It's not what it has to do, it's what it has to avoid doing. I believe the applicable quote is "Don't be evil.".
That said, Google has rarely been very evil. A lot of people seem to dislike them purely because they are large and successful, but for me that's not sufficient reason to call them evil. It is sufficient to be hesitant about trusting them. Someone who's extremely powerful can harm you without even noticing.
Sorry, but ever since reading about a developer who was across the room while his laptop exploded while charging *I've* considered them dangerous. If you want to say that charging your laptop is "misuse or abuse", then I have to think you are asserting the batteries are worthless.
Some people have said "There must have been a manufacturing defect.". This is a reasonable hypothesis, but since as a user I have no way of detecting such a defect that doesn't remove them from the dangerous category.
To say the battery exploding is a low probability event is something I could accept without problem, but that doesn't mean they aren't dangerous, just that they aren't *likely* to cause damage...and I have no good way of estimating the probability. For some reason manufacturers are pretty quiet about this, and how much could you trust what they say anyway in a case like this. Admitting possible culpability would put them squarely in the sites of lots of fire insurance companies.
By the time they could build a "good enough" body, you wouldn't want it. For a brain in a computer virtual reality could be better than any actual reality could be. For one thing the "actual reality" signals that were fed into your brain would be via the exact same channels that the virtual reality signals would use.
Upper management may be responsible for strategy, but they shouldn't be the strategist. They should know and be able to evaluate the strategist. The strategist DOES need to know the subject area well...as well as the lowest level of manager, and over a much wider area of what the company does. It shouldn't be a part time job of someone who also manages the company.
Now clearly, everything I've said only applies if there are multiple layers of management. And the important part is how far is top management (as in layers of management) from the actual work. It's the actual work that is primary, without it the company couldn't exist. Without management the company wouldn't last a month, but without those who do the work it wouldn't last a day. And that is how you determine what the actual work of the company is.
For an analogy, your brain is important, but your blood and mitochondria do the work. This doesn't imply that you can exist without a brain, and it doesn't imply that the liver and kidneys aren't important. It doesn't imply that you would be you without your brain. But it's the mitochondria (and blood) that do the work.
They must be counting hybrids as electrics is all I can figure out. E.g., a Prius would replace almost all needs of a gas car, and the ones it wouldn't replace aren't needed by most people.
Who are these people who are banging on about corruption in some third world country? Can I get a citation, please? We've got plenty of corruption in the Democratic Party, and every time it gets brought up the topic is changed to the Russians.
To quote an anonymous coward: You've got plenty of corruption in both parties and in government in general. Stop being so bloody partisan. The problem is broad and wide-spread.
The problem is that there are two parts here: 1) Management is a separate skill, and you need to be skilled at it to be a good manager. 2) Management of a particular area requires knowing the area.
So. In principle a good manager can manage anything...but if he doesn't already know the area it's going to take him a long time to get to know it. Upper management probably *IS* nearly the same everywhere. Everywhere they go they're managing managers who are managing managers. As you get "nearer to the metal" detailed knowledge becomes more important. And when you're directly managing subject experts you really need to know the area well. Not necessarily well enough to do the job, but well enough to properly evaluate what's being done, where the problems are, and what the problems are.
Given that what you have asserted is true, it sounds as if the court made the right decision, even if for the wrong reasons.
From what others have said, however, the reasons for the court decision were definitely wrong. Refusing to examine expert testimony isn't a valid basis for decision. (Deciding that it's wrong may be, but that isn't what was reported as happening here.)
OTOH, there are other grounds for suspecting that VMWare might be in the right. Most of them, however, would require examining the code to validate.
Or they could even be following the spirit of the GPL...version 2. IIRC it was originally asserted that it was ok to use dynamic linking, but not static linking. If so, VMWare could be wrapping the drivers in a way quite compatible with the intent of GPLv2...but you'd need to see the code to know.
I do believe that automated coding is possible. I also believe that it would require a program that could handle English (or some other full language). This doesn't sound like it.
Actually, it would need to do more than handle English, it would also need to have a rather complete model of the world. This just sounds like another domain specific language.
More to the point, nobody should be taught coding before they have learned algebra...or at least pre-algebra. Once you've mastered basic algebra then you can probably handle Scratch or similar programming languages. You can't do much in them, but you can use them to do what you can do.
This sounds like a system to take some quite detailed specs and turn them into a bunch of library calls. I'm not clear why it's superior to Python or Ruby, though, which do the same thing. In fact many C programs don't do much more than that. And it's going to take them a long time to wrap an many libraries has Python has.
That said, there are lots of domain specific languages that are far superior (in many ways) to general purpose languages within their particular domains. This particular example reminds me of a product for the Apple ][+ called "The Last One", which claimed to be the last programming language you would ever need to buy. What it was was a domain specific language for managing a decision table (NOT tree). For a certain limited range of problems it was quite good. I think the company went out of business.
It make legal sense, but the legal sense that it makes is that the police are a gang of thieves that are ok because the laws say so.
What they are doing is theft without trial, and thus in violation of the constitution. "...secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures...". If a warrant was issued in this case, then the judge should be charged with malfeasance.
An injustice being stamped "OK" by a court doesn't turn wrong into right, it turns the court into wrong. Civil forfeiture is blatantly against the fourth amendment, and to pretend otherwise is to be turned into an apostle of tyranny.
Well...IIUC summary judgment is a very high bar to reach. And if that's what this is about, then the whole headline, story, etc. is a pile of crap. Summary judgments are issued before the trial and avert the trial.
So if that's what this is about the whole story is click-bait...except the part that RightsCorp is using a lack of summary judgment as an excuse to threaten all the ISPs. If that's what's going on this is an even more reprehensible summary than usually occurs...and is good grounds for doubting every single thing that Slashdot posts.
This was an effect of the internet predicted decades ago. People like to listen to people who agree with them, and when they go to sites that agree with them, they feel that they have confirmed their opinions. I believe that this was called the "Echo-Chamber Effect". I think I read about it around 1995, but I'm not sure the article was new then.
If you think about it, you'll see many examples of it happening long before then internet. E.g. church congregations become firm believers in whatever their congregation believes, and feel that this is confirmed because their neighbors believe it too.
Well, that's partially right. Another part is that there's been a tremendous consolidation among the "traditional media" such that their voices are controlled by a small number of very wealthy people whose primary interest is not news.
This is not to claim that the news in general was ever trustworthy, but it is to claim that news organizations used to be mainly interested in news, and only secondarily politics or public relations. That this was never reliably true is witnessed by the Hearst Press, which earned the name "yellow journalism". But there were alternatives. E.g., in San Francisco a paper called "The Dramatic Chronicle" started off covering theatric presentations, and expanded into sports and local news. It was originally quite reliable. It's wider news, however, was no more reliable than the wire services. Then there was the New York Times, which used to be reliable, and perhaps still is if you learn how to read it...but which was delayed a week in getting to the west coast. Etc. Each news source was biased, but many had areas where they were accurate, and they weren't the same, because the controlling interests had differing goals.
I have lived on a volcanic island. It wasn't active at the time. But you aren't starting with a mass that's been gravitationally compacted into a solid, you're starting with something that's a weak, friable, mass of stuff. It's likely to be a pile of dust held together by ices. You will get the volatiles going off, and you'll probably get more of them as you bake the remaining solids to remove the ices adsorbed by the dust grains. Even the dust won't be the same as you find on Earth, because there won't be the massive quantities of organic matter, there won't be sedimentary grains, and there won't be anything metamorphic. I have my doubts that even igneous would be a reasonable categorization of the rocks that were the dust grains. It's probably more like aerogel without the aero, though with secondary inclusions of fluids.
OTOH, I'm speculating. We haven't actually dug up many comets. Some of them clearly do have large chunks of metal in them. And it's quite probable that the composition will be different at different distances from the sun. There is, however, good reason to suppose that they won't be much like rocks on earth at any distance. The mantel rocks are formed under enough pressure to create molecular forms that only form under pressure. The igneous rocks are formed at high temperature. Etc. In every case we can say "Asteroids don't appear to have had those conditions.". Their rocks probably form by accretion, sort of like sedimentary, only without the pressure, and without the water, and without the friction, and...in fact more the way aerogels are built, only without the air.
The volatiles go off with the pre-heating (and are collected separately, because there are as valuable as the rest). The faults are handled by annealing during the slow cooling. You don't get "differentiation" due to density differences because gravity isn't present. You would get differentiation due to chemical differences, different melting points, etc. and this would need to be handled. (I'm not thinking of this as a simple process, and I'm willing to consider that you might need to run the entire thing through a crude mass spectrometer and collect the fractions separately as an initial step. Please note the word "crude", you wouldn't get good separation, but you'd separate things by volatility and mass without excessive contamination. There's lots of difficulties that I can see in this process, but problems doesn't mean that you can't do it, it just means you need to solve the problems. I could easily see changing an asteroid into a habitat taking 50 years...and that may be an underestimate. But any other approach that doesn't involve lifting the mass off a planet looks more difficult. I suppose you could build the pieces on the moon and loft them with a catapult, but the moon doesn't have much in the way of volatiles, which you also need.
I doubt that you would get the same effect in the absence of gravity, the absence of convective cooling, and with a pre-heating to fusion (i.e., just less than molten) starting from dust...which would allow outgassing.
OTOH, there might well be problems with different fractions having different melting points. So you might need to do a crude mass-spectrometer of the dust before starting. Anyway you do it it's going to be a lot of work, and I don't see anything wrong with the concept of working the stuff on site, or melting with mirrors.
That said, this is clearly an advanced approach only suitable for those already "skilled in the art" who know what needs to be done at what stage. I can easily imagine that it might be best to take the dustpile and feed it slowly through the focus of a large mirror so that the various fractions vaporise and are collected separately. Don't doubt the capabilities of a large mirror in space, even though they are quite limited on earth. The sun isn't weakened by passing through the atmosphere, and the size of the mirror isn't constrained by gravity. I'm not sure what is the best mirror design for this kind of thing, but I doubt that mirrored plastic would be reasonable. Plastic tends to degrade in space, and also when exposed to direct sunlight, etc. Aluminized glass sounds plausible, but then you've got to make the large mirror...not an easy job, even though it doesn't need to be accurate enough for a telescope. I suppose you could piece together a large number of small pieces with the appropriate curvatures.
Expecting me to know the right way to go about doing this is unreasonable, when nobody on the planet currently has the appropriate expertise...but I'm not convinced the basic approach is permanently wrong, just "wrong for now, because we don't have the right skills (and tools)".
The cure for cracking while cooling is to cool very slowly, and possibly annealing. The point about micro-meteorites is much better, and there'd clearly need to be a lot of work. OTOH, any glass made this way wouldn't be transparent...and you're right about it not being thin...it would need to be reasonably thick. My WAG would say it would need to be a foot or two thick, but I've done no calculations, so it wouldn't surprise me to be off by a factor of 5.
OTOH, it would be best to have two layers and run, say, paraffin (US meaning) in between them to use as a radiation shield. Water would also work, but paraffin has other advantages than just lots of hydrogen, it can also be easily doped to reveal any leaks, and it's a decent sealant.
Well, to be fair there are lots of reasons that it's a bad idea at surface level. You need much larger mirrors, gravity distorts the shape, etc.
But, yeah, it's well oversimplified. Still, once we get enough experience that approach should be possible. OTOH, it's starting to look like most asteroids are mainly dustpiles, so you need to melt them once to fuse the material, then you do some preparatory work, and then you heat them to blow the bubble. But since volatiles may be as important as the solid stuff, you'd better surround the entire thing with a bubble before the first time you heat it.
To me it sounds like the sketch of a good approach once you are "skilled in the art", but it doesn't sound like a good way to get started.
Unfortunately, without either tone of voice or facial expressions, your message is quite ambiguous, but the straightforwards meaning being more likely than sarcasm. This is a characteristic of email, texting, etc. and is one reason emoji are so common.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not what it has to do, it's what it has to avoid doing. I believe the applicable quote is "Don't be evil.".
That said, Google has rarely been very evil. A lot of people seem to dislike them purely because they are large and successful, but for me that's not sufficient reason to call them evil. It is sufficient to be hesitant about trusting them. Someone who's extremely powerful can harm you without even noticing.
You may soon have trouble buying a monitor or a refrigerator. I don't want it either, but I'm not sure how long it will be reasonably avoidable.
Sorry, but ever since reading about a developer who was across the room while his laptop exploded while charging *I've* considered them dangerous. If you want to say that charging your laptop is "misuse or abuse", then I have to think you are asserting the batteries are worthless.
Some people have said "There must have been a manufacturing defect.". This is a reasonable hypothesis, but since as a user I have no way of detecting such a defect that doesn't remove them from the dangerous category.
To say the battery exploding is a low probability event is something I could accept without problem, but that doesn't mean they aren't dangerous, just that they aren't *likely* to cause damage...and I have no good way of estimating the probability. For some reason manufacturers are pretty quiet about this, and how much could you trust what they say anyway in a case like this. Admitting possible culpability would put them squarely in the sites of lots of fire insurance companies.
He's an idiot anyway. The GPL would only require the release of his code if he was trying to "steal" someone else's code.
You may well be right. "Lithium Garnet" sounds a bit expensive to make. So it may be reserved for specialty applications.
By the time they could build a "good enough" body, you wouldn't want it. For a brain in a computer virtual reality could be better than any actual reality could be. For one thing the "actual reality" signals that were fed into your brain would be via the exact same channels that the virtual reality signals would use.
Upper management may be responsible for strategy, but they shouldn't be the strategist. They should know and be able to evaluate the strategist. The strategist DOES need to know the subject area well...as well as the lowest level of manager, and over a much wider area of what the company does. It shouldn't be a part time job of someone who also manages the company.
Now clearly, everything I've said only applies if there are multiple layers of management. And the important part is how far is top management (as in layers of management) from the actual work. It's the actual work that is primary, without it the company couldn't exist. Without management the company wouldn't last a month, but without those who do the work it wouldn't last a day. And that is how you determine what the actual work of the company is.
For an analogy, your brain is important, but your blood and mitochondria do the work. This doesn't imply that you can exist without a brain, and it doesn't imply that the liver and kidneys aren't important. It doesn't imply that you would be you without your brain. But it's the mitochondria (and blood) that do the work.
They must be counting hybrids as electrics is all I can figure out. E.g., a Prius would replace almost all needs of a gas car, and the ones it wouldn't replace aren't needed by most people.
Who are these people who are banging on about corruption in some third world country? Can I get a citation, please? We've got plenty of corruption in the Democratic Party, and every time it gets brought up the topic is changed to the Russians.
To quote an anonymous coward:
You've got plenty of corruption in both parties and in government in general. Stop being so bloody partisan. The problem is broad and wide-spread.
The problem is that there are two parts here:
1) Management is a separate skill, and you need to be skilled at it to be a good manager.
2) Management of a particular area requires knowing the area.
So. In principle a good manager can manage anything...but if he doesn't already know the area it's going to take him a long time to get to know it. Upper management probably *IS* nearly the same everywhere. Everywhere they go they're managing managers who are managing managers. As you get "nearer to the metal" detailed knowledge becomes more important. And when you're directly managing subject experts you really need to know the area well. Not necessarily well enough to do the job, but well enough to properly evaluate what's being done, where the problems are, and what the problems are.
Given that what you have asserted is true, it sounds as if the court made the right decision, even if for the wrong reasons.
From what others have said, however, the reasons for the court decision were definitely wrong. Refusing to examine expert testimony isn't a valid basis for decision. (Deciding that it's wrong may be, but that isn't what was reported as happening here.)
OTOH, there are other grounds for suspecting that VMWare might be in the right. Most of them, however, would require examining the code to validate.
Or they could even be following the spirit of the GPL...version 2. IIRC it was originally asserted that it was ok to use dynamic linking, but not static linking. If so, VMWare could be wrapping the drivers in a way quite compatible with the intent of GPLv2...but you'd need to see the code to know.
I do believe that automated coding is possible. I also believe that it would require a program that could handle English (or some other full language). This doesn't sound like it.
Actually, it would need to do more than handle English, it would also need to have a rather complete model of the world. This just sounds like another domain specific language.
More to the point, nobody should be taught coding before they have learned algebra...or at least pre-algebra. Once you've mastered basic algebra then you can probably handle Scratch or similar programming languages. You can't do much in them, but you can use them to do what you can do.
This sounds like a system to take some quite detailed specs and turn them into a bunch of library calls. I'm not clear why it's superior to Python or Ruby, though, which do the same thing. In fact many C programs don't do much more than that. And it's going to take them a long time to wrap an many libraries has Python has.
That said, there are lots of domain specific languages that are far superior (in many ways) to general purpose languages within their particular domains. This particular example reminds me of a product for the Apple ][+ called "The Last One", which claimed to be the last programming language you would ever need to buy. What it was was a domain specific language for managing a decision table (NOT tree). For a certain limited range of problems it was quite good. I think the company went out of business.
It make legal sense, but the legal sense that it makes is that the police are a gang of thieves that are ok because the laws say so.
What they are doing is theft without trial, and thus in violation of the constitution. "...secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures...". If a warrant was issued in this case, then the judge should be charged with malfeasance.
An injustice being stamped "OK" by a court doesn't turn wrong into right, it turns the court into wrong. Civil forfeiture is blatantly against the fourth amendment, and to pretend otherwise is to be turned into an apostle of tyranny.
Well...IIUC summary judgment is a very high bar to reach. And if that's what this is about, then the whole headline, story, etc. is a pile of crap. Summary judgments are issued before the trial and avert the trial.
So if that's what this is about the whole story is click-bait...except the part that RightsCorp is using a lack of summary judgment as an excuse to threaten all the ISPs. If that's what's going on this is an even more reprehensible summary than usually occurs...and is good grounds for doubting every single thing that Slashdot posts.
I believe that there are countries in which this is true. The US is not one of those countries.
You can argue that the law *should* be interpreted that way, but to argue that it *is* interpreted that way just looks silly.
This was an effect of the internet predicted decades ago. People like to listen to people who agree with them, and when they go to sites that agree with them, they feel that they have confirmed their opinions. I believe that this was called the "Echo-Chamber Effect". I think I read about it around 1995, but I'm not sure the article was new then.
If you think about it, you'll see many examples of it happening long before then internet. E.g. church congregations become firm believers in whatever their congregation believes, and feel that this is confirmed because their neighbors believe it too.
Well, that's partially right. Another part is that there's been a tremendous consolidation among the "traditional media" such that their voices are controlled by a small number of very wealthy people whose primary interest is not news.
This is not to claim that the news in general was ever trustworthy, but it is to claim that news organizations used to be mainly interested in news, and only secondarily politics or public relations. That this was never reliably true is witnessed by the Hearst Press, which earned the name "yellow journalism". But there were alternatives. E.g., in San Francisco a paper called "The Dramatic Chronicle" started off covering theatric presentations, and expanded into sports and local news. It was originally quite reliable. It's wider news, however, was no more reliable than the wire services. Then there was the New York Times, which used to be reliable, and perhaps still is if you learn how to read it...but which was delayed a week in getting to the west coast. Etc. Each news source was biased, but many had areas where they were accurate, and they weren't the same, because the controlling interests had differing goals.
I have lived on a volcanic island. It wasn't active at the time. But you aren't starting with a mass that's been gravitationally compacted into a solid, you're starting with something that's a weak, friable, mass of stuff. It's likely to be a pile of dust held together by ices. You will get the volatiles going off, and you'll probably get more of them as you bake the remaining solids to remove the ices adsorbed by the dust grains. Even the dust won't be the same as you find on Earth, because there won't be the massive quantities of organic matter, there won't be sedimentary grains, and there won't be anything metamorphic. I have my doubts that even igneous would be a reasonable categorization of the rocks that were the dust grains. It's probably more like aerogel without the aero, though with secondary inclusions of fluids.
OTOH, I'm speculating. We haven't actually dug up many comets. Some of them clearly do have large chunks of metal in them. And it's quite probable that the composition will be different at different distances from the sun. There is, however, good reason to suppose that they won't be much like rocks on earth at any distance. The mantel rocks are formed under enough pressure to create molecular forms that only form under pressure. The igneous rocks are formed at high temperature. Etc. In every case we can say "Asteroids don't appear to have had those conditions.". Their rocks probably form by accretion, sort of like sedimentary, only without the pressure, and without the water, and without the friction, and...in fact more the way aerogels are built, only without the air.
The volatiles go off with the pre-heating (and are collected separately, because there are as valuable as the rest). The faults are handled by annealing during the slow cooling. You don't get "differentiation" due to density differences because gravity isn't present. You would get differentiation due to chemical differences, different melting points, etc. and this would need to be handled. (I'm not thinking of this as a simple process, and I'm willing to consider that you might need to run the entire thing through a crude mass spectrometer and collect the fractions separately as an initial step. Please note the word "crude", you wouldn't get good separation, but you'd separate things by volatility and mass without excessive contamination. There's lots of difficulties that I can see in this process, but problems doesn't mean that you can't do it, it just means you need to solve the problems. I could easily see changing an asteroid into a habitat taking 50 years...and that may be an underestimate. But any other approach that doesn't involve lifting the mass off a planet looks more difficult. I suppose you could build the pieces on the moon and loft them with a catapult, but the moon doesn't have much in the way of volatiles, which you also need.
I doubt that you would get the same effect in the absence of gravity, the absence of convective cooling, and with a pre-heating to fusion (i.e., just less than molten) starting from dust...which would allow outgassing.
OTOH, there might well be problems with different fractions having different melting points. So you might need to do a crude mass-spectrometer of the dust before starting. Anyway you do it it's going to be a lot of work, and I don't see anything wrong with the concept of working the stuff on site, or melting with mirrors.
That said, this is clearly an advanced approach only suitable for those already "skilled in the art" who know what needs to be done at what stage. I can easily imagine that it might be best to take the dustpile and feed it slowly through the focus of a large mirror so that the various fractions vaporise and are collected separately. Don't doubt the capabilities of a large mirror in space, even though they are quite limited on earth. The sun isn't weakened by passing through the atmosphere, and the size of the mirror isn't constrained by gravity. I'm not sure what is the best mirror design for this kind of thing, but I doubt that mirrored plastic would be reasonable. Plastic tends to degrade in space, and also when exposed to direct sunlight, etc. Aluminized glass sounds plausible, but then you've got to make the large mirror...not an easy job, even though it doesn't need to be accurate enough for a telescope. I suppose you could piece together a large number of small pieces with the appropriate curvatures.
Expecting me to know the right way to go about doing this is unreasonable, when nobody on the planet currently has the appropriate expertise...but I'm not convinced the basic approach is permanently wrong, just "wrong for now, because we don't have the right skills (and tools)".
The cure for cracking while cooling is to cool very slowly, and possibly annealing. The point about micro-meteorites is much better, and there'd clearly need to be a lot of work. OTOH, any glass made this way wouldn't be transparent...and you're right about it not being thin...it would need to be reasonably thick. My WAG would say it would need to be a foot or two thick, but I've done no calculations, so it wouldn't surprise me to be off by a factor of 5.
OTOH, it would be best to have two layers and run, say, paraffin (US meaning) in between them to use as a radiation shield. Water would also work, but paraffin has other advantages than just lots of hydrogen, it can also be easily doped to reveal any leaks, and it's a decent sealant.
Well, to be fair there are lots of reasons that it's a bad idea at surface level. You need much larger mirrors, gravity distorts the shape, etc.
But, yeah, it's well oversimplified. Still, once we get enough experience that approach should be possible. OTOH, it's starting to look like most asteroids are mainly dustpiles, so you need to melt them once to fuse the material, then you do some preparatory work, and then you heat them to blow the bubble. But since volatiles may be as important as the solid stuff, you'd better surround the entire thing with a bubble before the first time you heat it.
To me it sounds like the sketch of a good approach once you are "skilled in the art", but it doesn't sound like a good way to get started.
Unfortunately, without either tone of voice or facial expressions, your message is quite ambiguous, but the straightforwards meaning being more likely than sarcasm. This is a characteristic of email, texting, etc. and is one reason emoji are so common.