It doesn't work that way. You're thinking of parasites that tie their reproduction to the reproduction of the host. This is a parasite that ties its reproduction to the host being eaten by a cat. The evolutionary pressures are different.
Explaining the cause of a fault is not denying the existence of the fault.
The question is "What should be done about it?". I'll agree that "beating yourself up" is rarely a useful approach, but that doesn't mean you should just accept it. There are generally multiple approaches to controlling any specific behavior, and multiple ways to deal with an infirmity or other fault. Find one that works. Sometimes you need assistance in finding one that works.
The real problem is when there's a defect in goals...but this is often due to defective training rather than an inherent defect.
Actually, the reason cat bites are more dangerous is that they are more puncture wounds and less open wounds. The claws are something else, though I wouldn't guess why cat scratch fever happens. Dog scratch fever is unknown because dog scratches rarely break the skin, and when they do it's an open wound.
Bacteria and live in very small spaces, so ordinary cleanliness doesn't suffice for protection. For that we depend on our unbroken skin...which is dead on the outside, and continually sloughed off. And deep punctures are much more dangerous that surface wounds, as the contamination is harder to eliminate.
FWIW, under "natural" conditions people are among the dirtiest of animals. This is related to living in dense groups and not being evolved to do that very long. Domestic cats and dogs (and pigs and chickens and cattle and...) are raised in a much more congested environment than their wild ancestors would tolerate. Most of them would prefer to be cleaner, but food and fencing tend to cause them to tolerate less desirable conditions.
All that said, I have read that toxoplasmosis can only become sexually mature within a feline. (I believe it was within a feline gut.) And the normal way the prey becomes infected with it is by exposure to cat feces. So it doesn't evolve to specifically handle animals that aren't eaten by felines. But over historic periods this includes most families of mammals. And it's not picky as to who it infects for the "prey" stage of its life cycle (though I haven't heard that it infects anything except mammals).
Therefore we can plausibly assume that it causes us to behave in ways that would make our distant ancestors more likely to become a cat's dinner. Proving this assumption correct could, however, be difficult.
It's not a joke, but it's also not certainly true. It's a plausible hypothesis. Or it may explain parts of the effect.
The best way to tell would be to immunize a sufficient number of "cat ladies" and see whether they reduce the number of cats they give room to compared to a randomly selected control group. Unfortunately, I haven't heard of any way to immunize against toxoplasmosis.
I particular, with mice it has been shown that a toxoplasmosis infection causes them to be attracted to the odor of cat urine. Also, IIRC, to be more aggressive. I don't think it causes them to be generally attracted to cats, but the combination of greater attraction to the odor of cat urine and more aggressive tends to put them in harms way. If the cat eats the mouse, then the toxoplasmosis has a chance to reproduce successfully. (IIRC, it can only become sexually mature within a feline gut.)
Since people are rarely eaten by lions or leopards anymore the thing has no real basis for adapting to humans (unless it evolves to get from humans to cat food). But people are basically similar to mice and other small mammals, so the existing controls are likely to work. One could see if owning cats is correlated with incidents of road-rage for a plausible test, but most tests would be unethical.
The DMCA is frequently used by commercial entities to take down speech which has even less relevance to it than this. That's an example of why the DMCA is an atrocious law, but why should only the abusive entities, like the RIAA or the MPAA, be allowed to use it?
(There is at least one reason, but think about it for a minute first.)
The only reason I've been able to identify, is that then you hate the law less than it deserves. I.e., you become complicit in its injustice. But most laws are unjust to someone or other, and you can't go around ignoring them.
No. I remember when SOME companies had leadership that came from the engineers. But it was always a stage process, where the engineers were replaced by the entrepreneurs who were replaced by the beancounters.
If you want to say something killed the process, I'd say it was the marketing department injecting their folk in at the top. The beancounters killed technical companies, but it was a slow, relatively graceful, death. And often forked off viable descendant companies.
I'm not familiar with the credit card industry, but a lot of people at the top firms seem to have really swallowed "a good manager can manage anything". So I don't find it convincing. Possibly she had someone really technically competent as her main subordinate there. Or perhaps I'm being too skeptical.
Based on the third and fourth hand information that's passing in front of me (slashdot, etc.) I think she was a decent administrator and depended on subordinates for tech, and was unable to judge their level of competence.
It's not that simple. The people writing financial software should be BOTH programming experts AND financial experts. Either one is not sufficient. Note, however, that I didn't say top experts. A moderate level of expertise in both fields should suffice. Enough to know where the edge cases are and which corners should definitely NOT be cut.
O, and you need an administratively separate Q/A department.
Sadly, "brilliant" is not necessarily and advantage when writing software. I've seen some C code written by definitely brilliant programmers that was totally unmaintainable by anyone else, and probably not by them, either. You need some common sense, also. (The guy I'm talking about LOVED C macros.) Reading it was worse than Forth. If I knew Perl, I'd probably say it was worse then Perl.
Sorry, but the degree is almost irrelevant. It's the experience that counts. Of course, you shouldn't be able to get the degree without some experience in the process...
Well, I'm a bit dyslexic, so while I noticed it, I didn't jump on it the way you did. I will admit it's frequently a problem when getting things to compile, though. (And I've got to be careful to use names that are unique under common permutations.)
Please demonstrate that a human can do something that requires actual insight as opposed to statistical calculation. Now prove that this wasn't done via statistical calculation.
The real problem that most AIs have is lack of grounding and a weak goal structure. But if they have decent grounding and decent ability to manipulate their environment, then you'd better pray that you got the goal structure correct, whether or not they are "strong AI". Cockroaches aren't strong AI, but just try to get rid of them. And the AI will make itself useful to some powerful group of people. (Possibly the group that caused it to be created, but that depends on the goal structure.)
Sorry, but even one drink will affect decision making ability, though not as much as two. So will a cup of coffee. Or being hungry. Or being tired.
I agree that the problem is difficult, but you are oversimplifying. And there are ways of resolving the problem which, though not guaranteed, *do* result in generally correct answers. Of a statistical nature. These involve having a well matched control group. Unfortunately, the summary gives no sign that such a group was well matched, and the nature of the problem makes such a match unlikely. I suspect this is a report of a search through the literature, which while valuable as a clue is not going to be reliable as a result.
It might well be a cause/effect error. From the summary it's impossible to know how the control group was selected...presuming it was. And if it wasn't, then it may be saying that depression is likely to lead to death.
I'm going to presume that there was *some* selection done to the control group, but I really doubt they did a study where some people diagnosed as depressed were randomly given anti-depressants and others not, and otherwise treated identically. So I'm going to doubt that this is a significant study. Quite plausibly those prescribed anti-depressants were more seriously depressed than members of the control group.
Have they *ever* suffered for libeling someone in their "credit report"? I don't think so, but I could be wrong. If not, then their legal duty is purely theoretical.
Actually, the Japanese *do* dislike "foreigners" living there. So do most countries (or Trump would never have been elected) but the Japanese are a bit extreme...possibly because they have long been an island, and have repelled repeated invasions. But native Japanese of Korean ancestry who have lived there from multiple generations are still strongly discriminated against, even though *I*, as a Caucasian teenager, was not able to tell the difference by looking. (OTOH, I believe that those in the US with African ancestry who are natives and have lived in the country for multiple generations also feel strongly discriminated against. So don't be too self-righteous.)
My wife was in a "nursing home" for a couple of weeks before she died, and I'm rather sure that they were using cut rate medicines that were counterfeit, and totally certain that they didn't verify that she took the medicine. (When she was out of her head, they'd just leave the medicine there for her. Sometimes I was able to get her to take them, but I couldn't be there 24 hours a day.)
She was doing reasonably well in the hospital, so they transferred her to a "nursing home" for skilled treatment. The skilled treatment was better than I could have provided at home...she was a fall risk, needed daily physical therapy, etc., but the care was almost absent. Many of the staff did as well as they could, before they burned out, but they were so overworked that there was no possibility of decent treatment. Sometimes she would wait for a hour for someone to take care of her need to "go to the bathroom". It was so noisy that we were almost unable to talk. And when I found one of the pills that she was supposed to have taken in her bed, I found out that they had an official policy of not recording that event.
So, yes, care by a robot would probably have been better. With a robot I might even have been able to bring her home, and make sure she got the real medicine.
Also, at least among the older Japanese, smaller body sizes are more common. But don't assume their larger people are any smaller than the ones you know, unless you know some professional basketball or football players. Even then...the Japanese also produce Sumo wrestlers.
But on the average older Japanese are smaller than older USians, so smaller vehicles are appropriate.
You are right that I should be less definite that they had advance knowledge and took criminal advantage of it. Possibly the trades were scheduled ahead of time. Possibly they can be shown to not have known. (Though I'd be dubious about that. Gossip spreads in ways that aren't officially recorded.)
However it was their *JOB* to know that things were being managed well. That's how they justify their fancy salaries. I'm not going to let them off the hook for this, unless I consider them criminally negligent in their duties to the stockholders. (Actually, I do consider them so criminally negligent, whether they knew about the break in before they sold their stock or not.)
OTOH, it's also true that how I feel about them isn't going to affect what happens...and what I believe is going to happen is that if somebody in the company suffers significantly it's going to be a fall-guy who didn't volunteer for the role, and couldn't have prevented the incident.
That may be reasonable ALSO. But many sysadmins don't have the right to control what they work on, so I can't be sure. It's definitely the case that the executives claimed responsibility while everything was (apparently) working well, and it appears that it was the executives who started selling their stock when the problem was detected. But even though the problem was detected, it wasn't fixed, so I suspect the sysadmins didn't have the right to fix it.
Of course, it might be quite reasonable to charge them as "accessories before the fact".
It's normally good for the public until regulatory capture happens. Then it continues to be slightly less bad for the public...but often only slightly.
Regulators need to be forbidden to accept payments from the groups they regulate not only while in office, but also after leaving. And that includes jobs.
No. We can claim that they did not prevent the breach, but they may well have delayed it or made it more difficult.
That said, they clearly don't suffice. The executives and management should be held personally responsible for the time, effort, and financial damages that this breach caused to every single individual affected, including only those who had to spend time figuring out how to try to deal with it. At a reasonable hourly rate, say the average hourly rate of the corporation management (figured from their salary and their nominal working time).
When it comes to car companies, why did you single out Volkswagen? They weren't the only one to cheat on the tests, most of the companies have been found to have done so since then. They were just the first one discovered. Or were you thinking of something else.
With cars, I would have picked Ford for the "Ford firebomb" otherwise known as the Pinto.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't work that way. You're thinking of parasites that tie their reproduction to the reproduction of the host. This is a parasite that ties its reproduction to the host being eaten by a cat. The evolutionary pressures are different.
Explaining the cause of a fault is not denying the existence of the fault.
The question is "What should be done about it?". I'll agree that "beating yourself up" is rarely a useful approach, but that doesn't mean you should just accept it. There are generally multiple approaches to controlling any specific behavior, and multiple ways to deal with an infirmity or other fault. Find one that works. Sometimes you need assistance in finding one that works.
The real problem is when there's a defect in goals...but this is often due to defective training rather than an inherent defect.
Actually, the reason cat bites are more dangerous is that they are more puncture wounds and less open wounds. The claws are something else, though I wouldn't guess why cat scratch fever happens. Dog scratch fever is unknown because dog scratches rarely break the skin, and when they do it's an open wound.
Bacteria and live in very small spaces, so ordinary cleanliness doesn't suffice for protection. For that we depend on our unbroken skin...which is dead on the outside, and continually sloughed off. And deep punctures are much more dangerous that surface wounds, as the contamination is harder to eliminate.
FWIW, under "natural" conditions people are among the dirtiest of animals. This is related to living in dense groups and not being evolved to do that very long. Domestic cats and dogs (and pigs and chickens and cattle and...) are raised in a much more congested environment than their wild ancestors would tolerate. Most of them would prefer to be cleaner, but food and fencing tend to cause them to tolerate less desirable conditions.
All that said, I have read that toxoplasmosis can only become sexually mature within a feline. (I believe it was within a feline gut.) And the normal way the prey becomes infected with it is by exposure to cat feces. So it doesn't evolve to specifically handle animals that aren't eaten by felines. But over historic periods this includes most families of mammals. And it's not picky as to who it infects for the "prey" stage of its life cycle (though I haven't heard that it infects anything except mammals).
Therefore we can plausibly assume that it causes us to behave in ways that would make our distant ancestors more likely to become a cat's dinner. Proving this assumption correct could, however, be difficult.
It's not a joke, but it's also not certainly true. It's a plausible hypothesis. Or it may explain parts of the effect.
The best way to tell would be to immunize a sufficient number of "cat ladies" and see whether they reduce the number of cats they give room to compared to a randomly selected control group. Unfortunately, I haven't heard of any way to immunize against toxoplasmosis.
I particular, with mice it has been shown that a toxoplasmosis infection causes them to be attracted to the odor of cat urine. Also, IIRC, to be more aggressive. I don't think it causes them to be generally attracted to cats, but the combination of greater attraction to the odor of cat urine and more aggressive tends to put them in harms way. If the cat eats the mouse, then the toxoplasmosis has a chance to reproduce successfully. (IIRC, it can only become sexually mature within a feline gut.)
Since people are rarely eaten by lions or leopards anymore the thing has no real basis for adapting to humans (unless it evolves to get from humans to cat food). But people are basically similar to mice and other small mammals, so the existing controls are likely to work. One could see if owning cats is correlated with incidents of road-rage for a plausible test, but most tests would be unethical.
The DMCA is frequently used by commercial entities to take down speech which has even less relevance to it than this. That's an example of why the DMCA is an atrocious law, but why should only the abusive entities, like the RIAA or the MPAA, be allowed to use it?
(There is at least one reason, but think about it for a minute first.)
The only reason I've been able to identify, is that then you hate the law less than it deserves. I.e., you become complicit in its injustice. But most laws are unjust to someone or other, and you can't go around ignoring them.
No. I remember when SOME companies had leadership that came from the engineers. But it was always a stage process, where the engineers were replaced by the entrepreneurs who were replaced by the beancounters.
If you want to say something killed the process, I'd say it was the marketing department injecting their folk in at the top. The beancounters killed technical companies, but it was a slow, relatively graceful, death. And often forked off viable descendant companies.
I'm not familiar with the credit card industry, but a lot of people at the top firms seem to have really swallowed "a good manager can manage anything". So I don't find it convincing. Possibly she had someone really technically competent as her main subordinate there. Or perhaps I'm being too skeptical.
Based on the third and fourth hand information that's passing in front of me (slashdot, etc.) I think she was a decent administrator and depended on subordinates for tech, and was unable to judge their level of competence.
It's not that simple. The people writing financial software should be BOTH programming experts AND financial experts. Either one is not sufficient. Note, however, that I didn't say top experts. A moderate level of expertise in both fields should suffice. Enough to know where the edge cases are and which corners should definitely NOT be cut.
O, and you need an administratively separate Q/A department.
Sadly, "brilliant" is not necessarily and advantage when writing software. I've seen some C code written by definitely brilliant programmers that was totally unmaintainable by anyone else, and probably not by them, either. You need some common sense, also. (The guy I'm talking about LOVED C macros.) Reading it was worse than Forth. If I knew Perl, I'd probably say it was worse then Perl.
Sorry, but the degree is almost irrelevant. It's the experience that counts. Of course, you shouldn't be able to get the degree without some experience in the process...
Well, I'm a bit dyslexic, so while I noticed it, I didn't jump on it the way you did. I will admit it's frequently a problem when getting things to compile, though. (And I've got to be careful to use names that are unique under common permutations.)
Please demonstrate that a human can do something that requires actual insight as opposed to statistical calculation. Now prove that this wasn't done via statistical calculation.
The real problem that most AIs have is lack of grounding and a weak goal structure. But if they have decent grounding and decent ability to manipulate their environment, then you'd better pray that you got the goal structure correct, whether or not they are "strong AI". Cockroaches aren't strong AI, but just try to get rid of them. And the AI will make itself useful to some powerful group of people. (Possibly the group that caused it to be created, but that depends on the goal structure.)
Sorry, but even one drink will affect decision making ability, though not as much as two. So will a cup of coffee. Or being hungry. Or being tired.
I agree that the problem is difficult, but you are oversimplifying. And there are ways of resolving the problem which, though not guaranteed, *do* result in generally correct answers. Of a statistical nature. These involve having a well matched control group. Unfortunately, the summary gives no sign that such a group was well matched, and the nature of the problem makes such a match unlikely. I suspect this is a report of a search through the literature, which while valuable as a clue is not going to be reliable as a result.
It might well be a cause/effect error. From the summary it's impossible to know how the control group was selected...presuming it was. And if it wasn't, then it may be saying that depression is likely to lead to death.
I'm going to presume that there was *some* selection done to the control group, but I really doubt they did a study where some people diagnosed as depressed were randomly given anti-depressants and others not, and otherwise treated identically. So I'm going to doubt that this is a significant study. Quite plausibly those prescribed anti-depressants were more seriously depressed than members of the control group.
Have they *ever* suffered for libeling someone in their "credit report"? I don't think so, but I could be wrong. If not, then their legal duty is purely theoretical.
Actually, the Japanese *do* dislike "foreigners" living there. So do most countries (or Trump would never have been elected) but the Japanese are a bit extreme...possibly because they have long been an island, and have repelled repeated invasions. But native Japanese of Korean ancestry who have lived there from multiple generations are still strongly discriminated against, even though *I*, as a Caucasian teenager, was not able to tell the difference by looking. (OTOH, I believe that those in the US with African ancestry who are natives and have lived in the country for multiple generations also feel strongly discriminated against. So don't be too self-righteous.)
You know what, it *IS* a step up.
My wife was in a "nursing home" for a couple of weeks before she died, and I'm rather sure that they were using cut rate medicines that were counterfeit, and totally certain that they didn't verify that she took the medicine. (When she was out of her head, they'd just leave the medicine there for her. Sometimes I was able to get her to take them, but I couldn't be there 24 hours a day.)
She was doing reasonably well in the hospital, so they transferred her to a "nursing home" for skilled treatment. The skilled treatment was better than I could have provided at home...she was a fall risk, needed daily physical therapy, etc., but the care was almost absent. Many of the staff did as well as they could, before they burned out, but they were so overworked that there was no possibility of decent treatment. Sometimes she would wait for a hour for someone to take care of her need to "go to the bathroom". It was so noisy that we were almost unable to talk. And when I found one of the pills that she was supposed to have taken in her bed, I found out that they had an official policy of not recording that event.
So, yes, care by a robot would probably have been better. With a robot I might even have been able to bring her home, and make sure she got the real medicine.
Also, at least among the older Japanese, smaller body sizes are more common. But don't assume their larger people are any smaller than the ones you know, unless you know some professional basketball or football players. Even then...the Japanese also produce Sumo wrestlers.
But on the average older Japanese are smaller than older USians, so smaller vehicles are appropriate.
You are right that I should be less definite that they had advance knowledge and took criminal advantage of it. Possibly the trades were scheduled ahead of time. Possibly they can be shown to not have known. (Though I'd be dubious about that. Gossip spreads in ways that aren't officially recorded.)
However it was their *JOB* to know that things were being managed well. That's how they justify their fancy salaries. I'm not going to let them off the hook for this, unless I consider them criminally negligent in their duties to the stockholders. (Actually, I do consider them so criminally negligent, whether they knew about the break in before they sold their stock or not.)
OTOH, it's also true that how I feel about them isn't going to affect what happens...and what I believe is going to happen is that if somebody in the company suffers significantly it's going to be a fall-guy who didn't volunteer for the role, and couldn't have prevented the incident.
That may be reasonable ALSO. But many sysadmins don't have the right to control what they work on, so I can't be sure. It's definitely the case that the executives claimed responsibility while everything was (apparently) working well, and it appears that it was the executives who started selling their stock when the problem was detected. But even though the problem was detected, it wasn't fixed, so I suspect the sysadmins didn't have the right to fix it.
Of course, it might be quite reasonable to charge them as "accessories before the fact".
It's normally good for the public until regulatory capture happens. Then it continues to be slightly less bad for the public...but often only slightly.
Regulators need to be forbidden to accept payments from the groups they regulate not only while in office, but also after leaving. And that includes jobs.
No. We can claim that they did not prevent the breach, but they may well have delayed it or made it more difficult.
That said, they clearly don't suffice. The executives and management should be held personally responsible for the time, effort, and financial damages that this breach caused to every single individual affected, including only those who had to spend time figuring out how to try to deal with it. At a reasonable hourly rate, say the average hourly rate of the corporation management (figured from their salary and their nominal working time).
Also the debugging of laws is pathetically poor compared to decent software. There's not even alpha testing before going into release.
When it comes to car companies, why did you single out Volkswagen? They weren't the only one to cheat on the tests, most of the companies have been found to have done so since then. They were just the first one discovered. Or were you thinking of something else.
With cars, I would have picked Ford for the "Ford firebomb" otherwise known as the Pinto.