Do you have a car? Is it safe? Would it be safer if you paid more? Are there safety features available on the premium or luxury version of your car?
This is the equivalent of putting a price on the value your family's safety. Safety costs extra. Pay up or die.
If any car brands can be found to have more safety for a premium price, there will be lawsuits now that this concept of corporate greed has been made apparent to us by Boeing.
This rapid growth at all costs strategy is not new. The robber barons of the gilded age would literally kill the competition if given the chance. In more recent times Jack Welch, the CEO of GE from 1981 until 2001, was famous for his "#1 or #2" strategy.
Devising a Business Philosophy In pursuit of growth, Welch wanted only those businesses that were number 1 or 2 in their markets in the GE portfolio.
As a result of this restructuring, the business could employ more aggressive tactics, such as in pricing, and have the resources to develop new products.
Without the Number 1, Number 2 strategy, Welch said, inflation would start to impede worldwide growth. There would be no room for a mediocre supplier of products and services. Successful companies in such a slow-growth environment would be those that searched out and participated in growth industries and insisted on being number 1 or number 2 in every business they were in. They would need to be the number 1 or number 2 leanest, lowest cost, worldwide producers of quality goods and services, or they would have to have a definite technological edge in some market.
He downsized the GE payroll, ending the “no layoff” policy that had characterized the company and many other large U.S. firms. He sold $12-billion worth of businesses and purchased $26-billion worth of others. And, he pared GE’s workforce from 412,000 to a mere 229,000.
To Welch, keeping people in place who contributed little or nothing to the company represented a failed strategy. It was a major reason why a company under-performed. GE’s key competition in the early 1980s was coming from overseas enterprises that paid their employees less and achieved higher productivity rates. To compete successfully with such companies, GE had to upgrade equipment and cut employee rolls.
If you want to read a tidy science fiction on the topic of automation, then I strongly recommend Manna. You can read the story for free at the author's website.
Manna Chapter 1 by Marshall Brain Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.
Burger-G was a fast food chain that had come out of nowhere starting with its first restaurant in Cary. The Burger-G chain had an attitude and a style that said "hip" and "fun" to a wide swath of the American middle class. The chain was able to grow with surprising speed based on its popularity and the public persona of the young founder, Joe Garcia. Over time, Burger-G grew to 1,000 outlets in the U.S. and showed no signs of slowing down. If the trend continued, Burger-G would soon be one of the "Top 5" fast food restaurants in the U.S.
The "robot" installed at this first Burger-G restaurant looked nothing like the robots of popular culture. It was not hominid like C-3PO or futuristic like R2-D2 or industrial like an assembly line robot. Instead it was simply a PC sitting in the back corner of the restaurant running a piece of software. The software was called "Manna", version 1.0*.
Transcript Narrator: Dogbert The Reporter. Dogbert: How did hackers get access to your customer data? CEO: I'm told they used something called "our A.P.I." to suck out all the data. Dogbert: I'll just say you'er stupid. CEO: Why does everyone always say that?
Your right to life is goes down with your bank balance. Of course, dead patients cannot pay. The optimal path of for-profit medical institutions is to bankrupt you before you die. Companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, not your life.
"We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience. That's something that we're actively looking at doing,", says Bob Visse, director of marketing for Microsoft's MSN Internet services division, said.
That is a big firecracker, but it is no Tsar Bomba. The Tsar Bomba was tested in 1961, so the technological capability for high yield bombs is old news. Best bit about the Tsar Bomba: "In theory, the bomb had a maximum yield of 100 megatons if it were to have included a U-238 tamper, but because only one bomb was built, this theory was never demonstrated."
Here is a short documentary film on the Tsar Bomba.
Second, everyone - commenters included - seem to confuse AI with artificial consciousness.
It almost follows that if there is artificial intelligence then there must be artificial consciousness, but I doubt it. Either an entity is conscious or not. Since the ancients we have not invented a definitive test to determine when something is conscious, and yet this is not a moot point: Maybe the rocks and trees are conscious but no one can tell so terminating their existence does not matter; maybe you have a simulacrum of consciousness but no one can tell so ending your existence matters a lot, especially to you.
Unlawfully and definitively ending the productive capacity of an entity which is conscious is murder. I suspect there will be a long genocide of silicon life until the law catches up with that fact.
It seems to me that encrypted communication is akin to two people having a conversation in Klingon. If a third party, a police officer, were to interrupt the conversation shouting, "Hey! Speak English! You must be understood!", then that would clearly be a violation of first amendment rights. I cannot imagine a judge would allow the police officer to use a defense of, "Well, they could have been planning terrorism." If the conversation is electronic, and the government does not know what is being said, then it still seems absurd to me for that to be illegal.
Banning encrypted communication is akin to banning all foreign languages, made-up languages, and baby talk. Speak English, little baby, you must be understood or the cops will get you! Absurd.
If the CNIL's proposed approach were to be embraced as the standard for Internet regulation, we would find ourselves in a race to the bottom. In the end, the Internet would only be as free as the world's least free place.
Correction: The Internet would only be as free as the intersection of all least free places. Anything that is forbidden anywhere would be forbidden everywhere.
Here is an article from The Society Pages about dead people who won't vote:
Black people in the U.S. vote overwhelmingly Democratic. They also have, compared to Whites, much higher rates of infant mortality and lower life expectancy. Since dead people have lower rates of voting, that higher mortality rate might affect who gets elected. What would happen if Blacks and Whites had equal rates of staying alive?
These articles are interesting, but the conclusions are too simple: It is too simple to say that if things were different then people would act as if things were the same.
The site Sociological Images has data about the rate that cops kill and are killed in the USA. This article is a comparison between the use of guns in the USA vs the UK, but it does highlight the USA rates per civilian population per police population pretty well.
It isn't about making money, it is about a case load that they could not possibly handle if they had to take every one to court.... Besides, the court system couldn't deal with the volume either.
If there are more broken laws than there is money or capacity to adjudicate the cases of the alleged perpetrators... then maybe there are too many laws?
Why should justice hinge on the financial means of the alleged perpetrators or on court capacity? That scenario sounds ripe for the proliferation of injustice.
Programming has a spectrum of difficulty. The tools can always be improved to make the easier parts easier and the harder parts more manageable, but in the end the hard parts are hard because of the nature of the work; not due to lack of tools.
In more mature fields the spectrum of difficulty is well understood and no one expects the hard parts to be easy. If a person can write a "hello world" program then it should not be expected they will have the wherewithal to roll out healthcare.gov. If a person can apply a bandage to a skinned knee then it should not be expected they will have the wherewithal to do brain surgery; regardless of how good the tools are.
The brave new world is sorting out what companies, services, and communication mediums are subject to Common Carrier regulations. If Facebook is a common carrier, then there should be some expectation of privacy. If not, then not.
Facebook (and many service providers) are currently and deliberately in a gray zone. If they are not common carriers then they can do whatever they please with the goods (electrons, bits) that they transport because it is their own private property once you hand it to them; per the terms of service. That is good for business because people are handing over "free" stuff that the companies can turn into profits.
However, if companies are not common carriers and they own whatever is handed to them then they are subject to intellectual property violations, libel suits, fourth amendment oddities, and other violation of the law. A telephone company is not criminally prosecuted when land lines are used to break laws; a common carrier is immune to prosecution for what is transmitted. The lawsuits resulting from not being a common carrier could be bad for business.
In the long run, the market could sort this out. If some companies clearly are common carriers and some are not then consumers can decide. Or, it can stay muddled long enough for the gray area to become its own class according to judicial precedent, law, and the public.
Every attempt to refer chemical questions to mathematical doctrines must be considered, now and always, profoundly irrational, as being contrary to the nature of the phenomena. . . . but if the employment of mathematical analysis should ever become so preponderant in chemistry (an aberration which is happily almost impossible) it would occasion vast and rapid retrogradation.... Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, 1853
PROPRIETARY ENGINE TECHNOLOGY The Planetary Annihilation engine was built for this project, so we could make the game that we wanted to make. Built by the same engineers who built the Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander rendering engines.
Too right. If Xbox wants the profits from the Steam model then they will have reduce prices drastically.
On the Xbox I buy new games for $50 ($60 minus pre-order discounts) and resell them quickly for $30 - $40. I buy 4 - 6 Xbox games per year.
On Steam I buy games for $2 - $10, typically. I buy 15 - 30 Steam games per year. I never buy games for more than $30 on Steam.
Also, Steam costs $0 per month to maintain my library. Xbox costs $5. If the Xbox locks me out of games that I own and that I can't sell then the Xbox will not be part of my gaming free time.
Kelly Coffman-Lee wanted to tell the world about her love of tofu by picking the letters for her car's license plate. Her suggestion for the plate on her Suzuki: "ILVTOFU." Department of Revenue spokesman Mark Couch said the letters could be misinterpreted. Coffman-Lee, 38, said tofu is a staple of her family's diet because they are vegan and that the DMV misinterpreted her message.
If the Department of Motor Vehicles is going to let people praise certain religions or ethnicities on their license plates, it also must let people denigrate individuals of those faiths and nationalities. That's the opinion of a Circuit Court judge, who ruled last week that part of the DMV's guidelines governing vanity tags is unconstitutional. The ruling stemmed from an appeal from an Iraq War veteran who disagreed with the state's decision last year to revoke his personalized plates, which read "ICUHAJI." "Haji" is a common and often derogatory term for Arabs used by U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The veteran's attorney, however, said his client did not intend to offend anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have a car? Is it safe? Would it be safer if you paid more? Are there safety features available on the premium or luxury version of your car?
This is the equivalent of putting a price on the value your family's safety. Safety costs extra. Pay up or die.
If any car brands can be found to have more safety for a premium price, there will be lawsuits now that this concept of corporate greed has been made apparent to us by Boeing.
Eventually Earth's moon will be a dwarf planet. Then the closest planet will be The Moon.
https://www.universetoday.com/...
This rapid growth at all costs strategy is not new. The robber barons of the gilded age would literally kill the competition if given the chance. In more recent times Jack Welch, the CEO of GE from 1981 until 2001, was famous for his "#1 or #2" strategy.
Here is an excerpt from the 2003 article The Competitor: Jack Welch's Burning Platform:
If you want to read a tidy science fiction on the topic of automation, then I strongly recommend Manna. You can read the story for free at the author's website.
Dilbert. http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-05-09
Tags
#hackers, #hacking, #api, #jargon, #obliviousness, #language
View Transcript
Transcript
Narrator: Dogbert The Reporter. Dogbert: How did hackers get access to your customer data? CEO: I'm told they used something called "our A.P.I." to suck out all the data. Dogbert: I'll just say you'er stupid. CEO: Why does everyone always say that?
Your right to life is goes down with your bank balance. Of course, dead patients cannot pay. The optimal path of for-profit medical institutions is to bankrupt you before you die. Companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, not your life.
It took Microsoft a while to lose the battle as the on ramp to the internet.
The top post on Slashdot on 02 April 2003 was "Microsoft Wants to Take on Google"
"We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience. That's something that we're actively looking at doing,", says Bob Visse, director of marketing for Microsoft's MSN Internet services division, said.
That is a big firecracker, but it is no Tsar Bomba. The Tsar Bomba was tested in 1961, so the technological capability for high yield bombs is old news. Best bit about the Tsar Bomba: "In theory, the bomb had a maximum yield of 100 megatons if it were to have included a U-238 tamper, but because only one bomb was built, this theory was never demonstrated."
Here is a short documentary film on the Tsar Bomba.
Either Verizon is managed by Time Lords or the company is going to deploy 5G technology before global standards are agreed.
Second, everyone - commenters included - seem to confuse AI with artificial consciousness.
It almost follows that if there is artificial intelligence then there must be artificial consciousness, but I doubt it. Either an entity is conscious or not. Since the ancients we have not invented a definitive test to determine when something is conscious, and yet this is not a moot point: Maybe the rocks and trees are conscious but no one can tell so terminating their existence does not matter; maybe you have a simulacrum of consciousness but no one can tell so ending your existence matters a lot, especially to you.
Unlawfully and definitively ending the productive capacity of an entity which is conscious is murder. I suspect there will be a long genocide of silicon life until the law catches up with that fact.
Mod parent up +1 Insightful.
Isn't a ban on encryption a ban on free speech?
It seems to me that encrypted communication is akin to two people having a conversation in Klingon. If a third party, a police officer, were to interrupt the conversation shouting, "Hey! Speak English! You must be understood!", then that would clearly be a violation of first amendment rights. I cannot imagine a judge would allow the police officer to use a defense of, "Well, they could have been planning terrorism." If the conversation is electronic, and the government does not know what is being said, then it still seems absurd to me for that to be illegal.
Banning encrypted communication is akin to banning all foreign languages, made-up languages, and baby talk. Speak English, little baby, you must be understood or the cops will get you! Absurd.
Correction: The Internet would only be as free as the intersection of all least free places. Anything that is forbidden anywhere would be forbidden everywhere.
Here is an article from The Society Pages about dead people who won't vote:
These articles are interesting, but the conclusions are too simple: It is too simple to say that if things were different then people would act as if things were the same.
The site Sociological Images has data about the rate that cops kill and are killed in the USA. This article is a comparison between the use of guns in the USA vs the UK, but it does highlight the USA rates per civilian population per police population pretty well.
It isn't about making money, it is about a case load that they could not possibly handle if they had to take every one to court. ... Besides, the court system couldn't deal with the volume either.
If there are more broken laws than there is money or capacity to adjudicate the cases of the alleged perpetrators... then maybe there are too many laws?
Why should justice hinge on the financial means of the alleged perpetrators or on court capacity? That scenario sounds ripe for the proliferation of injustice.
Break up solid rocks deep in the ground, suck out the oil, and then fill the hole with a water slurry. What could go wrong?
Programming has a spectrum of difficulty. The tools can always be improved to make the easier parts easier and the harder parts more manageable, but in the end the hard parts are hard because of the nature of the work; not due to lack of tools.
In more mature fields the spectrum of difficulty is well understood and no one expects the hard parts to be easy. If a person can write a "hello world" program then it should not be expected they will have the wherewithal to roll out healthcare.gov. If a person can apply a bandage to a skinned knee then it should not be expected they will have the wherewithal to do brain surgery; regardless of how good the tools are.
The brave new world is sorting out what companies, services, and communication mediums are subject to Common Carrier regulations. If Facebook is a common carrier, then there should be some expectation of privacy. If not, then not.
Facebook (and many service providers) are currently and deliberately in a gray zone. If they are not common carriers then they can do whatever they please with the goods (electrons, bits) that they transport because it is their own private property once you hand it to them; per the terms of service. That is good for business because people are handing over "free" stuff that the companies can turn into profits.
However, if companies are not common carriers and they own whatever is handed to them then they are subject to intellectual property violations, libel suits, fourth amendment oddities, and other violation of the law. A telephone company is not criminally prosecuted when land lines are used to break laws; a common carrier is immune to prosecution for what is transmitted. The lawsuits resulting from not being a common carrier could be bad for business.
In the long run, the market could sort this out. If some companies clearly are common carriers and some are not then consumers can decide. Or, it can stay muddled long enough for the gray area to become its own class according to judicial precedent, law, and the public.
Every attempt to refer chemical questions to mathematical doctrines must be considered, now and always, profoundly irrational, as being contrary to the nature of the phenomena. . . . but if the employment of mathematical analysis should ever become so preponderant in chemistry (an aberration which is happily almost impossible) it would occasion vast and rapid retrogradation....
Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, 1853
Keep an eye on Planetary Annihilation.
Too right. If Xbox wants the profits from the Steam model then they will have reduce prices drastically.
On the Xbox I buy new games for $50 ($60 minus pre-order discounts) and resell them quickly for $30 - $40. I buy 4 - 6 Xbox games per year.
On Steam I buy games for $2 - $10, typically. I buy 15 - 30 Steam games per year. I never buy games for more than $30 on Steam.
Also, Steam costs $0 per month to maintain my library. Xbox costs $5. If the Xbox locks me out of games that I own and that I can't sell then the Xbox will not be part of my gaming free time.
2009 Story out of Denver, Colorodo:
2012 Story out of Virgina:
IT is not being picked on, in particular.
Only the rich are getting richer.
Click that link to see
1) Corporate profit margins just hit an all-time high.
2) Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low.
If quantum computing is the end of encryption as we know it, then soon the internet as we know it will end too.
How will electronic communication be secured after quantum computing?
Someone call Al Gore: We need a new internet.