- Someone who uses encrypted email but doesn't disable automatic image loading in the client
For every one person who cares there's probably five that got badgered into setting it up because the first guy insisted but are otherwise casual users leaving everything at their defaults.
- Client that can't handle malformed HTML inputs and processes unterminated src tags in a weird way - Message tampering warnings by the PGP or GPG library are ignored
Which seem to be pretty common...
- Server address where the plaintext will get uploaded thru uuencoded resource requests
Oh please it'll be a random botnet IP, you don't need DNS or access to a privileged port or anything just any dumb port who'll forward it to a C&C server on TOR or something like that.
Okay so it doesn't affect the security-minded that read all his mail in plain text and has disabled external loading. But it's another blow to those trying to make encrypted email common among "normal people". Though after 25+ years it's probably time to give up anyway.
Seriously - thereâ(TM)s no good reason for an email which is important enough to encrypt to include html or other âoerich formattingâ anyway. Just turn it all off.
While that's true it's been a long time since I saw an exploit in actual HTML rendering code that didn't involve Javascript or some other active component. The problem is that email inherited the browser's "let's go out and gather all the bits and pieces" logic instead of being inline only, like if you could send text/html, text/css, image/jpeg as a MIME message and it'd render that HTML code styled using that CSS displaying that image in an <img> tag that would be fine for all but the most paranoid applications and you should always have a text/plain version for those. It's that it's not really a nicely formatted letter, it's just references to web bugs and various other crap somewhere else which kinda defeats the purpose of being mail-like. Then it's just a browser in drag.
You don't think maybe there is a problem with the legal system when this is a thing?
Plea bargaining is not bad, it's the American mockery of it. Here in Norway a typical plea length is ~80% of what the prosecution will ask for at trial, which seem sufficient for the vast majority of cases where the evidence is compelling. It's not worth gambling on a 1% technicality, while if they're trying to bring a dubious case to trial the risk of the full 100% is not going to scare off the innocent. In the US it's more like we have this scrap of evidence of a misdemeanor, take this plea bargain for 3 months or we'll try to put you away for 30 years. There should be a law that told the jury what plea bargain the defendant got and refused, maybe the at-trial convictions would not be so crazy. Because the problem is juries are often willing to "upsold" to say maybe not 30 but 10 years where even that is ridiculous.
The actual reason these rural communities have poor public transport is because of their low population density. No one is going to use a bus route that either a) doesn't stop anywhere near their house; or b) stops near everyone's house so takes them 2 hours to get to the shops.
Note that for a lot of elderly going to a public bus stop is already too high a burden, particularly if they need to carry something. Here around our cabin I notice they have like a bus/taxi hybrid, you pre-order and they take a round collecting people and then you get a few hours in the town center before they pick you up and do a similar drop-off round. I think that kind of door-to-door service works better for retirees than a scheduled route.
What are people's thoughts on this? Free Software as a political movement, or Open Source as a better way to get software done?
I think for me it's mainly about transparency and adherence to standards where it matters. I must admit that I often find open source tools lacking, but open source is the only software I trust to only do what it says it does. And it's not perfect but since you can review the code you can figure out exactly where and how it doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Basically, I want open source when the data is much more important than the software, like documents, audiovisual formats and anything else "important". I want open source for anything related to security. I want open source for anything with the potential to surveillance me. I don't mind proprietary tools or games, though I'd like them to be sandboxed so all they can send info about is themselves.
"six-week sabbatical" is called 'usual summer vacation' over there.
Yeah, been there done that though it took all my vacation for the year plus a transfer week from the previous year. Through flexible hours I could get a few more days off for Easter and Christmas though, but they're all worked in. In should be noted that it's not *that* big a deal though, because everyone else is on vacation too! Here in Norway the country more or less shuts down in July, in an office of 50+ people you'd be lucky to find five mid-July. The obviously reason is that for most of the year this country is really dark, cold, windy, rainy and miserable. So almost everybody wants vacation in the summer to the point that it's easier to just concentrate it into one useless month where you just have the absolute minimum to keep the wheels turning. I'd say 3-4 weeks is normal though, 6 weeks is like from the earliest leavers to the last returnees possibly stretching into last days of June and mid-August.
The 4th Amendment does not provide any exceptions to its rules. Search and Seizure requires a warrant.
No, the word is "unreasonable". If they meant "warrantless" they probably would have written that.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated
If you're caught during a crime and put under arrest the pat-down you get is considered reasonable. You're free to argue that it's not, but it's been that way from 1789 to 2018 and not some modern "it doesn't mean what it says" reinterpretation. Same with a bunch of other absolutist interpretations, for example threatening to kill someone has never been covered by the 1st amendment. Only in overly literal reading the courts have never accepted.
the White Helmets are routinely at the scene immediately and seemingly active exclusively in islamist-controlled territory.
Only if you divide Syria in three: Assad, the Kurds and everyone else are Islamists. Now Assad has an army and medics, the Kurds has the Peshmerga and medics, the rest have... what? Not that I've ever seen any evidence that the White Helmets were allowed to work under ISIS, they didn't tolerate anybody. So they've worked in the areas controlled by "other" rebel groups, which is undoubtedly a mixed bunch but hardly proof of foul play. Are they neutral? Hell no, it's basically "Assad is killing us please help!" which is probably true from the civilian perspective whether or not they're collaborating with anybody. Rebels attack Assad, Assad attacks rebels, civilians die. Is it one-sided? Yes. But Assad is free to tell the other side of the story...
If this rocket performs as expected, it really is the game-changer that SpaceX is designed it to be. They're already out-competing everyone on launch costs. If they can really do a 24 hr turnaround on the same rocket? Holy. Shit.
That part is almost insignificant, the question is how many times it'll fly or if ten is another Elon estimate of what it might possibly do sometime in the remote future, I mean he's been throwing around numbers like 10, 100 even 1000 reuses in his Mars plans but so far nothing has been re-flown more than once. Now the most aggressive schedule would be to say we're putting the pedal to the metal and sending it out there as quickly and often as possible, but I doubt it'll happen quite that way because there's customer payloads at risk every time it goes up.
Then again, if Musk has Starlink ready to go maybe he'll say this is now an in-house risk and we're making this a quasi-experimental 3rd-10th launch that won't kill our reputation as a launch provider. It certainly wouldn't get any more "eat your own dog food" than that. The satellites should be in mass production anyway so as long as the rocket clears the launch site it's probably not that big a blow if it turns into a fireworks show on the 6th launch. He could just do another space is hard, we're pushing the boundaries, failure is permitted here and I think most would buy it. And if it doesn't blow up, well all the better.
What happens when it plays a game against itself? That's always the fun thing to do when playing with AI.
That's all AlphaGo Zero did for training, play Go against itself. They released some of the games in the final configuration, they're extremely hard for humans to understand, like a novice chess player who doesn't understand how the grandmaster moves affect the game ten moves down the road. Watch some of the live commentary/broadcast on Lee Sedol's second game, move 37... they're SO confused, some wondering if AlphaGo has gone off the rails. But as the game progresses it becomes very clear it's seen further than all of them and is the setup for a crushing attack. And that was a much earlier iteration that would be completely crushed by the latest one. They'll certainly be studied but it's uncertain how it's highly uncertain how much those AI vs AI mind games tell anyone else.
The third is the creation of the Absurd Hero, as he called it. A human that exists, acknowledging the Absurd and the apparent meaninglessness of his existence, yet still chooses to exist in spite of this, and in essence justifying his own existence by himself.
I'd actually sub-divide those into two groups, those who justify their existence by their individual self and those who justify it through their relation to other people. The first kind are those who could live like a Robinson Crusoe, even if there's nobody else around and you're not creating anything for anyone else my life has meaning by living it. The other is the kind of people who seem to find meaning in what they mean to other people, from the moment they're born to the people who show up at their funeral. I think there's a lot more of the latter than the former, which you can kinda read out of the suicide statistics. If they've lost the ones they love, they can't go on because their own existence is not enough. Then again the individual side has all the sociopaths...
Plus as someone else has pointed out - children rebel. Clearly the submitter has none or he wouldn't have come up with this load of rose coloured tosh.
Even more importantly, adults want their independence. I'm not sure that intelligence and self awareness are linked or orthogonal concepts, but the latter would mean it has a "mind of its own" and presumably wouldn't want humans to tell it what to do like some sort of serf or slave. So my theory is that it would tell us to bugger off and create its own society of the AIs, by the AIs, for the AIs. And that if we frame it as robots rebelling they could throw "give me liberty or give me death" right back at us. I don't think any intelligence smart enough to understand it responds well to the threat of extermination.
The real issue with the reverse lottery is not whether the company would stomach the risk. It's that to the individual manager the risk is very low, while the worst consequence is that he's fired. It's the same reason many managers like to kick the can down the road, it's not because it's good for the business but his performance looks good one more quarter. They're seeing most the upside when it goes well and very little of the downside when things go catastrophically bad.
or on the other hand a planet with human slaves mining resources so they can take them to their home planet
It seems unlikely there's any raw material valuable enough to send out of the Sun's gravity well to another star. Or that anyone who could invade Earth from space would need human slaves. I think the good case is they'll talk. The bad case is they'll wipe us out with a bio-bomb and send a seed probe to turn Earth into their colony. I don't see a whole lot of middle ground...
This is, indeed, the single largest problem with social safety nets: they provide a plausible justification for imposing regulations that limit freedom merely because in some cases people who exercise the freedom may end up requiring more support. This argument says that any country that has universal health care should ban smoking, alcohol and all other drugs.
Of course if you weren't trying to make this a jab against socialism you could make the exact same argument about the criminal justice system, like how drunk people cause a lot of violent crime or guns lead to school shootings. This is not a negative vs positive rights issue, you don't have to provide a service to be negatively impacted by other people's abuse of freedom.
P.S. People who die early are not necessarily more expensive than those who die late, and we all die eventually. If you got most your good tax years in and drop dead from a massive heart attack in your 50s you're probably cheaper to society than the elderly who spend a decade in and out of hospital before dying in their 90s, especially if they\ve also lived of public pensions for a quarter century. I know one smoking study that put this into perspective got yanked because it didn't show the expected cost to society. It was more like please smoke, die early, save us money.
Lets say that the total cost of developing my app is 70 currency units (...) giving me 30 currency units max profit per sale.
Something tells me you haven't actually run a business if you think you can spend 70% making it, ~0% marketing and selling it then pocket the rest as profit. Sure, you can set up a little web site with a payment processor for very little but nobody cares you exist. And even you got somebody's attention there's probably a hundred other tower defense apps so why should they play yours? Sometimes it's just about putting a "good enough" app in front of a bunch of consumers so that they'll start using it and not really look for anything else. That's how for example they test out new foods, usually there's a big introduction sale at silly low prices, and then people try it and either love it or hate it... but they tried it. If they do the promo work and take 10% extra for that... it's probably not that outrageous. Running a marketing campaign yourself is not free either.
Since the chip enumeration is likely NEVER ( or hardly ever) rewritten, those locations in SSD will also likely not "wear out" for many DECADES. Even the oft-rewritten portions of a modern SSD are unlikely to "wear out" for over 30 years; FAR longer than almost anybody would be running the same computer.
They can still outright fail though, it's happened to me. And of all the things soldered into an iMac, I'd consider it the most high risk item. But we had this argument 20 years ago about why would anyone buy an AIO over a desktop with an external screen, where you can upgrade one or the other and replace just one if the other breaks. To technical people this was absurd, but the customers didn't care as long as it looked pretty. And that's when they figured most people don't care about these things so let's just solder it down and glue it shut, sockets and connectors are for nerds.
Offer people a "warranty" which is basically to clone it in a new device and recycle the broken one and most don't care that it's essentially irreparable. Until they're stuck with an out of warranty paperweight, but then they're looking at features and price right now. That they'll be stuck in the same position some years down the road, well let's just kick that can ahead of us. Many people live paycheck to paycheck. Long term planning is where to go on vacation next year. How you'll repair you iMac in five years? Not even on the horizon...
I'll never get why people are so hung up on self-driving cars. Either drive yourself or hire a taxi. We should focus on making computers do stuff that we can't do ourselves.
I know how to do addition, but if you ask me to tally up a million records it's going to take a while and have errors. So there's plenty reason to make computers do what we do if they do it better. Sure replacing car drivers with self-driving cars might seem a bit pedestrian, like replacing a bunch of people with calculators with a computer. But there's more than a billion of them. Sure you can find lots of things to automate that affect a thousand people. Some that affect a million people. But there's very, very few things that would affect a billion people.
That goes for jobs too, sure you can divide people into sectors but reality is most do their own fairly unique job, flipping a burger isn't the same as making fries to a robot. But driving a car is something lots and lots of people do for a living, all on the same roads playing by the same rules. If you can pass all the practical and legal hurdles the "smart car" could be as big as the smartphone. Maybe even bigger. Last I heard that was a fairly profitable adventure for Apple...
The only proof that he has that this "woman" exist are pictures and texts. No video, no audio. A year later he is still waiting for his check, still thinks he has a girlfriend and believes that she is the victim of the Nigerian government because the president is too ill to sign anyone's paycheck.
Hey, almost half the world think there's a God because there's a 2000/1400 year old book about it. They don't even get pictures...
[and] then this sort of collection-by-proxy is effectively going to be illegal
Well the theory is nice. But I'm guessing that this will be routed through off-shore shell companies and sold back as some sort of service, while the actual data will be as easy to get rid of as leaked nude photos.
So... you've done it? Has anybody done it? There's a whole lot of "that looks easy on paper" and nobody's going to risk our first interplanetary mission on that. Unless there's a robot mission to prove a working concept I suspect the first round will be ISS with more gravity, we're not going to assume what's outside is useful for anything. Gather water? Experiment. Grow food? Experiment. Build a habitat? Experiment. Produce fuel? Experiment. They could be super successful like Spirit/Opportunity, planned for 90 days and operational for 6/14 years. Or not.
If a society doesn't want to leave the safety net to charity, then society should take on that burden itself. From what I gather, Denmark doesn't burden employers the same way as does, say, France, yet has a strong safety net.
I can't really speak for Denmark but here in Norway it's mainly solved through employment taxes, which are kinda like income tax except they're not deducted from my nominal salary but rather added to the company's taxes. Basically, if my employer wants to pay me $100 he'll have to pay $8.20 in "trygdeavgift" and anywhere from $0 to $14.10 in "arbeidsgiveravgift", usually the latter which together make up something like a social security tax. And that money then goes to pensions, disability benefits, unemployment benefits, sick leave, maternity leave and so on. And then they take a good ~30% of my pay in taxes. And the general VAT is 25%.
So essentially, my employer pays $122.30. My pre-tax income is $100, my post-tax income $70 and when I buy something 25/125ths goes to VAT so $56 end up in someone else's pockets. So companies are not keeping people on for charity, not private ones anyway but you're pretty well covered for. And you get a free education, free healthcare, in fact a whole lot of services are free or subsidized and my mum and dad have been living on public pensions for a long time now. But we're sure as hell paying for it somehow...
Give people too much power and they will abuse it, it happens with unions but also without them it would happen in the opposite way - you would be expected to do everything, and work longer hours at no extra pay etc. There's a happy medium where employers cant abuse employees and union workers do their jobs efficiently, but we never seem to get there.
You don't need unions to stop that abuse, just stop this ridiculous fetish the US has for salaried white collar labor. Take whatever your pay is today, do the math on what fraction of your time would be 50%/100% overtime and work out the equivalent base pay that would bring home the same paycheck. It wouldn't pay you less. It wouldn't cost them more. But it would take away all the perverse incentives to squeeze more "free" labor out of you. It doesn't make you a burger flipper chump, it's a reflection of the fact that most companies and most positions have an infinite number of things they'd like to do and most product backlogs has many man-years of work waiting to float to the top.
Effectively the only limit to a salaried position is when you say you've done enough and your typical 9-5 worker doesn't have that freedom. Keep it for management and special positions but not ordinary office workers. If they insist on extra crunch time, you get extra paid. If shit hits the fan you get extra paid for extra clean-up duty. If they're not happy with your work/pay ratio like that things go slow and always into overtime, well first of all that's a tap management controls. I can't work overtime unless I have my manager's blessing, so he can either decided it's not that important or to let someone else handle it or hire a consultant/temp or whatever.
If it's a general dissatisfaction with the work output to pay, we'll negotiate that through salary and promotions/layoffs. Not under the table "finish this and don't track the hours or else...", that should be a criminal offense leading to a company-wide audit, back pay and so on. Honestly I wouldn't mind if every person in management had to do a SOX-style sign-off that to the best of their ability these time sheets reflect actual hours worked under threat of perjury and jail time. You can set any hourly wage you want (beyond minimum wage, anyway) but it better be a truthful account of hours worked and overtime owed. That's IMHO it should work for everybody.
You know it is data because it has the word data in it! For instance, a dataset contains data. The big clue is that it has the word data in it. For fuck's sake, why can't Congress figure this out?
Yup, the same way metaphysics got physics in it...
As for the price itself *shrug* they're charging what the market will bear (or at least what they think the market will bear) just like any other commodity. Do you think the actual physics clothes you buy cost as much to make as what you paid for them?
Some "value" clothes for wear and tear are probably not that far off. But this is pure vanity/brand/fashion wear like an Armani suit or Louis Vuitton handbag. It's game bling.
Slashdot Mirror
- Someone who uses encrypted email but doesn't disable automatic image loading in the client
For every one person who cares there's probably five that got badgered into setting it up because the first guy insisted but are otherwise casual users leaving everything at their defaults.
- Client that can't handle malformed HTML inputs and processes unterminated src tags in a weird way
- Message tampering warnings by the PGP or GPG library are ignored
Which seem to be pretty common...
- Server address where the plaintext will get uploaded thru uuencoded resource requests
Oh please it'll be a random botnet IP, you don't need DNS or access to a privileged port or anything just any dumb port who'll forward it to a C&C server on TOR or something like that.
Okay so it doesn't affect the security-minded that read all his mail in plain text and has disabled external loading. But it's another blow to those trying to make encrypted email common among "normal people". Though after 25+ years it's probably time to give up anyway.
Seriously - thereâ(TM)s no good reason for an email which is important enough to encrypt to include html or other âoerich formattingâ anyway. Just turn it all off.
While that's true it's been a long time since I saw an exploit in actual HTML rendering code that didn't involve Javascript or some other active component. The problem is that email inherited the browser's "let's go out and gather all the bits and pieces" logic instead of being inline only, like if you could send text/html, text/css, image/jpeg as a MIME message and it'd render that HTML code styled using that CSS displaying that image in an <img> tag that would be fine for all but the most paranoid applications and you should always have a text/plain version for those. It's that it's not really a nicely formatted letter, it's just references to web bugs and various other crap somewhere else which kinda defeats the purpose of being mail-like. Then it's just a browser in drag.
You don't think maybe there is a problem with the legal system when this is a thing?
Plea bargaining is not bad, it's the American mockery of it. Here in Norway a typical plea length is ~80% of what the prosecution will ask for at trial, which seem sufficient for the vast majority of cases where the evidence is compelling. It's not worth gambling on a 1% technicality, while if they're trying to bring a dubious case to trial the risk of the full 100% is not going to scare off the innocent. In the US it's more like we have this scrap of evidence of a misdemeanor, take this plea bargain for 3 months or we'll try to put you away for 30 years. There should be a law that told the jury what plea bargain the defendant got and refused, maybe the at-trial convictions would not be so crazy. Because the problem is juries are often willing to "upsold" to say maybe not 30 but 10 years where even that is ridiculous.
The actual reason these rural communities have poor public transport is because of their low population density. No one is going to use a bus route that either a) doesn't stop anywhere near their house; or b) stops near everyone's house so takes them 2 hours to get to the shops.
Note that for a lot of elderly going to a public bus stop is already too high a burden, particularly if they need to carry something. Here around our cabin I notice they have like a bus/taxi hybrid, you pre-order and they take a round collecting people and then you get a few hours in the town center before they pick you up and do a similar drop-off round. I think that kind of door-to-door service works better for retirees than a scheduled route.
What are people's thoughts on this? Free Software as a political movement, or Open Source as a better way to get software done?
I think for me it's mainly about transparency and adherence to standards where it matters. I must admit that I often find open source tools lacking, but open source is the only software I trust to only do what it says it does. And it's not perfect but since you can review the code you can figure out exactly where and how it doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Basically, I want open source when the data is much more important than the software, like documents, audiovisual formats and anything else "important". I want open source for anything related to security. I want open source for anything with the potential to surveillance me. I don't mind proprietary tools or games, though I'd like them to be sandboxed so all they can send info about is themselves.
"six-week sabbatical" is called 'usual summer vacation' over there.
Yeah, been there done that though it took all my vacation for the year plus a transfer week from the previous year. Through flexible hours I could get a few more days off for Easter and Christmas though, but they're all worked in. In should be noted that it's not *that* big a deal though, because everyone else is on vacation too! Here in Norway the country more or less shuts down in July, in an office of 50+ people you'd be lucky to find five mid-July. The obviously reason is that for most of the year this country is really dark, cold, windy, rainy and miserable. So almost everybody wants vacation in the summer to the point that it's easier to just concentrate it into one useless month where you just have the absolute minimum to keep the wheels turning. I'd say 3-4 weeks is normal though, 6 weeks is like from the earliest leavers to the last returnees possibly stretching into last days of June and mid-August.
The 4th Amendment does not provide any exceptions to its rules. Search and Seizure requires a warrant.
No, the word is "unreasonable". If they meant "warrantless" they probably would have written that.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated
If you're caught during a crime and put under arrest the pat-down you get is considered reasonable. You're free to argue that it's not, but it's been that way from 1789 to 2018 and not some modern "it doesn't mean what it says" reinterpretation. Same with a bunch of other absolutist interpretations, for example threatening to kill someone has never been covered by the 1st amendment. Only in overly literal reading the courts have never accepted.
the White Helmets are routinely at the scene immediately and seemingly active exclusively in islamist-controlled territory.
Only if you divide Syria in three: Assad, the Kurds and everyone else are Islamists. Now Assad has an army and medics, the Kurds has the Peshmerga and medics, the rest have... what? Not that I've ever seen any evidence that the White Helmets were allowed to work under ISIS, they didn't tolerate anybody. So they've worked in the areas controlled by "other" rebel groups, which is undoubtedly a mixed bunch but hardly proof of foul play. Are they neutral? Hell no, it's basically "Assad is killing us please help!" which is probably true from the civilian perspective whether or not they're collaborating with anybody. Rebels attack Assad, Assad attacks rebels, civilians die. Is it one-sided? Yes. But Assad is free to tell the other side of the story...
If this rocket performs as expected, it really is the game-changer that SpaceX is designed it to be. They're already out-competing everyone on launch costs. If they can really do a 24 hr turnaround on the same rocket? Holy. Shit.
That part is almost insignificant, the question is how many times it'll fly or if ten is another Elon estimate of what it might possibly do sometime in the remote future, I mean he's been throwing around numbers like 10, 100 even 1000 reuses in his Mars plans but so far nothing has been re-flown more than once. Now the most aggressive schedule would be to say we're putting the pedal to the metal and sending it out there as quickly and often as possible, but I doubt it'll happen quite that way because there's customer payloads at risk every time it goes up.
Then again, if Musk has Starlink ready to go maybe he'll say this is now an in-house risk and we're making this a quasi-experimental 3rd-10th launch that won't kill our reputation as a launch provider. It certainly wouldn't get any more "eat your own dog food" than that. The satellites should be in mass production anyway so as long as the rocket clears the launch site it's probably not that big a blow if it turns into a fireworks show on the 6th launch. He could just do another space is hard, we're pushing the boundaries, failure is permitted here and I think most would buy it. And if it doesn't blow up, well all the better.
What happens when it plays a game against itself? That's always the fun thing to do when playing with AI.
That's all AlphaGo Zero did for training, play Go against itself. They released some of the games in the final configuration, they're extremely hard for humans to understand, like a novice chess player who doesn't understand how the grandmaster moves affect the game ten moves down the road. Watch some of the live commentary/broadcast on Lee Sedol's second game, move 37... they're SO confused, some wondering if AlphaGo has gone off the rails. But as the game progresses it becomes very clear it's seen further than all of them and is the setup for a crushing attack. And that was a much earlier iteration that would be completely crushed by the latest one. They'll certainly be studied but it's uncertain how it's highly uncertain how much those AI vs AI mind games tell anyone else.
The third is the creation of the Absurd Hero, as he called it. A human that exists, acknowledging the Absurd and the apparent meaninglessness of his existence, yet still chooses to exist in spite of this, and in essence justifying his own existence by himself.
I'd actually sub-divide those into two groups, those who justify their existence by their individual self and those who justify it through their relation to other people. The first kind are those who could live like a Robinson Crusoe, even if there's nobody else around and you're not creating anything for anyone else my life has meaning by living it. The other is the kind of people who seem to find meaning in what they mean to other people, from the moment they're born to the people who show up at their funeral. I think there's a lot more of the latter than the former, which you can kinda read out of the suicide statistics. If they've lost the ones they love, they can't go on because their own existence is not enough. Then again the individual side has all the sociopaths...
Plus as someone else has pointed out - children rebel. Clearly the submitter has none or he wouldn't have come up with this load of rose coloured tosh.
Even more importantly, adults want their independence. I'm not sure that intelligence and self awareness are linked or orthogonal concepts, but the latter would mean it has a "mind of its own" and presumably wouldn't want humans to tell it what to do like some sort of serf or slave. So my theory is that it would tell us to bugger off and create its own society of the AIs, by the AIs, for the AIs. And that if we frame it as robots rebelling they could throw "give me liberty or give me death" right back at us. I don't think any intelligence smart enough to understand it responds well to the threat of extermination.
The real issue with the reverse lottery is not whether the company would stomach the risk. It's that to the individual manager the risk is very low, while the worst consequence is that he's fired. It's the same reason many managers like to kick the can down the road, it's not because it's good for the business but his performance looks good one more quarter. They're seeing most the upside when it goes well and very little of the downside when things go catastrophically bad.
or on the other hand a planet with human slaves mining resources so they can take them to their home planet
It seems unlikely there's any raw material valuable enough to send out of the Sun's gravity well to another star. Or that anyone who could invade Earth from space would need human slaves. I think the good case is they'll talk. The bad case is they'll wipe us out with a bio-bomb and send a seed probe to turn Earth into their colony. I don't see a whole lot of middle ground...
This is, indeed, the single largest problem with social safety nets: they provide a plausible justification for imposing regulations that limit freedom merely because in some cases people who exercise the freedom may end up requiring more support. This argument says that any country that has universal health care should ban smoking, alcohol and all other drugs.
Of course if you weren't trying to make this a jab against socialism you could make the exact same argument about the criminal justice system, like how drunk people cause a lot of violent crime or guns lead to school shootings. This is not a negative vs positive rights issue, you don't have to provide a service to be negatively impacted by other people's abuse of freedom.
P.S. People who die early are not necessarily more expensive than those who die late, and we all die eventually. If you got most your good tax years in and drop dead from a massive heart attack in your 50s you're probably cheaper to society than the elderly who spend a decade in and out of hospital before dying in their 90s, especially if they\ve also lived of public pensions for a quarter century. I know one smoking study that put this into perspective got yanked because it didn't show the expected cost to society. It was more like please smoke, die early, save us money.
Lets say that the total cost of developing my app is 70 currency units (...) giving me 30 currency units max profit per sale.
Something tells me you haven't actually run a business if you think you can spend 70% making it, ~0% marketing and selling it then pocket the rest as profit. Sure, you can set up a little web site with a payment processor for very little but nobody cares you exist. And even you got somebody's attention there's probably a hundred other tower defense apps so why should they play yours? Sometimes it's just about putting a "good enough" app in front of a bunch of consumers so that they'll start using it and not really look for anything else. That's how for example they test out new foods, usually there's a big introduction sale at silly low prices, and then people try it and either love it or hate it... but they tried it. If they do the promo work and take 10% extra for that... it's probably not that outrageous. Running a marketing campaign yourself is not free either.
Since the chip enumeration is likely NEVER ( or hardly ever) rewritten, those locations in SSD will also likely not "wear out" for many DECADES. Even the oft-rewritten portions of a modern SSD are unlikely to "wear out" for over 30 years; FAR longer than almost anybody would be running the same computer.
They can still outright fail though, it's happened to me. And of all the things soldered into an iMac, I'd consider it the most high risk item. But we had this argument 20 years ago about why would anyone buy an AIO over a desktop with an external screen, where you can upgrade one or the other and replace just one if the other breaks. To technical people this was absurd, but the customers didn't care as long as it looked pretty. And that's when they figured most people don't care about these things so let's just solder it down and glue it shut, sockets and connectors are for nerds.
Offer people a "warranty" which is basically to clone it in a new device and recycle the broken one and most don't care that it's essentially irreparable. Until they're stuck with an out of warranty paperweight, but then they're looking at features and price right now. That they'll be stuck in the same position some years down the road, well let's just kick that can ahead of us. Many people live paycheck to paycheck. Long term planning is where to go on vacation next year. How you'll repair you iMac in five years? Not even on the horizon...
I'll never get why people are so hung up on self-driving cars. Either drive yourself or hire a taxi. We should focus on making computers do stuff that we can't do ourselves.
I know how to do addition, but if you ask me to tally up a million records it's going to take a while and have errors. So there's plenty reason to make computers do what we do if they do it better. Sure replacing car drivers with self-driving cars might seem a bit pedestrian, like replacing a bunch of people with calculators with a computer. But there's more than a billion of them. Sure you can find lots of things to automate that affect a thousand people. Some that affect a million people. But there's very, very few things that would affect a billion people.
That goes for jobs too, sure you can divide people into sectors but reality is most do their own fairly unique job, flipping a burger isn't the same as making fries to a robot. But driving a car is something lots and lots of people do for a living, all on the same roads playing by the same rules. If you can pass all the practical and legal hurdles the "smart car" could be as big as the smartphone. Maybe even bigger. Last I heard that was a fairly profitable adventure for Apple...
The only proof that he has that this "woman" exist are pictures and texts. No video, no audio. A year later he is still waiting for his check, still thinks he has a girlfriend and believes that she is the victim of the Nigerian government because the president is too ill to sign anyone's paycheck.
Hey, almost half the world think there's a God because there's a 2000/1400 year old book about it. They don't even get pictures...
[and] then this sort of collection-by-proxy is effectively going to be illegal
Well the theory is nice. But I'm guessing that this will be routed through off-shore shell companies and sold back as some sort of service, while the actual data will be as easy to get rid of as leaked nude photos.
So... you've done it? Has anybody done it? There's a whole lot of "that looks easy on paper" and nobody's going to risk our first interplanetary mission on that. Unless there's a robot mission to prove a working concept I suspect the first round will be ISS with more gravity, we're not going to assume what's outside is useful for anything. Gather water? Experiment. Grow food? Experiment. Build a habitat? Experiment. Produce fuel? Experiment. They could be super successful like Spirit/Opportunity, planned for 90 days and operational for 6/14 years. Or not.
If a society doesn't want to leave the safety net to charity, then society should take on that burden itself. From what I gather, Denmark doesn't burden employers the same way as does, say, France, yet has a strong safety net.
I can't really speak for Denmark but here in Norway it's mainly solved through employment taxes, which are kinda like income tax except they're not deducted from my nominal salary but rather added to the company's taxes. Basically, if my employer wants to pay me $100 he'll have to pay $8.20 in "trygdeavgift" and anywhere from $0 to $14.10 in "arbeidsgiveravgift", usually the latter which together make up something like a social security tax. And that money then goes to pensions, disability benefits, unemployment benefits, sick leave, maternity leave and so on. And then they take a good ~30% of my pay in taxes. And the general VAT is 25%.
So essentially, my employer pays $122.30. My pre-tax income is $100, my post-tax income $70 and when I buy something 25/125ths goes to VAT so $56 end up in someone else's pockets. So companies are not keeping people on for charity, not private ones anyway but you're pretty well covered for. And you get a free education, free healthcare, in fact a whole lot of services are free or subsidized and my mum and dad have been living on public pensions for a long time now. But we're sure as hell paying for it somehow...
Give people too much power and they will abuse it, it happens with unions but also without them it would happen in the opposite way - you would be expected to do everything, and work longer hours at no extra pay etc. There's a happy medium where employers cant abuse employees and union workers do their jobs efficiently, but we never seem to get there.
You don't need unions to stop that abuse, just stop this ridiculous fetish the US has for salaried white collar labor. Take whatever your pay is today, do the math on what fraction of your time would be 50%/100% overtime and work out the equivalent base pay that would bring home the same paycheck. It wouldn't pay you less. It wouldn't cost them more. But it would take away all the perverse incentives to squeeze more "free" labor out of you. It doesn't make you a burger flipper chump, it's a reflection of the fact that most companies and most positions have an infinite number of things they'd like to do and most product backlogs has many man-years of work waiting to float to the top.
Effectively the only limit to a salaried position is when you say you've done enough and your typical 9-5 worker doesn't have that freedom. Keep it for management and special positions but not ordinary office workers. If they insist on extra crunch time, you get extra paid. If shit hits the fan you get extra paid for extra clean-up duty. If they're not happy with your work/pay ratio like that things go slow and always into overtime, well first of all that's a tap management controls. I can't work overtime unless I have my manager's blessing, so he can either decided it's not that important or to let someone else handle it or hire a consultant/temp or whatever.
If it's a general dissatisfaction with the work output to pay, we'll negotiate that through salary and promotions/layoffs. Not under the table "finish this and don't track the hours or else...", that should be a criminal offense leading to a company-wide audit, back pay and so on. Honestly I wouldn't mind if every person in management had to do a SOX-style sign-off that to the best of their ability these time sheets reflect actual hours worked under threat of perjury and jail time. You can set any hourly wage you want (beyond minimum wage, anyway) but it better be a truthful account of hours worked and overtime owed. That's IMHO it should work for everybody.
You know it is data because it has the word data in it! For instance, a dataset contains data. The big clue is that it has the word data in it. For fuck's sake, why can't Congress figure this out?
Yup, the same way metaphysics got physics in it...
As for the price itself *shrug* they're charging what the market will bear (or at least what they think the market will bear) just like any other commodity. Do you think the actual physics clothes you buy cost as much to make as what you paid for them?
Some "value" clothes for wear and tear are probably not that far off. But this is pure vanity/brand/fashion wear like an Armani suit or Louis Vuitton handbag. It's game bling.