There are even specific things that people have said about Trump:
"Every taunt back and forth between Trump and Kim Jong Un maked deescalation and diplomacy less possible" -- Ben Rhodes, via twitter
"Poll: What one thing will work with North Korea? a) Military strike (9%), b) Embargo or blockade (1%) c) A grand bargain w/China (4%) d) Trump has no idea (86%)" -- Bill Kristol, via twitter
So we're scientists here, we know that science works by making models and predicting outcomes, and when we have two models we throw one out and keep the one with the better predictions.
What indications do you have that both of the above statements/sentiments are/were wrong? I.e., that with less taunts, the negotiations wouldn't be further along, or any indication that Trump knew what he was doing with his taunts?
North Korea came to the table after they finally demonstrated that they can hit Japan with a nuclear bomb, and possibly even the US. Additionally, their testing mountain complex has become very unstable with the latest tests, so they're abandoning it (presenting that move as a token of goodwill). In other words, there is little they can gain with further "tests" and they now have what they wanted: they're a nuclear power and hence have to be treated as one at the negotiation table. Unlike Iran, for that matter.
According to the EIA, "in February 2018, for the first time in decades, all of the new generating capacity coming online within a month were non-fossil-fueled. Of the 475 MW of capacity that came online in February, 81 percent was wind, 16 percent was solar photovoltaic, and the remaining 3 percent was hydro and biomass.
Granted, the "Last Month" is wrong. It was three months ago.
I think you're missing the point - it's not about treating women and minorities with respect because of their differences - it's about NOT treating them with disrespect because of them
If that is "the point" then why doesn't it say that in the CoC?
I don't see how UBI would alter this situation: yes everyone would have a fixed, base income, but garbage collection would still be low-skill, and patent litigation would still be high-skill. If anyone wanted more than their UBI, they would need to pursue work, and low-skill work would still be the easiest entry point. All UBI would do is remove the people who just don't want to do anything at all, and are content with a basic income, from the worker pool, which, if UBI advocates are to be believed, would be a minimal amount of people. It wouldn't have any impact on the disparity between pay scales between low and high-skilled labor.
What generally happens when people get a UBI, is that they start doing things they like, which in many cases involves starting their own business. They get that possibility because they don't have to fear that it will not be economically profitable, or not sufficiently profitable in a short enough time frame. Additionally, those people can also train/retrain much more easily since they don't have to do it while holding another job.
They need to feel like a big reward is possible, even if it's practically out of reach for most people. Penalizing success to give everyone more motivation to do the bare minimum is ultimately unhealthy for most societies (beyond a certain point anyway).
Between 1950 and 1980, the US had a constant top federal income tax rate of over 70%. I'm not aware of any unhealthy effects that had. Additionally, a UBI does not mean that everyone earns the same. Everyone can earn as much as they want on top of their UBI. You do need taxes to pay for UBI, and even if you deduct the savings from having reduced poverty, getting rid of entire administrations etc, you still have a net gain from working. If that's work that you actually like, then you're more likely to do it rather than sit at home all day.
No one disputes that we should have a social safety net for the old and infirm certainly, but a universal income for even the young and healthy only encourages a type of social stagnation.
If you are guaranteed UBI why would you choose to work as a garbage collector? There is no incentive to do so.
Hence you would have to create a proper incentive. A UBI would actually turn the labour market into a real functioning market, with real bargaining power on both the supply and demand side.
Personally I'd rather be ruled over by an immortal AI dictator a la The Culture, than a hypocritical moralizing human (or group of such humans). If anything, it would be resistant to bribery and appeals to its ego.
Humans are guaranteed to die, need sleep, have limited mental capacity regarding keeping track of what others are doing (even with the help of computers), can't do everything alone and need the help from others (that may start rebelling). AIs do not necessarily have any of these limitations (at least not in a way that matters in practice; i.e., they will necessarily have limited processing power, but this could be way more than what is needed).
A ruling in Oracle's favor would shut down the ability to use Wine to run Windows-exclusive applications on your Mac
First of all, I question if this is really true. It's a different case because it presents a way for executables to make system calls that work, it's not the same as an API specific to a programming language. It is very similar, I grant you that.
99.9% of WINE is the re-implementation of Microsoft libraries, just like Google reimplemented the Java libraries. There is no difference. You could just as well call the JVM an operating system, which in several ways it is.
Also, WINE is not making any money, whereas Google has made a ton of money from Android.
Most of the WINE developers are employed by CodeWeavers, which sells a commercialised version of WINE.
Double also, Microsoft benefits from people being able to run Windows applications in more places, because it encourages more Windows development.
Microsoft is trying to transforming itself into an advertising platform. Everyone that runs Windows applications without sending in as much usage data as possible to Microsoft is a loss for Microsoft.
Lastly though, I have to say think it would be awful to lose WINE. But the question is, would it be wrong?
The "commercial/exploitation rights" part of copyright are a tool to encourage innovation and competition (at least in jurisdictions that distinguish between the moral and the exploitation rights; in the US, the whole shebang is enshrined as intended to advance the useful arts etc). I don't see how extending them to cover APIs would help that.
Also, one of those numbers you quoted (1,362) is about actually identified victims, while the 100,000 is an estimate. Estimates by definition are extrapolations of actually identified cases.
It is indeed very hard to accurately estimate the numbers. In case you're interested, here's some more background about the issue (including the fact that until December 2000, there wasn't even a generally accepted definition of "trafficking"), and numbers from various (US and other) institutions.
As for the technical (in)capacity of the Eurocrats
The Council of Ministers are not Eurocrats. The Council of Ministers is literally a collection of ministers from the national governments of the countries in the EU. Depending on the topic at hand, different ministers meet under this umbrella name.
In fact, the Council of Ministers is the one branch of the EU that is supposed to prevent the EU from being too Euro-centric and to forget about national interests. In practice, of course, national governments use it to introduce positions that are unpopular at home, so they can then blame them on the evil EU. Fortunately, it is often (but definitely not always) the European Parliament that blocks, or at least weakens these things (although I know that part of this is a political game, where extremes are introduced so that later supposed "compromises" can be reached that are still horribly bad).
I quite liked the new Ghostbusters. It wasn't the best film ever, but it felt like an actual Ghostbusters film with the same kind of zany humour and atmosphere, unlike e.g. the Crystal Skull Indiana Jones abomination. And I say that as someone who saw the first two films as a child on the big screen.
Also, if you look at the content of the negative comments for Ghostbusters on IMDB, plenty of them do seem to be from people that somehow took offence to it.
It's not that surprising since the whole "drain the swamp" mantra was just something someone in Trump's campaign team proposed as a slogan, but that Trump didn't like. He then tried it out at a meeting, discovered it caught on, and kept using it. That's what Trump himself said after the elections anyway.
Given that this is a Microsoft-sanctioned emulator that they will include with their own OS, I think you can be pretty confident it will have similar permissions.
Having an intermediate format that you statically translate into the target architecture is definitely useful (like Android is now doing with ART), but keep in mind that LLVM IR is not architecture-independent most of the time. E.g., when LLVM IR is generated from C, then this C code will at least have been compiled based on a certain pointer size, size of long, size of long long, alignments for struct fields, etc. CIL is better in this regard.
However, you should see this as a solution that will be used in an addition to running native apps, not as something you promote to do instead. It probably mainly because it seems unlikely that all, or even many, developers will start shipping tons of Windows 10 AArch64 applications right away. It's a bit like how Apple shipped Rosetta with the first Mac OS X versions for Intel Macs so they could emulate PowerPC apps (and an m68k emulator with the PowerPC versions of classic MacOS), while at the same time encouraging developers to start creating native Intel apps.
Back then it was still Dynamo. And they only managed to do that on a particular HP PA-RISC architecture, because it was very sensitive to instruction cache missers (or had a bad branch predictor?) so that creating linear traces of code was very performant. They later tried to reproduce it on x86 and failed horribly (just like I did during my master's thesis; the best I got was a 20% slowdown for gzip, I think the best they got was no performance loss with some benchmarks).
The takeaway is that simply emulating the x86 instruction set results in about a 100x slowdown for an equivalent clock rate.
Emulation definitely results in slowdowns, but it's generally much less than 100x. In particular since any emulator that focuses even slightly on performance uses dynamic compilation: it translates the code once from x86 to the host architecture and from then on runs this translation. The translated version will probably be less efficient than the original code, but by no means 100x slower. 2x to 5x seems more realistic on average, although there are certainly outliers (e.g. code that intensively mucks with system registers or that triggers context switches will be slower, while some straightforward calculation loops may actually become just as fast as or even faster than the original code depending on the target architecture's nature).
I love that people can and do undertake this type of thing. It's good for the development and improvement of the state of the art, continued research is valuable purely as research and I don't really want it to stop.
It's also so far removed from pragmatic non-academic reality that it's insane.
SYSGO is a pretty pragmatic non-academic company that has existed in reality since 1991.
Three years, and found two bugs?
Keep in mind that PikeOS was already used in automotive and avionic systems, so it was already rigorously developed and tested. It is indeed quite a testament to the quality of the product.
Let alone the obvious risks around the complexity, completeness and accuracy of a model that took so long to develop.
This model was developed exactly because existing models and theories could not be applied to real-life systems such as the PikeOS microkernel. The papers I linked earlier explicitly discuss managing the complexity.
The EAL link is interesting though, hadn't come across that before.
I hope you are not working on safety-critical systems then.
I suspect most of the systems I work on would qualify at EAL4 but the cost of demonstrating it would kill their commercial value; we'd discontinue the products rather than waste the money.
In the industries where this currently matters, it is the same: you either get your certification (this, or another one depending on the field) or you discontinue the product since you are not allowed to sell it at all (or rather: your prospective customers are not allowed to use it).
EAL7? Comically that's more likely - but only for key algorithms we develop and use. A whole system? Could take down the company..
Another part of the project was about formalising the MILS (multiple independent levels of security) architecture, which enables you to compose components certified at different levels (EAL or otherwise) in a way that does not bring everything down to the level of the least certified component.
And indeed, you will almost never certify an entire system at EAL7.
constructed a formal model of the PikeOS separation kernel
How long did this take?
The EU project lasted 3 years. Before they could model the kernel, the formal modelling guys had to extend their modelling environment. There were two guys from SYSGO (developers of PikeOS) working (very) part-time on this, two senior researchers from universities, and then some graduate students (I don't think more than two).
Did it actually add any value?
They found 1.5 bugs in PikeOS with it: 1 real bug, and one theoretical bug that could not occur in practice due to the limitations of the API in which it was found (but it was fixed anyway, since you never know whether someone might want to extend it at some point).
Additionally, formal modelling is also a requirement for higher levels of certification, which the PikeOS developers want to reach.
Would it have been quicker to just rewrite PikeOS?
Which language and what development methodology would automatically have the same results as the existing working product and its associated formal model?
Slashdot Mirror
There are even specific things that people have said about Trump:
"Every taunt back and forth between Trump and Kim Jong Un maked deescalation and diplomacy less possible" -- Ben Rhodes, via twitter
"Poll: What one thing will work with North Korea? a) Military strike (9%), b) Embargo or blockade (1%) c) A grand bargain w/China (4%) d) Trump has no idea (86%)" -- Bill Kristol, via twitter
So we're scientists here, we know that science works by making models and predicting outcomes, and when we have two models we throw one out and keep the one with the better predictions.
What indications do you have that both of the above statements/sentiments are/were wrong? I.e., that with less taunts, the negotiations wouldn't be further along, or any indication that Trump knew what he was doing with his taunts?
North Korea came to the table after they finally demonstrated that they can hit Japan with a nuclear bomb, and possibly even the US. Additionally, their testing mountain complex has become very unstable with the latest tests, so they're abandoning it (presenting that move as a token of goodwill). In other words, there is little they can gain with further "tests" and they now have what they wanted: they're a nuclear power and hence have to be treated as one at the negotiation table. Unlike Iran, for that matter.
It's in the last two sentences of the summary:
According to the EIA, "in February 2018, for the first time in decades, all of the new generating capacity coming online within a month were non-fossil-fueled. Of the 475 MW of capacity that came online in February, 81 percent was wind, 16 percent was solar photovoltaic, and the remaining 3 percent was hydro and biomass.
Granted, the "Last Month" is wrong. It was three months ago.
What does "equally welcoming" have to do with anything we are talking about?
Being disrespectful because of people's race/gender/etc is not welcoming to said people.
I think you're missing the point - it's not about treating women and minorities with respect because of their differences - it's about NOT treating them with disrespect because of them
If that is "the point" then why doesn't it say that in the CoC?
It does. It says to be equally welcoming to everyone.
I don't see how UBI would alter this situation: yes everyone would have a fixed, base income, but garbage collection would still be low-skill, and patent litigation would still be high-skill. If anyone wanted more than their UBI, they would need to pursue work, and low-skill work would still be the easiest entry point. All UBI would do is remove the people who just don't want to do anything at all, and are content with a basic income, from the worker pool, which, if UBI advocates are to be believed, would be a minimal amount of people. It wouldn't have any impact on the disparity between pay scales between low and high-skilled labor.
What generally happens when people get a UBI, is that they start doing things they like, which in many cases involves starting their own business. They get that possibility because they don't have to fear that it will not be economically profitable, or not sufficiently profitable in a short enough time frame. Additionally, those people can also train/retrain much more easily since they don't have to do it while holding another job.
...is still communism.
This is not communism.
They need to feel like a big reward is possible, even if it's practically out of reach for most people. Penalizing success to give everyone more motivation to do the bare minimum is ultimately unhealthy for most societies (beyond a certain point anyway).
Between 1950 and 1980, the US had a constant top federal income tax rate of over 70%. I'm not aware of any unhealthy effects that had. Additionally, a UBI does not mean that everyone earns the same. Everyone can earn as much as they want on top of their UBI. You do need taxes to pay for UBI, and even if you deduct the savings from having reduced poverty, getting rid of entire administrations etc, you still have a net gain from working. If that's work that you actually like, then you're more likely to do it rather than sit at home all day.
No one disputes that we should have a social safety net for the old and infirm certainly, but a universal income for even the young and healthy only encourages a type of social stagnation.
Actually, that's not what happens in practice.
If you are guaranteed UBI why would you choose to work as a garbage collector? There is no incentive to do so.
Hence you would have to create a proper incentive. A UBI would actually turn the labour market into a real functioning market, with real bargaining power on both the supply and demand side.
Or, in other words, "Why garbage collectors should earn more than bankers".
Personally I'd rather be ruled over by an immortal AI dictator a la The Culture, than a hypocritical moralizing human (or group of such humans). If anything, it would be resistant to bribery and appeals to its ego.
Humans are guaranteed to die, need sleep, have limited mental capacity regarding keeping track of what others are doing (even with the help of computers), can't do everything alone and need the help from others (that may start rebelling). AIs do not necessarily have any of these limitations (at least not in a way that matters in practice; i.e., they will necessarily have limited processing power, but this could be way more than what is needed).
A ruling in Oracle's favor would shut down the ability to use Wine to run Windows-exclusive applications on your Mac
First of all, I question if this is really true. It's a different case because it presents a way for executables to make system calls that work, it's not the same as an API specific to a programming language. It is very similar, I grant you that.
99.9% of WINE is the re-implementation of Microsoft libraries, just like Google reimplemented the Java libraries. There is no difference. You could just as well call the JVM an operating system, which in several ways it is.
Also, WINE is not making any money, whereas Google has made a ton of money from Android.
Most of the WINE developers are employed by CodeWeavers, which sells a commercialised version of WINE.
Double also, Microsoft benefits from people being able to run Windows applications in more places, because it encourages more Windows development.
Microsoft is trying to transforming itself into an advertising platform. Everyone that runs Windows applications without sending in as much usage data as possible to Microsoft is a loss for Microsoft.
Lastly though, I have to say think it would be awful to lose WINE. But the question is, would it be wrong?
The "commercial/exploitation rights" part of copyright are a tool to encourage innovation and competition (at least in jurisdictions that distinguish between the moral and the exploitation rights; in the US, the whole shebang is enshrined as intended to advance the useful arts etc). I don't see how extending them to cover APIs would help that.
It can even run macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) (the current latest version).
At least already in the US.
Also, one of those numbers you quoted (1,362) is about actually identified victims, while the 100,000 is an estimate. Estimates by definition are extrapolations of actually identified cases.
It is indeed very hard to accurately estimate the numbers. In case you're interested, here's some more background about the issue (including the fact that until December 2000, there wasn't even a generally accepted definition of "trafficking"), and numbers from various (US and other) institutions.
Every notice how you never or rarely heard of sex trafficking before yet starting a few years ago
Not really, even if you limit yourself to the US and "modern day history".
As for the technical (in)capacity of the Eurocrats
The Council of Ministers are not Eurocrats. The Council of Ministers is literally a collection of ministers from the national governments of the countries in the EU. Depending on the topic at hand, different ministers meet under this umbrella name.
In fact, the Council of Ministers is the one branch of the EU that is supposed to prevent the EU from being too Euro-centric and to forget about national interests. In practice, of course, national governments use it to introduce positions that are unpopular at home, so they can then blame them on the evil EU. Fortunately, it is often (but definitely not always) the European Parliament that blocks, or at least weakens these things (although I know that part of this is a political game, where extremes are introduced so that later supposed "compromises" can be reached that are still horribly bad).
I quite liked the new Ghostbusters. It wasn't the best film ever, but it felt like an actual Ghostbusters film with the same kind of zany humour and atmosphere, unlike e.g. the Crystal Skull Indiana Jones abomination. And I say that as someone who saw the first two films as a child on the big screen.
Also, if you look at the content of the negative comments for Ghostbusters on IMDB, plenty of them do seem to be from people that somehow took offence to it.
It's not that surprising since the whole "drain the swamp" mantra was just something someone in Trump's campaign team proposed as a slogan, but that Trump didn't like. He then tried it out at a meeting, discovered it caught on, and kept using it. That's what Trump himself said after the elections anyway.
When I read "Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld ran a UBI program" I thought, ok, this is it.
Here's a more thorough description of that attempt and why it was prematurely aborted. It's really sad that opportunity was missed...
Given that this is a Microsoft-sanctioned emulator that they will include with their own OS, I think you can be pretty confident it will have similar permissions.
Having an intermediate format that you statically translate into the target architecture is definitely useful (like Android is now doing with ART), but keep in mind that LLVM IR is not architecture-independent most of the time. E.g., when LLVM IR is generated from C, then this C code will at least have been compiled based on a certain pointer size, size of long, size of long long, alignments for struct fields, etc. CIL is better in this regard.
However, you should see this as a solution that will be used in an addition to running native apps, not as something you promote to do instead. It probably mainly because it seems unlikely that all, or even many, developers will start shipping tons of Windows 10 AArch64 applications right away. It's a bit like how Apple shipped Rosetta with the first Mac OS X versions for Intel Macs so they could emulate PowerPC apps (and an m68k emulator with the PowerPC versions of classic MacOS), while at the same time encouraging developers to start creating native Intel apps.
That only means you have to mark the pages containing the code you just generated read-only once you're done.
Back then it was still Dynamo. And they only managed to do that on a particular HP PA-RISC architecture, because it was very sensitive to instruction cache missers (or had a bad branch predictor?) so that creating linear traces of code was very performant. They later tried to reproduce it on x86 and failed horribly (just like I did during my master's thesis; the best I got was a 20% slowdown for gzip, I think the best they got was no performance loss with some benchmarks).
The takeaway is that simply emulating the x86 instruction set results in about a 100x slowdown for an equivalent clock rate.
Emulation definitely results in slowdowns, but it's generally much less than 100x. In particular since any emulator that focuses even slightly on performance uses dynamic compilation: it translates the code once from x86 to the host architecture and from then on runs this translation. The translated version will probably be less efficient than the original code, but by no means 100x slower. 2x to 5x seems more realistic on average, although there are certainly outliers (e.g. code that intensively mucks with system registers or that triggers context switches will be slower, while some straightforward calculation loops may actually become just as fast as or even faster than the original code depending on the target architecture's nature).
I love that people can and do undertake this type of thing. It's good for the development and improvement of the state of the art, continued research is valuable purely as research and I don't really want it to stop.
It's also so far removed from pragmatic non-academic reality that it's insane.
SYSGO is a pretty pragmatic non-academic company that has existed in reality since 1991.
Three years, and found two bugs?
Keep in mind that PikeOS was already used in automotive and avionic systems, so it was already rigorously developed and tested. It is indeed quite a testament to the quality of the product.
Let alone the obvious risks around the complexity, completeness and accuracy of a model that took so long to develop.
This model was developed exactly because existing models and theories could not be applied to real-life systems such as the PikeOS microkernel. The papers I linked earlier explicitly discuss managing the complexity.
The EAL link is interesting though, hadn't come across that before.
I hope you are not working on safety-critical systems then.
I suspect most of the systems I work on would qualify at EAL4 but the cost of demonstrating it would kill their commercial value; we'd discontinue the products rather than waste the money.
In the industries where this currently matters, it is the same: you either get your certification (this, or another one depending on the field) or you discontinue the product since you are not allowed to sell it at all (or rather: your prospective customers are not allowed to use it).
EAL7? Comically that's more likely - but only for key algorithms we develop and use. A whole system? Could take down the company..
Another part of the project was about formalising the MILS (multiple independent levels of security) architecture, which enables you to compose components certified at different levels (EAL or otherwise) in a way that does not bring everything down to the level of the least certified component.
And indeed, you will almost never certify an entire system at EAL7.
constructed a formal model of the PikeOS separation kernel
How long did this take?
The EU project lasted 3 years. Before they could model the kernel, the formal modelling guys had to extend their modelling environment. There were two guys from SYSGO (developers of PikeOS) working (very) part-time on this, two senior researchers from universities, and then some graduate students (I don't think more than two).
Did it actually add any value?
They found 1.5 bugs in PikeOS with it: 1 real bug, and one theoretical bug that could not occur in practice due to the limitations of the API in which it was found (but it was fixed anyway, since you never know whether someone might want to extend it at some point).
Additionally, formal modelling is also a requirement for higher levels of certification, which the PikeOS developers want to reach.
Would it have been quicker to just rewrite PikeOS?
Which language and what development methodology would automatically have the same results as the existing working product and its associated formal model?