When both major parties are headed in the same direction, what choice do the voters have? Instant Runoff would at least give your argument the color of plausibility, but even then there are known and used ways of controlling the argument.
No. What we know is that using our current algorithms most things don't really benefit for more parallelism. You can't reasonably use the same algorithm on a process for parallel computation as for serial computation. And designing good parallel algorithms is *HARD*. So we've only got a few.
There's also suggestive evidence that there's often not a good algorithm, but only quite good heuristics, and often you can test the answer faster than you can solve it. When you can't, you gamble that multiple heuristics returning the same result yields something "close enough" to the correct answer.
It also depends on how complex the problem is that you're trying to deal with. Simple problems are more likely to not benefit from complex approaches.
The only real way forwards appears to be parallel processing. Unfortunately, many workloads have limiting serial components, and others appear to, because designing good parallel algorithms is really difficult. And, FWIW, there's suggestive evidence that correct, rather than usually correct, algorithms are going to be really hard to do. I don't think it's been proven impossible for most useful cases, but I wouldn't bet money.
It may well be that neural net type applications are the optimal approach.
You know, that really isn't clear. The towns wouldn't be there without the forest. If you remove the forest, then the reason for the town to exist goes away.
To an extent, you're correct, but the question is "Why are people living there anyway?". I suppose second or third generation residents might not be living there because of the environment...but I'm not at all sure that's correct. Most of the folks I've talked to liked the environment, and that's why they wanted to live there. But I don't usually know whether or not they moved there because of the environment, or whether they grew up there.
Now a good case could be made for better maintenance of large firebreaks, but that wouldn't be what the logging companies would desire. The ideal sites for fire breaks are not the best place for harvesting trees either in ease of access (ridgetops are not easy to access) or in the kinds of tree that would be there to harvest. And you don't want to disconnect the forests except during times of emergency, so there should be short uncut areas connecting the two sides of the firebreak, that are only cleared when a fire breaks out. Since they'd only be a few hundred yards wide, they could be quickly cleared when needed. But breaking the forest in to small pieces is really damaging to the wildlife in normal times...so you need connecting corridors that are thick enough that from the middle you can't see out to either side. (That's a rough estimate. I'm not sure what the exact parameters are, and it would be different for different species.) Ideally you'd have freeway overpasses that were forested strips, too, but that's probably too difficult to be feasible.
IIRC, it depends on the contract. And often the contract doesn't specify that any particular proportion of the replants be the species that were removed. And often it doesn't even specify that any particular proportion of the replants survive a couple of years. Sometimes it does specify such things, and if there are decent enforcement mechanisms, that produces a much better result.
You've got to remember that just like any large company, the logging companies are in business to turn a maximal profit and they don't figure this profit over decades unless they own the land.
There's a big difference between clear cutting a small area to create a fire break, and clear cutting a large area. Unfortunately, since the same word can be used to describe either action, you can't rely on stories that just use that term. But when a logging company talks about clear cutting, they frequently mean an area large enough to maximize their profit. Am I sure that was what was meant? No. But logging companies have a very bad, not even really checkered, history. Naturally, they're in it for the money. That's what they do to earn the money to stay in business. But it makes them very inappropriate as the folks in charge...or even to not be closely supervised by someone who isn't sympathetic to their desires.
Logging companies have a very bad history when it comes to sustainably managing forests. They often prefer to clear-cut and replant with the economically most profitable species of tree, or just to not replant if their lease is going to run out. I.e., the act in the way that they see economically most profitable. I don't know whether you want to call that evil or not, but it's certainly not maximally beneficial to anyone except the logging company.
If they were playing "catch up" at first, then it's quite reasonable that the controlled burns have been reduce.
The last time around there were several different fires, and the federal policy was "if it was started by natural causes, let it burn". This would be "sort of" reasonable if it wasn't following after a decades long policy of "snuff every fire as soon as you see it". They do (did?) have a policy that fires should be restrained from developed areas, even if they started naturally, but this means that for a lot of the work you need to decide how the fire started before you can act. Whoops! And when there's a lot of underbrush the fires are a lot hotter than when it's burned off periodically. And during the period when the policy was "snuff every fire immediately" people built in really stupid places...and they haven't since returned those to natural state. And...
So a large part of what's going on is policy changes that were properly motivated, but improperly implemented.
Ecosystems are large things, and don't arise quickly (though they can move location quickly on an evolutionary time scale.)
Because of this an eco-system collapse can be dramatic. It can also be sudden, taking only days, though that's a rather extreme case.
Part of the problem here is that eco-systems are invisible. All we can see are their component parts, and not all of them. So we often don't notice when they are tottering on the edge of collapse, but let me give you an example of one.
Aphids are mutualistic with ants. They also tend to spread by cloning. I've read one estimate that there are only seven individual aphids in the entire US, if you count clones as a single individual. The ants protect the aphids, and the aphids feed the ants. They are a major food source for the ants. If a contagious disease arose that killed the aphids, they may well not have enough genetic diversity to survive as a species. This may drive a number of ant species into extinction. The ants aerate the soil, increasing the fertility of the land (as well as eating the plants that grow on the land). When the ants die off, a new species may move in that doesn't aerate the land, but does eat the plants. Or it may be another species of ant that does things differently, perhaps leafcutter ants. These are likely to kill plants that the aphids only bothered, because their depredations are more localized. Etc.
But note that we can't see this chain of interactions. And I could easily be wrong about how the details would work out. But this collapse of ant species could already be in process (e.g., say, the disease spreading between aphids, but not yet largely fatal). It could be a large enough collapse in the making that hundreds of acres of land in a few places would temporarily become "dead zones". And we wouldn't know.
Now I don't believe my own model, but I also don't disbelieve it. It's possible. It could leave traces in the paleontological record. But from those traces we'd never be able to decipher what happened, only that something did, and some species went extinct. Not that there was a small ecosystem collapse.
I think the best guess is that they are not only incomplete and missing a lot of data, but some of the assumptions that they do make are probably wrong. Figuring out which ones, though, won't be easy.
That's actually my assumption to, but I'd be less sanguine about "can be modeled", as model implies that you have appropriately included all the important features, and this is an area where we don't really know what all is important. It could turn out that the survival of a visible ecosystem is dependent on the presence of a particular mix of microorganisms, and we don't even know most "species" of bacteria.
Whether they were more or less abusive depends on which business practices bother you more. So far I've been able to circumvent Apple's technical malice, and they've been less abusive legally, often only copying MS approach a few years later. It was, however, bad enough that around the time of OS10.4 I moved all critical applications away from their systems, and over to Linux. This wasn't easy, but I didn't care for the legal exposure that Apple's licenses provided. (Sneaking a change in the terms into a security upgrade had, of course, nothing to do with why I got so concerned.)
You're assuming that you determine the inputs. Actually there are ways around it, but they all involve eliminating lots of kinds of things being serialized or deserialized. YAML is safe. Python's ast.literal_eval is safe. Various others. But they don't allow arbitrary things to be de-serialized. And Ruby also has safe ways to handle this. (YAML is available in Ruby.)
But you need to realize that serialization isn't magic, and validate your imports before executing them. So arbitrary binaries can only be deserialized as byte arrays, or something essentially similar.
Anything that facilitates interpersonal communication also facilitates the spreading of false rumors. I'm not sure there's any way around that short of hard AI. Think of the Nigerian scams that appeared as soon as email became common.
Now the one way that is shown to work fairly well is to increase the cost of communicating. That didn't eliminate chain letters, or false advertising, but it sure reduced it. However that comes with other secondary costs.
Since most of those "interesting" terms are essentially undefined, I'm going to consider them as reliable as salesmen's verbal assurances.
OTOH, since I'm not making the purchasing decision this year, I have time to wait for this to shake out. But if it's as the article suggests, and as the somewhat reliable reports suggest, Apple is off my list of acceptable vendors.
Sorry, but that's a good reason to avoid the restrictions that come with an official Apple version of BSD. Particularly as I prefer KDE. However it's not true. Apple does have certain advantages. The only question is are they worth the extra cost, and this makes it sound like the answer is no.
OTOH, it may be incorrect. The answers that I got when following the links given by the apologists saying that it was incorrect, however, cause me to believe that it's true enough that Apple isn't worth the hassle.
For you it's not a deal-breaker. For me it is...if the reports so far are anywhere near correct. Apple was already pretty close to the line, and has only a few features that I really care about.
IOW, I've got to think that Apple is less abusive than MS, and that at least one if them isn't so abusive that I'm willing to put up with it to play commercial games. Stream is already giving me fewer reasons to put up with their shenanigans.
Those "facts" are not compelling. I don't remember the filesystem I used the last time I formatted a partition for Linux on an Apple, it may well have been ext2...but it was not any version of FAT, which I won't even use on USB sticks.
To me Apple was already only marginally attractive. If I need to use an external disk, that's switched to more than marginally unattractive.
OTOH, I note your handle is "FakeTimCook", so perhaps your response isn't authoritative, and there actually is a decent way to avoid this problem. I've got awhile to decide, as I wasn't planning on buying an Apple this month anyway. Before I do, I'll find out for certain what's involved in installing Linux....or I may just avoid the hassle by avoiding Apple. I doubt that Apple would care, but I'm doing it for my benefit, not theirs. I really dislike bureaucratic and bureaucratically imposed hassles.
Sorry, but no. That's not sufficient for me to consider Apple an acceptable vendor.
If I buy (when I bought) an Apple it was with the intention of running all my software native. Some software was native Linux, and for that I rebooted into the Linux partition. Some was Apple, and for that I rebooted into the Apple partition. Seriously, the Apple software wasn't sufficiently CPU intensive that running native was necessary, but that was the only way I know how to run it. The Linux software needed better access to the hardware, and a VM was not a satisfactory solution.
The Linux software was important. The Apple software was only games, and because I didn't want to support MS.
So, OK, if this is true I'll just give Apple a skip, too, the next time I purchase a computer (probably sometime next year, but maybe the year after that).
The GPL protects the freedom of the descendants of the code. BSD is more free, and allows the descendants to be sold into slavery.
This is an invalid analogy mainly because code isn't sentient, but also because if you don't distribute the descendants of GPL licensed code you aren't required to share it.
IIUC public domain became obsolete except upon the expiration of copyright terms when works became automatically under copyright. So unless you use a license explicitly granting rights, nobody else has the right to copy your program (except for fair use, which can always be challenged in court). This is true even if you publish it on the web.
IIRC, "Dan O'Neil's Comics and Stories" was enjoined from further publication under copyright law even though the characters drawn were clearly distinct from anything Disney ever did. It was decided that there were sufficient similarities that copyright law applied. Possibly if he'd had better lawyers....but he didn't.
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When both major parties are headed in the same direction, what choice do the voters have? Instant Runoff would at least give your argument the color of plausibility, but even then there are known and used ways of controlling the argument.
No. What we know is that using our current algorithms most things don't really benefit for more parallelism. You can't reasonably use the same algorithm on a process for parallel computation as for serial computation. And designing good parallel algorithms is *HARD*. So we've only got a few.
There's also suggestive evidence that there's often not a good algorithm, but only quite good heuristics, and often you can test the answer faster than you can solve it. When you can't, you gamble that multiple heuristics returning the same result yields something "close enough" to the correct answer.
It also depends on how complex the problem is that you're trying to deal with. Simple problems are more likely to not benefit from complex approaches.
There are fixes for Spectre...but they require redesigned hardware.
The only real way forwards appears to be parallel processing. Unfortunately, many workloads have limiting serial components, and others appear to, because designing good parallel algorithms is really difficult. And, FWIW, there's suggestive evidence that correct, rather than usually correct, algorithms are going to be really hard to do. I don't think it's been proven impossible for most useful cases, but I wouldn't bet money.
It may well be that neural net type applications are the optimal approach.
You know, that really isn't clear. The towns wouldn't be there without the forest. If you remove the forest, then the reason for the town to exist goes away.
To an extent, you're correct, but the question is "Why are people living there anyway?". I suppose second or third generation residents might not be living there because of the environment...but I'm not at all sure that's correct. Most of the folks I've talked to liked the environment, and that's why they wanted to live there. But I don't usually know whether or not they moved there because of the environment, or whether they grew up there.
Now a good case could be made for better maintenance of large firebreaks, but that wouldn't be what the logging companies would desire. The ideal sites for fire breaks are not the best place for harvesting trees either in ease of access (ridgetops are not easy to access) or in the kinds of tree that would be there to harvest. And you don't want to disconnect the forests except during times of emergency, so there should be short uncut areas connecting the two sides of the firebreak, that are only cleared when a fire breaks out. Since they'd only be a few hundred yards wide, they could be quickly cleared when needed. But breaking the forest in to small pieces is really damaging to the wildlife in normal times...so you need connecting corridors that are thick enough that from the middle you can't see out to either side. (That's a rough estimate. I'm not sure what the exact parameters are, and it would be different for different species.) Ideally you'd have freeway overpasses that were forested strips, too, but that's probably too difficult to be feasible.
IIRC, it depends on the contract. And often the contract doesn't specify that any particular proportion of the replants be the species that were removed. And often it doesn't even specify that any particular proportion of the replants survive a couple of years. Sometimes it does specify such things, and if there are decent enforcement mechanisms, that produces a much better result.
You've got to remember that just like any large company, the logging companies are in business to turn a maximal profit and they don't figure this profit over decades unless they own the land.
There's a big difference between clear cutting a small area to create a fire break, and clear cutting a large area. Unfortunately, since the same word can be used to describe either action, you can't rely on stories that just use that term. But when a logging company talks about clear cutting, they frequently mean an area large enough to maximize their profit. Am I sure that was what was meant? No. But logging companies have a very bad, not even really checkered, history. Naturally, they're in it for the money. That's what they do to earn the money to stay in business. But it makes them very inappropriate as the folks in charge...or even to not be closely supervised by someone who isn't sympathetic to their desires.
Logging companies have a very bad history when it comes to sustainably managing forests. They often prefer to clear-cut and replant with the economically most profitable species of tree, or just to not replant if their lease is going to run out. I.e., the act in the way that they see economically most profitable. I don't know whether you want to call that evil or not, but it's certainly not maximally beneficial to anyone except the logging company.
If they were playing "catch up" at first, then it's quite reasonable that the controlled burns have been reduce.
The last time around there were several different fires, and the federal policy was "if it was started by natural causes, let it burn". This would be "sort of" reasonable if it wasn't following after a decades long policy of "snuff every fire as soon as you see it". They do (did?) have a policy that fires should be restrained from developed areas, even if they started naturally, but this means that for a lot of the work you need to decide how the fire started before you can act. Whoops! And when there's a lot of underbrush the fires are a lot hotter than when it's burned off periodically. And during the period when the policy was "snuff every fire immediately" people built in really stupid places...and they haven't since returned those to natural state. And...
So a large part of what's going on is policy changes that were properly motivated, but improperly implemented.
Some people are homeless, and there aren't any public toilets, so what do you think?
Ecosystems are large things, and don't arise quickly (though they can move location quickly on an evolutionary time scale.)
Because of this an eco-system collapse can be dramatic. It can also be sudden, taking only days, though that's a rather extreme case.
Part of the problem here is that eco-systems are invisible. All we can see are their component parts, and not all of them. So we often don't notice when they are tottering on the edge of collapse, but let me give you an example of one.
Aphids are mutualistic with ants. They also tend to spread by cloning. I've read one estimate that there are only seven individual aphids in the entire US, if you count clones as a single individual. The ants protect the aphids, and the aphids feed the ants. They are a major food source for the ants. If a contagious disease arose that killed the aphids, they may well not have enough genetic diversity to survive as a species. This may drive a number of ant species into extinction. The ants aerate the soil, increasing the fertility of the land (as well as eating the plants that grow on the land). When the ants die off, a new species may move in that doesn't aerate the land, but does eat the plants. Or it may be another species of ant that does things differently, perhaps leafcutter ants. These are likely to kill plants that the aphids only bothered, because their depredations are more localized. Etc.
But note that we can't see this chain of interactions. And I could easily be wrong about how the details would work out. But this collapse of ant species could already be in process (e.g., say, the disease spreading between aphids, but not yet largely fatal). It could be a large enough collapse in the making that hundreds of acres of land in a few places would temporarily become "dead zones". And we wouldn't know.
Now I don't believe my own model, but I also don't disbelieve it. It's possible. It could leave traces in the paleontological record. But from those traces we'd never be able to decipher what happened, only that something did, and some species went extinct. Not that there was a small ecosystem collapse.
I think the best guess is that they are not only incomplete and missing a lot of data, but some of the assumptions that they do make are probably wrong. Figuring out which ones, though, won't be easy.
That's actually my assumption to, but I'd be less sanguine about "can be modeled", as model implies that you have appropriately included all the important features, and this is an area where we don't really know what all is important. It could turn out that the survival of a visible ecosystem is dependent on the presence of a particular mix of microorganisms, and we don't even know most "species" of bacteria.
Whether they were more or less abusive depends on which business practices bother you more. So far I've been able to circumvent Apple's technical malice, and they've been less abusive legally, often only copying MS approach a few years later. It was, however, bad enough that around the time of OS10.4 I moved all critical applications away from their systems, and over to Linux. This wasn't easy, but I didn't care for the legal exposure that Apple's licenses provided. (Sneaking a change in the terms into a security upgrade had, of course, nothing to do with why I got so concerned.)
You're assuming that you determine the inputs. Actually there are ways around it, but they all involve eliminating lots of kinds of things being serialized or deserialized. YAML is safe. Python's ast.literal_eval is safe. Various others. But they don't allow arbitrary things to be de-serialized. And Ruby also has safe ways to handle this. (YAML is available in Ruby.)
But you need to realize that serialization isn't magic, and validate your imports before executing them. So arbitrary binaries can only be deserialized as byte arrays, or something essentially similar.
Anything that facilitates interpersonal communication also facilitates the spreading of false rumors. I'm not sure there's any way around that short of hard AI. Think of the Nigerian scams that appeared as soon as email became common.
Now the one way that is shown to work fairly well is to increase the cost of communicating. That didn't eliminate chain letters, or false advertising, but it sure reduced it. However that comes with other secondary costs.
Since most of those "interesting" terms are essentially undefined, I'm going to consider them as reliable as salesmen's verbal assurances.
OTOH, since I'm not making the purchasing decision this year, I have time to wait for this to shake out. But if it's as the article suggests, and as the somewhat reliable reports suggest, Apple is off my list of acceptable vendors.
Sorry, but that's a good reason to avoid the restrictions that come with an official Apple version of BSD. Particularly as I prefer KDE. However it's not true. Apple does have certain advantages. The only question is are they worth the extra cost, and this makes it sound like the answer is no.
OTOH, it may be incorrect. The answers that I got when following the links given by the apologists saying that it was incorrect, however, cause me to believe that it's true enough that Apple isn't worth the hassle.
For you it's not a deal-breaker. For me it is...if the reports so far are anywhere near correct. Apple was already pretty close to the line, and has only a few features that I really care about.
IOW, I've got to think that Apple is less abusive than MS, and that at least one if them isn't so abusive that I'm willing to put up with it to play commercial games. Stream is already giving me fewer reasons to put up with their shenanigans.
Those "facts" are not compelling. I don't remember the filesystem I used the last time I formatted a partition for Linux on an Apple, it may well have been ext2...but it was not any version of FAT, which I won't even use on USB sticks.
To me Apple was already only marginally attractive. If I need to use an external disk, that's switched to more than marginally unattractive.
OTOH, I note your handle is "FakeTimCook", so perhaps your response isn't authoritative, and there actually is a decent way to avoid this problem. I've got awhile to decide, as I wasn't planning on buying an Apple this month anyway. Before I do, I'll find out for certain what's involved in installing Linux....or I may just avoid the hassle by avoiding Apple. I doubt that Apple would care, but I'm doing it for my benefit, not theirs. I really dislike bureaucratic and bureaucratically imposed hassles.
Sorry, but no.
That's not sufficient for me to consider Apple an acceptable vendor.
If I buy (when I bought) an Apple it was with the intention of running all my software native. Some software was native Linux, and for that I rebooted into the Linux partition. Some was Apple, and for that I rebooted into the Apple partition. Seriously, the Apple software wasn't sufficiently CPU intensive that running native was necessary, but that was the only way I know how to run it. The Linux software needed better access to the hardware, and a VM was not a satisfactory solution.
The Linux software was important. The Apple software was only games, and because I didn't want to support MS.
So, OK, if this is true I'll just give Apple a skip, too, the next time I purchase a computer (probably sometime next year, but maybe the year after that).
The GPL protects the freedom of the descendants of the code. BSD is more free, and allows the descendants to be sold into slavery.
This is an invalid analogy mainly because code isn't sentient, but also because if you don't distribute the descendants of GPL licensed code you aren't required to share it.
IIUC public domain became obsolete except upon the expiration of copyright terms when works became automatically under copyright. So unless you use a license explicitly granting rights, nobody else has the right to copy your program (except for fair use, which can always be challenged in court). This is true even if you publish it on the web.
IIRC, "Dan O'Neil's Comics and Stories" was enjoined from further publication under copyright law even though the characters drawn were clearly distinct from anything Disney ever did. It was decided that there were sufficient similarities that copyright law applied. Possibly if he'd had better lawyers....but he didn't.
Oracle's technical glory days had passed before they released Oracle 9i back around 2000.