But what are those principles that disallow working with the US government but allow working with the Chinese government?
They cancelled their plan to work with China though. They thought about it, did a bit of prototyping to see what it would be like, and decided it was unethical.
Has Dragonfly been canceled? I haven't seen any news to suggest that. The quote I see is
We've been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from developing Android, through mobile apps such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our developer tools," said a Google representative in an emailed statement. "But our work on search has been exploratory, and we are not close to launching a search product in China.
That says that the project has not been canceled and that work is proceeding as before.
If the project had been truly canceled, it would have made headlines, as that would have necessarily meant that Google was once again pulling out of the huge Chinese market. That would have induced material stock market waves. So, obviously the project has not been canceled.
"We are not bidding on the JEDI contract because first, we couldn't be assured that it would align with our AI Principles," a Google spokesman said in a statement.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with sticking to your principles. But what are those principles that disallow working with the US government but allow working with the Chinese government? I wish Google would expound on those principles, because they might be righteous and moralistic. Or they might be principles based on maximum profit. I wouldn't be surprised if the profits from Dragonfly (and the ability to operate in China) dwarf the slice of the $10 billion JEDI Google might have been contemplating.
"And second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications."
That sounds weird. So get those certifications or hire people with those certifications. Google can't get certified to work with the US government, but they have no problems getting certified to work with the Chinese government.
Google's PR department needs an upgrade. These "reasons" don't make Google look that great.
who challenge that we cannot possibly rebuilt the connection of spine to spine, or even to brain, its worth remembering that the spine and brain are only 100 billion neurons, and a synaptic vesicle is only 50 nanometers.
to put this into perspective, Ryzen's 8 core architecture is 40 billion transistors. the fabrication feature size is only 14 nanometers. At some point in the future a very important question will arise, and that is, whether we care to continue using a broken spinal cord, or simply replace it altogether.
I also hope that we can someday rehabilitate, repair, and replace nerves. However, while we can build new circuit devices with small dimensions and separations, we don't even bother to repair such circuits because it's such a hard problem. We just throw away the bad circuits. It's the splicing that's hard for chips or nerves. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to see spliced nerves before spliced chips. However, either spliced chips or nerves would be a tremendous breakthrough.
You're just really biased against discussions of policy, so you presume the word "political" is a bad word. Here, it is a literally informative word to discuss the difference between the mathematical and human-opinion aspects. It doesn't imply that the parents are being unreasonable; rather, it implies that the concerns of the parents are actually more important than whatever math they used, because of the nature of the problem.
My advice, stop telling politician jokes, that's probably what poisoned your well.
I don't believe I'm the only one who attaches negative connotations to the word "political". The word may denote matters of policy, but I doubt that's the common perception of the word, aside from political science majors. Politics in American daily usage clearly has negative connotations. If interpersonal relationships, verbal communication, or social discourse was the intended meaning, better words should have been chosen. But politics is a negative word, and not because I said so.
More importantly, the word politics distracts from the core problem of the issue, i.e., that the architects of the software problem incorrectly specified the goals and parameters of the issue. The problem was not one of policy. Perhaps there should have been better communication between parents and the school, but the onus is on the school to drive that communication.
As for bias, yes, of course, I'm biased, because I'm alive and thinking. Only dead people are unbiased. There are those that prefer to perceive of themselves as unbiased, but objectivity is the claim of liars and fools.
What about providing optimal bus routes without changing start times? Or what about factoring in a cost for changing start times to only do so when the new start time makes a huge difference in the bussing cost? They just need to take into account the political cost of moving start times as another set of parameters.
The goal was to make things easier for humans, so characterizing the reaction to the negative, unintended impacts on humans as "political" is not only lazy but misdirected. Is the word "political" is intended to convey the idea that the parents are unreasonable? At what point of human inconvenience would be the human pushback transition from "political" to an understandable, natural, and expected human response? What if the start times had been staggered to be 24/7? If a 24/7 staggering would have been unreasonable, why would a 2-hour window staggering be less unreasonable?
It's clear that the problem was in the specification of the engineering task. The engineers did what they were told. The parents reacted in the expected and understandable way. The superintendent and those who specified the allowed start time changes were at fault. If a pejorative needed to be synthetically invented to smear someone, the pejorative should be targeted at them. Although in this case, no pejorative is needed.
> Emails demanding deletion of the memo contained "pixel trackers" that notified human resource managers when their messages had been read, recipients determined.
How's it feel to have the shoe on the other foot?
So, the Google employees that disabled auto loading/rendering of inline pictures should have plausible deniability in saying that they never read the HR message.
Surreptitiously monitoring employees is creepy. Intentionally censoring searches is contemptible. Ratting out users is collaboration.
Where'd we get the idea we can tell other countries how to run their own affairs?
We, the US government, have no direct ability to force other counties to behave according to our dictates, absent a military war.
We, the US government, have the same rights as all other counties to express our opinions concerning what we consider to be proper behavior. Furthermore, the ability of any country to inhibit the free speech of other counties is an encroachment on the internal affairs of those other countries.
We, the esteemed contributors to Slashdot, obviously have the right to express our personal opinions concerning what other countries are doing right or wrong.
Personal absence of sin is not a requirement to criticize others, but the perpetrators of gross sin would like it to be otherwise so that they can continue their sins in peace. It would be horrific to imagine the past and current horrors perpetrated by countries, businesses, and people that would still exist without the forceful criticism of those who were all less than perfectly moral.
I don't care, because anything else that Google could have done would have made no difference, or would have made things worse.
I don't know what Google could do differently to help the cause of human rights in China. I don't see how staying out of the Chinese market could make things worse.
Corporations are required to obey the laws of the countries in which they do business. So Google's only alternative would have been to cutback services, and leave the market to competitors that would have been even more compliant.
Right. Staying out of the market was what they had been doing. They saw the loss of revenue as being more important than being complicit in human rights violations. This type of action is motivated by a need to increase revenue to boost stock prices/bonuses, despite already huge revenues and profits.
American corporations are not going to "fix" China, and it is silly to expect them to try. That is not their purpose, and they wouldn't make a difference even if they tried.
That's a dangerous way to look at morality. We're not talking about selling hamburgers or something else that doesn't directly abet human rights violations. It's not even so much the abetting of propaganda through the firewall that is so dangerous, it's the collection and transfer of information to identify people who entered illegal terms in their search queries. Given the willingness of the current Chinese regime to hand out life changing/ending punishments, collecting and handing over this information is tantamount to programming a drone to kill people. The main differences are that Dragonfly will likely earn Google much more than the paltry $10 millions from Maven and that Dragonfly will likely kill more people than Maven.
The Chinese may be on a trajectory to mimic the historical Japanese leap from cheap copycats to innovators and technology leaders. However, that hasn't happened yet and is not guaranteed to happen. The absolute number of academic papers isn't very interesting as the number publication venues have exploded much faster than the number of top conferences. The modest increase in the number of Chinese-authored papers in top conferences is much more impressive than the increase in the total number of papers in all conferences.
If the Chinese were truly interested in raising their international academic publishing profile, they should thinking about SEO-like ways to increase their citation rankings. Top conferences tends to be gated by self-interested incumbents that not only tend to crowd out new Chinese authors but also new non-Chinese authors. In contrast, citation rankings are guarded by algorithms and not a cadre of self-selected experts.
Should passes be given for tests, reports, and projects?
Reasonable accommodations are made for tests. Extra time, etc. The purpose of a test i to assess knowledge. If someone doesn't speak English, giving them in a test in English is pretty useless.
True, reasonable accommodations can often be extended without impeding the development or teaching of the core ideas. However, if the class is an English class, then testing in any language other than English defeats the purpose of the test. If the class is a communications class that teaches oral communication, then testing in any other media defeats the purpose of the test. If the class is a basketball skills class, then testing without a basketball defeats the purpose of the class.
It sounds good, but who defines "extremist content" or worse "incites acts of terrorism". It might be clear to you and me what this would be, but how about if you don't agree with what people say who are in control of this definition?
Exactly. Unfortunately, even among mostly reasonable people, there exists a wide range of views regarding what constitutes extremism. In the hands of dictators (e.g., Russia, Turkey, and China), extremism or terrorism is defined as whatever challenges the existing dictator or party. This type of censorship law allows those dictators to claim that they are acting exactly like the so-called democratic governments.
More seriously, tests, reports, and lab projects are huge stress-inducers, often prompting even more anxiety than oral presentations. Should passes be given for tests, reports, and projects? School is about learning things that are not already mastered and are usually challenging, which causes stress, anxiety, and frustration in most people.
If there is a true need to excuse students from major requirements, then the grade report should reflect the excuse. If the excused activity doesn't affect grades, then the activity can be considered optional. However, if grades are affected, then giving full credit for an excused activity directly penalizes other students. In that case, the choice is no longer solely whether to excuse a student but rather whether to penalize the excused student or to penalize the other students.
Although the above underlined sentence above contains ideas mentioned in the article, the summary doesn't reflect what the author wrote and instead conveys a meaning that is very different from the article.
From the article: "Morton, who left his role as Seagate's CFO to join Tesla, was not flustered by the tweet [about privatization] and met with Musk to go over various details that would make a take-private difficult. He brought up specific details such as equity change of control provisions and potential step-ups in the value of Tesla's debt associated with a new controlling shareholder. Musk and other executives didn't seem to care about the various financial obstacles, which concerned Morton."
Then only after all this, "When Morton offered advice about capitalizing the company through other means rather than going private, he was ignored."
These missing parts paint a very different picture of the reason for Morton's departure. From the article, Morton is painted much more positively and Musk and Tesla in a much less positive light.
This isn't some new behavior for Google - just an expansion of an already existing program. Google has been collecting your off-line purchases for years now.
Allowing third parties to view my financial transactions feels to me as violating as putting a camera in my home. Even if a trusted friend or relative were the only viewer of the camera footage, that would be extremely creepy. If a for-profit corporation controlled the camera, that would be an outrage. Why is the viewing of non-anonymized financial transactions legal and ostensibly tolerable? Because politicians are easy to bribe (excuse me, educate via legal financial expenditures). Because we are impotent to do anything about it, absent using cash exclusively.
If it hadn't been clear before, it should be clear that "do no evil" is only possible when the meaning of evil is re-engineered.
Is this a suggestion that the Chinese government is willing to allow Google some leeway or breaks in their implementation of the firewall?
Yes. The GFWOC is much less monolithic than you seem to believe.
Have you ever been to China? You seem to have some naive ideas about how things work there.
Disclaimer: I have an ulterior motive for wanting Google back in China: Baidu's English language search engine sucks.
Yes, I have been to China. But I have to admit to not being courageous enough try searching for any forbidden words, so I don't know from experience if the alleged forbidden words are myth or reality. Have you ever tried searching for any forbidden words?
I admit to not being privy to the rules of the firewall. I also don't know what monolithic means with regards to a firewall. Are you suggesting there isn't a set of rules regarding what is allowed? (Not said sarcastically...) It would be useful if you could help educate me and others on this topic.
American corporations are not going to "fix" China. That is up to the Chinese people,
No, it will be up to the Chinese government. The people don't have a say in this.
and at least for now they consider their rapidly rising standard of living to be a reasonable tradeoff for the CCP's censorship.
No, they acknowledge their inability to protest the censorship and surveillance and instead attempt low-keyed mitigation (e.g., VPNs) or are simply resigned to their situation. There is no tradeoff because there is no decision to be made.
Google can play a positive role in China, and it is better for them to engage than to leave the market to companies like Baidu that will be even more compliant censors.
I'm not sure why Baidu would be a more strict censor. Is this a suggestion that the Chinese government is willing to allow Google some leeway or breaks in their implementation of the firewall? The Chinese government seeks to strengthen local businesses, so this decision to allow Google as a competitor isn't consistent with their usual strategy. The only reasons for the Chinese government to allow Google into their market are to exert some measure of control over Google, to gain observability into Google technology, and perhaps to hold up Google as a trophy head (i.e., see, even the vaunted Google will kneel and obey our wishes because we can use our market to exert power over them).
I don't know the answer to this question, but would a self-driving car helped the mom and daughter? If the 100mph murder car is trying to hit a self-driving car, would the self-driving car be able to react quickly enough to avoid the murder car in all cases, by swerving and hitting the brakes? If the victim car could swerve enough to turn the head-on crash into an offset crash, would the victims have survived? Or, would the offset crash have been even worse?
None of this is any of our business. Whether those people are happy or unhappy working there, the only things that might legitimately concern those of us without AMZN-stock, is: "are they there voluntarily?"
Until you can no longer legally quit your job for some reason, your not leaving is proof, the job-conditions are Ok.
Nothing to see here, move along.
The private lives of the employees are their own personal lives. Amazon is a private company and can make its own decisions. However, how Amazon operates affects the lives of the people in the surrounding communities. If Amazon employees are underpaid, they place greater burdens on government programs, much as Walmart workers have, with resulting impacts on tax rates and societal impacts on communities, families, schools, etc. If Amazon employees are injured on the job without adequate health coverage, then the government-run health and workers compensation programs will be burdened, again with associated tax and societal impacts. If Amazon pays its employees less than they would have received from other jobs, then the local tax base decreases.
This is not to say that government should dictate to Amazon how to operate their business. However, because Amazon's way of doing business significantly impacts the community, the community should be able to voice their concerns.
The slashdot title stated the most sensational part of the study, but the summary left out the single-most important statement in the entire study:
"The level of alcohol consumption that minimised harm across health outcomes was zero (95% UI 00–08) standard drinks per week."
This statement is at odds with some studies and the hopes of many recreational drinkers. However, there have been other meta-studies that have found that studies that find a health benefit from moderate drinking often aggregate teetotalers due to religion/philosophy with teetotalers due to illness.
You are partially correct. Since "protecting one's reputation is legal", it is not possible to try a person for violating campaign law.
Well, protecting one's reputation is legal in general. However, protecting one's reputation is legal using some means and illegal using other means. For example, it's illegal to kill someone under the guise of protecting one's reputation. Similarly, it's also illegal to violate campaign finance laws under the guise of protecting one's reputation.
"Apparently in violation of campaign finance laws" I'm confused how paying off Denials was part of Trumps political campaign any more then any of the payments Bill Cosby made to those he was trying to keep silent. I mean, isn't 'protection your reputation' something you can do at any time regardless of running for public office?
The obvious answer to that question is no. Campaign finance laws exist. One could argue that those laws are unreasonable and should be changed, but they currently exist, and therefore there are legal sanctions for violating those laws.
Yes, protecting one's reputation is legal as part of electioneering. The potential problem for the President is that the combination of protecting one's reputation coupled with money used for that purpose is subject to campaign finance laws. If max contribution limits are exceeded or proper reporting is not followed, then there are problems. We'll see if there is evidence of the breaking of any campaign finance laws.
Probability doesn't figure into success nearly as much as determination and hard work.
The bit about the NBA is a straw man argument; to paraphrase a thing I heard once, you can't teach yourself to be 7ft tall.
In technology, if you're reasonably bright and determined and work your ass off over years or decades to build a resume that checks all the boxes of your dream job... you'll get it. Degree or not.
Your comment about the NBA and height is the exact right way to think about this. Hard work and determination are often helpful but are just a few of many factors that determine success. The factors that are controlled by a particular individual are combined with physical, institutional, and other non-directly controllable factors to determine success. There are institutional biases (gender, age, race, height, religion, politics, skin color, accent, and on and on) that are often much more determinant than determination and hard work. And education is one of those biases.
It's not that probability determines success but rather describes the likelihood of success. For each of these factors for success, there is a true population statistic, and the historical numbers associated with those factors are estimators for those statistics. While estimators based on past history have sampling error, the confidence intervals can be calculated. Hoping that the true population statistics are not reflected in the historical data is denial.
Finally, it's not "anecdotally possible." It's my reality.
Yes, your reality is actual truth. However, it's one sample from the population, from which we can gather much more data to get a truer picture of the true population.
Don't sell yourself (or anyone else) on a narrative where you can't do anything significant without a degree.
What is the probability of getting a job at Apple without a degree? What is the probability based on sampling recent hires? What is the probability based on expected future hires. I know it's anecdotally possible, but is it likely? It's also possible to get a job as an athlete in the NBA, but it's abysmally improbable. Encouraging young people to shoot for improbable success is irresponsible.
Slashdot Mirror
But what are those principles that disallow working with the US government but allow working with the Chinese government?
They cancelled their plan to work with China though. They thought about it, did a bit of prototyping to see what it would be like, and decided it was unethical.
Has Dragonfly been canceled? I haven't seen any news to suggest that. The quote I see is
That says that the project has not been canceled and that work is proceeding as before.
If the project had been truly canceled, it would have made headlines, as that would have necessarily meant that Google was once again pulling out of the huge Chinese market. That would have induced material stock market waves. So, obviously the project has not been canceled.
"We are not bidding on the JEDI contract because first, we couldn't be assured that it would align with our AI Principles," a Google spokesman said in a statement.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with sticking to your principles. But what are those principles that disallow working with the US government but allow working with the Chinese government? I wish Google would expound on those principles, because they might be righteous and moralistic. Or they might be principles based on maximum profit. I wouldn't be surprised if the profits from Dragonfly (and the ability to operate in China) dwarf the slice of the $10 billion JEDI Google might have been contemplating.
"And second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications."
That sounds weird. So get those certifications or hire people with those certifications. Google can't get certified to work with the US government, but they have no problems getting certified to work with the Chinese government.
Google's PR department needs an upgrade. These "reasons" don't make Google look that great.
who challenge that we cannot possibly rebuilt the connection of spine to spine, or even to brain, its worth remembering that the spine and brain are only 100 billion neurons, and a synaptic vesicle is only 50 nanometers.
to put this into perspective, Ryzen's 8 core architecture is 40 billion transistors. the fabrication feature size is only 14 nanometers. At some point in the future a very important question will arise, and that is, whether we care to continue using a broken spinal cord, or simply replace it altogether.
I also hope that we can someday rehabilitate, repair, and replace nerves. However, while we can build new circuit devices with small dimensions and separations, we don't even bother to repair such circuits because it's such a hard problem. We just throw away the bad circuits. It's the splicing that's hard for chips or nerves. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to see spliced nerves before spliced chips. However, either spliced chips or nerves would be a tremendous breakthrough.
You're just really biased against discussions of policy, so you presume the word "political" is a bad word. Here, it is a literally informative word to discuss the difference between the mathematical and human-opinion aspects. It doesn't imply that the parents are being unreasonable; rather, it implies that the concerns of the parents are actually more important than whatever math they used, because of the nature of the problem.
My advice, stop telling politician jokes, that's probably what poisoned your well.
I don't believe I'm the only one who attaches negative connotations to the word "political". The word may denote matters of policy, but I doubt that's the common perception of the word, aside from political science majors. Politics in American daily usage clearly has negative connotations. If interpersonal relationships, verbal communication, or social discourse was the intended meaning, better words should have been chosen. But politics is a negative word, and not because I said so.
More importantly, the word politics distracts from the core problem of the issue, i.e., that the architects of the software problem incorrectly specified the goals and parameters of the issue. The problem was not one of policy. Perhaps there should have been better communication between parents and the school, but the onus is on the school to drive that communication.
As for bias, yes, of course, I'm biased, because I'm alive and thinking. Only dead people are unbiased. There are those that prefer to perceive of themselves as unbiased, but objectivity is the claim of liars and fools.
What about providing optimal bus routes without changing start times? Or what about factoring in a cost for changing start times to only do so when the new start time makes a huge difference in the bussing cost? They just need to take into account the political cost of moving start times as another set of parameters.
The goal was to make things easier for humans, so characterizing the reaction to the negative, unintended impacts on humans as "political" is not only lazy but misdirected. Is the word "political" is intended to convey the idea that the parents are unreasonable? At what point of human inconvenience would be the human pushback transition from "political" to an understandable, natural, and expected human response? What if the start times had been staggered to be 24/7? If a 24/7 staggering would have been unreasonable, why would a 2-hour window staggering be less unreasonable?
It's clear that the problem was in the specification of the engineering task. The engineers did what they were told. The parents reacted in the expected and understandable way. The superintendent and those who specified the allowed start time changes were at fault. If a pejorative needed to be synthetically invented to smear someone, the pejorative should be targeted at them. Although in this case, no pejorative is needed.
> Emails demanding deletion of the memo contained "pixel trackers" that notified human resource managers when their messages had been read, recipients determined.
How's it feel to have the shoe on the other foot?
So, the Google employees that disabled auto loading/rendering of inline pictures should have plausible deniability in saying that they never read the HR message.
Surreptitiously monitoring employees is creepy.
Intentionally censoring searches is contemptible.
Ratting out users is collaboration.
Where'd we get the idea we can tell other countries how to run their own affairs?
We, the US government, have no direct ability to force other counties to behave according to our dictates, absent a military war.
We, the US government, have the same rights as all other counties to express our opinions concerning what we consider to be proper behavior. Furthermore, the ability of any country to inhibit the free speech of other counties is an encroachment on the internal affairs of those other countries.
We, the esteemed contributors to Slashdot, obviously have the right to express our personal opinions concerning what other countries are doing right or wrong.
Personal absence of sin is not a requirement to criticize others, but the perpetrators of gross sin would like it to be otherwise so that they can continue their sins in peace. It would be horrific to imagine the past and current horrors perpetrated by countries, businesses, and people that would still exist without the forceful criticism of those who were all less than perfectly moral.
I don't care, because anything else that Google could have done would have made no difference, or would have made things worse.
I don't know what Google could do differently to help the cause of human rights in China. I don't see how staying out of the Chinese market could make things worse.
Corporations are required to obey the laws of the countries in which they do business. So Google's only alternative would have been to cutback services, and leave the market to competitors that would have been even more compliant.
Right. Staying out of the market was what they had been doing. They saw the loss of revenue as being more important than being complicit in human rights violations. This type of action is motivated by a need to increase revenue to boost stock prices/bonuses, despite already huge revenues and profits.
American corporations are not going to "fix" China, and it is silly to expect them to try. That is not their purpose, and they wouldn't make a difference even if they tried.
That's a dangerous way to look at morality. We're not talking about selling hamburgers or something else that doesn't directly abet human rights violations. It's not even so much the abetting of propaganda through the firewall that is so dangerous, it's the collection and transfer of information to identify people who entered illegal terms in their search queries. Given the willingness of the current Chinese regime to hand out life changing/ending punishments, collecting and handing over this information is tantamount to programming a drone to kill people. The main differences are that Dragonfly will likely earn Google much more than the paltry $10 millions from Maven and that Dragonfly will likely kill more people than Maven.
The Chinese may be on a trajectory to mimic the historical Japanese leap from cheap copycats to innovators and technology leaders. However, that hasn't happened yet and is not guaranteed to happen. The absolute number of academic papers isn't very interesting as the number publication venues have exploded much faster than the number of top conferences. The modest increase in the number of Chinese-authored papers in top conferences is much more impressive than the increase in the total number of papers in all conferences.
If the Chinese were truly interested in raising their international academic publishing profile, they should thinking about SEO-like ways to increase their citation rankings. Top conferences tends to be gated by self-interested incumbents that not only tend to crowd out new Chinese authors but also new non-Chinese authors. In contrast, citation rankings are guarded by algorithms and not a cadre of self-selected experts.
Reasonable accommodations are made for tests. Extra time, etc. The purpose of a test i to assess knowledge. If someone doesn't speak English, giving them in a test in English is pretty useless.
True, reasonable accommodations can often be extended without impeding the development or teaching of the core ideas. However, if the class is an English class, then testing in any language other than English defeats the purpose of the test. If the class is a communications class that teaches oral communication, then testing in any other media defeats the purpose of the test. If the class is a basketball skills class, then testing without a basketball defeats the purpose of the class.
It sounds good, but who defines "extremist content" or worse "incites acts of terrorism". It might be clear to you and me what this would be, but how about if you don't agree with what people say who are in control of this definition?
Exactly. Unfortunately, even among mostly reasonable people, there exists a wide range of views regarding what constitutes extremism. In the hands of dictators (e.g., Russia, Turkey, and China), extremism or terrorism is defined as whatever challenges the existing dictator or party. This type of censorship law allows those dictators to claim that they are acting exactly like the so-called democratic governments.
I have grade anxiety.
Give me an "A" or I'll cry.
More seriously, tests, reports, and lab projects are huge stress-inducers, often prompting even more anxiety than oral presentations. Should passes be given for tests, reports, and projects? School is about learning things that are not already mastered and are usually challenging, which causes stress, anxiety, and frustration in most people.
If there is a true need to excuse students from major requirements, then the grade report should reflect the excuse. If the excused activity doesn't affect grades, then the activity can be considered optional. However, if grades are affected, then giving full credit for an excused activity directly penalizes other students. In that case, the choice is no longer solely whether to excuse a student but rather whether to penalize the excused student or to penalize the other students.
Morton left because he was a privatization expert for a company no longer looking at going private, and felt nobody cared about his privatization ideas anyway.
Although the above underlined sentence above contains ideas mentioned in the article, the summary doesn't reflect what the author wrote and instead conveys a meaning that is very different from the article.
From the article: "Morton, who left his role as Seagate's CFO to join Tesla, was not flustered by the tweet [about privatization] and met with Musk to go over various details that would make a take-private difficult. He brought up specific details such as equity change of control provisions and potential step-ups in the value of Tesla's debt associated with a new controlling shareholder. Musk and other executives didn't seem to care about the various financial obstacles, which concerned Morton."
Then only after all this, "When Morton offered advice about capitalizing the company through other means rather than going private, he was ignored."
These missing parts paint a very different picture of the reason for Morton's departure. From the article, Morton is painted much more positively and Musk and Tesla in a much less positive light.
This isn't some new behavior for Google - just an expansion of an already existing program. Google has been collecting your off-line purchases for years now.
Allowing third parties to view my financial transactions feels to me as violating as putting a camera in my home. Even if a trusted friend or relative were the only viewer of the camera footage, that would be extremely creepy. If a for-profit corporation controlled the camera, that would be an outrage. Why is the viewing of non-anonymized financial transactions legal and ostensibly tolerable? Because politicians are easy to bribe (excuse me, educate via legal financial expenditures). Because we are impotent to do anything about it, absent using cash exclusively.
If it hadn't been clear before, it should be clear that "do no evil" is only possible when the meaning of evil is re-engineered.
Is this a suggestion that the Chinese government is willing to allow Google some leeway or breaks in their implementation of the firewall?
Yes. The GFWOC is much less monolithic than you seem to believe.
Have you ever been to China? You seem to have some naive ideas about how things work there.
Disclaimer: I have an ulterior motive for wanting Google back in China: Baidu's English language search engine sucks.
Yes, I have been to China. But I have to admit to not being courageous enough try searching for any forbidden words, so I don't know from experience if the alleged forbidden words are myth or reality. Have you ever tried searching for any forbidden words?
I admit to not being privy to the rules of the firewall. I also don't know what monolithic means with regards to a firewall. Are you suggesting there isn't a set of rules regarding what is allowed? (Not said sarcastically ...) It would be useful if you could help educate me and others on this topic.
American corporations are not going to "fix" China. That is up to the Chinese people,
No, it will be up to the Chinese government. The people don't have a say in this.
and at least for now they consider their rapidly rising standard of living to be a reasonable tradeoff for the CCP's censorship.
No, they acknowledge their inability to protest the censorship and surveillance and instead attempt low-keyed mitigation (e.g., VPNs) or are simply resigned to their situation. There is no tradeoff because there is no decision to be made.
Google can play a positive role in China, and it is better for them to engage than to leave the market to companies like Baidu that will be even more compliant censors.
I'm not sure why Baidu would be a more strict censor. Is this a suggestion that the Chinese government is willing to allow Google some leeway or breaks in their implementation of the firewall? The Chinese government seeks to strengthen local businesses, so this decision to allow Google as a competitor isn't consistent with their usual strategy. The only reasons for the Chinese government to allow Google into their market are to exert some measure of control over Google, to gain observability into Google technology, and perhaps to hold up Google as a trophy head (i.e., see, even the vaunted Google will kneel and obey our wishes because we can use our market to exert power over them).
I don't know the answer to this question, but would a self-driving car helped the mom and daughter? If the 100mph murder car is trying to hit a self-driving car, would the self-driving car be able to react quickly enough to avoid the murder car in all cases, by swerving and hitting the brakes? If the victim car could swerve enough to turn the head-on crash into an offset crash, would the victims have survived? Or, would the offset crash have been even worse?
If Amazon employees are underpaid, they place greater burdens on government programs...
Do you mean underpaid based on the work being performed, or underpaid based on how much money they need to live?
The latter. Underpaid to the extent that they need government subsidies.
None of this is any of our business. Whether those people are happy or unhappy working there, the only things that might legitimately concern those of us without AMZN-stock, is: "are they there voluntarily?"
Until you can no longer legally quit your job for some reason, your not leaving is proof, the job-conditions are Ok.
Nothing to see here, move along.
The private lives of the employees are their own personal lives. Amazon is a private company and can make its own decisions. However, how Amazon operates affects the lives of the people in the surrounding communities. If Amazon employees are underpaid, they place greater burdens on government programs, much as Walmart workers have, with resulting impacts on tax rates and societal impacts on communities, families, schools, etc. If Amazon employees are injured on the job without adequate health coverage, then the government-run health and workers compensation programs will be burdened, again with associated tax and societal impacts. If Amazon pays its employees less than they would have received from other jobs, then the local tax base decreases.
This is not to say that government should dictate to Amazon how to operate their business. However, because Amazon's way of doing business significantly impacts the community, the community should be able to voice their concerns.
The slashdot title stated the most sensational part of the study, but the summary left out the single-most important statement in the entire study:
"The level of alcohol consumption that minimised harm across health outcomes was zero (95% UI 00–08) standard drinks per week."
This statement is at odds with some studies and the hopes of many recreational drinkers. However, there have been other meta-studies that have found that studies that find a health benefit from moderate drinking often aggregate teetotalers due to religion/philosophy with teetotalers due to illness.
You are partially correct. Since "protecting one's reputation is legal", it is not possible to try a person for violating campaign law.
Well, protecting one's reputation is legal in general. However, protecting one's reputation is legal using some means and illegal using other means. For example, it's illegal to kill someone under the guise of protecting one's reputation. Similarly, it's also illegal to violate campaign finance laws under the guise of protecting one's reputation.
Not if he also had other legitimate reasons for paying the hush money. An FEC violation requires the election motivation to be the sole purpose.
Is this true? If so, it seems like a really easy, huge loophole that pretty much guts the entire idea of campaign finance limits.
"Apparently in violation of campaign finance laws"
I'm confused how paying off Denials was part of Trumps political campaign any more then any of the payments Bill Cosby made to those he was trying to keep silent. I mean, isn't 'protection your reputation' something you can do at any time regardless of running for public office?
The obvious answer to that question is no. Campaign finance laws exist. One could argue that those laws are unreasonable and should be changed, but they currently exist, and therefore there are legal sanctions for violating those laws.
Yes, protecting one's reputation is legal as part of electioneering. The potential problem for the President is that the combination of protecting one's reputation coupled with money used for that purpose is subject to campaign finance laws. If max contribution limits are exceeded or proper reporting is not followed, then there are problems. We'll see if there is evidence of the breaking of any campaign finance laws.
Probability doesn't figure into success nearly as much as determination and hard work.
The bit about the NBA is a straw man argument; to paraphrase a thing I heard once, you can't teach yourself to be 7ft tall.
In technology, if you're reasonably bright and determined and work your ass off over years or decades to build a resume that checks all the boxes of your dream job... you'll get it. Degree or not.
Your comment about the NBA and height is the exact right way to think about this. Hard work and determination are often helpful but are just a few of many factors that determine success. The factors that are controlled by a particular individual are combined with physical, institutional, and other non-directly controllable factors to determine success. There are institutional biases (gender, age, race, height, religion, politics, skin color, accent, and on and on) that are often much more determinant than determination and hard work. And education is one of those biases.
It's not that probability determines success but rather describes the likelihood of success. For each of these factors for success, there is a true population statistic, and the historical numbers associated with those factors are estimators for those statistics. While estimators based on past history have sampling error, the confidence intervals can be calculated. Hoping that the true population statistics are not reflected in the historical data is denial.
Finally, it's not "anecdotally possible." It's my reality.
Yes, your reality is actual truth. However, it's one sample from the population, from which we can gather much more data to get a truer picture of the true population.
Don't sell yourself (or anyone else) on a narrative where you can't do anything significant without a degree.
What is the probability of getting a job at Apple without a degree? What is the probability based on sampling recent hires? What is the probability based on expected future hires. I know it's anecdotally possible, but is it likely? It's also possible to get a job as an athlete in the NBA, but it's abysmally improbable. Encouraging young people to shoot for improbable success is irresponsible.