Will Unpredictable 'Franken-Algorithms' Have Deadly Consequences
Probably yes.
and Make Programmers Obsolete?
Almost certainly not.
We are creating algorithms where the result can not be explained in human terms. Nobody can truly understand why AlphaGo thinks a move is good, it's a neural network of weights we don't understand. It's about as useless as trying to get a chess grandmaster to articulate why a particular move is good, it's subtleties you can't record and put in a rule book. Which is fine for AlphaGo since the worst it'll do is lose a game. If it's Watson totally misdiagnosing your cancer or Waymo's car T-boning a school bus it matters a lot.
That is why I think developers will always be busy implementing guard rails. Like if you're trying to minimize humanity's environmental impact then the divide by zero solution is obviously superior. It's not a practically feasible solution in the real world though.
An alternative is to require people receiving this treatment to consent to forced sterilization
Ah, you want to remove undesirables from the gene pool. I think the 1930s called and want their genetic hygiene back. Have you looked at what hospitals do today already? We try to fix everything, no matter how poor the fertility is, how high the tendency to miscarry, how unfit the mother is to give vaginal birth, how premature the child is born and no matter what kind of physical and mental handicaps or hereditary diseases they're born with or what health problems they have as a child. All those poor genes are being passed on and none of those children are asked to sign away their right to reproduce, there's nothing unique about muscular dystrophy that is significantly worse or different.
If you want to argue we should be screening out who gets to reproduce or not, then just go full tilt. At age... 14? everyone has their medical history, physical and mental health reviewed, those who pass go through and the rest are sterilized/given a vasectomy. A license to breed, more or less. Also make sure to say how hardcore you'd get, like is it muscular dystrophy or gluten allergy that's enough to disqualify you. I'm guessing you're not very likely to get much support, but hey... that's kinda what you really want with this "if we do this for you, you agree not to have children" right? And I'm sure there would be no potential for abuse or corruption in such a system, not at all...
He's wrong: it means we'll just get slower and slower software because hardly anyone knows how to do anything besides paste libraries together.
Except when they write massive kludges of spaghetti code that should have been a library or used the standard library. It's not that libraries are inherently bad, I mean you couldn't even write print( "Hello world!" ) without something interpreting letters to bitmaps and defining what a "standard output" is. The problem is often that these libraries grow because there's always one more use case to cover until they become huge and complex. At which point somebody decides fuck it, I don't need this let's just start over.
For example take the software above, it would be really nice if we had some kind of string class right? With convenience functions like length(), substring(), append() etc. but real simple ASCII with values 0-127 that always means the same. Then comes a European who wants their mööse and you got code pages. Then Unicode and multi-byte, variable or fixed length characters, sort collations and so on. And while it doesn't necessarily gets slower the library becomes big and complex with a big interface. And then someone says fuck it, this is too much for me to bother with.
And then you have the printing of "Hello world!", it's no longer a bitmap. It's a FreeType font of vector shapes with kerning and anti-aliasing and whatnot requiring an advanced rendering engine to actually have something to display. And if you wanted to print the date, well there's probably a huge library for that too with short forms and long forms and conversions to/from string format and leap seconds and whatnot. And that's not even starting to get into the fun of input/output devices, networking or whatever... you are in a library world already. Some of them are just a really bad idea.
Not buying it. I'd say, if a suspect in a case forgot his password and told the judge that, AND that he'd be willing to attempt to guess it, or work with password reset mechanisms to assist, (s)he'd be free to go. I couldn't tell you any of my passwords, either. I don't know them. But I could tell you how to access my password storage thing to retrieve a password. I really don't think a judge would jail me on contempt of court for having a password manager, or forgetting a password and being willing to help get it reset or whatnot.
Honestly, I think you're blissfully naive. If you manage to decrypt it somehow, you're off the hook. If for any reason you can't because you've forgotten the password or your "password storage thing" is corrupt or the stress of facing years in prison is causing you to mind blank then they're likely to slam you double for pretending to know it and wasting everybody's time.
When you say it like that - particularly with the capitalization - I get the image of English aristocrats nipping tea and complaining how everyone who hasn't suffered through Latin is just a country bumpkin. It was probably a good idea when the highly educated were the teachers, doctors and priests while most everyone else were farmers or craftsmen so they had to cover a broad range of subjects. Today we need specialists, lots and lots of specialists. I don't need my neurosurgeon to have university-level education in "History, Literature, Politics, Arts, Sociology, Philosophy and Psychology" I need a damn good surgeon and honestly I couldn't care if he has the social skills of Dr. Stephen Strange either.
From first grade to my master's degree I had 17 years of education. I really don't think 12 years as a generalist and 5 years as a specialist is too much. There is plenty I had to learn and plenty more I could have learned in my field of study, of course we also need cross-overs so the specialists talk to each other but we don't need Renaissance men like Leonardo da Vinci trying to cover everything from anatomy to airplanes. If you want to be an aerospace engineer for SpaceX that's cool but it'll probably take most your education and work experience to get there. There's so many giants standing on the shoulders of other giants it takes a good while just to learn what others have learned before you.
Do people have a choice here? Forgive me if I am asking something silly; I haven't used Windows for a long, long time.
Average people? No. They'll get nags and eventually it'll reboot on its own. You can play various tricks with metered connection, disabling the update service etc. but most tricks only work for a little while then Microsoft force-installs it anyway. Mostly because critical patches ignore your settings and eventually a critical patch will require you upgrade the base system first. There's apparently some very obscure ways to really block it for machines where the upgrade fails and such, but they've hidden it real well. And it's monolithic, if you block it then no security patches either. Once you're on the Win10 train, Microsoft really doesn't want you to get off.
The patent is an extension on an already-extant concept of automatic turn signals based on a person about to leave a lane.
Really? Never heard of it. Even if all the claims held what you essentially got is an auto-blink that'll start after the person is already crossing into a different lane. Which is legally too late in most jurisdictions and would lead consumers to believe they don't need to blink because the car will do that. But I guess that's the same story as the autopilot, who needs to drive when the car can do that? Tesla makes really great electric cars, but when it comes to self-driving features they're one notch above Uber in shadiness.
The only people who need 8K for moving pictures are people with beyond 20/20 sight. If you look at this chart the THX recommended viewing angle is 40 degrees, the most they allow for the front row of the cinema is 53 degrees. If you got a 100" screen, you'd have to sit 7.3' away for that, while to see 8K you'd have to be close than 6'. That said, 20/20 is just "normal" vision, about 30% have 20/15 vision and 1% has 20/10 vision. That would give you an effective viewing distance of 5.48 and 3.55 feet, meaning they see some but not all the detail of 8K. So ~30% would have some benefit sitting very close - but not unnaturally close - to a very big screen. If you go back to the recommended viewing angle which would be more typical middle of the cinema that's 10' for a 100" screen. Now even the 20/15 can't see that at 7.5' effective, but the 1% still get some more detail at 5' effective. So for the very few.
That said it has more appeal for still photos, if motion is not an issue you can get very close pixel peeping. Pretty much any modern camera takes >8MP photos, with a 32MP screen you'd finally start to see the full detail of most 20-25MP cameras. Of course there are megapixel monsters that go beyond that too, but you'd be scaling them down a whole lot less. In fact that's probably the only time you'd really notice 8K, above I talked about the theoretical limits but they are if you're staring at a Snellen chart. They threw in a lot of other upgrades to 4K like Rec.2020, HDR, 10 bit colors etc. and if you kept those but scaled it down to 1080p not many would notice the difference in resolution alone. Just 8K quadrupling size for a minimal improvement for a tiny fraction of the population will fly like a brick.
Not from the customer perspective, they'll insure satellites riding into space on top of a flying bomb if the premium is high enough. They do want a profit margin, but considering that SDCs are essentially clones you're not guessing at a lot of variables it's just accidents/miles driven in a given area. But until Waymo decides to sell to the private market it's irrelevant, they're more than big enough to self-insure. They know every detail about their own accident rate and how often their safety drivers have saved their ass. And they'd run out of public goodwill and permission to drive long before they ran out of money. From 2009 to 2015 they invested way over a billion dollars in this program, given the recent scale up I'm guessing it's now two to three. Even $100 million in accident payouts wouldn't be enough to stop them from an economic perspective, but they'd be chased off the road long, long before that.
You realize that Trump's attacks on media alone have done more damage to democracy than a generation of Hilary ever could, right? He has done more to undermine public faith in journalism than ANY Western leader in history.
Well in this case we have a genuine case of fake news being taken by truth as the POTUS. Now Trump is just throwing a hand grenade into the debate but there really needs to be a higher awareness and debate about the level of propaganda, disinformation and plain old lies spreading online, the existence of alt-media and the people who believe their own alt-facts in their own alt-reality.
Well "..." is the spread operator in Javascript, here's =!=, it seems plausible that "+-+" might be interpreted as x+(-(+y)) which collapses to "x-y". Not sure about -+/* but Ruby should get a honorable mention for %/%. The most annoying thing about operators though is not each one, it's the precedence rules. For example in SQL "WHERE a OR b AND c = 1" when you mean "WHERE (a OR b) AND c = 1. I really, really wish some smart language would say "fuck that, we're not making obscure rules nobody remembers/notices are invoked" and just throws a syntax error, here's ambiguity so resolve it explicitly with parentheses. That would be the sane solution for all future maintenance. Also I'd like to ban the singular "=" operator, use "==" for comparison and ":=" for assignment, you can keep the mixed ones like "+=".
Sounds like the author is having an existential crisis. I've never had a conservative friend worry about such things. That leads me to believe the author is in an echo chamber.
Conservatives don't have echo chambers? I think the existential crisis is correct but the reason is far more basic than political leanings, it's that the next generation doesn't actually care all that much about what your generation did or liked. A generation is ~30 years, do you see many kids playing video games from 1988? Teens listening to music from 1988? Watch TV or movies from 1988? How many read books that were popular in 1988? Dress the way they did in 1988? Sure, occasionally something old comes back as retro or becomes a classic but for the vast part contemporary culture is just contemporary and tossed on history's graveyard. He simply sounds a bit miffed that his cultural legacy is heading that way. Blaming the medium is an excuse, story-telling is far from dead and if you had something to say that'd appeal to people in 2018 you'd still have a big audience and the movie/TV rights on top.
...as well as things like this newly-released thousands-of-hours of audio, do any of the moon hoaxers start to lose their resolve?
No. The harder someone tries to prove to a conspiracy theorist that he's wrong, the more desperate they are because the cover-up is not working. For example the Nazis wanted order and kept tons of records on the Holocaust, but if you talk to a Holocaust denier the extensive and detailed evidence is proof that it's fake because if it was real it'd be way more fragmented and incomplete. The only way it could be so comprehensive is if there was a bunch of Jews manufacturing it, basically the compelling evidence against the conspiracy becomes part of the conspiracy. I think 19000 hours of radio chatter goes in the same category, the only way you have all this is because it's made up. But the "truthers" see through your ploy...
Who is manufacturing them? This is like Metallica suing Napster for distributing mp3 files. The judge says you can't download these files. What if you printed the text of these files into a book and sold it? Would that book be deemed illegal?
Sure. Copyright is an obvious limitation on free speech, you're not free to reuse what someone else has created. If these guns designs were copyrighted then copyright would apply, the question is whether they can stop content that is original or posted with permission. Instructions on doing something illegal has generally been considered speech, it may be illegal to make meth but it's not illegal to describe the chemical reactions to make meth. Technical progress might have made it easier to go from a blueprint to a product, but the principle is unchanged - it's not actually illegal until you do it. Pretty sure they'll eventually win this one on first amendment reasons.
I can tell you my forecast: Someone will figure out that since there are no strings attached, they can offer these people loans at high interest, paid for by the $1k per month. So they'll be just as poor as before, but perhaps have a car for a while, and someone else gets richer.
The only people who'd get $1k extra are the people earning $0 today - not including those already on welfare programs as they'd be reduced/cut - which means they're either dependent on somebody else, living off savings, accumulating debt or hobos living under a bridge. That deadbeat son/daughter you haven't got the heart to kick out? Well now they got money to pay rent or to get a shabby room somewhere else. The stay-at-home mom and dads have a family economy. UBI for retirees would essentially be a public pension program, higher taxes but less need to set off funds for retirement. Students would hopefully exit their education with less debt and they'd probably be expected to pay in full many more places. And I don't think the first thing a hobo will do is buy a car.
If you have low income you'd be expected to pay a lot more taxes because your net income already start at UBI, everything you earn comes on top. Looking at current income tax brackets I'd guess a flat rate somewhere around 35%, like if you earn $100k, pay $35k taxes but get $12k UBI back the net is 23%, for $60k -> 15%, $200k -> 29%. So If you make $17k/year pay ~$6k in taxes, get $12k in UBI for a net $23k/year instead of paying ~$1800 in taxes. for a net $15200/year. That's a pretty good uplift, but then the UBI proponents want to cut all other programs like food stamps etc. so in exchange for those $7800 you're on your own. That program alone averages $1500/year per recipient, so poof it's down to $6300 extra. Medicaid could be another big one. Subsidized housing. There's lots of small programs that would be killed off.
Break-even would be around $35k, $35k * 0.35 = $12250 in, $12000 out. What's the break-even wage today, like how much do you need to earn to make a net contributon? I'm guessing it's not too far off. The only reason question is how many people would like to take some kind of sabbatical or take some kind of leap of faith and those $12k tip the scales. I sure as hell wouldn't try to live off that permanently, but if you have an attractive education/experience and know you can get back into the job market then the difference between a year off with $0 income and $12k is pretty big. Or just $12k/year more to coast into retirement.
Did Moore's law just end? Intel said they thought it had...maybe this is confirmation.
Not quite yet, we have designs for a 4nm transistor made with silicon so I think there's room for one more iteration past 7nm. But yes the end is coming and soon, first half of the 2020s I think you can hold the funeral.
But you will be forced - at gun point, which is how all taxes are collected - to pay for somebody else doing it.
The implication is that you wouldn't be paying for "somebody else" otherwise, but reality is that you do. Like our little eGamer wacko recently, I bet he didn't have the assets to cover all the medical expenses he caused, much less if he had to pay restitution to everyone from the inconvenienced to the deceased's relatives. Even if there's health insurance and whatnot that just means the costs gets smeared broad and thin. And anything but anarchists wants law and order so somebody's paying cops and judges and prisons and it's not the penniless perp. Heck it could be simple things like theft, or even if not theft then the cost of the anti-theft system you need to keep thieves away. Maybe you think UBI is a poor strategy of appeasement, but taxes is far from the only way you end up with the bill. Less desperate people do less desperate things, of course it's no miracle worker but it helps.
That's probably why a single kernel doesn't do all this shit. The source is there for all these features, but each kernel is customized with conditional compilation controlled by the.config file at build time.
While that's true most will use their distro's precompiled kernel which obviously has most things enable to support all the possible use cases their customers have. I guess it works to keep experimental code in the tree but not in the default build, but once it's lifted to "production code" I think a lot of people will get it by default.
America is only 11 when it comes to mass shooting casualties per capita. Belgium, France, Norway are way ahead.
I think both the time period and definition of mass shooting was cherry picked but technically that's correct, mainly because there's been more deaths due to political terrorism like the Paris attacks (130 victims) and Norway's Utøya massacre (69 shooting victims, 77 total) compared to the US with the Orlando nightclub shooting (50 victims). Though I feel terrorism is kinda their own category and whether they use guns, bombs, gas, trucks or airplanes to kill is kinda irrelevant. Like our Norwegian terrorist set off a bomb that would have killed hundreds if it had worked as intended, the mass shooting was just a backup plan. If you look for something resembling school shootings where the goal seems to be nothing but carnage and suicide/death by cop the US is leading by a mile.
The flip side to "Labour arbitrage" is that you think some workers have a god-given right to be compensated better than other workers. Like if you got the choice between hiring a software developer for $100k/year in Silicon Valley or $50k/year in the Midwest who have the exact same skills and can do the exact same job does it matter what the cost of living is in Silicon Valley? No. What you call arbitrage is what economic theory would call optimization, the jobs flow to where they can be done the cheapest. Those who priced themselves out of the market either need to have other skills/advantages to justify their wage or they'll need to lower their wage.
Dead money is mostly an illusion, it's not like any company is putting the money in a vault and goes swimming in them like Scrooge McDuck. That money is in the bank and being rented out through loans, the problem in your linked article is that very few want to loan to invest because they're too uncertain about the future. When you create a global financial crisis causing interest rates to skyrocket and credit lines to be yanked across the whole economy it's no wonder those who do make a profit hold on to their money. I wouldn't want to be at the bank's mercy...
I would play for hours and feel empty afterwards. (...) Instead I started to work on development side projects (when not spending time with my family)
So you essentially created a side job to have more money to invest in your family time. It's a fair choice, but I think most of us think we do enough to make money in our day job. What I spend the remaining hours on will almost certainly be a "waste" of time and money if my life goal was to die with the biggest possible bank account. Like if I go to a fine restaurant, what I get is probably not objectively "better" food that will improve my health it's just a temporary sensory experience. I have fun gaming, thus it has value. If you don't appreciate it anymore find something else you'd like to spend your time and money on, but I wouldn't say you should replace "unproductive" time with "productive" time unless you need it to improve your remaining leisure time.
You just explained what we obviously knew for at the very least 120 years, since it's basically the reason behind the Berne Convention. Did you just run out of stuff to say, or what's the motivation behind it?
But up until not that long ago, you had to deliver some form of physical manifestation whether it was a paper book, a CD, a DVD or something like that which had "manufacturing-like" properties like production runs, distribution logistics and so on. In practice you only had access to what was profitable to have in stock near you and there was a whole supply chain that would have to decide to make and distribute more. Even if you could make some kind of special order just finding it was very hard before the Internet. I think the purely abstract business model is fundamentally different and we're still trying to figure out what exactly Kindle, Spotify, Netflix etc. will do to the market. And for better and worse also the ability to constantly update the software and get feedback on it.
There seems to be a grey area between fiction, and really harmful content.
Oh please, it's Pokemon Go with zombies. You walk around with your cell phone and click to kill zombies instead of capturing pokemons. Next thing you know Pokemon Go should be banned for having "battles" in public locations. OMG the carnage...
Slashdot Mirror
Will Unpredictable 'Franken-Algorithms' Have Deadly Consequences
Probably yes.
and Make Programmers Obsolete?
Almost certainly not.
We are creating algorithms where the result can not be explained in human terms. Nobody can truly understand why AlphaGo thinks a move is good, it's a neural network of weights we don't understand. It's about as useless as trying to get a chess grandmaster to articulate why a particular move is good, it's subtleties you can't record and put in a rule book. Which is fine for AlphaGo since the worst it'll do is lose a game. If it's Watson totally misdiagnosing your cancer or Waymo's car T-boning a school bus it matters a lot.
That is why I think developers will always be busy implementing guard rails. Like if you're trying to minimize humanity's environmental impact then the divide by zero solution is obviously superior. It's not a practically feasible solution in the real world though.
Forget gluten [allergy], what about peanuts?
Shoot on sight. Take no prisoners. Also I'm totally not allergic to peanuts. *throws smoke bomb*
An alternative is to require people receiving this treatment to consent to forced sterilization
Ah, you want to remove undesirables from the gene pool. I think the 1930s called and want their genetic hygiene back. Have you looked at what hospitals do today already? We try to fix everything, no matter how poor the fertility is, how high the tendency to miscarry, how unfit the mother is to give vaginal birth, how premature the child is born and no matter what kind of physical and mental handicaps or hereditary diseases they're born with or what health problems they have as a child. All those poor genes are being passed on and none of those children are asked to sign away their right to reproduce, there's nothing unique about muscular dystrophy that is significantly worse or different.
If you want to argue we should be screening out who gets to reproduce or not, then just go full tilt. At age... 14? everyone has their medical history, physical and mental health reviewed, those who pass go through and the rest are sterilized/given a vasectomy. A license to breed, more or less. Also make sure to say how hardcore you'd get, like is it muscular dystrophy or gluten allergy that's enough to disqualify you. I'm guessing you're not very likely to get much support, but hey... that's kinda what you really want with this "if we do this for you, you agree not to have children" right? And I'm sure there would be no potential for abuse or corruption in such a system, not at all...
He's wrong: it means we'll just get slower and slower software because hardly anyone knows how to do anything besides paste libraries together.
Except when they write massive kludges of spaghetti code that should have been a library or used the standard library. It's not that libraries are inherently bad, I mean you couldn't even write print( "Hello world!" ) without something interpreting letters to bitmaps and defining what a "standard output" is. The problem is often that these libraries grow because there's always one more use case to cover until they become huge and complex. At which point somebody decides fuck it, I don't need this let's just start over.
For example take the software above, it would be really nice if we had some kind of string class right? With convenience functions like length(), substring(), append() etc. but real simple ASCII with values 0-127 that always means the same. Then comes a European who wants their mööse and you got code pages. Then Unicode and multi-byte, variable or fixed length characters, sort collations and so on. And while it doesn't necessarily gets slower the library becomes big and complex with a big interface. And then someone says fuck it, this is too much for me to bother with.
And then you have the printing of "Hello world!", it's no longer a bitmap. It's a FreeType font of vector shapes with kerning and anti-aliasing and whatnot requiring an advanced rendering engine to actually have something to display. And if you wanted to print the date, well there's probably a huge library for that too with short forms and long forms and conversions to/from string format and leap seconds and whatnot. And that's not even starting to get into the fun of input/output devices, networking or whatever... you are in a library world already. Some of them are just a really bad idea.
Not buying it. I'd say, if a suspect in a case forgot his password and told the judge that, AND that he'd be willing to attempt to guess it, or work with password reset mechanisms to assist, (s)he'd be free to go. I couldn't tell you any of my passwords, either. I don't know them. But I could tell you how to access my password storage thing to retrieve a password. I really don't think a judge would jail me on contempt of court for having a password manager, or forgetting a password and being willing to help get it reset or whatnot.
Honestly, I think you're blissfully naive. If you manage to decrypt it somehow, you're off the hook. If for any reason you can't because you've forgotten the password or your "password storage thing" is corrupt or the stress of facing years in prison is causing you to mind blank then they're likely to slam you double for pretending to know it and wasting everybody's time.
Sometimes human drivers are just responsible.
Well you'd think so, considering they're driving. I suppose there can be a few mechanical faults where they're not, but otherwise duuuuh.
A Proper education needs Humanities and STEM.
When you say it like that - particularly with the capitalization - I get the image of English aristocrats nipping tea and complaining how everyone who hasn't suffered through Latin is just a country bumpkin. It was probably a good idea when the highly educated were the teachers, doctors and priests while most everyone else were farmers or craftsmen so they had to cover a broad range of subjects. Today we need specialists, lots and lots of specialists. I don't need my neurosurgeon to have university-level education in "History, Literature, Politics, Arts, Sociology, Philosophy and Psychology" I need a damn good surgeon and honestly I couldn't care if he has the social skills of Dr. Stephen Strange either.
From first grade to my master's degree I had 17 years of education. I really don't think 12 years as a generalist and 5 years as a specialist is too much. There is plenty I had to learn and plenty more I could have learned in my field of study, of course we also need cross-overs so the specialists talk to each other but we don't need Renaissance men like Leonardo da Vinci trying to cover everything from anatomy to airplanes. If you want to be an aerospace engineer for SpaceX that's cool but it'll probably take most your education and work experience to get there. There's so many giants standing on the shoulders of other giants it takes a good while just to learn what others have learned before you.
Do people have a choice here? Forgive me if I am asking something silly; I haven't used Windows for a long, long time.
Average people? No. They'll get nags and eventually it'll reboot on its own. You can play various tricks with metered connection, disabling the update service etc. but most tricks only work for a little while then Microsoft force-installs it anyway. Mostly because critical patches ignore your settings and eventually a critical patch will require you upgrade the base system first. There's apparently some very obscure ways to really block it for machines where the upgrade fails and such, but they've hidden it real well. And it's monolithic, if you block it then no security patches either. Once you're on the Win10 train, Microsoft really doesn't want you to get off.
The patent is an extension on an already-extant concept of automatic turn signals based on a person about to leave a lane.
Really? Never heard of it. Even if all the claims held what you essentially got is an auto-blink that'll start after the person is already crossing into a different lane. Which is legally too late in most jurisdictions and would lead consumers to believe they don't need to blink because the car will do that. But I guess that's the same story as the autopilot, who needs to drive when the car can do that? Tesla makes really great electric cars, but when it comes to self-driving features they're one notch above Uber in shadiness.
The only people who need 8K for moving pictures are people with beyond 20/20 sight. If you look at this chart the THX recommended viewing angle is 40 degrees, the most they allow for the front row of the cinema is 53 degrees. If you got a 100" screen, you'd have to sit 7.3' away for that, while to see 8K you'd have to be close than 6'. That said, 20/20 is just "normal" vision, about 30% have 20/15 vision and 1% has 20/10 vision. That would give you an effective viewing distance of 5.48 and 3.55 feet, meaning they see some but not all the detail of 8K. So ~30% would have some benefit sitting very close - but not unnaturally close - to a very big screen. If you go back to the recommended viewing angle which would be more typical middle of the cinema that's 10' for a 100" screen. Now even the 20/15 can't see that at 7.5' effective, but the 1% still get some more detail at 5' effective. So for the very few.
That said it has more appeal for still photos, if motion is not an issue you can get very close pixel peeping. Pretty much any modern camera takes >8MP photos, with a 32MP screen you'd finally start to see the full detail of most 20-25MP cameras. Of course there are megapixel monsters that go beyond that too, but you'd be scaling them down a whole lot less. In fact that's probably the only time you'd really notice 8K, above I talked about the theoretical limits but they are if you're staring at a Snellen chart. They threw in a lot of other upgrades to 4K like Rec.2020, HDR, 10 bit colors etc. and if you kept those but scaled it down to 1080p not many would notice the difference in resolution alone. Just 8K quadrupling size for a minimal improvement for a tiny fraction of the population will fly like a brick.
Insurance companies are extremely risk adverse.
Not from the customer perspective, they'll insure satellites riding into space on top of a flying bomb if the premium is high enough. They do want a profit margin, but considering that SDCs are essentially clones you're not guessing at a lot of variables it's just accidents/miles driven in a given area. But until Waymo decides to sell to the private market it's irrelevant, they're more than big enough to self-insure. They know every detail about their own accident rate and how often their safety drivers have saved their ass. And they'd run out of public goodwill and permission to drive long before they ran out of money. From 2009 to 2015 they invested way over a billion dollars in this program, given the recent scale up I'm guessing it's now two to three. Even $100 million in accident payouts wouldn't be enough to stop them from an economic perspective, but they'd be chased off the road long, long before that.
You realize that Trump's attacks on media alone have done more damage to democracy than a generation of Hilary ever could, right? He has done more to undermine public faith in journalism than ANY Western leader in history.
Well in this case we have a genuine case of fake news being taken by truth as the POTUS. Now Trump is just throwing a hand grenade into the debate but there really needs to be a higher awareness and debate about the level of propaganda, disinformation and plain old lies spreading online, the existence of alt-media and the people who believe their own alt-facts in their own alt-reality.
Well "..." is the spread operator in Javascript, here's =!=, it seems plausible that "+-+" might be interpreted as x+(-(+y)) which collapses to "x-y". Not sure about -+/* but Ruby should get a honorable mention for %/%. The most annoying thing about operators though is not each one, it's the precedence rules. For example in SQL "WHERE a OR b AND c = 1" when you mean "WHERE (a OR b) AND c = 1. I really, really wish some smart language would say "fuck that, we're not making obscure rules nobody remembers/notices are invoked" and just throws a syntax error, here's ambiguity so resolve it explicitly with parentheses. That would be the sane solution for all future maintenance. Also I'd like to ban the singular "=" operator, use "==" for comparison and ":=" for assignment, you can keep the mixed ones like "+=".
Sounds like the author is having an existential crisis. I've never had a conservative friend worry about such things. That leads me to believe the author is in an echo chamber.
Conservatives don't have echo chambers? I think the existential crisis is correct but the reason is far more basic than political leanings, it's that the next generation doesn't actually care all that much about what your generation did or liked. A generation is ~30 years, do you see many kids playing video games from 1988? Teens listening to music from 1988? Watch TV or movies from 1988? How many read books that were popular in 1988? Dress the way they did in 1988? Sure, occasionally something old comes back as retro or becomes a classic but for the vast part contemporary culture is just contemporary and tossed on history's graveyard. He simply sounds a bit miffed that his cultural legacy is heading that way. Blaming the medium is an excuse, story-telling is far from dead and if you had something to say that'd appeal to people in 2018 you'd still have a big audience and the movie/TV rights on top.
...as well as things like this newly-released thousands-of-hours of audio, do any of the moon hoaxers start to lose their resolve?
No. The harder someone tries to prove to a conspiracy theorist that he's wrong, the more desperate they are because the cover-up is not working. For example the Nazis wanted order and kept tons of records on the Holocaust, but if you talk to a Holocaust denier the extensive and detailed evidence is proof that it's fake because if it was real it'd be way more fragmented and incomplete. The only way it could be so comprehensive is if there was a bunch of Jews manufacturing it, basically the compelling evidence against the conspiracy becomes part of the conspiracy. I think 19000 hours of radio chatter goes in the same category, the only way you have all this is because it's made up. But the "truthers" see through your ploy...
Who is manufacturing them? This is like Metallica suing Napster for distributing mp3 files. The judge says you can't download these files. What if you printed the text of these files into a book and sold it? Would that book be deemed illegal?
Sure. Copyright is an obvious limitation on free speech, you're not free to reuse what someone else has created. If these guns designs were copyrighted then copyright would apply, the question is whether they can stop content that is original or posted with permission. Instructions on doing something illegal has generally been considered speech, it may be illegal to make meth but it's not illegal to describe the chemical reactions to make meth. Technical progress might have made it easier to go from a blueprint to a product, but the principle is unchanged - it's not actually illegal until you do it. Pretty sure they'll eventually win this one on first amendment reasons.
I can tell you my forecast: Someone will figure out that since there are no strings attached, they can offer these people loans at high interest, paid for by the $1k per month. So they'll be just as poor as before, but perhaps have a car for a while, and someone else gets richer.
The only people who'd get $1k extra are the people earning $0 today - not including those already on welfare programs as they'd be reduced/cut - which means they're either dependent on somebody else, living off savings, accumulating debt or hobos living under a bridge. That deadbeat son/daughter you haven't got the heart to kick out? Well now they got money to pay rent or to get a shabby room somewhere else. The stay-at-home mom and dads have a family economy. UBI for retirees would essentially be a public pension program, higher taxes but less need to set off funds for retirement. Students would hopefully exit their education with less debt and they'd probably be expected to pay in full many more places. And I don't think the first thing a hobo will do is buy a car.
If you have low income you'd be expected to pay a lot more taxes because your net income already start at UBI, everything you earn comes on top. Looking at current income tax brackets I'd guess a flat rate somewhere around 35%, like if you earn $100k, pay $35k taxes but get $12k UBI back the net is 23%, for $60k -> 15%, $200k -> 29%. So If you make $17k/year pay ~$6k in taxes, get $12k in UBI for a net $23k/year instead of paying ~$1800 in taxes. for a net $15200/year. That's a pretty good uplift, but then the UBI proponents want to cut all other programs like food stamps etc. so in exchange for those $7800 you're on your own. That program alone averages $1500/year per recipient, so poof it's down to $6300 extra. Medicaid could be another big one. Subsidized housing. There's lots of small programs that would be killed off.
Break-even would be around $35k, $35k * 0.35 = $12250 in, $12000 out. What's the break-even wage today, like how much do you need to earn to make a net contributon? I'm guessing it's not too far off. The only reason question is how many people would like to take some kind of sabbatical or take some kind of leap of faith and those $12k tip the scales. I sure as hell wouldn't try to live off that permanently, but if you have an attractive education/experience and know you can get back into the job market then the difference between a year off with $0 income and $12k is pretty big. Or just $12k/year more to coast into retirement.
Did Moore's law just end? Intel said they thought it had...maybe this is confirmation.
Not quite yet, we have designs for a 4nm transistor made with silicon so I think there's room for one more iteration past 7nm. But yes the end is coming and soon, first half of the 2020s I think you can hold the funeral.
But you will be forced - at gun point, which is how all taxes are collected - to pay for somebody else doing it.
The implication is that you wouldn't be paying for "somebody else" otherwise, but reality is that you do. Like our little eGamer wacko recently, I bet he didn't have the assets to cover all the medical expenses he caused, much less if he had to pay restitution to everyone from the inconvenienced to the deceased's relatives. Even if there's health insurance and whatnot that just means the costs gets smeared broad and thin. And anything but anarchists wants law and order so somebody's paying cops and judges and prisons and it's not the penniless perp. Heck it could be simple things like theft, or even if not theft then the cost of the anti-theft system you need to keep thieves away. Maybe you think UBI is a poor strategy of appeasement, but taxes is far from the only way you end up with the bill. Less desperate people do less desperate things, of course it's no miracle worker but it helps.
That's probably why a single kernel doesn't do all this shit. The source is there for all these features, but each kernel is customized with conditional compilation controlled by the .config file at build time.
While that's true most will use their distro's precompiled kernel which obviously has most things enable to support all the possible use cases their customers have. I guess it works to keep experimental code in the tree but not in the default build, but once it's lifted to "production code" I think a lot of people will get it by default.
America is only 11 when it comes to mass shooting casualties per capita. Belgium, France, Norway are way ahead.
I think both the time period and definition of mass shooting was cherry picked but technically that's correct, mainly because there's been more deaths due to political terrorism like the Paris attacks (130 victims) and Norway's Utøya massacre (69 shooting victims, 77 total) compared to the US with the Orlando nightclub shooting (50 victims). Though I feel terrorism is kinda their own category and whether they use guns, bombs, gas, trucks or airplanes to kill is kinda irrelevant. Like our Norwegian terrorist set off a bomb that would have killed hundreds if it had worked as intended, the mass shooting was just a backup plan. If you look for something resembling school shootings where the goal seems to be nothing but carnage and suicide/death by cop the US is leading by a mile.
The flip side to "Labour arbitrage" is that you think some workers have a god-given right to be compensated better than other workers. Like if you got the choice between hiring a software developer for $100k/year in Silicon Valley or $50k/year in the Midwest who have the exact same skills and can do the exact same job does it matter what the cost of living is in Silicon Valley? No. What you call arbitrage is what economic theory would call optimization, the jobs flow to where they can be done the cheapest. Those who priced themselves out of the market either need to have other skills/advantages to justify their wage or they'll need to lower their wage.
Dead money is mostly an illusion, it's not like any company is putting the money in a vault and goes swimming in them like Scrooge McDuck. That money is in the bank and being rented out through loans, the problem in your linked article is that very few want to loan to invest because they're too uncertain about the future. When you create a global financial crisis causing interest rates to skyrocket and credit lines to be yanked across the whole economy it's no wonder those who do make a profit hold on to their money. I wouldn't want to be at the bank's mercy...
I would play for hours and feel empty afterwards. (...) Instead I started to work on development side projects (when not spending time with my family)
So you essentially created a side job to have more money to invest in your family time. It's a fair choice, but I think most of us think we do enough to make money in our day job. What I spend the remaining hours on will almost certainly be a "waste" of time and money if my life goal was to die with the biggest possible bank account. Like if I go to a fine restaurant, what I get is probably not objectively "better" food that will improve my health it's just a temporary sensory experience. I have fun gaming, thus it has value. If you don't appreciate it anymore find something else you'd like to spend your time and money on, but I wouldn't say you should replace "unproductive" time with "productive" time unless you need it to improve your remaining leisure time.
You just explained what we obviously knew for at the very least 120 years, since it's basically the reason behind the Berne Convention. Did you just run out of stuff to say, or what's the motivation behind it?
But up until not that long ago, you had to deliver some form of physical manifestation whether it was a paper book, a CD, a DVD or something like that which had "manufacturing-like" properties like production runs, distribution logistics and so on. In practice you only had access to what was profitable to have in stock near you and there was a whole supply chain that would have to decide to make and distribute more. Even if you could make some kind of special order just finding it was very hard before the Internet. I think the purely abstract business model is fundamentally different and we're still trying to figure out what exactly Kindle, Spotify, Netflix etc. will do to the market. And for better and worse also the ability to constantly update the software and get feedback on it.
There seems to be a grey area between fiction, and really harmful content.
Oh please, it's Pokemon Go with zombies. You walk around with your cell phone and click to kill zombies instead of capturing pokemons. Next thing you know Pokemon Go should be banned for having "battles" in public locations. OMG the carnage...