uploaded to a government I'd rather have a government that's far away and has no personal interest in me. It's much better than having the NSA app preinstalled.
What could the foreign government of China do with the data of Americans? There are quite a few possibilities, including denying your visa request to visit China, punishing in various forms the Chinese and non-Chinese people that you are connected to, breaking into your accounts to observe personal and corporate information, gathering that information directly, implanting trojans to monitor and disrupt various infrastructure or financial networks, etc.
The Chinese government has absolutely no personal interest in any American on the street. However, it has a huge interest in leveraging the information and potential leverage points from any accessible American individual to gain military, political, commercial, and emotional advantages over the American nation.
TFA is based on the assumption that any consumer grade cell phone can be monitored at will by the Chinese and Russians.
This strawman argument is completely made up. This assumption never appears in the article. Instead the article says, "American spy agencies, the officials said, had learned that China and Russia were eavesdropping on the president’s cellphone calls from human sources inside foreign governments and intercepting communications between foreign officials." Of course, each reader is free to discount the competence of American intelligence agencies, like our President does.
The Chinese strategy is not to learn nuggets of classified information. Instead, "the officials said they have also determined that China is seeking to use what it is learning from the calls — how Mr. Trump thinks, what arguments tend to sway him and to whom he is inclined to listen — to keep a trade war with the United States from escalating further. In what amounts to a marriage of lobbying and espionage, the Chinese have pieced together a list of the people with whom Mr. Trump regularly speaks in hopes of using them to influence the president, the officials said."
Perhaps the most interesting idea from the article is "Russia is not believed to be running as sophisticated an influence effort as China because of Mr. Trump’s apparent affinity for President Vladimir V. Putin, a former official said." That is, Mr. Xi can only dream of being like Putin. So, instead Xi needs spy tactics to learn which Americans to taint, but Putin can talk to his American friend directly.
I'm waiting to hear how Tesla is losing money on each car it sells, such as some people have been saying around here (FALSELY) for months. If they lose money on each car they sell, how did they wildly beat all the analysts by selling more of them?
When everyone is telling you that you are wrong, sometimes it's a good idea to gain a little objectivity and at least examine the possibility that you actually are wrong.
Tesla had its best quarter in a while. Hopefully, it can continue to execute in manufacturing cars and meet future debt payments. It's not out of the wood yet, but the direction looks good. A strong, successful Tesla will be good for consumers, the car market, and even for other car companies.
However, since it's Tesla and Musk, the report stretches facts somewhat. "Model 3 was the best-selling car in the US in terms of revenue and the 5th best-selling car in terms of volume." Well, that's technically true, if you exclude the top-6(!) selling vehicles in the US. That is, if you exclude the 65-70% of the car market represented by trucks and SUVs, which are technically not cars, then the Model 3 is the top revenue seller. But, that doesn't sound as impressive, even though it actually is.
America doesn't build great infrastructure like this anymore. We're broke and getting more in debt every day.
The reason nothing is built in America is dysfunctional politics: Gridlock at the national level, combined with NIMBYism at the local level.
If something on this scale was attempted in America, we would spend $15B just on legal fees.
It's true that the American political system is not as efficient as the Chinese one. That's both good and bad. Capital-intensive projects take a long time and money in the US, which is bad. In China, grand projects like $17-billion bridges and $32-billion dams get fast-tracked, as do ghost cities and concentration camps.
The current big players in the car battery are in East Asia, with China rapidly becoming the dominant manufacturer. Some projections have China with 70% of the worldwide market within two years. With government subsidies and other cost advantages, batteries and especially EV batteries will be sourced largely from China. That other locales with cleaner energy exist won't matter that much. The question is how quickly China will ramp up their renewable energy availability. Estimates of renewable/nuclear energy production range from 20% to 50% by 2030.
Surveillance and collaborating with Chinese authorities to identify "undesirable" people is the problem. Google is being allowed to trade ratting out people in exchange for money.
That's a pretty strong claim. Got anything to support it?
From an article in The Intercept quoting Jack Poulson who probably knows a few things about Dragonfly:
As an example of Dragonfly support for surveillance, many news outlets, such as Engadget, have claimed that Google will be forced to connect search queries with phone numbers, which will further the Chinese goal of having Google abet their surveillance. In China, phone numbers are linked to real names to avoid anonymity. Google is also likely to be required to both host their data on Chinese soil and to partner with a local Chinese firm, with both requirements intending to ensure Google compliance with Chinese demands.
Google isn't considering selling the censorship technology. Logically, any google search product can only add (however slightly) to the pool of information available to people in China. What's the sense of refusing to provide any information on the basis that they're not allowed to provide certain additional information? They already thoroughly tested whether packing up their bag and leaving would pressure China into changing laws -- it didn't.
Censorship is a red herring that Google and China hope the world focuses on. Censorship by Google in China is just a distraction, and as Google and friends would point out, any little bit of any information served up by Google technically constitutes breaking the technical censorship that Google's absence from the Chinese market represents. That such an argument makes sense to some people is literally quite perverse.
Surveillance and collaborating with Chinese authorities to identify "undesirable" people is the problem. Google is being allowed to trade ratting out people in exchange for money. That the Chinese government gets to see Google squirm with PR issues in the US is just icing on the cake.
The basic idea that eating less and raising fewer livestock animals should be beneficial for climate change is fairly intuitive. However, the numbers don't make sense, and unfortunately the Nature article is paywalled, so going off the Guardian article as a summary, how does the following statement make sense: "This flexitarian diet means the average world citizen needs to eat 75% less beef, 90% less pork and half the number of eggs .... This would halve emissions from livestock ..." Assuming that eating 75-90% fewer animals results in the existence of 75-90% fewer animals, how does that reduce emissions from those animals by 50%? Do the remaining animals compensate by emitting more greenhouse gases? And why is it necessary for people in the US and UK to compensate for lower meat consumption with more beans and pulses? Lack of calories is not a prevailing problem in the US and UK. The article rightfully addresses the environmental effects of plant agriculture but doesn't discuss any of the tradeoffs of less animal farming and more plant farming. That's the interesting part, not the round numbers that are proposed and appear to be arbitrary without the underlying mathematical models.
The only interesting part about the Nature article are the details in the proposed models, which I can't see because I'm cheap and won't pay for the article.
Where did you get the idea that they were censored anyway. Maybe by using Chinese phones, but not the SIM card. The Smart and the Phone are quite distinct remember. All the SIM sees is encoded packets.
Because SIM cards act as credentials, they allow access to networks. That's why US SIM cards bypass the firewall in China and why Chinese SIM cards outside of China still censor access. The actual phone don't control access, the SIM cards do.
Not sure what you mean by "Chinese roamers".
Chinese folks with Chinese SIM cards that roam outside of China.
Once Google starts up in China, it is only a matter of time before someone accuses Google of censoring US search results to please China. It will be very hard to defend against such claims, especially as China will want something in return for allowing Google in.
Search results for Chinese roamers in the US are already censored. I doubt the Chinese care about the viewing habits of Americans. The Chinese only want two things from Google: block access to forbidden things for Chinese and rat out Chinese who are against the party.
Google will never become more than a niche player in China, they will simply not allow it.
Bing is already there.
I bet they are sipping Champagne at Duck Duck Go. Finally, a solid reason to exist.
Bing is nothing. Google is nothing. Baidu has a dominant share, and all non-Chinese search engines are bit players in China. The curious question is why the party is playing with Google at all. They will never allow Google to be a significant player in China, so why even talk to Google? Perhaps the appearance of subjugating a supposedly high-minded and powerful Western company? Perhaps the acquisition of technology that is de facto required of Western companies doing business in China?