It does not make any sense that some people spend time and money replacing what is currently working with some incompatible crap. (...) There is no need to point out that I cannot prove it, I know, it just make sense to me.
Many developers fix problems like a guy about to lose a two week vacation because he can't find his passport. Rip open every drawer, empty every shelf, spread it all across the tables and floors until you find it, then rush out the door leaving everything in a mess. It solved HIS problem.
When you want to evict somebody for real, you do it legally to begin with dont fuck around. Dont try to serve the notice yourself or any of that bullshit. Or come up with your own arbitrary timeline. The kid was right initially, they cant evict him by typing some letter saying get out in 2 weeks. Thats not how it works people.
Except he doesn't pay rent, this is "evicting" the guy you let sleep in your spare bedroom for a few days but never leaves. Or your girlfriend kicking you out of her house and you go nope we had an "informal agreement" so I live here now until I'm evicted. Freebies end when the person giving it away wants it to end. When the time was up they should have put his things on the street and changed the lock. I doubt he'd have gotten anywhere in court, no consideration = no contract. No contract = you're a guest. Guests leave when they're asked to leave or they get kicked out.
You are right. And then, a "false report" punishment should be far, far away from live conviction and a million fine.
I disagree. If you caused this shit, it's on your head. Like, say your 911 call caused the police to respond with a high speed approach with lights and sirens. That's above and beyond the normal risk, taken because the police think it's averting or mitigating a bigger risk. Well shit happens, they crash and somebody dies. I don't care if it was a prank call and the police would have arrived, discerned there's no actual risk and backed down. You instigated it, you take the blame because someone died. It doesn't mean you were in a conspiracy with the driver or you planned/wanted it to happen, but it did.
The law isn't quite clear on this because it doesn't explicitly say if it values the actions or the consequences. Like, why is murder and attempted murder two different crimes if the only difference is incompetence. It's certainly possible to argue that if all you wanted to do was make a prank call then that's all you can be charged with. I disagree, if a drunk driver runs over people it doesn't matter that he didn't intend to do that, or rather it lowers it from murder to manslaughter. Anything you do with malice deserves to
Not really. The sunken cost fallacy states that you should ignore past cost paid when making decisions. I.e. it would only apply here if you went to a movie with movie pass you normally would not have gone to EVEN if it was free. The even part is important.
It can be both. If you pay for an all-you-can-eat buffet, you eat as long as there's a marginal benefit to eating. If you go past that and over-eat to improve or justify your decision to order all-you-can-eat then it's the sunken cost fallacy. Humans are quite prone to do that so it's quite possible that some would use their MoviePass to watch movies they didn't really care for or didn't really have time for in order to maximize their "value". Life is short and there's an opportunity cost to everything, even if it's free and harmless. If it was free to watch any time it'd be different, it's the "use it or lose it" opportunity for something that normally costs money that encourages this behavior. Of course there's many opportunities you should take, but don't buy junk only because it's on sale...
We've reached a point in our technological evolution where every single human being on this planet could easily live a life of middle class security, with much left over.
And...? What's understood as "good" living conditions is a moving target. When I grew up, nobody had cell phones except possibly a few yuppies on Wall Street. These days smartphones are the norm. We didn't have a microwave, what's wrong with a stove? Eventually, everything is trivialized - like obviously light comes on at the flip of a switch. Except 200 years ago not even royalty had that. There's always some eco-hippies who want to freeze time like a modern Amish and say "this is enough for everyone, forever". Well they're wrong, I do want a self-driving car. For convenience now, if I can't legally drive anymore like my parents then even stronger. In 100 years time the idea of not having it will probably be as remote as having to go by horse and buggy is to me. I'm not looking to stop progress, are you?
We have two related trends: the growth of a knowledge economy, and the rise of automation. Gee, i wonder what the outcome will be?
A world where having all your basic needs met is much cheaper in absolute terms? I don't know about wages and wealth, but the cost for the 1%ers to carry the rest is going down. And with wealth comes fewer kids, it's no longer an exponentially rising cost we're down to a world population increasing by 1.1%/year and most predict it'll decline further. We've seen this in Asia and South America, it's basically just Africa left and even there the good outweighs the bad. Basically the rich will become richer, but there's little reason to think the poor will become poorer. The western world has been rather stagnant but we were way ahead of the curve, it was kinda ridiculous when you could hire dozens of people in China or India for the price of one westerner.
Can you program a Windows/GTK application without taking those courses? Most likely. (...) Most programmers don't have to deal with any of this stuff
Well we need a lot of those, it's kinda the IT version of handymen where somebody needs a house. And it's not going to be a revolution in carpentry, plumbing or wiring but you take some kind of business need and create software for that, it's a honest living even though you're not pushing the boundaries of CS. Despite many years of trying it'll never be just rule engines and configuration, at least not without turning your business-side into quasi-developers and making the tools so complex and flexible they resemble the code you tried to get away from.
I'm probably going to get shot down over this and get -1 as troll, but IMAO you cannot make a great programmer unless you've taken some college courses specifically related to computer science.
I think it goes a bit the other way, if you have a lot of talent you either develop a hubris that my way is the best way and become a "rock star" developer or you want to stand on the shoulders of giants and learn from the best. It doesn't necessarily mean formal college classes, it could just as easily be picking up the book and working through it on your own. Some of the best simply never got around to finishing college because they got job offers so tempting they dropped out and just ran it with it. That said, many finish the degree because "highest education level" is a HR filter...
The Tesla owners said they paid an extra $5,000 (...) will receive between $20 and $280 in compensation.
So between 0.4% and 5.6% of what they paid, if Tesla gets to keep 95% they're probably happy. The lawyers are happy because they "won" and get paid. But for any of the people in the class this is a joke, either they have a case and should get much more or they have no case and should get nothing. This is just lawyer busywork...
While someone in another country could possibly pull these skills together, #3 becomes a lot harder if you're not fluent in English, but if even if you are and you're not fluent in the "office speak" of that business.
I think this is more a case of "everybody thinks they're special". Almost every sector, every business develops their own lingo. If I say TDD, do you know what I mean? Probably, but only because most of us are developers. If you were in procurement, you'd instantly know what a RFQ was. If you are an MBA (you know that one right?) you'd know what EBIDTA is. And that's just the general terms, in this company XYZ means something in particular. As a total outsider, you'd not understand shit and that's completely normal. But if you explain to them the specific terms, you don't get that much "free" by being a native. Some of course, but an ounce of specific knowledge is often worth a pound of general knowledge. It's more who you talk to, if you pay peanuts you get monkeys...
Not necessarily. A tiny union of the only 3 people in the world who knows how to run your automated factory has more power over you than a union of 10,000 manual laborers who used to do that work by hand. The first is almost impossible to replace, while the second only takes some time.
Except nobody would run a big business that would go under if three people disappeared, because people go on vacation or quit or get hit by a bus. And even if that was the case all they'd have to do is pay one of them real well to "sell out" the magic formula. You try actively switching out union members with non-union members and see how far you'd get before they call a strike and bring your business to a grinding halt. That's their collective threat, you can't replace all of us and all our experience/know-how at once.
I think the power of striking is greatly diminished as we go from providing the actual service to maintaining the systems that provide the service. Right now if taxi drivers go on strike, the taxis stop. If Waymo's developers go on strike, do the self driving cars stop? I'm not so sure. New development stops sure, but that doesn't have nearly the same business impact. They just need a few non-union members to keep a skeleton crew running and the employers could keep it up much longer than the strikers.
I think even geeks want appliances. Most of the things around me are neither open source software nor open source hardware, my microwave works the way it works and as long as it's not outright defective the only reasonable choice I have if I'm unhappy with it is to go down to the store and buy a new one from a different brand. Now I'm sure RMS would say I should be able to make and install my own enhancements and bug fixes and the 3D printing fans would say I should be able to make my own parts, but for me that is sufficient consumer power. Most of the time I feel that way about my phone too, if it does the things it does well I don't care so much about the wall unless of course something I desperately want is on the other side.
Lately I've become more and more concerned though with the level of data collection going on, it's not what the app does for me it's all the spying it does on the side. Apple has made that so hard even the FBI is frustrated. And the main alternative is a phone made by the biggest data miner of them all, tied into a ton of their services. The "third option" has been Windows Phone, Blackberry or some extremely niche phones with near zero support or applications. So I picked my poison and figured Apple was actually the least bad choice. If I want root control and the source code it's called Linux and runs on a laptop/desktop. If it's that sensitive, then I simply wouldn't put it on a phone.
Still waiting on the Uber apologists to show up and tell us how much safer these systems will be and how these accidents will only happen once ever. Like developers never reintroduce errors.
Seems that one death has made Uber pull out of developing SDCs, at least they've handed in the license they had and are laying off the staff so looks fairly permanent. That's probably the best that could happen to SDCs because Uber's business is built on playing it fast and loose with the law. Which is one thing when it's about medallions and whatnot, but when they get people killed it's a big deal. Hopefully the serious players will keep going slow and steady, Waymo has been working for it for 9 years and don't seem to be in any hurry to rush it to market before it's ready. And I think Tesla has discovered through their non-self driving Autopilot that they have a long list of corner cases to cover before launching a genuinely self-driving car, regardless of what they've pre-sold.
As for comparison with human drivers, we have a lot of unfit drivers that caused a death before their license got yanked. I don't think Uber's fatality speaks more for SDCs in general than that half-blind 90yo does for human drivers. Other humans will keep on driving. Other companies will keep on making SDCs. I still think SDCs will win out in the end because their skills accumulate while human experience expires and can't easily be passed on, every year it's someone's first year on the road while experienced drivers retire. The average driver doesn't really change much from year to year even though the individuals gain experience. When they start winning there'll be no comeback any more than humans beating computers at chess again.
The poorly written article makes it sound like Uber's system either didn't have a feature for braking for obstacles or that it was disabled. This is not accurate.
No, you're the one spreading misinformation. To quote the NTSB report directly:
According to Uber emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator.
Basically they had a system that calculated it would crash, but did nothing and warned no one. In other words, the same as having no system at all.
No idea what the grandparent is talking about, possibly the general principle that you can act on reasonable belief. Like if you point a replica gun at me, I can shoot you in self-defense even though you were actually incapable of shooting me. The real facts don't matter, just my perception of a threat. Cops in the US certainly have a lot of leeway to say they thought you posed a threat, so the use of lethal force was justified. In fact, if you're on a SWAT team it's damn near immunity because you're not calling in the SWAT team unless there is a reasonable belief that someone is in grave danger.
I can understand that the courts want to err on the side of the police, that you don't want cops on the street worrying whether this guy is threatening enough or is somebody far away in their comfy office chair going to decide in hindsight that this is actually murder. On the other hand, if you can't curb the aggression the cops are likely to go more and more in the "shoot first, ask questions later" direction because it's safe and easy for them. But I suppose criticizing anything in how the cops are equipped and trained or the specifics of this police action would probably look like an admission of guilt, so let's pick the easy option to pin it all on the swatters. Same procedure next swatting...
It's a joke from Soviet Russia, though probably an obscure reference in 2018. They had two main newspapers, Pravda which means "Truth" and Izvestia which means "News". Pravda was the official voice of the communist party and Izvestia was the official voice of the soviet government. In English the joke would be "There is no truth in News, and there is no news in Truth." The current day newspapers are fairly unrelated.
This isn't your facebook feed, you can't just post that kind of stuff without some sort of proof to back up that claim.
I can't quite remember where I read it, but the car model has collision detection in the default configuration and would normally have performed an emergency brake when collision was imminent. All the "smart" features were disabled to run Uber's SDC software, though from what I understand this is standard practice so you don't have competing/conflicting automated systems. Nobody made a big deal of that part, it's just part of the explanation of how it could plow down that pedestrian without reacting at all - they disabled a primitive system that worked and replaced it with a sophisticated system that didn't and actually performed worse than out of the box.
The question is not how frequently they release a new model, it's how long until the old models are retired. Pretty much every year cars come with new tweaks and why not? It's not like I have to run out and buy a new car, the improvements just accumulate and every year it's somebody's turn to retire their old car and get a new one. Would there be anything gained by waiting years between upgrades? Smaller upgrades means exactly what version you get matters less, it's big generation gaps that make you care and consider waiting for the next one rather than simply getting the latest at any given time. And it's usually not that which kills support, it's having a thousand configuration choices not a yearly revision...
But we shouldn't have humans fighting robots in a real-world war. Of course that's precisely what'll end up happening, won't it?
Far more civilians than military die in modern war and we've lived 70+ years with the threat of entire cities being nuked into oblivion. If you're spending billions on a Terminator it's to kill with extreme precision, carnage is much cheaper.
Or they'll expect us to send all our weakest troops against them first and gradually send more and more powerful troops until finally- as they get close to victory against us we'll send Theresa May against them for a final boss fight. Only May will grow 50ft tall and regenerate some health between each missile that strikes her and she'll have flame throwers coming out of her arms.
Hey, the brexiters won. Don't knock it if it works.
On the contrary, an ongoing territorial dispute may be the best way to lock Ukraine in a stalemale, the way Cyprus had the EU stalled and like China and Taiwan are today. Russia has been losing allies since the 90s, back then the dividing line ran through Germany now they've lost pretty much all of Eastern Europe from the Baltics in the north to the Slavic countries in the south and the western sphere of influence has been crawling eastwards into ex-Soviet territory. Maybe the country was divided when the unrest started but I think in a few years Russia would be holding the short end of that stick anyway.
A full membership in EU/NATO would put them right at Putin's doorstep. Not just the proximity to Moscow, Ukraine is big both in terms of territory and manpower while Crimea is absolutely essential to Russia's navy. Maybe this will push the people in a pro-western direction but formally this makes Ukraine a hot potato because either you acknowledge their full territory which would make you a party to the conflict or you de facto recognize that Russia has taken it and isn't going to give it back, both of which are politically untenable. Even if it's not a hot conflict it can potentially stall things for decades and if anyone gets too cozy I'm sure the unrest will flare up for reasons "unknown".
I think Putin got all he could reasonably hope for, maybe he was hoping for a massive overreaction so he could send Russian tanks all the way to Kiev to protect the Russian minority but I doubt it as it would have been really messy. The Ukrainian response was also clearly limited to avoid provoking an all-out war with Russia, they certainly could have struck back harder. As for Putin, how many allies does he have left to lose? There's Belarus that he got in his pocket, he's supporting a few whack jobs down in the Middle East but as a military and economic bloc he's pretty lonely unless he gets friendly with China. I think he just wants it to stop before Russia has their own Euromaidan...
Nope. The day people figure out they can use Facebook all the way to MacDonalds and back will be a good day to look for a second hand car.
Well that, but I also think you'll have a rapidly accumulating statistic. Like if you can get 1000 daredevils to buy version 1.0 you'll have no problem convincing 10000 tech-fans to buy 1.1. And once they have it, they'll convince 100000 tech-curious to buy 1.2. So people are worried now... well they won't be as the owner of the 746252th self driving car in America. Like, by the time you care what the "mass market" thinks they'll have a completely different statistical basis. And this isn't even like "do cell phones cause cancer" scary, if you can walk away from your self driving car trip it went well so you don't need long term studies just bulk volume. Basically if you deliver it, they will come. And they will come in droves.
Everything nominal, from employee sighs the fairing recovery attempt failed but they didn't show any of that so basically no progress just your bog standard satellite launch. I guess that's better for SpaceX than the alternative but the entertainment value was quite low.
This has been the argument against open source for over 25 years â" and it has been debunked for about that long... Are we really reading this again in 2018? Why is this FUD even on Slashdot's front page?
It's been debunked in open source software, but there are many ancient and abandoned versions of open source libraries in closed source software, either because nobody takes responsibility or they're relying on some deprecated API or custom modifications. Which is a pretty big risk when an exploit is found in the current code base, that library will get rebuilt and pushed out to Linux distributions but not your average random COTS software. But they seem to be pushing for Win10-style force fed updates, whether you like it or not. I suppose it's necessary for idiots who refuse to patch and become part of the latest botnet, but keep that far away from me...
I think you're falling into a nerd trap by pretending we don't have black and white even though we haven't exactly narrowed down the shade of gray that marks the border, like when does a fan become a stalker or perseverance become harassment or a bad deal become a fraud. We're never going to exactly define how high you can go on a rooftop and how big a telephoto lens you can use before it's an invasion of privacy. I think we need restrictions on collection, storage and sharing of data and metadata, I don't think the human mind is the right template but the question is what is necessary to deliver the service and should you be allowed to opt out of the rest.
For example if I go to buy groceries then what they need is payment for goods, obviously they should be able to register that in their inventory/financial systems but the rest is not essential. And some of it is necessary for billing but not permanent storage. When it comes to sharing I think commercial transactions by default should have a consumer-vendor confidentiality. It's probably stricter than humans since they gossip, but I don't think my hair dresser and clothing store should be able to pool their information, even if it's necessary for each separate business. Obviously the information has value so they should be able to give discounts but not force you to share with "business partners" through boilerplate agreements.
Of course being highly unionized is how a lot of this became law in the first place, if they've first given in to the union's demands it's better for them to lobby it into law so the non-union shops are stuck with it too.
It doesn't matter whether you do it by hand or by computer. For example, black people are statistically far more likely to be poor than everyone else, and as a consequence they have terrible credit scores. This is a fact, and no matter who does the calculations, as long as they are based on observable facts, they will be less likely to give black people a loan. Reality is racist. Statistics is based on reality. If you don't like the outcome, change the reality and the statistics will take those changes into account.
You're missing out on the part where the output of the algorithms become the input to the algorithms. Then you get feedback loops that shape reality, not simply interpret it. For example very few black people are employed as X -> don't show them ads for jobs as X -> even fewer are employed as X. It's not difficult to create algorithms that cement or enlarge the social differences so that black people get low scores because they are poor and they are poor because they get low scores, even if there's no inherent reason other than chance and history. That's how caste systems work, if the children of the elite get all the opportunities and the untouchables none social mobility is zero. Like setting up a dating app with a huge bias towards relationships within the same caste.
Slashdot Mirror
It does not make any sense that some people spend time and money replacing what is currently working with some incompatible crap. (...) There is no need to point out that I cannot prove it, I know, it just make sense to me.
Many developers fix problems like a guy about to lose a two week vacation because he can't find his passport. Rip open every drawer, empty every shelf, spread it all across the tables and floors until you find it, then rush out the door leaving everything in a mess. It solved HIS problem.
When you want to evict somebody for real, you do it legally to begin with dont fuck around. Dont try to serve the notice yourself or any of that bullshit. Or come up with your own arbitrary timeline. The kid was right initially, they cant evict him by typing some letter saying get out in 2 weeks. Thats not how it works people.
Except he doesn't pay rent, this is "evicting" the guy you let sleep in your spare bedroom for a few days but never leaves. Or your girlfriend kicking you out of her house and you go nope we had an "informal agreement" so I live here now until I'm evicted. Freebies end when the person giving it away wants it to end. When the time was up they should have put his things on the street and changed the lock. I doubt he'd have gotten anywhere in court, no consideration = no contract. No contract = you're a guest. Guests leave when they're asked to leave or they get kicked out.
You are right. And then, a "false report" punishment should be far, far away from live conviction and a million fine.
I disagree. If you caused this shit, it's on your head. Like, say your 911 call caused the police to respond with a high speed approach with lights and sirens. That's above and beyond the normal risk, taken because the police think it's averting or mitigating a bigger risk. Well shit happens, they crash and somebody dies. I don't care if it was a prank call and the police would have arrived, discerned there's no actual risk and backed down. You instigated it, you take the blame because someone died. It doesn't mean you were in a conspiracy with the driver or you planned/wanted it to happen, but it did.
The law isn't quite clear on this because it doesn't explicitly say if it values the actions or the consequences. Like, why is murder and attempted murder two different crimes if the only difference is incompetence. It's certainly possible to argue that if all you wanted to do was make a prank call then that's all you can be charged with. I disagree, if a drunk driver runs over people it doesn't matter that he didn't intend to do that, or rather it lowers it from murder to manslaughter. Anything you do with malice deserves to
Not really. The sunken cost fallacy states that you should ignore past cost paid when making decisions. I.e. it would only apply here if you went to a movie with movie pass you normally would not have gone to EVEN if it was free. The even part is important.
It can be both. If you pay for an all-you-can-eat buffet, you eat as long as there's a marginal benefit to eating. If you go past that and over-eat to improve or justify your decision to order all-you-can-eat then it's the sunken cost fallacy. Humans are quite prone to do that so it's quite possible that some would use their MoviePass to watch movies they didn't really care for or didn't really have time for in order to maximize their "value". Life is short and there's an opportunity cost to everything, even if it's free and harmless. If it was free to watch any time it'd be different, it's the "use it or lose it" opportunity for something that normally costs money that encourages this behavior. Of course there's many opportunities you should take, but don't buy junk only because it's on sale...
We've reached a point in our technological evolution where every single human being on this planet could easily live a life of middle class security, with much left over.
And...? What's understood as "good" living conditions is a moving target. When I grew up, nobody had cell phones except possibly a few yuppies on Wall Street. These days smartphones are the norm. We didn't have a microwave, what's wrong with a stove? Eventually, everything is trivialized - like obviously light comes on at the flip of a switch. Except 200 years ago not even royalty had that. There's always some eco-hippies who want to freeze time like a modern Amish and say "this is enough for everyone, forever". Well they're wrong, I do want a self-driving car. For convenience now, if I can't legally drive anymore like my parents then even stronger. In 100 years time the idea of not having it will probably be as remote as having to go by horse and buggy is to me. I'm not looking to stop progress, are you?
We have two related trends: the growth of a knowledge economy, and the rise of automation. Gee, i wonder what the outcome will be?
A world where having all your basic needs met is much cheaper in absolute terms? I don't know about wages and wealth, but the cost for the 1%ers to carry the rest is going down. And with wealth comes fewer kids, it's no longer an exponentially rising cost we're down to a world population increasing by 1.1%/year and most predict it'll decline further. We've seen this in Asia and South America, it's basically just Africa left and even there the good outweighs the bad. Basically the rich will become richer, but there's little reason to think the poor will become poorer. The western world has been rather stagnant but we were way ahead of the curve, it was kinda ridiculous when you could hire dozens of people in China or India for the price of one westerner.
Can you program a Windows/GTK application without taking those courses? Most likely. (...) Most programmers don't have to deal with any of this stuff
Well we need a lot of those, it's kinda the IT version of handymen where somebody needs a house. And it's not going to be a revolution in carpentry, plumbing or wiring but you take some kind of business need and create software for that, it's a honest living even though you're not pushing the boundaries of CS. Despite many years of trying it'll never be just rule engines and configuration, at least not without turning your business-side into quasi-developers and making the tools so complex and flexible they resemble the code you tried to get away from.
I'm probably going to get shot down over this and get -1 as troll, but IMAO you cannot make a great programmer unless you've taken some college courses specifically related to computer science.
I think it goes a bit the other way, if you have a lot of talent you either develop a hubris that my way is the best way and become a "rock star" developer or you want to stand on the shoulders of giants and learn from the best. It doesn't necessarily mean formal college classes, it could just as easily be picking up the book and working through it on your own. Some of the best simply never got around to finishing college because they got job offers so tempting they dropped out and just ran it with it. That said, many finish the degree because "highest education level" is a HR filter...
The Tesla owners said they paid an extra $5,000 (...) will receive between $20 and $280 in compensation.
So between 0.4% and 5.6% of what they paid, if Tesla gets to keep 95% they're probably happy. The lawyers are happy because they "won" and get paid. But for any of the people in the class this is a joke, either they have a case and should get much more or they have no case and should get nothing. This is just lawyer busywork...
While someone in another country could possibly pull these skills together, #3 becomes a lot harder if you're not fluent in English, but if even if you are and you're not fluent in the "office speak" of that business.
I think this is more a case of "everybody thinks they're special". Almost every sector, every business develops their own lingo. If I say TDD, do you know what I mean? Probably, but only because most of us are developers. If you were in procurement, you'd instantly know what a RFQ was. If you are an MBA (you know that one right?) you'd know what EBIDTA is. And that's just the general terms, in this company XYZ means something in particular. As a total outsider, you'd not understand shit and that's completely normal. But if you explain to them the specific terms, you don't get that much "free" by being a native. Some of course, but an ounce of specific knowledge is often worth a pound of general knowledge. It's more who you talk to, if you pay peanuts you get monkeys...
Not necessarily. A tiny union of the only 3 people in the world who knows how to run your automated factory has more power over you than a union of 10,000 manual laborers who used to do that work by hand. The first is almost impossible to replace, while the second only takes some time.
Except nobody would run a big business that would go under if three people disappeared, because people go on vacation or quit or get hit by a bus. And even if that was the case all they'd have to do is pay one of them real well to "sell out" the magic formula. You try actively switching out union members with non-union members and see how far you'd get before they call a strike and bring your business to a grinding halt. That's their collective threat, you can't replace all of us and all our experience/know-how at once.
I think the power of striking is greatly diminished as we go from providing the actual service to maintaining the systems that provide the service. Right now if taxi drivers go on strike, the taxis stop. If Waymo's developers go on strike, do the self driving cars stop? I'm not so sure. New development stops sure, but that doesn't have nearly the same business impact. They just need a few non-union members to keep a skeleton crew running and the employers could keep it up much longer than the strikers.
I think even geeks want appliances. Most of the things around me are neither open source software nor open source hardware, my microwave works the way it works and as long as it's not outright defective the only reasonable choice I have if I'm unhappy with it is to go down to the store and buy a new one from a different brand. Now I'm sure RMS would say I should be able to make and install my own enhancements and bug fixes and the 3D printing fans would say I should be able to make my own parts, but for me that is sufficient consumer power. Most of the time I feel that way about my phone too, if it does the things it does well I don't care so much about the wall unless of course something I desperately want is on the other side.
Lately I've become more and more concerned though with the level of data collection going on, it's not what the app does for me it's all the spying it does on the side. Apple has made that so hard even the FBI is frustrated. And the main alternative is a phone made by the biggest data miner of them all, tied into a ton of their services. The "third option" has been Windows Phone, Blackberry or some extremely niche phones with near zero support or applications. So I picked my poison and figured Apple was actually the least bad choice. If I want root control and the source code it's called Linux and runs on a laptop/desktop. If it's that sensitive, then I simply wouldn't put it on a phone.
Still waiting on the Uber apologists to show up and tell us how much safer these systems will be and how these accidents will only happen once ever. Like developers never reintroduce errors.
Seems that one death has made Uber pull out of developing SDCs, at least they've handed in the license they had and are laying off the staff so looks fairly permanent. That's probably the best that could happen to SDCs because Uber's business is built on playing it fast and loose with the law. Which is one thing when it's about medallions and whatnot, but when they get people killed it's a big deal. Hopefully the serious players will keep going slow and steady, Waymo has been working for it for 9 years and don't seem to be in any hurry to rush it to market before it's ready. And I think Tesla has discovered through their non-self driving Autopilot that they have a long list of corner cases to cover before launching a genuinely self-driving car, regardless of what they've pre-sold.
As for comparison with human drivers, we have a lot of unfit drivers that caused a death before their license got yanked. I don't think Uber's fatality speaks more for SDCs in general than that half-blind 90yo does for human drivers. Other humans will keep on driving. Other companies will keep on making SDCs. I still think SDCs will win out in the end because their skills accumulate while human experience expires and can't easily be passed on, every year it's someone's first year on the road while experienced drivers retire. The average driver doesn't really change much from year to year even though the individuals gain experience. When they start winning there'll be no comeback any more than humans beating computers at chess again.
The poorly written article makes it sound like Uber's system either didn't have a feature for braking for obstacles or that it was disabled. This is not accurate.
No, you're the one spreading misinformation. To quote the NTSB report directly:
According to Uber emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator.
Basically they had a system that calculated it would crash, but did nothing and warned no one. In other words, the same as having no system at all.
Citations, please?
No idea what the grandparent is talking about, possibly the general principle that you can act on reasonable belief. Like if you point a replica gun at me, I can shoot you in self-defense even though you were actually incapable of shooting me. The real facts don't matter, just my perception of a threat. Cops in the US certainly have a lot of leeway to say they thought you posed a threat, so the use of lethal force was justified. In fact, if you're on a SWAT team it's damn near immunity because you're not calling in the SWAT team unless there is a reasonable belief that someone is in grave danger.
I can understand that the courts want to err on the side of the police, that you don't want cops on the street worrying whether this guy is threatening enough or is somebody far away in their comfy office chair going to decide in hindsight that this is actually murder. On the other hand, if you can't curb the aggression the cops are likely to go more and more in the "shoot first, ask questions later" direction because it's safe and easy for them. But I suppose criticizing anything in how the cops are equipped and trained or the specifics of this police action would probably look like an admission of guilt, so let's pick the easy option to pin it all on the swatters. Same procedure next swatting...
It's a joke from Soviet Russia, though probably an obscure reference in 2018. They had two main newspapers, Pravda which means "Truth" and Izvestia which means "News". Pravda was the official voice of the communist party and Izvestia was the official voice of the soviet government. In English the joke would be "There is no truth in News, and there is no news in Truth." The current day newspapers are fairly unrelated.
This isn't your facebook feed, you can't just post that kind of stuff without some sort of proof to back up that claim.
I can't quite remember where I read it, but the car model has collision detection in the default configuration and would normally have performed an emergency brake when collision was imminent. All the "smart" features were disabled to run Uber's SDC software, though from what I understand this is standard practice so you don't have competing/conflicting automated systems. Nobody made a big deal of that part, it's just part of the explanation of how it could plow down that pedestrian without reacting at all - they disabled a primitive system that worked and replaced it with a sophisticated system that didn't and actually performed worse than out of the box.
The question is not how frequently they release a new model, it's how long until the old models are retired. Pretty much every year cars come with new tweaks and why not? It's not like I have to run out and buy a new car, the improvements just accumulate and every year it's somebody's turn to retire their old car and get a new one. Would there be anything gained by waiting years between upgrades? Smaller upgrades means exactly what version you get matters less, it's big generation gaps that make you care and consider waiting for the next one rather than simply getting the latest at any given time. And it's usually not that which kills support, it's having a thousand configuration choices not a yearly revision...
But we shouldn't have humans fighting robots in a real-world war. Of course that's precisely what'll end up happening, won't it?
Far more civilians than military die in modern war and we've lived 70+ years with the threat of entire cities being nuked into oblivion. If you're spending billions on a Terminator it's to kill with extreme precision, carnage is much cheaper.
Or they'll expect us to send all our weakest troops against them first and gradually send more and more powerful troops until finally- as they get close to victory against us we'll send Theresa May against them for a final boss fight. Only May will grow 50ft tall and regenerate some health between each missile that strikes her and she'll have flame throwers coming out of her arms.
Hey, the brexiters won. Don't knock it if it works.
On the contrary, an ongoing territorial dispute may be the best way to lock Ukraine in a stalemale, the way Cyprus had the EU stalled and like China and Taiwan are today. Russia has been losing allies since the 90s, back then the dividing line ran through Germany now they've lost pretty much all of Eastern Europe from the Baltics in the north to the Slavic countries in the south and the western sphere of influence has been crawling eastwards into ex-Soviet territory. Maybe the country was divided when the unrest started but I think in a few years Russia would be holding the short end of that stick anyway.
A full membership in EU/NATO would put them right at Putin's doorstep. Not just the proximity to Moscow, Ukraine is big both in terms of territory and manpower while Crimea is absolutely essential to Russia's navy. Maybe this will push the people in a pro-western direction but formally this makes Ukraine a hot potato because either you acknowledge their full territory which would make you a party to the conflict or you de facto recognize that Russia has taken it and isn't going to give it back, both of which are politically untenable. Even if it's not a hot conflict it can potentially stall things for decades and if anyone gets too cozy I'm sure the unrest will flare up for reasons "unknown".
I think Putin got all he could reasonably hope for, maybe he was hoping for a massive overreaction so he could send Russian tanks all the way to Kiev to protect the Russian minority but I doubt it as it would have been really messy. The Ukrainian response was also clearly limited to avoid provoking an all-out war with Russia, they certainly could have struck back harder. As for Putin, how many allies does he have left to lose? There's Belarus that he got in his pocket, he's supporting a few whack jobs down in the Middle East but as a military and economic bloc he's pretty lonely unless he gets friendly with China. I think he just wants it to stop before Russia has their own Euromaidan...
Nope. The day people figure out they can use Facebook all the way to MacDonalds and back will be a good day to look for a second hand car.
Well that, but I also think you'll have a rapidly accumulating statistic. Like if you can get 1000 daredevils to buy version 1.0 you'll have no problem convincing 10000 tech-fans to buy 1.1. And once they have it, they'll convince 100000 tech-curious to buy 1.2. So people are worried now... well they won't be as the owner of the 746252th self driving car in America. Like, by the time you care what the "mass market" thinks they'll have a completely different statistical basis. And this isn't even like "do cell phones cause cancer" scary, if you can walk away from your self driving car trip it went well so you don't need long term studies just bulk volume. Basically if you deliver it, they will come. And they will come in droves.
Everything nominal, from employee sighs the fairing recovery attempt failed but they didn't show any of that so basically no progress just your bog standard satellite launch. I guess that's better for SpaceX than the alternative but the entertainment value was quite low.
This has been the argument against open source for over 25 years â" and it has been debunked for about that long... Are we really reading this again in 2018? Why is this FUD even on Slashdot's front page?
It's been debunked in open source software, but there are many ancient and abandoned versions of open source libraries in closed source software, either because nobody takes responsibility or they're relying on some deprecated API or custom modifications. Which is a pretty big risk when an exploit is found in the current code base, that library will get rebuilt and pushed out to Linux distributions but not your average random COTS software. But they seem to be pushing for Win10-style force fed updates, whether you like it or not. I suppose it's necessary for idiots who refuse to patch and become part of the latest botnet, but keep that far away from me...
I think you're falling into a nerd trap by pretending we don't have black and white even though we haven't exactly narrowed down the shade of gray that marks the border, like when does a fan become a stalker or perseverance become harassment or a bad deal become a fraud. We're never going to exactly define how high you can go on a rooftop and how big a telephoto lens you can use before it's an invasion of privacy. I think we need restrictions on collection, storage and sharing of data and metadata, I don't think the human mind is the right template but the question is what is necessary to deliver the service and should you be allowed to opt out of the rest.
For example if I go to buy groceries then what they need is payment for goods, obviously they should be able to register that in their inventory/financial systems but the rest is not essential. And some of it is necessary for billing but not permanent storage. When it comes to sharing I think commercial transactions by default should have a consumer-vendor confidentiality. It's probably stricter than humans since they gossip, but I don't think my hair dresser and clothing store should be able to pool their information, even if it's necessary for each separate business. Obviously the information has value so they should be able to give discounts but not force you to share with "business partners" through boilerplate agreements.
Of course being highly unionized is how a lot of this became law in the first place, if they've first given in to the union's demands it's better for them to lobby it into law so the non-union shops are stuck with it too.
It doesn't matter whether you do it by hand or by computer. For example, black people are statistically far more likely to be poor than everyone else, and as a consequence they have terrible credit scores. This is a fact, and no matter who does the calculations, as long as they are based on observable facts, they will be less likely to give black people a loan. Reality is racist. Statistics is based on reality. If you don't like the outcome, change the reality and the statistics will take those changes into account.
You're missing out on the part where the output of the algorithms become the input to the algorithms. Then you get feedback loops that shape reality, not simply interpret it. For example very few black people are employed as X -> don't show them ads for jobs as X -> even fewer are employed as X. It's not difficult to create algorithms that cement or enlarge the social differences so that black people get low scores because they are poor and they are poor because they get low scores, even if there's no inherent reason other than chance and history. That's how caste systems work, if the children of the elite get all the opportunities and the untouchables none social mobility is zero. Like setting up a dating app with a huge bias towards relationships within the same caste.