Others have tried arguing with you, but I'll make this very plain and answer your questions bluntly, since you seem to lack some of the knowledge they assume you have.
It's not a ripoff - they are selling consumers exactly the performance they are promising.
Manufacturing isn't perfect. They test at the factory to see if each chip can run at the promised core count and clockspeeds. Fairly often, particularly with top-of-the-line chips, a few cores will be broken, or unstable at the specified clock speeds. They are unfit for sale as the originally-designed product. Rather than throw it away, they disable whatever is broken (either in firmware, or by blowing fuses built for this purpose on the processor) and sell it as a lower-cost, lower-capability product. This is standard procedure for everyone. Just off currently-sold chips:
For Nvidia: The 970 is a 980 with 3 SMMs disabled (out of 16) The Titan is a Titan Black/780 Ti with one SMX disabled (out of 15). The 780 is a Titan Black/780 Ti with 3 SMX disabled (out of 15) The 760 Ti is a 770 with one SMX disabled (out of 8) The 760 is a 770 with two SMX disabled (out of 8) The 745 and 750 are 750 Tis with one SMM disabled (out of 5)
For AMD (GPUs): The 290 is a 290X with four CUs disabled (out of 44) The 280 is a 280X with four CUs disabled (out of 32) The 265 is a 270/270X with four CUs disabled (out of 20) The 260 is a 260X with two CUs disabled (out of 14) The 240 is a 250 with one CU disabled (out of 6)
Note: I wanted to include AMD CPUs as well, but I can't find perfect info on their CPUs. They are clearly using binning like everyone else (probably more, if their Phenom II days are anything to go by), but I can't tell you exactly which ones are stripped-down versions of which.
For Intel (CPUs): The 5920K is a 5830K with 12 PCIe lanes disabled (out of 40). Both of those *might* be 5960Xs with two cores (of eight) disabled. Every current desktop i5 is an i7 with hyper-threading disabled. Likewise, any current desktop Celeron or Pentium is an i3 with hyper-threading disabled. For the most part though, Intel only bins based on clock, not cores - if it's a low-clock version of a given chip, it likely tested unable to run at higher speeds with stock voltages and cooling.
Oh, and every single PS3 processor had one SPU disabled out of 8. Processors with all 8 functional were used in certain IBM servers, amongst other things.
If you want a car analogy, imagine you were sold a car with a 4-cylinder engine. You check later, and find a 6-cylinder engine block, but two don't have piston heads in them and don't run. When you get some spares and try to run them, you find the two cylinders have completely busted sealing, and they contribute no power, only noise and pollution and a nasty rumble.
When run exactly as you were promised it would run, it works perfectly. The extra cylinders affect nothing, because this is a metaphor and the actual physics of a car don't apply. They used a part to a higher-end car that would not work in said higher-end car, but they neither told you that it would, nor charged you as if it did. They actually probably charged you slightly less than if they had built it as a four-cylinder engine to begin with.
For this story, imagine some unscrupulous car dealer (also known as just "a car dealer") took that car, put the pistons back in, and sold it to you as the higher-end car without letting you test-drive it to find out that it doesn't actually work, only letting you pop the hood to see that it has all six cylinders. The car manufacturer then changes their procedures so that instead of simply removing the pistons, they actually fill the broken cylinders with steel to prevent it from even pretending to work.
Oh, exactly. I used SQLite for a game database - RPGs have a lot of stats and such, and SQLite was a million times faster than the hand-rolled CSV parser I was using. And I love how focused it is on reliability and correctness and standards compliance. It's just not built for certain things - it will work as a web database, and one of the frameworks I use even ships with it as a testing option, but it's not a good pick for production use.
The performance degrades (or at least, doesn't scale well) once you have multiple processes accessing the same database, as you would be on a web server. It's a great tool, don't get me wrong, and I can definitely see the use case for a test environment. But even on a single-server system, you're better off with an actual database process.
1) They still haven't explained how they solved the memory-bandwidth issues inherent to point-cloud rendering. As far as I'm concerned, they're probably a scam just because of this. I can't say with 100% certainty, but their refusal to demonstrate it actually running in real-time is extremely suspicious.
2) How do they plan to work with dynamic content? Animations? Dynamic lights/shadows? So far I've only seen static scenes - unless they just want to make a new Myst, this is basically useless for games.
3) How exactly is this "cheaper"? Instead of making a scene in Maya or whatever, you now have to physically fabricate your set, then scan it, and then probably do some edits on the computer anyways. Even if they really can do everything they say they can, they're just going to make game development orders of magnitude more expensive, which is directly against one of their main advertising pillars.
While I suppose it's not impossible that there's a second group that uses that disguise, uses those methods and hates anyone who isn't a white protestant, Occam's Razor suggests that those five were most likely the KKK. While we would of course want to identify those five specifically when pursuing legal action, "5 as-yet-unidentified klansmen" would suffice for my criteria of a plausible conspiracy. Remember, *you're* the one who said that wouldn't be good enough, not I.
As an aside, you really need to work on your debate skills. A word of advice, if I may?
If you're going to fight by using reductio ad absurdum, you might as well go all the way. How can I prove that there were only five of them? How can I prove that five is a number? How can I prove that they were people? How can I prove that *I* am a person?
If you want to ignore every precept of reality, go all the way! Argue that reality doesn't exist! Question whether or not truth is true! Prove basic logic fundamentally inconsistent! Everything else you believe is completely detached from reality anyways - arguing that the moon landings could not have happened because we're all just minds with unprovable senses that may or may not be lying to us, is just as plausible as arguing that they could not have happened because the lighting is wrong.
Those were the PAL codes, basically a safety. On top of that, you've got the two-man rule and the authorization codes (the ones the President carries), plus dozens of safeties against accidents. The PALs were really there to secure it when on loan to other countries - like the nukes positioned in Europe.
Yes, it was dumb. They've remedied that now. However, the British didn't even have that, and to this day there is no similar safety on British nuclear weapons.
Perhaps, but unless they were faking some of their achievements as well, they would still have nothing to lose by revealing the American landings as a hoax. Coupled with a rational explanation of "it's not possible with current technology", that would suffice to let them bow out gracefully while still humiliating their enemies. They might not even need to explain why they hadn't succeeded - they could still say they were working on it, and just keep running the probe series and space stations they were working on.
And if the Soviets *were* faking some of their missions, that again raises the question of why the Americans didn't call them out on it, with all the same reasons I listed above, just swap "Soviets" for "Americans".
Go ahead. List them. I guarantee you there is an answer to every single one of them that doesn't involve a worldwide conspiracy.
Conspiracies do happen. But if you want to prove one happened, you need to a) identify all the conspirators, and b) identify their goal. If you just handwave the former as "oh, it was the government" or invent or co-opt some secret society that ran it, you're not doing an investigation, you're creating a cult. If you just handwave the latter as "oh, it was to prove that they had control of the planet" or some other vague goal, your rantings have no more weight than the average paranoid schizophrenics. Specific members. Specific goals. Can you do that?
Conspiracies that actually happened can easily meet those. The Gunpowder Plot? We know every member of the conspiracy, and their goals, while unlikely to be achieved, were realistic and real. Same for dozens, even hundreds of other actual conspiracies, from the Reichstag Burning to everyday criminal plots.
If you agree that those two conditions must be met to even consider a conspiracy theory plausible, I can disprove the Moon Hoax Theories right here, right now. Two words: Soviet Union.
They had the tech to put stuff into space (we're still using it). They launched probe after probe to the Moon. They had the means to monitor our launches and our communications (during Apollo 13, they made a gesture of ordering their people off any frequencies near the NASA ones, to prevent any interference). In short, if it were faked, the Soviets would have known. Why, then, would they have remained silent? Unless they were "in" on the conspiracy, they would not have.
What possible conspiracy could have counted both sides of the Cold War among their conspirators? What possible goal could they have had that would have justified it not just to the Americans, but to their mortal enemies? The purpose of the conspiracy, as most tell it, was to cheat at the space race and win it for America. Why would the USSR go along with it? What did they gain from it that was worth so much of a loss?
I can come up with nothing that can explain Soviet participation in this conspiracy. And so I am forced to conclude that the initial premise was wrong - the moon landings happened, as supported by literal tons of evidence.
Interestingly, if you theorize that Soviets started to spread lies and misinformation that the Apollo landings were faked, to reduce American prestige and regain their own, you can easily meet both the two conditions I had for a plausible conspiracy theory. They had the means - it's simple propaganda, through word-of-mouth. Get it started and the paranoid will parrot it for you. They had the motivation, obviously enough. This isn't proof that it did happen that way, of course, but it's a much more plausible theory than the one you subscribe to.
I've backed several book printings. The content already existed. All they needed was to go through the proofing process and have enough cash to do a print run. The former, while time-consuming, is fairly low-risk. With Kickstarter's "no money taken until you meet the threshold" setup, the latter is also pretty guaranteed.
But despite it being a very low-risk proposition, banks don't really help with such a project. It's too little money - one had a minimum of $6000, and even the biggest was only $20K. Likewise, who wants to bring in VCs who will try to take over your business (if not just burn it for profit) for a small project?
Really, I think you're wrong in that you think VCs and banks are a good judge of whether a project will succeed. They really aren't, in many cases, particularly for niche fandoms. And they might also not be good for the business, since they inevitably take a large chunk of the profits for themselves. Some of the projects I've backed could easily have self-funded - but they used Kickstarter to make sure there was enough demand for it to be profitable.
I tend to treat Kickstarter as a sort of preorder system, with the caveat that I need some sort of proof that you actually know what you're doing before I will commit. Many of them have successfully done such things before. I kickstarted Exalted 3rd Edition, since the mere existence of two prior editions is a good indicator that they can make a third. I've kickstarted a few games from new creators that had fully playable prototypes (Superhot and Nothing To Hide). Those were riskier, but still a pretty acceptable risk.
I do, however, shy away from any Kickstarter project that will need additional funding - like Clang, which took all that money just to build something they could show to VCs. That's like paying an entrance fee to a casino - sure, you might still hit the jackpot but those are some pretty long odds.
There's a couple webcomics I read where the "only traitors enable adblock" images are still less obnoxious than the actual ads, so I keep it enabled and just buy some of their swag instead.
Depends on the browser - IIRC on Chrome, it can't prevent ads from being downloaded, it can only prevent them from rendering. Or at least that was the case several years ago, maybe Chrome's added the APIs for it by now.
You do realize judging the entire country of Africa by the most notorious problems is like judging North America by Haiti and West Virginia. Ebola isn't even that deadly at a population level - it's killed fewer people, total, than the recent Gaza war. The real killer diseases in Africa are the ones we've already solved in the developed world - malaria and the ilk.
Anyways, build a modern healthcare infrastructure, modern farms with GMO crops, stop all the pointless wars and rein industry in a bit, and Africa will be fine.
Better idea then - they get a warrant for one guy that forces Apple to roll out an update that removes *everyone's* encryption. Because otherwise they're obviously harboring terrorists/pedophiles/satanists/communists/anarchists/Tories/heretics/witches/whatever.
The guy offered to do the development in lieu of the overly-broad request, and the government refused it.
THEY *HAVE* GOTTEN WARRANTS LIKE THAT. WORSE, EVEN.
Remember Lavabit? They got a warrant to seize his private SSL key, so they could hijack connections from every user. The warrant only covered one person specifically but the order was for the SSL key itself, giving them the technical ability to read everything the users read. He even offered to modify his code so it would do it for just that one user, and they refused. The warrant even came with a gag order preventing him from talking about it.
Wait a minute... ISIS are now stealing American intellectual property? Sure, the terrorism and genocide was bad, but now they're *real* criminals. Might have to bring back the nukes for these guys!
Way back in the day, when Steam used that ugly vaguely-military olive drab color, any free apps just showed up in everyone's accounts. There weren't that many - a few demos, all for Valve games. The entire Steam library was only like thirty or forty games at this point.
And then PopCap joined. They basically doubled the list of paid games, but also added demos for at least two dozen games (I recall the list was so long I actually had to scroll). People were understandably furious, because that made it a lot harder to pick out the games you had actually bought from the demos that just popped into everyone's accounts. I think this was before there was an option to show only installed games, which would have made things much worse.
Valve fixed that pretty damn quickly. And I thought everyone would have seen and learned from that. Sadly Apple refuses to learn from their own mistakes, let alone the mistakes of others.
You're making the assumption that any situation the car cannot handle is both an immediate danger, and a situation that can be handled perfectly by a human.
When I try to think of situations where an automated car would fail, most tend to be ones where a response of "come to a full stop, don't do anything until the human orients himself and takes charge" is a perfectly valid one. Traffic lights not working? Let the human figure it out. Bridge out ahead? Let the human figure it out. Conditions so bad you can't see the road markings? Let the human try to do better, and if he wants to sit on his ass until it clears, that's probably a good idea anyways.
Sure, there are situations where an AI might not be able to avoid an accident an alert human would. Let's say a trailer detaches from a truck in front of you, but not in your lane. As it skids, it suddenly tumbles into your lane. An automated car might have ignored it until it was too late, while an alert human would have slammed on the brakes as soon as they saw it.
But how many humans would have been that alert? Even if they weren't on a phone, or sipping their coffee, or fiddling with the radio, most drivers end up in a sort of trance, doing things automatically. I've seen people crash just because they weren't paying attention - not distracted by anything, just driving without conscious thought. Automated cars won't have that problem - they don't *get* bored. Even if they can't dodge a freak accident, they'll be avoiding plenty of routine accidents. Net gain for people who don't like car wrecks.
Or let's see if it could handle the commute I had this morning:
There was a power outage. Seems to have affected at least two blocks, including the traffic lights. I was trying to make a left turn, onto Main Street.
For those whose traffic laws may be different, in this jurisdiction, a downed traffic signal is treated as an all-way stop sign. Or at least, it's supposed to be.
Traffic coming from the left refused to stop. They just blew right through it, most didn't even slow down. Traffic from the right stopped occasionally (they had passed through other downed lights to get there, so I guess they had a few seconds to think), but that didn't help me. I eventually had to turn around and find a different route, specifically one that would not hit any traffic lights.
I wonder if automated cars would have done better. Would they have stopped, as they were supposed to? Would they recognize it as a dangerous situation, stop and hand control back to the driver? Would they just plow right through it like all the dumb humans? The first is obviously correct behavior, the second would be tolerable, and the third would be merely no better than humans were doing.
What if my car was automated? Would it have stopped? I sure hope so. Would it have realized that humans are morons and that it would never be able to make that turn? Would it plan a backup route that avoided all traffic lights, or would it continue to be surprised every time humans failed to remember an obscure driving law?
What if a policeman had been directing traffic? Do Google's cars know how to obey hand signals? People can usually figure them out even if they don't remember them, since they're fairly intuitive to us, but that has no bearing on whether it makes sense to a machine.
We need more penalties just for trying to include illegal terms in a non-negotiable contract. It's not enough to simply say "well, the courts will toss it out if they try to enforce it" - because that relies on people being able to fight a legal battle that they shouldn't have needed to fight to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, if it's not running straight LISP at the hardware level, it's not a real computer. Who needs firmware when you have CONS?
Others have tried arguing with you, but I'll make this very plain and answer your questions bluntly, since you seem to lack some of the knowledge they assume you have.
It's not a ripoff - they are selling consumers exactly the performance they are promising.
Manufacturing isn't perfect. They test at the factory to see if each chip can run at the promised core count and clockspeeds. Fairly often, particularly with top-of-the-line chips, a few cores will be broken, or unstable at the specified clock speeds. They are unfit for sale as the originally-designed product. Rather than throw it away, they disable whatever is broken (either in firmware, or by blowing fuses built for this purpose on the processor) and sell it as a lower-cost, lower-capability product. This is standard procedure for everyone. Just off currently-sold chips:
For Nvidia:
The 970 is a 980 with 3 SMMs disabled (out of 16)
The Titan is a Titan Black/780 Ti with one SMX disabled (out of 15).
The 780 is a Titan Black/780 Ti with 3 SMX disabled (out of 15)
The 760 Ti is a 770 with one SMX disabled (out of 8)
The 760 is a 770 with two SMX disabled (out of 8)
The 745 and 750 are 750 Tis with one SMM disabled (out of 5)
For AMD (GPUs):
The 290 is a 290X with four CUs disabled (out of 44)
The 280 is a 280X with four CUs disabled (out of 32)
The 265 is a 270/270X with four CUs disabled (out of 20)
The 260 is a 260X with two CUs disabled (out of 14)
The 240 is a 250 with one CU disabled (out of 6)
Note: I wanted to include AMD CPUs as well, but I can't find perfect info on their CPUs. They are clearly using binning like everyone else (probably more, if their Phenom II days are anything to go by), but I can't tell you exactly which ones are stripped-down versions of which.
For Intel (CPUs):
The 5920K is a 5830K with 12 PCIe lanes disabled (out of 40). Both of those *might* be 5960Xs with two cores (of eight) disabled.
Every current desktop i5 is an i7 with hyper-threading disabled. Likewise, any current desktop Celeron or Pentium is an i3 with hyper-threading disabled. For the most part though, Intel only bins based on clock, not cores - if it's a low-clock version of a given chip, it likely tested unable to run at higher speeds with stock voltages and cooling.
Oh, and every single PS3 processor had one SPU disabled out of 8. Processors with all 8 functional were used in certain IBM servers, amongst other things.
If you want a car analogy, imagine you were sold a car with a 4-cylinder engine. You check later, and find a 6-cylinder engine block, but two don't have piston heads in them and don't run. When you get some spares and try to run them, you find the two cylinders have completely busted sealing, and they contribute no power, only noise and pollution and a nasty rumble.
When run exactly as you were promised it would run, it works perfectly. The extra cylinders affect nothing, because this is a metaphor and the actual physics of a car don't apply. They used a part to a higher-end car that would not work in said higher-end car, but they neither told you that it would, nor charged you as if it did. They actually probably charged you slightly less than if they had built it as a four-cylinder engine to begin with.
For this story, imagine some unscrupulous car dealer (also known as just "a car dealer") took that car, put the pistons back in, and sold it to you as the higher-end car without letting you test-drive it to find out that it doesn't actually work, only letting you pop the hood to see that it has all six cylinders. The car manufacturer then changes their procedures so that instead of simply removing the pistons, they actually fill the broken cylinders with steel to prevent it from even pretending to work.
Oh, exactly. I used SQLite for a game database - RPGs have a lot of stats and such, and SQLite was a million times faster than the hand-rolled CSV parser I was using. And I love how focused it is on reliability and correctness and standards compliance. It's just not built for certain things - it will work as a web database, and one of the frameworks I use even ships with it as a testing option, but it's not a good pick for production use.
The performance degrades (or at least, doesn't scale well) once you have multiple processes accessing the same database, as you would be on a web server. It's a great tool, don't get me wrong, and I can definitely see the use case for a test environment. But even on a single-server system, you're better off with an actual database process.
I really, really hope nobody is using SQLite for a production web database, but sadly I know somebody probably is.
1) They still haven't explained how they solved the memory-bandwidth issues inherent to point-cloud rendering. As far as I'm concerned, they're probably a scam just because of this. I can't say with 100% certainty, but their refusal to demonstrate it actually running in real-time is extremely suspicious.
2) How do they plan to work with dynamic content? Animations? Dynamic lights/shadows? So far I've only seen static scenes - unless they just want to make a new Myst, this is basically useless for games.
3) How exactly is this "cheaper"? Instead of making a scene in Maya or whatever, you now have to physically fabricate your set, then scan it, and then probably do some edits on the computer anyways. Even if they really can do everything they say they can, they're just going to make game development orders of magnitude more expensive, which is directly against one of their main advertising pillars.
While I suppose it's not impossible that there's a second group that uses that disguise, uses those methods and hates anyone who isn't a white protestant, Occam's Razor suggests that those five were most likely the KKK. While we would of course want to identify those five specifically when pursuing legal action, "5 as-yet-unidentified klansmen" would suffice for my criteria of a plausible conspiracy. Remember, *you're* the one who said that wouldn't be good enough, not I.
As an aside, you really need to work on your debate skills. A word of advice, if I may?
If you're going to fight by using reductio ad absurdum, you might as well go all the way. How can I prove that there were only five of them? How can I prove that five is a number? How can I prove that they were people? How can I prove that *I* am a person?
If you want to ignore every precept of reality, go all the way! Argue that reality doesn't exist! Question whether or not truth is true! Prove basic logic fundamentally inconsistent! Everything else you believe is completely detached from reality anyways - arguing that the moon landings could not have happened because we're all just minds with unprovable senses that may or may not be lying to us, is just as plausible as arguing that they could not have happened because the lighting is wrong.
Those were the PAL codes, basically a safety. On top of that, you've got the two-man rule and the authorization codes (the ones the President carries), plus dozens of safeties against accidents. The PALs were really there to secure it when on loan to other countries - like the nukes positioned in Europe.
Yes, it was dumb. They've remedied that now. However, the British didn't even have that, and to this day there is no similar safety on British nuclear weapons.
Perhaps, but unless they were faking some of their achievements as well, they would still have nothing to lose by revealing the American landings as a hoax. Coupled with a rational explanation of "it's not possible with current technology", that would suffice to let them bow out gracefully while still humiliating their enemies. They might not even need to explain why they hadn't succeeded - they could still say they were working on it, and just keep running the probe series and space stations they were working on.
And if the Soviets *were* faking some of their missions, that again raises the question of why the Americans didn't call them out on it, with all the same reasons I listed above, just swap "Soviets" for "Americans".
Dodging the question, I see. List your "obvious flaws", or I will be forced to conclude you were making them up.
Go ahead. List them. I guarantee you there is an answer to every single one of them that doesn't involve a worldwide conspiracy.
Conspiracies do happen. But if you want to prove one happened, you need to a) identify all the conspirators, and b) identify their goal. If you just handwave the former as "oh, it was the government" or invent or co-opt some secret society that ran it, you're not doing an investigation, you're creating a cult. If you just handwave the latter as "oh, it was to prove that they had control of the planet" or some other vague goal, your rantings have no more weight than the average paranoid schizophrenics. Specific members. Specific goals. Can you do that?
Conspiracies that actually happened can easily meet those. The Gunpowder Plot? We know every member of the conspiracy, and their goals, while unlikely to be achieved, were realistic and real. Same for dozens, even hundreds of other actual conspiracies, from the Reichstag Burning to everyday criminal plots.
If you agree that those two conditions must be met to even consider a conspiracy theory plausible, I can disprove the Moon Hoax Theories right here, right now. Two words: Soviet Union.
They had the tech to put stuff into space (we're still using it). They launched probe after probe to the Moon. They had the means to monitor our launches and our communications (during Apollo 13, they made a gesture of ordering their people off any frequencies near the NASA ones, to prevent any interference). In short, if it were faked, the Soviets would have known. Why, then, would they have remained silent? Unless they were "in" on the conspiracy, they would not have.
What possible conspiracy could have counted both sides of the Cold War among their conspirators? What possible goal could they have had that would have justified it not just to the Americans, but to their mortal enemies? The purpose of the conspiracy, as most tell it, was to cheat at the space race and win it for America. Why would the USSR go along with it? What did they gain from it that was worth so much of a loss?
I can come up with nothing that can explain Soviet participation in this conspiracy. And so I am forced to conclude that the initial premise was wrong - the moon landings happened, as supported by literal tons of evidence.
Interestingly, if you theorize that Soviets started to spread lies and misinformation that the Apollo landings were faked, to reduce American prestige and regain their own, you can easily meet both the two conditions I had for a plausible conspiracy theory. They had the means - it's simple propaganda, through word-of-mouth. Get it started and the paranoid will parrot it for you. They had the motivation, obviously enough. This isn't proof that it did happen that way, of course, but it's a much more plausible theory than the one you subscribe to.
Often it's too little money for a loan.
I've backed several book printings. The content already existed. All they needed was to go through the proofing process and have enough cash to do a print run. The former, while time-consuming, is fairly low-risk. With Kickstarter's "no money taken until you meet the threshold" setup, the latter is also pretty guaranteed.
But despite it being a very low-risk proposition, banks don't really help with such a project. It's too little money - one had a minimum of $6000, and even the biggest was only $20K. Likewise, who wants to bring in VCs who will try to take over your business (if not just burn it for profit) for a small project?
Really, I think you're wrong in that you think VCs and banks are a good judge of whether a project will succeed. They really aren't, in many cases, particularly for niche fandoms. And they might also not be good for the business, since they inevitably take a large chunk of the profits for themselves. Some of the projects I've backed could easily have self-funded - but they used Kickstarter to make sure there was enough demand for it to be profitable.
I tend to treat Kickstarter as a sort of preorder system, with the caveat that I need some sort of proof that you actually know what you're doing before I will commit. Many of them have successfully done such things before. I kickstarted Exalted 3rd Edition, since the mere existence of two prior editions is a good indicator that they can make a third. I've kickstarted a few games from new creators that had fully playable prototypes (Superhot and Nothing To Hide). Those were riskier, but still a pretty acceptable risk.
I do, however, shy away from any Kickstarter project that will need additional funding - like Clang, which took all that money just to build something they could show to VCs. That's like paying an entrance fee to a casino - sure, you might still hit the jackpot but those are some pretty long odds.
There's a couple webcomics I read where the "only traitors enable adblock" images are still less obnoxious than the actual ads, so I keep it enabled and just buy some of their swag instead.
Depends on the browser - IIRC on Chrome, it can't prevent ads from being downloaded, it can only prevent them from rendering. Or at least that was the case several years ago, maybe Chrome's added the APIs for it by now.
... I really meant to say "continent" there. I really did.
You do realize judging the entire country of Africa by the most notorious problems is like judging North America by Haiti and West Virginia. Ebola isn't even that deadly at a population level - it's killed fewer people, total, than the recent Gaza war. The real killer diseases in Africa are the ones we've already solved in the developed world - malaria and the ilk.
Anyways, build a modern healthcare infrastructure, modern farms with GMO crops, stop all the pointless wars and rein industry in a bit, and Africa will be fine.
Better idea then - they get a warrant for one guy that forces Apple to roll out an update that removes *everyone's* encryption. Because otherwise they're obviously harboring terrorists/pedophiles/satanists/communists/anarchists/Tories/heretics/witches/whatever.
The guy offered to do the development in lieu of the overly-broad request, and the government refused it.
THEY *HAVE* GOTTEN WARRANTS LIKE THAT. WORSE, EVEN.
Remember Lavabit? They got a warrant to seize his private SSL key, so they could hijack connections from every user. The warrant only covered one person specifically but the order was for the SSL key itself, giving them the technical ability to read everything the users read. He even offered to modify his code so it would do it for just that one user, and they refused. The warrant even came with a gag order preventing him from talking about it.
Wait a minute... ISIS are now stealing American intellectual property? Sure, the terrorism and genocide was bad, but now they're *real* criminals. Might have to bring back the nukes for these guys!
In completely unrelated news, Slashcode 14.08 has full UTF-8 functionality, and has been live on Soylent for almost a month now.
Way back in the day, when Steam used that ugly vaguely-military olive drab color, any free apps just showed up in everyone's accounts. There weren't that many - a few demos, all for Valve games. The entire Steam library was only like thirty or forty games at this point.
And then PopCap joined. They basically doubled the list of paid games, but also added demos for at least two dozen games (I recall the list was so long I actually had to scroll). People were understandably furious, because that made it a lot harder to pick out the games you had actually bought from the demos that just popped into everyone's accounts. I think this was before there was an option to show only installed games, which would have made things much worse.
Valve fixed that pretty damn quickly. And I thought everyone would have seen and learned from that. Sadly Apple refuses to learn from their own mistakes, let alone the mistakes of others.
You're making the assumption that any situation the car cannot handle is both an immediate danger, and a situation that can be handled perfectly by a human.
When I try to think of situations where an automated car would fail, most tend to be ones where a response of "come to a full stop, don't do anything until the human orients himself and takes charge" is a perfectly valid one. Traffic lights not working? Let the human figure it out. Bridge out ahead? Let the human figure it out. Conditions so bad you can't see the road markings? Let the human try to do better, and if he wants to sit on his ass until it clears, that's probably a good idea anyways.
Sure, there are situations where an AI might not be able to avoid an accident an alert human would. Let's say a trailer detaches from a truck in front of you, but not in your lane. As it skids, it suddenly tumbles into your lane. An automated car might have ignored it until it was too late, while an alert human would have slammed on the brakes as soon as they saw it.
But how many humans would have been that alert? Even if they weren't on a phone, or sipping their coffee, or fiddling with the radio, most drivers end up in a sort of trance, doing things automatically. I've seen people crash just because they weren't paying attention - not distracted by anything, just driving without conscious thought. Automated cars won't have that problem - they don't *get* bored. Even if they can't dodge a freak accident, they'll be avoiding plenty of routine accidents. Net gain for people who don't like car wrecks.
Or let's see if it could handle the commute I had this morning: There was a power outage. Seems to have affected at least two blocks, including the traffic lights. I was trying to make a left turn, onto Main Street. For those whose traffic laws may be different, in this jurisdiction, a downed traffic signal is treated as an all-way stop sign. Or at least, it's supposed to be. Traffic coming from the left refused to stop. They just blew right through it, most didn't even slow down. Traffic from the right stopped occasionally (they had passed through other downed lights to get there, so I guess they had a few seconds to think), but that didn't help me. I eventually had to turn around and find a different route, specifically one that would not hit any traffic lights. I wonder if automated cars would have done better. Would they have stopped, as they were supposed to? Would they recognize it as a dangerous situation, stop and hand control back to the driver? Would they just plow right through it like all the dumb humans? The first is obviously correct behavior, the second would be tolerable, and the third would be merely no better than humans were doing. What if my car was automated? Would it have stopped? I sure hope so. Would it have realized that humans are morons and that it would never be able to make that turn? Would it plan a backup route that avoided all traffic lights, or would it continue to be surprised every time humans failed to remember an obscure driving law? What if a policeman had been directing traffic? Do Google's cars know how to obey hand signals? People can usually figure them out even if they don't remember them, since they're fairly intuitive to us, but that has no bearing on whether it makes sense to a machine.
NFL: One of the few industries where smooth talking idiots can rake in millions spewing bullshit.
Few?
We need more penalties just for trying to include illegal terms in a non-negotiable contract. It's not enough to simply say "well, the courts will toss it out if they try to enforce it" - because that relies on people being able to fight a legal battle that they shouldn't have needed to fight to begin with.