Exactly. 5G is a marketing ploy, just like 4g and 3g were. I still use GPRS, and guess what? It's fine - all my favourite WAP sites are lightning still fast. When I get home I plug my phone into a UTP patch cable which connects to the Internet via my private T1. More bandwidth than I'll ever need.
The Chinese can keep their fake "5G" technology - maybe it will help them with their fake space program and so-called manufacturing industry.
Buying gear for a game character is no different to buying a decorative phone case. People see it and say (or think) oh, that looks nice. You see it every time you get your phone out and think, oh, that's *my* phone with the case I chose.
If you play a game two hours a night why not pay to customise it to look a certain way?
The fact that the phone case has some plastic material with some notional retained value is irrelevant. The resale value of a phone case is basically zero, and it will become useless when you inevitable upgrade your phone to a different sized one.
Being a lawyer can't be regulated, because there's also no hard purchase component. There's just me giving advice. Hey, I'm a lawyer! Yeah, I'll write you a contract. It might be low quality, but hey, caveat emptor. You can't regulate opinions and ideas, and that contract is just my ideas in writing!
You can regulate AI just like you can regulate legal advice, or financial advice, or banking. An AI tool is a 'thing' just as much as a financial instrument is or a legal contract is, or a medical diagnosis is. Law, medicine and finance are regulated because it turned out that a free for all in those fields didn't really make the world a better place.
Why regulate AI and not every bit of software ever? Because some software (like the firmware in a car) has major consequences if it's badly made, and some software, like facial recognition in a city-wide CCTV system also has major consequences if it's badly made.
Whatever I can legally do myself, I should be able to legally use a tool to do. Using tools to make it easier to do things that we already do manually is an important part of the essence of being human.
So, because you can phone someone up and ask them if they want a new vacuum cleaner, you think auto-diallers should be unregulated?
Because you can travel by foot from A to B, you should be able to use a tool like a helicopter to do so too, without any regulation around that?
Because I can sit on my front lawn and write in a notebook anyone I recognise walking down my street, there should be no regulation about using a camera and AI to auto-post to a public blog the names of everyone walking down my street, all day every day?
It's an English font
No, it's a French font. One that describes characters invented in what is now Italy, and which were adopted by most European (and all Western European) languages in favour of their original writing systems.
There is nothing particularly English about the characters used to write English
It's annoying but it's been a growing trend for a long time. Android phone makers are far worse in shipping unremovable random software. I remember years ago being infuriated that Linux distributions started shipping huge amounts of software as compulsory installed components (and even more as default options), while OSes like Solaris would still default to a minimal base install.
Having a system assume you want Python installed is less annoying than one assuming you want Candy Crush installed, but only marginally.
I think this thread explains the situation perfectly. All the potential users of Dropbox on Linux already know that:
1. Dropbox doesn't hire good developers or else this would be a non-issue 2. Dropbox are trying to back door the system, and if not show us the source and prove it.
That reduces their possible audience of happy customers to 8,000, all of whom are on corporate Linux deployments in Germany aren't aren't allowed to install Dropbox anyway.
Meanwhile: 1. Dropbox works really well. 2. WSL already.
I'm not sure the layout of a city 1600 years later and in another continent is *all* that relevant.
In the eternal dilemma of whether to believe 'article on internet' and 'commenter on article on internet' I shall have to put my faith in the former.
Dr Dirk Schmitz from the Roman-Germanic Museum of Cologne may have no idea what he's talking about, but if that's the case he's done well to blag the job.
Good to see Slackware is still going, it was the first distro I installed. Nothing wrong with BSD style init, but I always thought Sys V style was better, and only a little more complicated. I've no idea what systemd is, as I stopped playing with computers long ago:)
A protester posts lots of information publicly on social media. Then someone else uses that to build a profile of them and to try to demonstrate that they are likely to commit trespass etc.
I fail to see why this is surprising or interesting. No-one has breached anyone's privacy. It's no different from a PI following what you do in public - like meeting your intern for a drink in a secluded wine bar - and then reporting back to parties (like your spouse) who might want to act on that information.
Hint to protesters - if you are doing something vaguely clandestine or not-entirely-legal maybe don't put your whole life on social media. Just a tip.
"It seems like an important detail missing from the article is what the causes of death are"
The paper explicitly looks at all-cause mortality (ie, it doesn't differentiate causes of death), and mentions that additional studies that do look at causes of death would be beneficial.
The usual problem is that as you start dividing populations up by more factors, the population groups get a bit small for valid statistics. Remember they've already removed a range on confounding factors to find populations who differ only by the type of work they do. Remember also this is a meta-analysis and they are reliant on the original underlying studies recording mortality in ways that are both adequately detailed, and reasonably consistent across studies.
Have you read the paper? No you haven't. Because the paper raises all the issues you have. Only better, in more detail, with some facts and numbers. Because you know, *science*
I re-read Consider Phlebas quite recently, and it shows its age. Sure, it's still a fun space-opera style romp with some nicely imagined scenarios, but the main characters are all a bit 80s action movie. I actually think it would work much better staying true to the era than trying to update it to be a thoughtful subtle modern drama.
Well, The FTC is looking at Qualcomm and South Korea and China have also fined them for breaking rules on anti-competitive behaviour.
If you want to trade in the EU, read the rules and stick to them or get fined. Don't like the rules? Don't have to sell there.
The actual issue is that qualcom is cementing a market dominant position. If a tiny start up had agreed an exclusivity deal with Apple, that would not have broken the rules.
And since when do military services need to bribe each other with a briefcase full of cash to get up-to-date satellite intelligence?
All the time! Services and agencies are not only constantly competing with each other for limited resources, they also like to try and undermine each other by deliberately not sharing intelligence.
Not sure/. id length is a great measure of age, but I remember Hong Kong and Taiwan as the 'low quality' manufacturing base - cheap injection moulded toys, that kind of thing. Japan were seen as high quality precision manufacturers in the early 80s - to the point where British companies would adopt Japanese sounding brand names for their electronic products (Saisho springs to mind). Pentax, Fuji, and Sony, Toshiba were seen as quality brands.
China has performed the remarkable feat of retaining it's low cost low quality manufacturing base at the same time as building a very competitive high quality manufacturing sector.
Oh, and it's the EU so energy saving light-bulbs are mandatory.
No they aren't. They were going to ban them in 2012, and then they were going to have another go in 2016, but they are still available in high street shops. You might struggle to find them in a supermarket or department store though, you need to go to a proper lighting supplier or electrical shop.
That said, most people in their homes now have non-incandescent lamps for regular lighting. Things like the lights in ovens are still incandescent and you can still get replacement bulbs.
Modern ones use the latent heat of condensation to warm incoming air, saving on electricity. They are about twice as efficient in power terms as a 'normal' dryer, although they do take longer to dry clothes.
I know little about anchoring turbines, but I've never moored a boat with four anchors in my life - and removable boat anchors are much less reliable than permanent mooring systems.
I'm all in favour of redundancy, but it's not the only solution to making things safe. I've flown in many single-engine aircraft, and I've driven over plenty of bridges which will fall down if any one of their pillars collapses.
how is google showing up in a google search abuse? Will they fine Amazon for having amazon sales show up in amazon search?
Amazon doesn't have market dominance in search, so that's not relevant.
Suppose that 90% of all washing machines sold in the EU were Bosch washing machines. They would have market dominance.
Then, suppose Bosch announced that you would void your warranty unless you used Bosch branded detergent. That would be an abuse of dominant market position - muscling in on the detergent market by leveraging dominance in washing machines.
Google is being accused of muscling in on the price-comparison market by leveraging the dominance in internet website search.
Imagine if Google decided to get into the used car business, an all of a sudden searches for "used 2010 Hondo Civic" returned results from Google dealers at the top, and other dealers a surprisingly long way down. That would be seen by many as abuse of market position.
You could argue that in a free market, people will just stop using Google to search, and will start looking for new cars in Bing, and order will be restored to the world. Many people in Europe have less faith in the market's ability to just correct these sorts of things.
Java is mainly large enterprise back end systems, and some android, and quite a lot of embedded stuff (nominally what it was invented for), and, worryingly, quite a lot of client side GUI stuff.
C++ is used for legacy systems and where you need speed.
C is used where you need speed, have simple programs and memory constraints, and old fashioned unix software.
C# is for windows programming and.net
Javascript is for browser programming and Node, and some general scripting, where someone has used it as their system's internal scripting language (see also lua)
PHP is used for relatively simple web stuff, because it's easy and works and has wide library support
Python is used for what PHP is by better developers, and has brilliant maths libraries so is increasingly used for anything maths related where esoteric things like matlab and R and F# are unhelpfully niche.
Haskell is used for academic curiosity, and some maths stuff.
Perl is dying out, but is still used for unix automation a fair bit.
"Engineering, leadership, R&D, sales and customer support -- those are roles that don't lend themselves very well to remote work."
There's little point leaders being in the office if the people they are meant to be leading work from home...
I find remote working useless for what I do, which is mainly getting people to talk to each other. It's far easier when people are all in the office to make them sit down and talk it out.
Developer productivity is tricky. Some devs really do struggle with open plan offices (although many don't). The problem is that what is efficient in terms of correctly working code tends to be inefficient in terms of code that was worth writing in the first place. Most waste in software comes from writing functionality that no-one actually wanted. Avoiding that requires a fair bit of communication.
"But my point was that men and women are different and they both have their strengths and weaknesses"
Quite possibly, but we don't really know what those are. Men do seem to be stronger than women, and women do seem to live for longer, but that's about it. Beyond that we are stuck in a loop, whereby we can't judge any 'natural' differences because of the societal differences already in place. We might think "men are on average better at science-y maths stuff" but there's no evidence for that assertion that doesn't just as well support the assertion "women are discouraged by society from learning about or practicing science-y maths stuff".
25 years ago, people would have said that women, in general, are unsuited to medicine because it requires too much hard science. And yet most doctors in Russia are women, and most newly qualified doctors in the UK are women.
Most of the qualities we care about are not observable.
I don't have a CS degree, and few than 50% of people my age (mid 40s) in the industry do (in the UK). Few of the most technically impressive senior people I've met had CS degrees, and only about half of them had technical degrees.
When I hire developers, I don't require ANY degree, much less a CS degree. What I require is the ability to write software.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. 5G is a marketing ploy, just like 4g and 3g were. I still use GPRS, and guess what? It's fine - all my favourite WAP sites are lightning still fast. When I get home I plug my phone into a UTP patch cable which connects to the Internet via my private T1. More bandwidth than I'll ever need.
The Chinese can keep their fake "5G" technology - maybe it will help them with their fake space program and so-called manufacturing industry.
Buying gear for a game character is no different to buying a decorative phone case. People see it and say (or think) oh, that looks nice. You see it every time you get your phone out and think, oh, that's *my* phone with the case I chose.
If you play a game two hours a night why not pay to customise it to look a certain way?
The fact that the phone case has some plastic material with some notional retained value is irrelevant. The resale value of a phone case is basically zero, and it will become useless when you inevitable upgrade your phone to a different sized one.
Being a lawyer can't be regulated, because there's also no hard purchase component. There's just me giving advice. Hey, I'm a lawyer! Yeah, I'll write you a contract. It might be low quality, but hey, caveat emptor. You can't regulate opinions and ideas, and that contract is just my ideas in writing!
You can regulate AI just like you can regulate legal advice, or financial advice, or banking. An AI tool is a 'thing' just as much as a financial instrument is or a legal contract is, or a medical diagnosis is. Law, medicine and finance are regulated because it turned out that a free for all in those fields didn't really make the world a better place.
Why regulate AI and not every bit of software ever? Because some software (like the firmware in a car) has major consequences if it's badly made, and some software, like facial recognition in a city-wide CCTV system also has major consequences if it's badly made.
So, because you can phone someone up and ask them if they want a new vacuum cleaner, you think auto-diallers should be unregulated?
Because you can travel by foot from A to B, you should be able to use a tool like a helicopter to do so too, without any regulation around that?
Because I can sit on my front lawn and write in a notebook anyone I recognise walking down my street, there should be no regulation about using a camera and AI to auto-post to a public blog the names of everyone walking down my street, all day every day?
It's an English font No, it's a French font. One that describes characters invented in what is now Italy, and which were adopted by most European (and all Western European) languages in favour of their original writing systems. There is nothing particularly English about the characters used to write English
It's annoying but it's been a growing trend for a long time. Android phone makers are far worse in shipping unremovable random software. I remember years ago being infuriated that Linux distributions started shipping huge amounts of software as compulsory installed components (and even more as default options), while OSes like Solaris would still default to a minimal base install.
Having a system assume you want Python installed is less annoying than one assuming you want Candy Crush installed, but only marginally.
Anyway, it's an unstoppable trend.
I think this thread explains the situation perfectly. All the potential users of Dropbox on Linux already know that:
1. Dropbox doesn't hire good developers or else this would be a non-issue
2. Dropbox are trying to back door the system, and if not show us the source and prove it.
That reduces their possible audience of happy customers to 8,000, all of whom are on corporate Linux deployments in Germany aren't aren't allowed to install Dropbox anyway.
Meanwhile:
1. Dropbox works really well.
2. WSL already.
I'm not sure the layout of a city 1600 years later and in another continent is *all* that relevant.
In the eternal dilemma of whether to believe 'article on internet' and 'commenter on article on internet' I shall have to put my faith in the former.
Dr Dirk Schmitz from the Roman-Germanic Museum of Cologne may have no idea what he's talking about, but if that's the case he's done well to blag the job.
Good to see Slackware is still going, it was the first distro I installed. Nothing wrong with BSD style init, but I always thought Sys V style was better, and only a little more complicated. I've no idea what systemd is, as I stopped playing with computers long ago :)
So...
A protester posts lots of information publicly on social media. Then someone else uses that to build a profile of them and to try to demonstrate that they are likely to commit trespass etc.
I fail to see why this is surprising or interesting. No-one has breached anyone's privacy. It's no different from a PI following what you do in public - like meeting your intern for a drink in a secluded wine bar - and then reporting back to parties (like your spouse) who might want to act on that information.
Hint to protesters - if you are doing something vaguely clandestine or not-entirely-legal maybe don't put your whole life on social media. Just a tip.
"It seems like an important detail missing from the article is what the causes of death are"
The paper explicitly looks at all-cause mortality (ie, it doesn't differentiate causes of death), and mentions that additional studies that do look at causes of death would be beneficial.
The usual problem is that as you start dividing populations up by more factors, the population groups get a bit small for valid statistics. Remember they've already removed a range on confounding factors to find populations who differ only by the type of work they do. Remember also this is a meta-analysis and they are reliant on the original underlying studies recording mortality in ways that are both adequately detailed, and reasonably consistent across studies.
Have you read the paper? No you haven't. Because the paper raises all the issues you have. Only better, in more detail, with some facts and numbers. Because you know, *science*
"Concentrated calories like carbs / sugar, are the devil"
How are carbs concentrated calories?? Butter has twice the calories per gram as refined sugar.
I re-read Consider Phlebas quite recently, and it shows its age. Sure, it's still a fun space-opera style romp with some nicely imagined scenarios, but the main characters are all a bit 80s action movie. I actually think it would work much better staying true to the era than trying to update it to be a thoughtful subtle modern drama.
Well, The FTC is looking at Qualcomm and South Korea and China have also fined them for breaking rules on anti-competitive behaviour.
If you want to trade in the EU, read the rules and stick to them or get fined. Don't like the rules? Don't have to sell there.
The actual issue is that qualcom is cementing a market dominant position. If a tiny start up had agreed an exclusivity deal with Apple, that would not have broken the rules.
And since when do military services need to bribe each other with a briefcase full of cash to get up-to-date satellite intelligence?
All the time! Services and agencies are not only constantly competing with each other for limited resources, they also like to try and undermine each other by deliberately not sharing intelligence.
Not sure /. id length is a great measure of age, but I remember Hong Kong and Taiwan as the 'low quality' manufacturing base - cheap injection moulded toys, that kind of thing. Japan were seen as high quality precision manufacturers in the early 80s - to the point where British companies would adopt Japanese sounding brand names for their electronic products (Saisho springs to mind). Pentax, Fuji, and Sony, Toshiba were seen as quality brands.
China has performed the remarkable feat of retaining it's low cost low quality manufacturing base at the same time as building a very competitive high quality manufacturing sector.
Oh, and it's the EU so energy saving light-bulbs are mandatory.
No they aren't. They were going to ban them in 2012, and then they were going to have another go in 2016, but they are still available in high street shops. You might struggle to find them in a supermarket or department store though, you need to go to a proper lighting supplier or electrical shop.
That said, most people in their homes now have non-incandescent lamps for regular lighting. Things like the lights in ovens are still incandescent and you can still get replacement bulbs.
Modern ones use the latent heat of condensation to warm incoming air, saving on electricity. They are about twice as efficient in power terms as a 'normal' dryer, although they do take longer to dry clothes.
I know little about anchoring turbines, but I've never moored a boat with four anchors in my life - and removable boat anchors are much less reliable than permanent mooring systems.
I'm all in favour of redundancy, but it's not the only solution to making things safe. I've flown in many single-engine aircraft, and I've driven over plenty of bridges which will fall down if any one of their pillars collapses.
how is google showing up in a google search abuse? Will they fine Amazon for having amazon sales show up in amazon search?
Amazon doesn't have market dominance in search, so that's not relevant.
Suppose that 90% of all washing machines sold in the EU were Bosch washing machines. They would have market dominance.
Then, suppose Bosch announced that you would void your warranty unless you used Bosch branded detergent. That would be an abuse of dominant market position - muscling in on the detergent market by leveraging dominance in washing machines.
Google is being accused of muscling in on the price-comparison market by leveraging the dominance in internet website search.
Imagine if Google decided to get into the used car business, an all of a sudden searches for "used 2010 Hondo Civic" returned results from Google dealers at the top, and other dealers a surprisingly long way down. That would be seen by many as abuse of market position.
You could argue that in a free market, people will just stop using Google to search, and will start looking for new cars in Bing, and order will be restored to the world. Many people in Europe have less faith in the market's ability to just correct these sorts of things.
Java is mainly large enterprise back end systems, and some android, and quite a lot of embedded stuff (nominally what it was invented for), and, worryingly, quite a lot of client side GUI stuff.
C++ is used for legacy systems and where you need speed.
C is used where you need speed, have simple programs and memory constraints, and old fashioned unix software.
C# is for windows programming and .net
Javascript is for browser programming and Node, and some general scripting, where someone has used it as their system's internal scripting language (see also lua)
PHP is used for relatively simple web stuff, because it's easy and works and has wide library support
Python is used for what PHP is by better developers, and has brilliant maths libraries so is increasingly used for anything maths related where esoteric things like matlab and R and F# are unhelpfully niche.
Haskell is used for academic curiosity, and some maths stuff.
Perl is dying out, but is still used for unix automation a fair bit.
"Engineering, leadership, R&D, sales and customer support -- those are roles that don't lend themselves very well to remote work."
There's little point leaders being in the office if the people they are meant to be leading work from home...
I find remote working useless for what I do, which is mainly getting people to talk to each other. It's far easier when people are all in the office to make them sit down and talk it out.
Developer productivity is tricky. Some devs really do struggle with open plan offices (although many don't). The problem is that what is efficient in terms of correctly working code tends to be inefficient in terms of code that was worth writing in the first place. Most waste in software comes from writing functionality that no-one actually wanted. Avoiding that requires a fair bit of communication.
"But my point was that men and women are different and they both have their strengths and weaknesses"
Quite possibly, but we don't really know what those are. Men do seem to be stronger than women, and women do seem to live for longer, but that's about it. Beyond that we are stuck in a loop, whereby we can't judge any 'natural' differences because of the societal differences already in place. We might think "men are on average better at science-y maths stuff" but there's no evidence for that assertion that doesn't just as well support the assertion "women are discouraged by society from learning about or practicing science-y maths stuff".
25 years ago, people would have said that women, in general, are unsuited to medicine because it requires too much hard science. And yet most doctors in Russia are women, and most newly qualified doctors in the UK are women.
Most of the qualities we care about are not observable.
I don't have a CS degree, and few than 50% of people my age (mid 40s) in the industry do (in the UK). Few of the most technically impressive senior people I've met had CS degrees, and only about half of them had technical degrees.
When I hire developers, I don't require ANY degree, much less a CS degree. What I require is the ability to write software.