Never understood why they do it like SUM(pages read)/users instead of SUM(pages read/user). That way a bot reading 10000 pages doesn't matter, it'll still only distribute it's own subscription fee. Granted, it'd be a lot harder to audit since rates would differ slightly but surely you can have some independent audit verify that you're not skimming extra off the royalty pool.
They would probably rent a generator pod (trailer) instead. Then again, this might just push companies to start developing of cars with an all-day driving range (say 800 miles per charge).
Would be nice, but's it's not all about price. The battery pack in a Tesla is already very heavy, there's a diminishing return as you're lugging around a bigger and bigger battery. I'd say superchargers, battery swaps and possibly long haul trains is the way to go, if you have electrified track it should be possible to both give you a high speed ride and charge the car back to full at the same time. Or just take the train/plane and get a rental or whatever. Swapping trailers is actually how I expect long haul cargo transport will happen, you just pull into a stop, the drained electric truck goes to charge, a fully charged one plugs in and off you go again. Most trucks do the same routes over and over again.
A well known event that happens every year in Europe is when people from Belgium and the Netherlands pack their stuff in their cars and migrate through Germany to southern Europe. This pisses of the Germans as their autobahns are stock full of cars... how will they continue to do this with cars that only move a few hundred km between recharges?
Depends on the car I guess, a Tesla with supercharging wouldn't be that bad. I just checked the distance Amsterdam - Lisboa, that's ~2250km southwest and and Athens is ~2850km southeast though realistically most will be going to place like Nice on the French riviera, ~1400km away. If you're a bit loony you can drive the US coast to coast in 59 hours, that's ~4500km or about 75 km/h average including charging. So 1400km @ 75 km/h would be 18-19 hours straight charging/driving, even if we generously assume 130km/h on the Autobahn it's still 11 hours of driving in a regular car. Maybe I sound a bit like a hobbit but if I could have a charge during breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack break, dinner and supper it sounds like I could mostly cover the same ground in a day, I need a pit stop more often than my gas guzzler.
On the other hand I haven't heard James Cameron applying for the role of Michael Moore. Maybe he just thought it'd be a good story, the way most movies are just entertainment? It's not hypocracy to make James Bond and still think sending out people with "license to kill" is a bad idea in the real world...
We know where earthquakes will be - along fault lines. When will it happen? When the tension gets too high. It's like asking what pebble will start a landslide, what snowflake will start an avalance or what straw will break the camel's back. The problem isn't the lack of an answer, the problem is that we're expecting an exact result to a complex and chaotic process. Would you also like a map of where lighting is going to strike?
The theory is nice. But what kind of effort will companies make to fact check, hear the other side of the story and make an impartial judgement? It's one thing if you want the BBC to take down an article they wrote because it's supposed to be a fact-checked objectively written and newsworthy story in the first place. However if Google gets a complaint about a YouTube video the default is always going to lean heavily towards removing it and hoping the case goes away, because every complaint, review, appeal and possibly law suit costs money.
There's a saying that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, what's to keep people from simply whining their way into having unfavorable posts removed? And I think it actually gets worse the less resources you have, if you're just doing something as a non-profit and this becomes another unwanted, unpaid administration task those complaints will be rubber stamped through. Maybe a few slashdotters can manage to keep it online by self-hosting but after being shitcanned by all the major search engines it's practically as good as erased anyway. Sure, the original article will still be on display in the national archives for "historical, statistical and scientific" purposes...
"But the plans were on display..." "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them." "That's the display department." "With a flashlight." "Ah, well, the lights had probably gone." "So had the stairs." "But look, you found the notice, didn't you?" "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
But speed reading reduces enjoyment and comprehension, so removes the pleasure from pleasure reading, and the comprehension from technical reading. So there ends up being no advantages.
That assumes you've already decided this is a text you need to fully comprehend cover to cover like a textbook. If you're given a lengthy draft and asked for your opinion you're not going to read everything. You're going to look at the index and summary, the headlines and then you're going to skim some chapters and maybe read a few in great detail. For example I recently had to read a lengthy legal proposal, much of it was background information and known to me but I knew there were some contentious areas I wanted to find the decisions on and if there were any major surprises compared to what I was expecting. Same thing when I get asked to give input on some idea or project or design or whatever, I don't have infinite time. I'm not looking to understand every detail. It's just to box it into "okay/uhhhh/not okay" so I can quite quickly get back to them to say these are the obvious issues I see, this is where I'm not really sure but the rest sounds okay to me. Very often the latter doesn't mean it's how I'd do it, but basically it's good enough for me and won't cause us grief down the road.
I don't know about your daily work but for me there's more than enough to fill my day and if I engaged myself in every issue that came my way I just wouldn't get anything done. Instead of picking up one or two items and getting involved properly it's better to skim over ten looking for the "oh hell no" cases and just let the minor things slide. Particularly when I'm working on major changes that I know will ultimately mean more than doing small-scale fire fighting all over the board. Not to mention sending off a few well placed remarks often end up with the people who actually should be doing it realizing they haven't really thought this through properly. In fact getting back to them with key flaws quickly typically enhances the effect, like if it was that obvious shouldn't we have caught it ourselves. Because there is way more work than for one man, there's no point in trying to carry the weight of the world alone. I'm just trying to be as useful as I can be for the overall progress.
"there must be a line beyond which a practice is not 'religious' simply because a plaintiff labels it as such.
He is right - in this case. But it is difficult (if not impossible) to define a criteria - like in that earlier case, where judges where asked to distinguish between erotic art and pornography: "I know it when I see it. Religion is even more difficult to define.
I think if you take the sum of every practice generally recognized as "religious", past and present as prior art then excluding something as a potential religious practice would be an impossible task. Of course you can suspect that if an inmate claims $deity demands he only eats Kobe steaks and lobster dinners with Beluga caviar and Champagne you might doubt the sincerity, but you'll never prove it and I doubt you'll find a principal difference to kosher, halal, sikhs that won't eat meat and so on.
As for sincerity surely there are a few wacky cult leaders who genuinely think they're god's prophet and deserve special treatment. Heck, in many cases it's the "exercise" of their religion that brought them there. Sure you might say it's against the law, but if you try to be some sort of ecclesiastical court telling them their religions beliefs are wrong or invalid that's absurd. If you transported an ancient Aztec who genuinely believe in human sacrifice to the present, you can't decide in court that he's wrong. But you'll still convict him for murder.
But the whole idea of government - whether in prison or the military, wherever - recognizing a religion and making special accommodations for followers seems like a violation of the First Amendment. I mean the establishing part of it - you can still freely exercise whatever as long as it does not require special accommodations.
And I think that's exactly what the judge was trying to avoid, because that would go against a ton of small and large concessions made for religion. Which is what FSM is all about, making a joke of religion and forcing people to treat it as seriously as any other religion to take away those special "religious" privileges. It would be cool if in 1791 they said:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion nor grant any special privilege based on faith" but they didn't... and there's a few centuries of precedence that says they don't read it that way.
I know the anti-government types will shy away from this, but, with a warrant, is this so unreasonable?
It's a bit like asking if you want digital cameras that won't produce kiddie porn. While you might score brownie points with the technically clueless, no engineer will think that's a sane idea.
a) Stealing the decryption key is a huge goldmine b) There's more than one government with conflicting interests c) There's open source and you can encrypt more than once d) Nobody will know if you've tampered with it until they try
All of these means you're asking for magic. Say you want Apple to hold the device keys for all the iPhones (which is better than one key to rule them all, at least). That means there must be a database somewhere in Apple HQ that Chinese hackers or the NSA with a National Security Letter can steal. Or you must install them with a country-specific key on sale, but what happens if I bring my phone from Norway to the US? It'd have the Norwegian government's key, not the US. Unless you want China to be able to decrypt all US phones. And it'd only move the master key problem somewhere else.
Nobody can stop me from encrypting with GPG inside any crypto-crippled channel, just like you can with regular email. Or how about a Linux system with full disk encryption using LUKS, you going to outlaw that too? And finally, even if there's a backdoor key for anything stored on a regular disk you can probably just overwrite the area of the key and nobody will discover it until the government tries to decrypt and fails. In short, it's such an unworkable idea due to premises that won't change that there is no point in trying.
P.S. What you ask for already exists, many company encryption solutions have your key and the company's spare key. It only works because they control the whole system.
- Salaries across the world are slowly trending towards a midpoint. This will suck for more developed countries and will boost lesser developed countries.
In retrospect it's rather amazing that it already happened without western wages decreasing, once you could hire like 20-30 people in the far east for the price of one US worker, but any gains they've made in productivity the wages have been close to follow and today minimum wage in China is ~1/4 of the US so most of that adjustment period is actually already behind us.
- Productivity will likewise even out: countries where people work 6h a day will no longer be able to sustain that work style. Similarly, countries where people work 12h a day, 6-7 days a week will slowly roll down to less than that.
I'm not so sure since it's largely cultural. Both the US and Europe have seen huge productivity and wage gains but I haven't gotten the impression the work culture has aligned much.
- Cultures will clash. They already do and it's not pretty. Some countries' culture is 500 years back: they will have to go through a deep transformation to reach present time, or they will bring down more evolved cultures - and then productivity will be the least of our worries as a species.
China, India and a bunch of others seem to have embraced the modern world easily enough. If the Middle East didn't have oil we wouldn't really give a shit, some 5+ billion don't follow Islam and on the whole I have the impression religion is being "casualized". Like how many really go to church every Sunday and believe all those crazy stories in the Bible are literal accounts. It's a little bit like the "safe-betting" we've found traces of when the Norse gods were being replaced with the Christian ones, best to keep on good terms with both the old gods and the new. And now many are "religiousish", no need to offend any god but really it's mostly atheist life.
Even if you could, the connection aspect would not be your only worry. Brain death usually leads to death of the remaining body in fairly short order, due to complications from a fairly large piece of decaying goo in the former person's skull. The rest of the body goes on, but those brain cells are dead, and start decaying.
I was under the impression that with heart-lung machines, tube feeding etc. they could keep patients with very little to no brain activity alive for quite some time, but doctors just pull the plug because there's nobody home. From what I understand they don't operate out dead goo even when people have had massive brain strokes, the dead parts are just gone. Is that wrong? Has there been any actual research on keeping the brain dead "alive"?
And there is a worse side: Let's say that the government requires back doors everywhere. Does that mean that terrorists are going to give up and throw up their hands figuratively? Hell, no. Any competent programmer can come up with an encryption scheme not known to the government, perhaps with vulnerabiilities which are also unknown to the government.
Please... the number of programmers that could come up with good cryptographic primitives is 0.1% or less. You're much better off just using AES for symmetric, RSA for asymmetric and DHE for key exchange with forward secrecy that tons of crypto analysists have spent years on and not come up with anything of significance. The flaws are usually all implementation and backdoors, not the building blocks themselves.
Parallel construction is an orthogonal (unrelated) problem. Yes, it can be abused to obtain a warrant dishonestly, but it has legitimate purposes too. It is dangerous, but a person innocent of substantial wrongdoing is yet to be convicted because of it...
Parallel construction is far from orthogonal to privacy. It's basically permission to violate your privacy any way they wish, pretend it didn't happen and after the fact come up with an alternate story that doesn't violate your rights. They can just read your emails, listen to your phone calls, open your letters, bug your house, attach a GPS tracker to your car and if they get caught, too bad it's inadmissable. If they don't, a police officer just happened to catch you in the act or they got an anonymous tip or whatever fits their story. You don't get to challenge what really happened, because they'll never tell you.
It's legalized perjury. That whole "truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" not applying to the police. And because they don't have to tell it ever, the innocent never get to hear about it either. How can they challenge the constitutionality of something they're not even aware happened? And who is to say they cops didn't add a few more lies to ensure a conviction when they're lying in the first place? It's an insult to both the 4th and 5th amendment, a clever joke like Mr. Smith telling Neo "What good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?"
When you think about what sucks in Ubuntu right now, are apt and deb really the worst offenders that need work?
By far no. But sometimes all those dependencies drag you into cascading updates that you don't want. Like I once wanted a new feature in KDevelop, but really I didn't want to touch the rest of my KDE apps because they were working fine. But KDevelop insisted on updating the KDE libraries, which lead to apt-get insisting on new versions of almost everything. If a "snap" could let me install that one application in isolation that's certainly a feature I could like. And maybe the other way around too, if I really don't like the way an application f*cked up their UI I can easily run an old version without conflicts and complaints because I had to pin a package and thus all its dependencies too. I wouldn't want every package to be like that, but when it's the right tool for what you want it seems useful.
These are people receiving disability benefits from Social Security, if you want to combat fraud it'd be wiser to improve the checks there. The problem here is those that are eligible aren't aware of the program, everybody knows there are handicap parking spots but if you can't see it and nobody tells you and you never apply it doesn't happen automatically. Also it seems about half are already defaulting and since they're permanently disabled they'll probably never recover from that, this is just as much a write-off of already lost money.
Is anybody actually interested in interacting with machines via chatbots? Seriously.
No, but a lot of people vastly prefer getting in touch with a real person even though there's a perfectly adequate self-service solution. But that is expensive and require training, we're trying to pass off chatbots as a poor man's substitute. Now I really don't have a problem navigating my online bank, but my mom.... I could totally see this conversation happening:
"Hi, this is Vici (VIrtual Customer Interface). How may I help you?" "I'd like to pay a bill." "Sure, do you have the recipients name or account number?" "243254322432" "And what amount?" "$24.46" "And when should it be paid?" "Next friday." "So you would like to transfer $24.46 to account 243254322432 on the 22th of April, is this correct?" "Yes." "Your transfer has now been scheduled. Is there anything else I can help you with?" "No thank you." "Okay, I'll be here if you need me. Have a nice day."
It'd drive me crazy going through the conversation... but I think my mom would rather have a "wizard-like" experience than hunting menu buttons and filling out forms.
Slashdot's community loves Mozilla. We love Firefox. We just want them to get back on the right track.
The question is, was Mozilla the company ever that great? What we now know as Firefox was a runaway community fork from the Mozilla application suite, which was what they were originally backing. Early Firefox competed against IE6 that Microsoft intentionally kept non-standard and on life support to stall the rise of web applications, not responding to the competition from Firefox in the slightest before IE7 in 2006. Opera was adware and buckling under Microsoft "giving" IE away and only Mac people knew Safari even existed. Or to say it Dilbert style, you'd struggle hard to find a market with softer competition.
Also they found a rich sugar daddy in Google that wanted to push web standards by proxy. What I'm saying is that even with a mediocre company performance it'd be hard for Mozilla to fail, simply because everyone else united under their banner to dethrone MSIE. They've never won in a market with tough competition against players who wouldn't give an inch of market share voluntarily. They've never been the one trying to catch up to a company moving faster than them. Losing to Chrome now and winning over IE6 then is competing in vastly different leagues. They don't just have to get back to the "good old days" to beat Chrome, they need to do much better.
If pot growers use electric lights to grow weed, then the electric utility must cut off electricity to the whole building or the apartment complex. Why take half measures, no electricity to the entire zip code. That will teach them.
Electric lights? I hear there's pot growers using sunlight, it's time to shut it all down. <godmode>*click*</godmode> Eight minutes to go, time to find your nearest pub and a friend from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.
"Programmers who hurl insults at each other like to think it's because they're honest, no-nonsense efficiency machines that get things done. The reality is that they never bothered to learn how to interact effectively with other human beings, and that deficiency is typically far more detrimental to their professional lives than they realize."
I'm sure Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds agree it totally ruined their lives. To use a car analogy, there's people at work like:
They: "Let's build a flying car!" Me: "What?" They: "It's a great idea, people can fly around like on the Jetsons" Me: "Sure, but it doesn't work in practice." They: "I'm sure it would, just crossbreed an airplane with a helicopter"
At which point I could a) argue rationally for a few hours why this is total insanity in terms of engineering, cost, legislation, noise pollution, flight logistics, fuel efficiency, pointing out failed attempts and so on or b) "This is fucking stupid and a waste of everyone's time that only a moron would think is a idea we need to develop, let's just kill it stone dead right now." And sadly they'd have all the plans drawn up about who'd benefit from flying cars and all the marketing check boxes it should check and how you would do the roll-out, but fuck all on how to make one.
I try not to abuse people for simply making mistakes, I'm not without faults myself either. But if you think you can just crap all over the code and expect other people to clean up your mess then no, you're going to get a good chewing out. Or when you're obviously not doing your job but just repeatedly handing off obvious crap to me because I'll fix it up using me like some kind of doormat. Of course I could go the formal route, but really... you want me to? Because I can't just go whining to my boss, I'd have to ask him to step in and do something. If you're called into a meeting with your boss because "somebody" is unhappy with your work performance, I think the work environment would get a lot more hostile than a few harsh words.
Sure, I try not to get personal but it's pretty hard to critique a work without it implying something about the person who did it. If the code is sloppy, you've been sloppy. If your code doesn't work, you failed. If your code broke the system, you screwed it up. Some people will take everything as an attack on their person and use any fringe excuse about the form and tone than addressing the core problem, that you're not delivering to professional standards. If I am being impolite, it's usually because I've tried being polite and it didn't work.
::sigh:: I can answer my own question here. In the "results" section it gives, "rate of 0.91% (95% CI: 0.41-1.75%)." Note to submitter: this does not mean less than 1%. This means 1-2%, as given in the abstract. This is part of why abstracts exist - to give results in an unambiguous manner, so that they're not misinterpreted. Maybe it's not a big deal here, but it can be sometimes.
Wow, this much hubris and you don't understand confidence intervals worth shit. The most likely value is 0.91%, that is to say it's more likely <1% than >1%. With 95% confidence it's between 0.41% and 1.75%, so it's almost certainly below 2% but it may be as low as 0.5%
And don't forget the streaming services are a business too. They're constantly trying to push the prices of their "suppliers" in an oligarchy-like fashion. Not the superstars that could take millions of "beliebers" with them to a different service but the bread-and-butter artists that need to be where their market is because they're just one among several competing artists. The streaming companies know people are slow to change, so short term it's the artist taking the biggest hit.
And if people pirate because it's not on their preferred service, even better because then it's a little money or no money - which do you want? For artists it's meet the new boss, same as the whole boss. This whole "it's the Internet, you can sell it yourself and cut out the middle man" didn't really work out for the music industry. The name and nature changed, but there's a new middleman between you and your customers who does what it wants for its reasons.
Indeed. This thing can _fake_ certain simple things that humans can actually do. The deception is limited to simple standard-situations and is entirely shallow. It breaks down completely as soon as something unexpected happens. This thing is an automaton, no intelligence involved.
I think you underestimate how much people do that really is based in rules and training, most people aren't really doing anything groundbreaking new. And particularly in a professional context their authority to be creative is often extremely limited where they'll have to either escalate or reject things that are out of the ordinary. If you're a star chef you set your own menu, if you're a pizza chef in a chain restaurat it's all regulated right down to how many slices of pepperoni goes on a pepperoni pizza. If you want an outlet in your shower, the electrician isn't going to get creative he'll just say that's not according to code and that's that.
Maybe your car driving "automaton" only knows how to drive a car, your chef "automaton" to cook, your maid "automaton" to do housecleaning but if you keep adding the pieces I think you'll end up with a pretty slim slice that says "real" intellect.
Breivik had planned his attack for years, becoming a farmer for access to large amounts of fertilizer, model airplane group for fuel, hunting license for the rifle, joined a pistol club for the hand gun, picked a small island, assassinated the one police officer first... He's got way more in common with IS than your average school shooter, if the bomb had brought the building down as he planned he'd have killed hundreds in the capital instead of eight. The mass shooting was just his follow-up/plan b. No, it won't stop Unabomber class crazy but very little will, unfortunately...
The only accurate point in your post is that second stage landings may not prove practical, which is why there are no current plans to attempt that. Fortunately the second stage is a lot cheaper than the first stage, in this case the second stage is just one engine compared to 9 in the first stage.
Even if they can't recover the second stage, if they can get reliable recovery/refurbishing/reuse of the first stage that'll completely change the economic equation. Say you can reduce the second stage cost by $1m by increasing the first stage cost by $1.2 million, today you won't do that because it's a net $200k loss. If you can reuse the first stage once for neglible fuel costs it becomes a (2*$1m - $1.2m)/2 = $400k profit per launch. If they can do it five or ten times, it's even more profitable. So I think there's a lot of potential improvements just redesigning to take maximum advantage of first stage reuse by making the second stage do less and cost less.
First of all, they don't have to do it consistently just enough to matter. Every success is a win, every failure a cost of doing business. The real question now is, how big is the refurb effort. After all they've landed... twice. They've relaunched... zero. And if they can keep doing that, I mean once is nice but... if they can do it five times, ten times that's when you really start to spread the initial cost across lots of launches. It'll be interesting to see what's possible, also hopefully by the end of the year we'll see the Falcon Heavy launch.
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Never understood why they do it like SUM(pages read)/users instead of SUM(pages read/user). That way a bot reading 10000 pages doesn't matter, it'll still only distribute it's own subscription fee. Granted, it'd be a lot harder to audit since rates would differ slightly but surely you can have some independent audit verify that you're not skimming extra off the royalty pool.
They would probably rent a generator pod (trailer) instead. Then again, this might just push companies to start developing of cars with an all-day driving range (say 800 miles per charge).
Would be nice, but's it's not all about price. The battery pack in a Tesla is already very heavy, there's a diminishing return as you're lugging around a bigger and bigger battery. I'd say superchargers, battery swaps and possibly long haul trains is the way to go, if you have electrified track it should be possible to both give you a high speed ride and charge the car back to full at the same time. Or just take the train/plane and get a rental or whatever. Swapping trailers is actually how I expect long haul cargo transport will happen, you just pull into a stop, the drained electric truck goes to charge, a fully charged one plugs in and off you go again. Most trucks do the same routes over and over again.
A well known event that happens every year in Europe is when people from Belgium and the Netherlands pack their stuff in their cars and migrate through Germany to southern Europe. This pisses of the Germans as their autobahns are stock full of cars. .. how will they continue to do this with cars that only move a few hundred km between recharges?
Depends on the car I guess, a Tesla with supercharging wouldn't be that bad. I just checked the distance Amsterdam - Lisboa, that's ~2250km southwest and and Athens is ~2850km southeast though realistically most will be going to place like Nice on the French riviera, ~1400km away. If you're a bit loony you can drive the US coast to coast in 59 hours, that's ~4500km or about 75 km/h average including charging. So 1400km @ 75 km/h would be 18-19 hours straight charging/driving, even if we generously assume 130km/h on the Autobahn it's still 11 hours of driving in a regular car. Maybe I sound a bit like a hobbit but if I could have a charge during breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack break, dinner and supper it sounds like I could mostly cover the same ground in a day, I need a pit stop more often than my gas guzzler.
On the other hand I haven't heard James Cameron applying for the role of Michael Moore. Maybe he just thought it'd be a good story, the way most movies are just entertainment? It's not hypocracy to make James Bond and still think sending out people with "license to kill" is a bad idea in the real world...
We know where earthquakes will be - along fault lines. When will it happen? When the tension gets too high. It's like asking what pebble will start a landslide, what snowflake will start an avalance or what straw will break the camel's back. The problem isn't the lack of an answer, the problem is that we're expecting an exact result to a complex and chaotic process. Would you also like a map of where lighting is going to strike?
The theory is nice. But what kind of effort will companies make to fact check, hear the other side of the story and make an impartial judgement? It's one thing if you want the BBC to take down an article they wrote because it's supposed to be a fact-checked objectively written and newsworthy story in the first place. However if Google gets a complaint about a YouTube video the default is always going to lean heavily towards removing it and hoping the case goes away, because every complaint, review, appeal and possibly law suit costs money.
There's a saying that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, what's to keep people from simply whining their way into having unfavorable posts removed? And I think it actually gets worse the less resources you have, if you're just doing something as a non-profit and this becomes another unwanted, unpaid administration task those complaints will be rubber stamped through. Maybe a few slashdotters can manage to keep it online by self-hosting but after being shitcanned by all the major search engines it's practically as good as erased anyway. Sure, the original article will still be on display in the national archives for "historical, statistical and scientific" purposes...
"But the plans were on display..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice, didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
But speed reading reduces enjoyment and comprehension, so removes the pleasure from pleasure reading, and the comprehension from technical reading. So there ends up being no advantages.
That assumes you've already decided this is a text you need to fully comprehend cover to cover like a textbook. If you're given a lengthy draft and asked for your opinion you're not going to read everything. You're going to look at the index and summary, the headlines and then you're going to skim some chapters and maybe read a few in great detail. For example I recently had to read a lengthy legal proposal, much of it was background information and known to me but I knew there were some contentious areas I wanted to find the decisions on and if there were any major surprises compared to what I was expecting. Same thing when I get asked to give input on some idea or project or design or whatever, I don't have infinite time. I'm not looking to understand every detail. It's just to box it into "okay/uhhhh/not okay" so I can quite quickly get back to them to say these are the obvious issues I see, this is where I'm not really sure but the rest sounds okay to me. Very often the latter doesn't mean it's how I'd do it, but basically it's good enough for me and won't cause us grief down the road.
I don't know about your daily work but for me there's more than enough to fill my day and if I engaged myself in every issue that came my way I just wouldn't get anything done. Instead of picking up one or two items and getting involved properly it's better to skim over ten looking for the "oh hell no" cases and just let the minor things slide. Particularly when I'm working on major changes that I know will ultimately mean more than doing small-scale fire fighting all over the board. Not to mention sending off a few well placed remarks often end up with the people who actually should be doing it realizing they haven't really thought this through properly. In fact getting back to them with key flaws quickly typically enhances the effect, like if it was that obvious shouldn't we have caught it ourselves. Because there is way more work than for one man, there's no point in trying to carry the weight of the world alone. I'm just trying to be as useful as I can be for the overall progress.
"there must be a line beyond which a practice is not 'religious' simply because a plaintiff labels it as such.
He is right - in this case. But it is difficult (if not impossible) to define a criteria - like in that earlier case, where judges where asked to distinguish between erotic art and pornography: "I know it when I see it. Religion is even more difficult to define.
I think if you take the sum of every practice generally recognized as "religious", past and present as prior art then excluding something as a potential religious practice would be an impossible task. Of course you can suspect that if an inmate claims $deity demands he only eats Kobe steaks and lobster dinners with Beluga caviar and Champagne you might doubt the sincerity, but you'll never prove it and I doubt you'll find a principal difference to kosher, halal, sikhs that won't eat meat and so on.
As for sincerity surely there are a few wacky cult leaders who genuinely think they're god's prophet and deserve special treatment. Heck, in many cases it's the "exercise" of their religion that brought them there. Sure you might say it's against the law, but if you try to be some sort of ecclesiastical court telling them their religions beliefs are wrong or invalid that's absurd. If you transported an ancient Aztec who genuinely believe in human sacrifice to the present, you can't decide in court that he's wrong. But you'll still convict him for murder.
But the whole idea of government - whether in prison or the military, wherever - recognizing a religion and making special accommodations for followers seems like a violation of the First Amendment. I mean the establishing part of it - you can still freely exercise whatever as long as it does not require special accommodations.
And I think that's exactly what the judge was trying to avoid, because that would go against a ton of small and large concessions made for religion. Which is what FSM is all about, making a joke of religion and forcing people to treat it as seriously as any other religion to take away those special "religious" privileges. It would be cool if in 1791 they said:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion nor grant any special privilege based on faith" but they didn't... and there's a few centuries of precedence that says they don't read it that way.
I know the anti-government types will shy away from this, but, with a warrant, is this so unreasonable?
It's a bit like asking if you want digital cameras that won't produce kiddie porn. While you might score brownie points with the technically clueless, no engineer will think that's a sane idea.
a) Stealing the decryption key is a huge goldmine
b) There's more than one government with conflicting interests
c) There's open source and you can encrypt more than once
d) Nobody will know if you've tampered with it until they try
All of these means you're asking for magic. Say you want Apple to hold the device keys for all the iPhones (which is better than one key to rule them all, at least). That means there must be a database somewhere in Apple HQ that Chinese hackers or the NSA with a National Security Letter can steal. Or you must install them with a country-specific key on sale, but what happens if I bring my phone from Norway to the US? It'd have the Norwegian government's key, not the US. Unless you want China to be able to decrypt all US phones. And it'd only move the master key problem somewhere else.
Nobody can stop me from encrypting with GPG inside any crypto-crippled channel, just like you can with regular email. Or how about a Linux system with full disk encryption using LUKS, you going to outlaw that too? And finally, even if there's a backdoor key for anything stored on a regular disk you can probably just overwrite the area of the key and nobody will discover it until the government tries to decrypt and fails. In short, it's such an unworkable idea due to premises that won't change that there is no point in trying.
P.S. What you ask for already exists, many company encryption solutions have your key and the company's spare key. It only works because they control the whole system.
- Salaries across the world are slowly trending towards a midpoint. This will suck for more developed countries and will boost lesser developed countries.
In retrospect it's rather amazing that it already happened without western wages decreasing, once you could hire like 20-30 people in the far east for the price of one US worker, but any gains they've made in productivity the wages have been close to follow and today minimum wage in China is ~1/4 of the US so most of that adjustment period is actually already behind us.
- Productivity will likewise even out: countries where people work 6h a day will no longer be able to sustain that work style. Similarly, countries where people work 12h a day, 6-7 days a week will slowly roll down to less than that.
I'm not so sure since it's largely cultural. Both the US and Europe have seen huge productivity and wage gains but I haven't gotten the impression the work culture has aligned much.
- Cultures will clash. They already do and it's not pretty. Some countries' culture is 500 years back: they will have to go through a deep transformation to reach present time, or they will bring down more evolved cultures - and then productivity will be the least of our worries as a species.
China, India and a bunch of others seem to have embraced the modern world easily enough. If the Middle East didn't have oil we wouldn't really give a shit, some 5+ billion don't follow Islam and on the whole I have the impression religion is being "casualized". Like how many really go to church every Sunday and believe all those crazy stories in the Bible are literal accounts. It's a little bit like the "safe-betting" we've found traces of when the Norse gods were being replaced with the Christian ones, best to keep on good terms with both the old gods and the new. And now many are "religiousish", no need to offend any god but really it's mostly atheist life.
Even if you could, the connection aspect would not be your only worry. Brain death usually leads to death of the remaining body in fairly short order, due to complications from a fairly large piece of decaying goo in the former person's skull. The rest of the body goes on, but those brain cells are dead, and start decaying.
I was under the impression that with heart-lung machines, tube feeding etc. they could keep patients with very little to no brain activity alive for quite some time, but doctors just pull the plug because there's nobody home. From what I understand they don't operate out dead goo even when people have had massive brain strokes, the dead parts are just gone. Is that wrong? Has there been any actual research on keeping the brain dead "alive"?
And there is a worse side: Let's say that the government requires back doors everywhere. Does that mean that terrorists are going to give up and throw up their hands figuratively? Hell, no. Any competent programmer can come up with an encryption scheme not known to the government, perhaps with vulnerabiilities which are also unknown to the government.
Please... the number of programmers that could come up with good cryptographic primitives is 0.1% or less. You're much better off just using AES for symmetric, RSA for asymmetric and DHE for key exchange with forward secrecy that tons of crypto analysists have spent years on and not come up with anything of significance. The flaws are usually all implementation and backdoors, not the building blocks themselves.
Parallel construction is an orthogonal (unrelated) problem. Yes, it can be abused to obtain a warrant dishonestly, but it has legitimate purposes too. It is dangerous, but a person innocent of substantial wrongdoing is yet to be convicted because of it...
Parallel construction is far from orthogonal to privacy. It's basically permission to violate your privacy any way they wish, pretend it didn't happen and after the fact come up with an alternate story that doesn't violate your rights. They can just read your emails, listen to your phone calls, open your letters, bug your house, attach a GPS tracker to your car and if they get caught, too bad it's inadmissable. If they don't, a police officer just happened to catch you in the act or they got an anonymous tip or whatever fits their story. You don't get to challenge what really happened, because they'll never tell you.
It's legalized perjury. That whole "truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" not applying to the police. And because they don't have to tell it ever, the innocent never get to hear about it either. How can they challenge the constitutionality of something they're not even aware happened? And who is to say they cops didn't add a few more lies to ensure a conviction when they're lying in the first place? It's an insult to both the 4th and 5th amendment, a clever joke like Mr. Smith telling Neo "What good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?"
When you think about what sucks in Ubuntu right now, are apt and deb really the worst offenders that need work?
By far no. But sometimes all those dependencies drag you into cascading updates that you don't want. Like I once wanted a new feature in KDevelop, but really I didn't want to touch the rest of my KDE apps because they were working fine. But KDevelop insisted on updating the KDE libraries, which lead to apt-get insisting on new versions of almost everything. If a "snap" could let me install that one application in isolation that's certainly a feature I could like. And maybe the other way around too, if I really don't like the way an application f*cked up their UI I can easily run an old version without conflicts and complaints because I had to pin a package and thus all its dependencies too. I wouldn't want every package to be like that, but when it's the right tool for what you want it seems useful.
These are people receiving disability benefits from Social Security, if you want to combat fraud it'd be wiser to improve the checks there. The problem here is those that are eligible aren't aware of the program, everybody knows there are handicap parking spots but if you can't see it and nobody tells you and you never apply it doesn't happen automatically. Also it seems about half are already defaulting and since they're permanently disabled they'll probably never recover from that, this is just as much a write-off of already lost money.
Is anybody actually interested in interacting with machines via chatbots? Seriously.
No, but a lot of people vastly prefer getting in touch with a real person even though there's a perfectly adequate self-service solution. But that is expensive and require training, we're trying to pass off chatbots as a poor man's substitute. Now I really don't have a problem navigating my online bank, but my mom.... I could totally see this conversation happening:
"Hi, this is Vici (VIrtual Customer Interface). How may I help you?"
"I'd like to pay a bill."
"Sure, do you have the recipients name or account number?"
"243254322432"
"And what amount?"
"$24.46"
"And when should it be paid?"
"Next friday."
"So you would like to transfer $24.46 to account 243254322432 on the 22th of April, is this correct?"
"Yes."
"Your transfer has now been scheduled. Is there anything else I can help you with?"
"No thank you."
"Okay, I'll be here if you need me. Have a nice day."
It'd drive me crazy going through the conversation... but I think my mom would rather have a "wizard-like" experience than hunting menu buttons and filling out forms.
Slashdot's community loves Mozilla. We love Firefox. We just want them to get back on the right track.
The question is, was Mozilla the company ever that great? What we now know as Firefox was a runaway community fork from the Mozilla application suite, which was what they were originally backing. Early Firefox competed against IE6 that Microsoft intentionally kept non-standard and on life support to stall the rise of web applications, not responding to the competition from Firefox in the slightest before IE7 in 2006. Opera was adware and buckling under Microsoft "giving" IE away and only Mac people knew Safari even existed. Or to say it Dilbert style, you'd struggle hard to find a market with softer competition.
Also they found a rich sugar daddy in Google that wanted to push web standards by proxy. What I'm saying is that even with a mediocre company performance it'd be hard for Mozilla to fail, simply because everyone else united under their banner to dethrone MSIE. They've never won in a market with tough competition against players who wouldn't give an inch of market share voluntarily. They've never been the one trying to catch up to a company moving faster than them. Losing to Chrome now and winning over IE6 then is competing in vastly different leagues. They don't just have to get back to the "good old days" to beat Chrome, they need to do much better.
If pot growers use electric lights to grow weed, then the electric utility must cut off electricity to the whole building or the apartment complex. Why take half measures, no electricity to the entire zip code. That will teach them.
Electric lights? I hear there's pot growers using sunlight, it's time to shut it all down. <godmode>*click*</godmode> Eight minutes to go, time to find your nearest pub and a friend from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.
"Programmers who hurl insults at each other like to think it's because they're honest, no-nonsense efficiency machines that get things done. The reality is that they never bothered to learn how to interact effectively with other human beings, and that deficiency is typically far more detrimental to their professional lives than they realize."
I'm sure Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds agree it totally ruined their lives. To use a car analogy, there's people at work like:
They: "Let's build a flying car!"
Me: "What?"
They: "It's a great idea, people can fly around like on the Jetsons"
Me: "Sure, but it doesn't work in practice."
They: "I'm sure it would, just crossbreed an airplane with a helicopter"
At which point I could a) argue rationally for a few hours why this is total insanity in terms of engineering, cost, legislation, noise pollution, flight logistics, fuel efficiency, pointing out failed attempts and so on or b) "This is fucking stupid and a waste of everyone's time that only a moron would think is a idea we need to develop, let's just kill it stone dead right now." And sadly they'd have all the plans drawn up about who'd benefit from flying cars and all the marketing check boxes it should check and how you would do the roll-out, but fuck all on how to make one.
I try not to abuse people for simply making mistakes, I'm not without faults myself either. But if you think you can just crap all over the code and expect other people to clean up your mess then no, you're going to get a good chewing out. Or when you're obviously not doing your job but just repeatedly handing off obvious crap to me because I'll fix it up using me like some kind of doormat. Of course I could go the formal route, but really... you want me to? Because I can't just go whining to my boss, I'd have to ask him to step in and do something. If you're called into a meeting with your boss because "somebody" is unhappy with your work performance, I think the work environment would get a lot more hostile than a few harsh words.
Sure, I try not to get personal but it's pretty hard to critique a work without it implying something about the person who did it. If the code is sloppy, you've been sloppy. If your code doesn't work, you failed. If your code broke the system, you screwed it up. Some people will take everything as an attack on their person and use any fringe excuse about the form and tone than addressing the core problem, that you're not delivering to professional standards. If I am being impolite, it's usually because I've tried being polite and it didn't work.
::sigh:: I can answer my own question here. In the "results" section it gives, "rate of 0.91% (95% CI: 0.41-1.75%)." Note to submitter: this does not mean less than 1%. This means 1-2%, as given in the abstract. This is part of why abstracts exist - to give results in an unambiguous manner, so that they're not misinterpreted. Maybe it's not a big deal here, but it can be sometimes.
Wow, this much hubris and you don't understand confidence intervals worth shit. The most likely value is 0.91%, that is to say it's more likely <1% than >1%. With 95% confidence it's between 0.41% and 1.75%, so it's almost certainly below 2% but it may be as low as 0.5%
And don't forget the streaming services are a business too. They're constantly trying to push the prices of their "suppliers" in an oligarchy-like fashion. Not the superstars that could take millions of "beliebers" with them to a different service but the bread-and-butter artists that need to be where their market is because they're just one among several competing artists. The streaming companies know people are slow to change, so short term it's the artist taking the biggest hit.
And if people pirate because it's not on their preferred service, even better because then it's a little money or no money - which do you want? For artists it's meet the new boss, same as the whole boss. This whole "it's the Internet, you can sell it yourself and cut out the middle man" didn't really work out for the music industry. The name and nature changed, but there's a new middleman between you and your customers who does what it wants for its reasons.
Indeed. This thing can _fake_ certain simple things that humans can actually do. The deception is limited to simple standard-situations and is entirely shallow. It breaks down completely as soon as something unexpected happens. This thing is an automaton, no intelligence involved.
I think you underestimate how much people do that really is based in rules and training, most people aren't really doing anything groundbreaking new. And particularly in a professional context their authority to be creative is often extremely limited where they'll have to either escalate or reject things that are out of the ordinary. If you're a star chef you set your own menu, if you're a pizza chef in a chain restaurat it's all regulated right down to how many slices of pepperoni goes on a pepperoni pizza. If you want an outlet in your shower, the electrician isn't going to get creative he'll just say that's not according to code and that's that.
Maybe your car driving "automaton" only knows how to drive a car, your chef "automaton" to cook, your maid "automaton" to do housecleaning but if you keep adding the pieces I think you'll end up with a pretty slim slice that says "real" intellect.
Breivik had planned his attack for years, becoming a farmer for access to large amounts of fertilizer, model airplane group for fuel, hunting license for the rifle, joined a pistol club for the hand gun, picked a small island, assassinated the one police officer first... He's got way more in common with IS than your average school shooter, if the bomb had brought the building down as he planned he'd have killed hundreds in the capital instead of eight. The mass shooting was just his follow-up/plan b. No, it won't stop Unabomber class crazy but very little will, unfortunately...
The only accurate point in your post is that second stage landings may not prove practical, which is why there are no current plans to attempt that. Fortunately the second stage is a lot cheaper than the first stage, in this case the second stage is just one engine compared to 9 in the first stage.
Even if they can't recover the second stage, if they can get reliable recovery/refurbishing/reuse of the first stage that'll completely change the economic equation. Say you can reduce the second stage cost by $1m by increasing the first stage cost by $1.2 million, today you won't do that because it's a net $200k loss. If you can reuse the first stage once for neglible fuel costs it becomes a (2*$1m - $1.2m)/2 = $400k profit per launch. If they can do it five or ten times, it's even more profitable. So I think there's a lot of potential improvements just redesigning to take maximum advantage of first stage reuse by making the second stage do less and cost less.
First of all, they don't have to do it consistently just enough to matter. Every success is a win, every failure a cost of doing business. The real question now is, how big is the refurb effort. After all they've landed... twice. They've relaunched... zero. And if they can keep doing that, I mean once is nice but... if they can do it five times, ten times that's when you really start to spread the initial cost across lots of launches. It'll be interesting to see what's possible, also hopefully by the end of the year we'll see the Falcon Heavy launch.