Putting the autonomous car on the road can be justified when the car doesn't need human supervision
Yeah why don't we hold humans to that standard, no supervised driving on public roads until you have your driver's license. You can have a professional driving instructor giving you reasonable challenges building up your skill step by step making sure to catch your mistakes or you can have a teen with ADD and a dad who'll throw you out there to either sink or swim with a legal babysitter. And the last guy just mowed down somebody, clearly supervised driving on public roads is the problem... not. Uber is the problem and they were probably lucky they weren't more obviously to blame, because they're simply a reckless company in everything they do. Waymo has driven 5+ million miles now without fucking up anywhere near this bad, clearly it's possible if your priorities are right.
The trouble is modern graphics have gotten _hard_ to make. Pixel shaders are a bitch. They're too labor intensive. What's needed is something that lets you do great graphics with less man hours and fewer bugs. If ray tracing isn't gonna do that then it might as well be PC's answer to 3D TVs.
I think that problem extends far beyond graphics, if you're going for realistic graphics it also has to behave and interact with everything like it's real. Like if the wind is blowing everything has to be fluttering in the wind. If you're making a dog it can't just look like a dog, it has to move like an actual dog with bones and muscles dragged down by gravity and leave paw prints in the mud. To say nothing of humans, uncanny valley here we come. Heck, I think it'd be difficult just to properly simulate taking a baseball bat to inanimate objects. All the dents and chips and scrapes and smears and splinters are very difficult to get right unless you bring in a ton of material science and deformation models. Usually we just fake it with an animation or two, replacing the "whole" model with a "broken" model and skipping all the hard parts. But it only looks half real...
It would be nice if these devices automatically unlocked after some time limit, like 1 year.
That would imply an application Logic-based lock, but instead, these phones use cryptography so the passcode is required to decrypt the data;
Not really, the PIN is not the key and would not be needed if you could use brute force. And it enforces the timeouts somehow so it has a clock. If it doesn't work to have a one-year clock you have one "decrease unlock clock attempt" per day that always succeeds and if you do that 365 times it unlocks, technically it's not a problem to build it into the system But practically one year later is not a problem for somebody looking for celeb nudes on a stolen phone, the information is still valuable. All the pros and cons for keeping it locked down are still there a year later.
Columbus was a bit loopy thinking he could reach India, this dude is completely bonkers, there's no comparison.
IIRC they had made some faulty measurements and models on the curvature and thus circumference of earth and had poor maps stretching Europe/Asia far longer east/west than reality, apparently they also ignored other sources that suggested it was longer but this was not settled science. In retrospect they were extremely lucky that America was in the way, but they didn't set out to try sailing halfway around the world. They thought they were going 78 degrees west on an earth 30000 km in circumference or about (78/360)*30000 = 6500 km. Which would be quite the distance in a 15th century ship, but they actually sailed longer so the distance was within reach. America was discovered because they didn't know how bad their data was.
The problem is that in today's culture, it seems like 'getting wasted' is the objective of drug use. Drink some beer, take some speed and maybe some shrooms, man. Get bent. Chemicals are a tool, to be used with care. 'Tripping' shouldn't be a 'gee, wow!' roller coaster ride. But this amounts to preaching to the choir, I imagine, on/.
I don't think you understand the expression "preaching for the choir". Since the church choir is mostly devout believers, it means the priest is talking to the people who already agree with him. The implication is that the priest is wasting his time instead of trying to convert non-believers. So unless you think/. so overwhelmingly agrees with you it's kinda redundant to say it you're not "preaching for the choir". Perhaps you meant to say "preaching for deaf ears"? That means a wasted effort because people's opinion isn't going to change anyway. I'll continue my light recreational beer drinking, thank you.
Australia doesn't actually require ID to fly domestically in all cases so manifests may or may not be accurate. Also, there are plenty of non-flyers going to the airport on any given day. Contractors, interviewees, people meeting friends/dropping them off, etc.
On any given day, but rarely on the same combination of days and departure/arrival times if you keep using the same card. Most of the non-flyers can probably be trivially be dismissed as contractors probably work there regularly and people meeting arrivals will depart again much quicker than those departing for a round trip. I checked my local airport, it has ~4 million passengers per year so ~2 million departures or 5500/day. If you give it a 4-hour window it's maybe 2000 in the rush hour.
Being away for more than a day probably makes the return trip its own data point, the least unique is the one-day business trip. Since I got no data I'll just exaggerate and estimate there's 1000 people who conceivably have left on a morning flight, returned on an evening flight. That's neat, but if you're like how many did that only on 17th of April and 26th of September last year I'm thinking maybe a few dozen at most. And if you're adding November 21st, I think you're pretty unique.
Heck, if you're really Big Brother it sounds like she was cashing out in ATMs to top of the card at places in relative proximity quite regularly because she was running short. I'm sure if you did a correlation on whose nearby ATM withdrawals correlate best with this card's top-ups she'd float right to the top of the list. Doubly so if you negatively weighted use when the travel card was provably in use somewhere else. Easier still if the values correlate too, like withdraw 20 GBP, top up 20 GBP.
Metadata is an extremely powerful tool. If you got lots of electronic tracks from a pseudo-anonymous source like this card and lots of electronic tracks from real people it's really, really hard to compartmentalize. Obviously all these problems go away if you start replacing the card regularly. But that's the problem these days, there's so many hooks to reel you in you're bound to miss a few ways. Her anonymity was lost long before that final straw that formally linked it to her debit card.
That's what I don't get. It would be so simple to certify for these kinds of things before allowing on public roads. Everyone acts like it would be such an impediment.
I think you'd just be wasting a ton of resources testing a non-problem. The sensors are designed to be capable enough and throw errors if they malfunction as they either go dark or produce gibberish. It seems extremely unlikely that you'd have a sensor glitch hide a person crossing the road while everything else looks normal. It's the logic layer that's difficult and formally retesting that for every tweak would be an impediment, it'd be like retesting a human driver every time he learns something new. At best you'd certify a minimum baseline, but there wouldn't really be any guarantee that future updates doesn't introduce fatal bugs.
For a company with deep pockets it's product liability law that is the big punishment. It's not like IKEA needs to certify their new table design with the furniture approval board. But if it's faulty and collapses on top of the toddler crawling under it they'll be sued to hell and back after the fact. It doesn't work so well on people for many reasons, but there's no real reason to think it won't work on Uber and Waymo. If they're held liable they'd have to pay up pretty big, if it's ruled an accident and Uber is not at fault then they've actually exceeded the minimum that a driver's exam should measure which means they should get their certification unless you want to hold them to a different standard. Being sub-optimal is not a crime, not even for self driving cars.
So it sent itself off the virtual edge of the simulation area, ending the run and minimizing it's negative score as best as possible. By accident someone created a suicidal bot, yay! (...) But a lot of the time it does something stupid.
Who did something "stupid"? The bot achieved its goal, but the programmed goal completely failed to achieve the intended goal. This is basically "The code did what I said, not what I meant" taken to a new level. The problem is that you can't easily inspect a neural network's logic in human terms the way you trace through code, it's more like another person. I think this is a cat, you think this is cat, the AI thinks this is a cat but we can't exactly quantify exactly what makes this a cat or non-cat which means the model can break down unexpectedly in ways you can't possibly predict, like you show it a one-eyed cat and suddenly the AI thinks it's a cyclops. And that's going to be a problem as we start relying on AI, like this self driving car thinks you're a pedestrian until one day for some inexplicable reason you don't qualify.
None of this is about Tesla or its products. Its about Norway having a shortage of competent delivery services.
We don't, really. It's either that Tesla is cheaping out hiring other EEA-area drivers - we have a lot of foreigners coming to Norway poorly prepared, but we can't block them due to EU regulations - or they're trying to do a massive end-of-quarter batch to please the stock market which exceeds the peak capacity. Norway is not unique, but you'd better be ready for a Montana-style winter. If you're sending truck drivers from southern California or its equal, there will be trouble...
Waymo claims 5600m between interventions. Maybe it's true, but until they are forced to release some data (say, via a fatality) I see no reason for believing a claim made by a company spokesperson.
It's public because California's regulations require it to be public. 352454 miles driven, 63 disengagements = once every 5600 miles. Read the report (pdf) yourself.
Bill Shatner should be pleased that people actually care whether or not he's alive - there are a lot of octogenarian TV & movie stars that when somebody hears their name reply with "I thought they were dead."
I think that's just as much to do with the way the person chooses to retire. Some of them are like "I'm done", they've lived in the spotlight most their lives and when it's no longer part of the "job" they clam up completely, no interviews, no memoirs, no events, no celebrity dinners, nothing. It's like they dropped off the earth because they wanted to just be that old man in the park playing with his grandkids and great-grandkids.
Other people seem to be enjoying it (or milking it?) to the last, even if you're kinda a has-been everyone who's been an A-list celebrity gets invited to enough VIP events that they can keep their name and face in the news if they want. Like for example Shatner can show up at any Trek-related event as a VIP guest any time he wants or he could decided that as far as he's concerned James T. Kirk is dead and buried. It's really up to them.
Jaywalking doesn't even exist in the rest of the world. It is some weird concept spoken about in movies and TV shows from the US. For example, in the UK we would call it 'crossing the road' and 'crossing the road' is not illegal (it is expected that pedestrians will use common sense). The idea that 'crossing the road' could be illegal is very strange to someone from the UK.
Germany has the same rule, I think. Came as a surprise to us from Norway, but we crossed so far from traffic nobody fined us or anything. But then Germany is notorious for having rules for everything and actually sticking to them. It's kinda nice and incredibly frustrating at the same time, depending on what side of the stick you're on.
If the patient is not convinced of the seriousness of the illness, and that taking the medication is absolutely necessary . . . no elaborate scheme of pill taking monitoring will help.
True, but most of those problems relate to taking a new drug. These people have been ill, taken the drugs and started feeling better like they beat it. They've just gotten a bit sloppy and lazy, not developed some deeper aversion against the drug. Just like they should have eaten healthier, exercised more, taken their vitamins, flossed properly and so on but never got around to it. This is just a small reminder that finishing your cure is kinda important so they don't relapse - at least that's what you should say is in it for them. That there's also a public benefit in reducing the spread of antibiotic resistant diseases is important to us, but maybe not so much to them. Easier to say you're doing it for your own health...
I know of no state where "salaried" personnel get paid overtime. The workplace may authorize compensation time. But overtime for senior developer, systems, DevOps, or technical managerial personnel. Even for hourly private contractors, I do not see overtime. In what what private industry. non-union field are you seeing overtime paid?
I'm in one of those "other countries" I was talking about, more specifically Norway:
Maybe in the US people on wages are just office drones that walk out when the work day is over no matter what, but that's not normal in other countries.
Here's the rules here:
Exceptions to overtime rules The rules on working hours and overtime are basically applicable to all employees, but there are exceptions for employees who have:
Leading position Leading positions mean senior positions with clear management functions. Examples of such positions may be head of department, office managers and others such as:
Has a greater responsibility.
May in particular make independent decisions on behalf of the business.
Themselves can determine the need for own work effort and can largely control their own working hours.
Particularly independent position By specially independent position is meant workers who do not have direct managerial functions but who still have senior and responsible positions. This concerns an employee who himself prioritises his tasks, they decide what to do, what to delegate to others, when the work is to be done and how the work is to be done. Even if an employee is exempted from these provisions, working hours must nevertheless be arranged such that:
Employees are not exposed to unfortunate physical or mental loads.
The employee has the opportunity to safeguard the safety
The first one requires a real management position with subordinates and a business unit, you can't just slap a "team lead" or "architect" label on someone and make them exempt because they direct. I know even shift leaders in manufacturing is not exempt because they have to be there when the shift runs, they don't really have any more freedom than the shift workers just a bit more responsibility. My department head is exempt, but none of the people who actually develop or manage the IT systems.
Particularly independent positions are very rare, they're basically for partner models, special advisors etc. that aren't "normal" employees at all. If there's a boss expecting to see you in your office (minimum) 9-5, you probably don't qualify. Independent contractors don't get overtime pay, though if you're hired by a consulting company they too are by these rules. And yes, both private and public industry mostly respects this because it's not worth the slap-down if they do an audit and insist you owe all the employees back pay for the last X years. It's happened and it's ugly.
Of course they're not stupid, if they have to pay overtime the base pay reflects that. And it's an incentive to keep a reasonable number of people on the job, two people working 60 hours/week is more expensive than three people working 40 hours/week which means you don't get insane crunch times because the week was already full. There is a certain pressure to use "flexible hours" instead which is a perk many offer to give you some freedom in when you're coming and going letting you accumulate hours in a time bank, though typically with "core hours" you have to be there.
Maybe some employers there are more abusive than others but I've worked in both the private and public sector and it's been pretty clear what extra hours are truly mandatory and there hasn't been any major objection to using overtime then. But you might say that in stressful periods you tend to accumulate flexible hours and in peaceful periods you take time off so you adapt somewhat to what the business needs and not just what you want.
If a client four time zones away calls and need help, I'm not going to jeopardize a big contract and not just my own job but others' too, including those on wages, by declining to take the call. I'm compensated extra for the willingness to do what it takes, whether it's during office hours or not.
So do I, it's called overtime pay. I'll work all night and weekends too for +50/100%. Maybe in the US people on wages are just office drones that walk out when the work day is over no matter what, but that's not normal in other countries. And you know we still have to negotiate for base pay raises and promotions, if you're not there when it counts don't expect to see much of those. Maybe you're one of the few that actually belong in the salaried category with real power and freedom to decide how to do your job, but my impression is that most salaried US workers are essentially wage slaves with no overtime pay where they just pile on the workload until you are working extra.
We all look at the total package with actual compensation compared to actual hours worked. The difference is simply that I'm not paid for in advance, if you want me to work all night there's a cost which means my boss isn't going to approve it unless it's actually important. While you've already got your salary, let's take as much advantage of that as we possibly can. I mean there's probably a near endless list of things the company would want me to do, at some point you're probably setting a cutoff yourself, now I've done "enough" for my pay grade so I'm going home. For me it's my boss making that decision, if he's not paying overtime it can wait until tomorrow. It's really as simple as that...
If we really have a metaphysical "soul", then just how would that re-attach to the physical form you transport elsewhere?
Most people who believe in souls are wildly inconsistent with themselves. If someone is executed in the Guillotine, is the soul above or below the blade as you're beheaded? Most would claim it's both, like your metaphysical shadow not limited to an organ like the heart or the brain. But the very same people would never claim that an amputee has lost part of their soul. For those that believe that all living things have a soul, what happens if you divide an earth worm and both halves live on? I think most would say both still have god's grace. So I think you pick the metaphysical explanation you want:
If your "true" self goes, the soul goes with it If your "true" self dies, the copy is a soul-less abomination If they're both your "true" self, they each have a soul.
Personally I think it's a load of crock, a religious invention so that no matter what you can get away with in the real world your immortal soul hangs in the balance. No souls, no heaven or hell, no carrot or stick, no judgement or justice. Not that Christianity invented it, even ancient Egyptians had it. And if not that then karma, we're not just flesh and blood that do good things or bad things and then we die. There has to be a reward/punishment, like we have no ethics or morality of our own. Which says a lot about the people who think that's how it works, really.
Not that hard. Because they're not trying to mimic human behavior, they're simply trying to win a known system.
While I agree this article is a puff piece, why does it matter if it wins the "human" way as long as it wins a legal way? While it's possible that some aimbot-like characteristics are far easier for a computer to achieve than an human, it's not cheating if it's man vs machine. It's only cheating if you're pretending it's man vs man. I've played some chess computers playing very "unhuman" chess, but I don't think their victory is any less valid because of that.
'Streaming' is shit. Why can't you all see that the Corporate world is trying to move everything in our lives to a 'rental' model? Do you really want to live in a world where you can't own anything yourself? Rich get richer, poor get poorer.
Well it's entertainment, most the value is in watching it once so the smart people would probably buy a second hand DVD, watch the movie, and sell it again for essentially the same price. That's in essence how Netflix got started, let's just pass around the same disc as quickly as possible. The movie studios made great money on those who bought the disc, watched it then put in on the shelf because of a pack rat mentality or the idea that maybe some day I'll want to see it again. I have a shelf full to prove that, they're mostly collecting dust.
With streaming I don't need to consider the future value or the resale value, it's simply whether my desire to watch it here and now is bigger than the cost. If I want to watch it again in 10 years, it's probably on some bargain bin service where streaming + bargain bin < buying the disc anyway. It's not like my copy is first edition or signed or anything. And there's very little reason for something on a streaming service to go "out of print", yes it can disappear from one service but it usually means it's now on some other service that paid more. It's not rescuing Doctor Who episodes...
All of a sudden this is a problem or a scandal? Why?
Sausages. Everybody eats them, nobody wants to know how they're made. It's a "free" service, nobody wants to know why it's free. You think people read the ToS? I think there was a story about someone who made a metric to see how many had scrolled through the EULA in their installer before agreeing to it, it was like 99.9% no. Even if you give people the benefit of the doubt that some may be reinstalls or installs on multiple computers, people don't care at all.
It should not be very difficult to create a decentralized Facebook clone. Not Diaspora easy (god that name alone sounds like you mangled diarrhea and fungal spores), but like if you invested a few million dollars then you're probably good. You can see the big services are cross-stealing ideas, there's not that many truly unique features. The problem is where's the profit in that? In fact, what pays your bills? People expect the service to the be "free", without access to the content you can't sell profiles, you can't sell ads, you can't sell trends... okay you can sell totally dumb ads, but that barely makes money.
You'll probably have to run a hosted service for those who won't/can't self-host and won't use a third party service. And you'll have to deal with all sorts of shit posts and take downs and bots and whatever on what you host, just software is not enough. You'll have real staff running costs. Which means you need to make money somehow. I don't see any easy way out of that unless you run into a philanthropist with money to burn. And developers, or you'll end up like email and IRC. It was social media 25 years ago, but it hasn't evolved a bit since.
Seriously. Pay attention when crossing the road, especially at night.
Seriously. Pay attention when driving a car, especially at night.
Unfortunately paying attention as a driver is no immunity from getting hit as a pedestrian. It doesn't matter if I have the right of way, I'll be the one injured, crippled or dead. And when you know that by far most of the adult population have a driver's license so when you're scraping the bottom of that barrel there's some pretty terrible drivers out there. Looking out for yourself is simple self-preservation, not matter how much the rules say you shouldn't have to.
The people in China know they are watching and they also know that unless you are plotting against the Government or doing illegal stuff that they don't really give a shit.
For values of "plotting against the Government" that amount to "establishing any kind of movement or organization that is threatening their undisputed power or rallies protests or tries to promote change", sure. You don't need to dress up as Guy Fawkes and try blowing up parliament to be "plotting", you won't be seeing any hippies protesting on the White House lawn in China. You won't be seeing the Falun Gong or protest signs saying "Free Tibet" or "Remember Tiananmen Square", if you're critical of the government in any way you're silenced. The US may be just as bad as China when it comes to spying, but they're cracking down much harder on dissent.
To go from CGA to EGA was an huge leap, in a world where monitors were not very many and most were monochrome. Compare to your phone going from small bezel to no bezel/curved screen or something. (...) Human senses -- that includes the mental faculty -- are logarithmic in nature.
But the result of extrapolating that way is that the most exciting time in human history was the caveman who discovered fire and it's been downhill ever since. That's clearly not true, we've had Dark Ages and Industrial Revolutions where human society has been stagnant or regressing and other times were it has grown by leaps and bounds. And it's hard to compare because every leap is fundamentally different, like say before and after electricity. The world before and after computers.
I think the mass spread of the Internet is one such true revolution that has fundamentally changed almost every aspect of human society, I think it's the kind of watershed moment that makes you start a new chapter in the history books. Sure the PC was big, but we already had computers. Cellphones was big, but we already had phones. Sure the smartphone was big, the Internet in your pocket instead of the Internet on your PC, and it absorbed the digital music player, digital camera, GPS navigation etc. too. But those I feel are a tier below the truly grand lines of society and not merely technology.
It's easy to lose perspective, like the iPod was huge for Apple and Jobs but in the grand scheme of things it's an "insignificant" improvement on the Sony Walkman. But maybe I'm talking him down a bit much, if we zoom out to decades where they say the Industrial Revolution was 1820-1840 then the smartphone is maybe the culmination of the Internet Revolution. It starts with the dot com boom around 1997 and ends with it being available to almost everyone, everywhere, all the time. It's going to be hard to top that.
The problem Africa has in getting into manufacturing comes in several parts. 1) A lot of corruption, 2) extremely bad infrastructure, 3) An inexperienced talent pool for workers. All these are solvable problems but aren't easy ones either. Automation is far down the list of obstacles to manufacturing in Africa.
And - in some places at least - political instability. The list above are all day-to-day problems but when a powder keg goes off business can be seriously disrupted for a long time. You need it with natural disasters, there's flooding in Thailand and HDD supply is crippled. There's an earthquake in Japan and camera supply is crippled. What happens if there's a new Arab Spring or another war in CAR or Somalia or rioting in South Africa or a Boko Haram attack or the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda start killing each other again? You start investing in the whole supply chain from infrastructure and transportation to factories and training and then someone throws a monkey wrench in your plan. Unfortunately that's often a catch-22, stability brings prosperity and prosperity brings stability. If you haven't got either it's very hard to get businesses to commit to investments.
*Fingering away on my iShiney*, "What's a pay phone?"
That's already happened in Scandinavia... in 2015 they disappeared in Sweden, 01.01.2016 it ended in Norway, 13.12.2017 the last one disappeared in Denmark. Those who grow up today will never have seen a working phone booth.
Slashdot Mirror
Putting the autonomous car on the road can be justified when the car doesn't need human supervision
Yeah why don't we hold humans to that standard, no supervised driving on public roads until you have your driver's license. You can have a professional driving instructor giving you reasonable challenges building up your skill step by step making sure to catch your mistakes or you can have a teen with ADD and a dad who'll throw you out there to either sink or swim with a legal babysitter. And the last guy just mowed down somebody, clearly supervised driving on public roads is the problem... not. Uber is the problem and they were probably lucky they weren't more obviously to blame, because they're simply a reckless company in everything they do. Waymo has driven 5+ million miles now without fucking up anywhere near this bad, clearly it's possible if your priorities are right.
The trouble is modern graphics have gotten _hard_ to make. Pixel shaders are a bitch. They're too labor intensive. What's needed is something that lets you do great graphics with less man hours and fewer bugs. If ray tracing isn't gonna do that then it might as well be PC's answer to 3D TVs.
I think that problem extends far beyond graphics, if you're going for realistic graphics it also has to behave and interact with everything like it's real. Like if the wind is blowing everything has to be fluttering in the wind. If you're making a dog it can't just look like a dog, it has to move like an actual dog with bones and muscles dragged down by gravity and leave paw prints in the mud. To say nothing of humans, uncanny valley here we come. Heck, I think it'd be difficult just to properly simulate taking a baseball bat to inanimate objects. All the dents and chips and scrapes and smears and splinters are very difficult to get right unless you bring in a ton of material science and deformation models. Usually we just fake it with an animation or two, replacing the "whole" model with a "broken" model and skipping all the hard parts. But it only looks half real...
It would be nice if these devices automatically unlocked after some time limit, like 1 year.
That would imply an application Logic-based lock, but instead, these phones use cryptography so the passcode is required to decrypt the data;
Not really, the PIN is not the key and would not be needed if you could use brute force. And it enforces the timeouts somehow so it has a clock. If it doesn't work to have a one-year clock you have one "decrease unlock clock attempt" per day that always succeeds and if you do that 365 times it unlocks, technically it's not a problem to build it into the system But practically one year later is not a problem for somebody looking for celeb nudes on a stolen phone, the information is still valuable. All the pros and cons for keeping it locked down are still there a year later.
Columbus was a bit loopy thinking he could reach India, this dude is completely bonkers, there's no comparison.
IIRC they had made some faulty measurements and models on the curvature and thus circumference of earth and had poor maps stretching Europe/Asia far longer east/west than reality, apparently they also ignored other sources that suggested it was longer but this was not settled science. In retrospect they were extremely lucky that America was in the way, but they didn't set out to try sailing halfway around the world. They thought they were going 78 degrees west on an earth 30000 km in circumference or about (78/360)*30000 = 6500 km. Which would be quite the distance in a 15th century ship, but they actually sailed longer so the distance was within reach. America was discovered because they didn't know how bad their data was.
The problem is that in today's culture, it seems like 'getting wasted' is the objective of drug use. Drink some beer, take some speed and maybe some shrooms, man. Get bent. Chemicals are a tool, to be used with care. 'Tripping' shouldn't be a 'gee, wow!' roller coaster ride. But this amounts to preaching to the choir, I imagine, on /.
I don't think you understand the expression "preaching for the choir". Since the church choir is mostly devout believers, it means the priest is talking to the people who already agree with him. The implication is that the priest is wasting his time instead of trying to convert non-believers. So unless you think /. so overwhelmingly agrees with you it's kinda redundant to say it you're not "preaching for the choir". Perhaps you meant to say "preaching for deaf ears"? That means a wasted effort because people's opinion isn't going to change anyway. I'll continue my light recreational beer drinking, thank you.
Australia doesn't actually require ID to fly domestically in all cases so manifests may or may not be accurate. Also, there are plenty of non-flyers going to the airport on any given day. Contractors, interviewees, people meeting friends/dropping them off, etc.
On any given day, but rarely on the same combination of days and departure/arrival times if you keep using the same card. Most of the non-flyers can probably be trivially be dismissed as contractors probably work there regularly and people meeting arrivals will depart again much quicker than those departing for a round trip. I checked my local airport, it has ~4 million passengers per year so ~2 million departures or 5500/day. If you give it a 4-hour window it's maybe 2000 in the rush hour.
Being away for more than a day probably makes the return trip its own data point, the least unique is the one-day business trip. Since I got no data I'll just exaggerate and estimate there's 1000 people who conceivably have left on a morning flight, returned on an evening flight. That's neat, but if you're like how many did that only on 17th of April and 26th of September last year I'm thinking maybe a few dozen at most. And if you're adding November 21st, I think you're pretty unique.
Heck, if you're really Big Brother it sounds like she was cashing out in ATMs to top of the card at places in relative proximity quite regularly because she was running short. I'm sure if you did a correlation on whose nearby ATM withdrawals correlate best with this card's top-ups she'd float right to the top of the list. Doubly so if you negatively weighted use when the travel card was provably in use somewhere else. Easier still if the values correlate too, like withdraw 20 GBP, top up 20 GBP.
Metadata is an extremely powerful tool. If you got lots of electronic tracks from a pseudo-anonymous source like this card and lots of electronic tracks from real people it's really, really hard to compartmentalize. Obviously all these problems go away if you start replacing the card regularly. But that's the problem these days, there's so many hooks to reel you in you're bound to miss a few ways. Her anonymity was lost long before that final straw that formally linked it to her debit card.
That's what I don't get. It would be so simple to certify for these kinds of things before allowing on public roads. Everyone acts like it would be such an impediment.
I think you'd just be wasting a ton of resources testing a non-problem. The sensors are designed to be capable enough and throw errors if they malfunction as they either go dark or produce gibberish. It seems extremely unlikely that you'd have a sensor glitch hide a person crossing the road while everything else looks normal. It's the logic layer that's difficult and formally retesting that for every tweak would be an impediment, it'd be like retesting a human driver every time he learns something new. At best you'd certify a minimum baseline, but there wouldn't really be any guarantee that future updates doesn't introduce fatal bugs.
For a company with deep pockets it's product liability law that is the big punishment. It's not like IKEA needs to certify their new table design with the furniture approval board. But if it's faulty and collapses on top of the toddler crawling under it they'll be sued to hell and back after the fact. It doesn't work so well on people for many reasons, but there's no real reason to think it won't work on Uber and Waymo. If they're held liable they'd have to pay up pretty big, if it's ruled an accident and Uber is not at fault then they've actually exceeded the minimum that a driver's exam should measure which means they should get their certification unless you want to hold them to a different standard. Being sub-optimal is not a crime, not even for self driving cars.
So it sent itself off the virtual edge of the simulation area, ending the run and minimizing it's negative score as best as possible. By accident someone created a suicidal bot, yay! (...) But a lot of the time it does something stupid.
Who did something "stupid"? The bot achieved its goal, but the programmed goal completely failed to achieve the intended goal. This is basically "The code did what I said, not what I meant" taken to a new level. The problem is that you can't easily inspect a neural network's logic in human terms the way you trace through code, it's more like another person. I think this is a cat, you think this is cat, the AI thinks this is a cat but we can't exactly quantify exactly what makes this a cat or non-cat which means the model can break down unexpectedly in ways you can't possibly predict, like you show it a one-eyed cat and suddenly the AI thinks it's a cyclops. And that's going to be a problem as we start relying on AI, like this self driving car thinks you're a pedestrian until one day for some inexplicable reason you don't qualify.
None of this is about Tesla or its products. Its about Norway having a shortage of competent delivery services.
We don't, really. It's either that Tesla is cheaping out hiring other EEA-area drivers - we have a lot of foreigners coming to Norway poorly prepared, but we can't block them due to EU regulations - or they're trying to do a massive end-of-quarter batch to please the stock market which exceeds the peak capacity. Norway is not unique, but you'd better be ready for a Montana-style winter. If you're sending truck drivers from southern California or its equal, there will be trouble...
Waymo claims 5600m between interventions. Maybe it's true, but until they are forced to release some data (say, via a fatality) I see no reason for believing a claim made by a company spokesperson.
It's public because California's regulations require it to be public. 352454 miles driven, 63 disengagements = once every 5600 miles. Read the report (pdf) yourself.
Bill Shatner should be pleased that people actually care whether or not he's alive - there are a lot of octogenarian TV & movie stars that when somebody hears their name reply with "I thought they were dead."
I think that's just as much to do with the way the person chooses to retire. Some of them are like "I'm done", they've lived in the spotlight most their lives and when it's no longer part of the "job" they clam up completely, no interviews, no memoirs, no events, no celebrity dinners, nothing. It's like they dropped off the earth because they wanted to just be that old man in the park playing with his grandkids and great-grandkids.
Other people seem to be enjoying it (or milking it?) to the last, even if you're kinda a has-been everyone who's been an A-list celebrity gets invited to enough VIP events that they can keep their name and face in the news if they want. Like for example Shatner can show up at any Trek-related event as a VIP guest any time he wants or he could decided that as far as he's concerned James T. Kirk is dead and buried. It's really up to them.
Jaywalking doesn't even exist in the rest of the world. It is some weird concept spoken about in movies and TV shows from the US. For example, in the UK we would call it 'crossing the road' and 'crossing the road' is not illegal (it is expected that pedestrians will use common sense). The idea that 'crossing the road' could be illegal is very strange to someone from the UK.
Germany has the same rule, I think. Came as a surprise to us from Norway, but we crossed so far from traffic nobody fined us or anything. But then Germany is notorious for having rules for everything and actually sticking to them. It's kinda nice and incredibly frustrating at the same time, depending on what side of the stick you're on.
If the patient is not convinced of the seriousness of the illness, and that taking the medication is absolutely necessary . . . no elaborate scheme of pill taking monitoring will help.
True, but most of those problems relate to taking a new drug. These people have been ill, taken the drugs and started feeling better like they beat it. They've just gotten a bit sloppy and lazy, not developed some deeper aversion against the drug. Just like they should have eaten healthier, exercised more, taken their vitamins, flossed properly and so on but never got around to it. This is just a small reminder that finishing your cure is kinda important so they don't relapse - at least that's what you should say is in it for them. That there's also a public benefit in reducing the spread of antibiotic resistant diseases is important to us, but maybe not so much to them. Easier to say you're doing it for your own health...
I know of no state where "salaried" personnel get paid overtime. The workplace may authorize compensation time. But overtime for senior developer, systems, DevOps, or technical managerial personnel. Even for hourly private contractors, I do not see overtime. In what what private industry. non-union field are you seeing overtime paid?
I'm in one of those "other countries" I was talking about, more specifically Norway:
Maybe in the US people on wages are just office drones that walk out when the work day is over no matter what, but that's not normal in other countries.
Here's the rules here:
Exceptions to overtime rules
The rules on working hours and overtime are basically applicable to all employees, but there are exceptions for employees who have:
Leading position
Leading positions mean senior positions with clear management functions. Examples of such positions may be head of department, office managers and others such as:
Particularly independent position
By specially independent position is meant workers who do not have direct managerial functions but who still have senior and responsible positions. This concerns an employee who himself prioritises his tasks, they decide what to do, what to delegate to others, when the work is to be done and how the work is to be done. Even if an employee is exempted from these provisions, working hours must nevertheless be arranged such that:
The first one requires a real management position with subordinates and a business unit, you can't just slap a "team lead" or "architect" label on someone and make them exempt because they direct. I know even shift leaders in manufacturing is not exempt because they have to be there when the shift runs, they don't really have any more freedom than the shift workers just a bit more responsibility. My department head is exempt, but none of the people who actually develop or manage the IT systems.
Particularly independent positions are very rare, they're basically for partner models, special advisors etc. that aren't "normal" employees at all. If there's a boss expecting to see you in your office (minimum) 9-5, you probably don't qualify. Independent contractors don't get overtime pay, though if you're hired by a consulting company they too are by these rules. And yes, both private and public industry mostly respects this because it's not worth the slap-down if they do an audit and insist you owe all the employees back pay for the last X years. It's happened and it's ugly.
Of course they're not stupid, if they have to pay overtime the base pay reflects that. And it's an incentive to keep a reasonable number of people on the job, two people working 60 hours/week is more expensive than three people working 40 hours/week which means you don't get insane crunch times because the week was already full. There is a certain pressure to use "flexible hours" instead which is a perk many offer to give you some freedom in when you're coming and going letting you accumulate hours in a time bank, though typically with "core hours" you have to be there.
Maybe some employers there are more abusive than others but I've worked in both the private and public sector and it's been pretty clear what extra hours are truly mandatory and there hasn't been any major objection to using overtime then. But you might say that in stressful periods you tend to accumulate flexible hours and in peaceful periods you take time off so you adapt somewhat to what the business needs and not just what you want.
If a client four time zones away calls and need help, I'm not going to jeopardize a big contract and not just my own job but others' too, including those on wages, by declining to take the call. I'm compensated extra for the willingness to do what it takes, whether it's during office hours or not.
So do I, it's called overtime pay. I'll work all night and weekends too for +50/100%. Maybe in the US people on wages are just office drones that walk out when the work day is over no matter what, but that's not normal in other countries. And you know we still have to negotiate for base pay raises and promotions, if you're not there when it counts don't expect to see much of those. Maybe you're one of the few that actually belong in the salaried category with real power and freedom to decide how to do your job, but my impression is that most salaried US workers are essentially wage slaves with no overtime pay where they just pile on the workload until you are working extra.
We all look at the total package with actual compensation compared to actual hours worked. The difference is simply that I'm not paid for in advance, if you want me to work all night there's a cost which means my boss isn't going to approve it unless it's actually important. While you've already got your salary, let's take as much advantage of that as we possibly can. I mean there's probably a near endless list of things the company would want me to do, at some point you're probably setting a cutoff yourself, now I've done "enough" for my pay grade so I'm going home. For me it's my boss making that decision, if he's not paying overtime it can wait until tomorrow. It's really as simple as that...
If we really have a metaphysical "soul", then just how would that re-attach to the physical form you transport elsewhere?
Most people who believe in souls are wildly inconsistent with themselves. If someone is executed in the Guillotine, is the soul above or below the blade as you're beheaded? Most would claim it's both, like your metaphysical shadow not limited to an organ like the heart or the brain. But the very same people would never claim that an amputee has lost part of their soul. For those that believe that all living things have a soul, what happens if you divide an earth worm and both halves live on? I think most would say both still have god's grace. So I think you pick the metaphysical explanation you want:
If your "true" self goes, the soul goes with it
If your "true" self dies, the copy is a soul-less abomination
If they're both your "true" self, they each have a soul.
Personally I think it's a load of crock, a religious invention so that no matter what you can get away with in the real world your immortal soul hangs in the balance. No souls, no heaven or hell, no carrot or stick, no judgement or justice. Not that Christianity invented it, even ancient Egyptians had it. And if not that then karma, we're not just flesh and blood that do good things or bad things and then we die. There has to be a reward/punishment, like we have no ethics or morality of our own. Which says a lot about the people who think that's how it works, really.
Not that hard. Because they're not trying to mimic human behavior, they're simply trying to win a known system.
While I agree this article is a puff piece, why does it matter if it wins the "human" way as long as it wins a legal way? While it's possible that some aimbot-like characteristics are far easier for a computer to achieve than an human, it's not cheating if it's man vs machine. It's only cheating if you're pretending it's man vs man. I've played some chess computers playing very "unhuman" chess, but I don't think their victory is any less valid because of that.
'Streaming' is shit. Why can't you all see that the Corporate world is trying to move everything in our lives to a 'rental' model? Do you really want to live in a world where you can't own anything yourself? Rich get richer, poor get poorer.
Well it's entertainment, most the value is in watching it once so the smart people would probably buy a second hand DVD, watch the movie, and sell it again for essentially the same price. That's in essence how Netflix got started, let's just pass around the same disc as quickly as possible. The movie studios made great money on those who bought the disc, watched it then put in on the shelf because of a pack rat mentality or the idea that maybe some day I'll want to see it again. I have a shelf full to prove that, they're mostly collecting dust.
With streaming I don't need to consider the future value or the resale value, it's simply whether my desire to watch it here and now is bigger than the cost. If I want to watch it again in 10 years, it's probably on some bargain bin service where streaming + bargain bin < buying the disc anyway. It's not like my copy is first edition or signed or anything. And there's very little reason for something on a streaming service to go "out of print", yes it can disappear from one service but it usually means it's now on some other service that paid more. It's not rescuing Doctor Who episodes...
All of a sudden this is a problem or a scandal? Why?
Sausages. Everybody eats them, nobody wants to know how they're made. It's a "free" service, nobody wants to know why it's free. You think people read the ToS? I think there was a story about someone who made a metric to see how many had scrolled through the EULA in their installer before agreeing to it, it was like 99.9% no. Even if you give people the benefit of the doubt that some may be reinstalls or installs on multiple computers, people don't care at all.
It should not be very difficult to create a decentralized Facebook clone. Not Diaspora easy (god that name alone sounds like you mangled diarrhea and fungal spores), but like if you invested a few million dollars then you're probably good. You can see the big services are cross-stealing ideas, there's not that many truly unique features. The problem is where's the profit in that? In fact, what pays your bills? People expect the service to the be "free", without access to the content you can't sell profiles, you can't sell ads, you can't sell trends... okay you can sell totally dumb ads, but that barely makes money.
You'll probably have to run a hosted service for those who won't/can't self-host and won't use a third party service. And you'll have to deal with all sorts of shit posts and take downs and bots and whatever on what you host, just software is not enough. You'll have real staff running costs. Which means you need to make money somehow. I don't see any easy way out of that unless you run into a philanthropist with money to burn. And developers, or you'll end up like email and IRC. It was social media 25 years ago, but it hasn't evolved a bit since.
As long as I can drink rum and have a parrot, I don't care what you call it.
The eye patch, peg leg and that all the music is shanties is kinda a downer though.
Seriously. Pay attention when crossing the road, especially at night.
Seriously. Pay attention when driving a car, especially at night.
Unfortunately paying attention as a driver is no immunity from getting hit as a pedestrian. It doesn't matter if I have the right of way, I'll be the one injured, crippled or dead. And when you know that by far most of the adult population have a driver's license so when you're scraping the bottom of that barrel there's some pretty terrible drivers out there. Looking out for yourself is simple self-preservation, not matter how much the rules say you shouldn't have to.
The people in China know they are watching and they also know that unless you are plotting against the Government or doing illegal stuff that they don't really give a shit.
For values of "plotting against the Government" that amount to "establishing any kind of movement or organization that is threatening their undisputed power or rallies protests or tries to promote change", sure. You don't need to dress up as Guy Fawkes and try blowing up parliament to be "plotting", you won't be seeing any hippies protesting on the White House lawn in China. You won't be seeing the Falun Gong or protest signs saying "Free Tibet" or "Remember Tiananmen Square", if you're critical of the government in any way you're silenced. The US may be just as bad as China when it comes to spying, but they're cracking down much harder on dissent.
To go from CGA to EGA was an huge leap, in a world where monitors were not very many and most were monochrome. Compare to your phone going from small bezel to no bezel/curved screen or something. (...) Human senses -- that includes the mental faculty -- are logarithmic in nature.
But the result of extrapolating that way is that the most exciting time in human history was the caveman who discovered fire and it's been downhill ever since. That's clearly not true, we've had Dark Ages and Industrial Revolutions where human society has been stagnant or regressing and other times were it has grown by leaps and bounds. And it's hard to compare because every leap is fundamentally different, like say before and after electricity. The world before and after computers.
I think the mass spread of the Internet is one such true revolution that has fundamentally changed almost every aspect of human society, I think it's the kind of watershed moment that makes you start a new chapter in the history books. Sure the PC was big, but we already had computers. Cellphones was big, but we already had phones. Sure the smartphone was big, the Internet in your pocket instead of the Internet on your PC, and it absorbed the digital music player, digital camera, GPS navigation etc. too. But those I feel are a tier below the truly grand lines of society and not merely technology.
It's easy to lose perspective, like the iPod was huge for Apple and Jobs but in the grand scheme of things it's an "insignificant" improvement on the Sony Walkman. But maybe I'm talking him down a bit much, if we zoom out to decades where they say the Industrial Revolution was 1820-1840 then the smartphone is maybe the culmination of the Internet Revolution. It starts with the dot com boom around 1997 and ends with it being available to almost everyone, everywhere, all the time. It's going to be hard to top that.
The problem Africa has in getting into manufacturing comes in several parts. 1) A lot of corruption, 2) extremely bad infrastructure, 3) An inexperienced talent pool for workers. All these are solvable problems but aren't easy ones either. Automation is far down the list of obstacles to manufacturing in Africa.
And - in some places at least - political instability. The list above are all day-to-day problems but when a powder keg goes off business can be seriously disrupted for a long time. You need it with natural disasters, there's flooding in Thailand and HDD supply is crippled. There's an earthquake in Japan and camera supply is crippled. What happens if there's a new Arab Spring or another war in CAR or Somalia or rioting in South Africa or a Boko Haram attack or the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda start killing each other again? You start investing in the whole supply chain from infrastructure and transportation to factories and training and then someone throws a monkey wrench in your plan. Unfortunately that's often a catch-22, stability brings prosperity and prosperity brings stability. If you haven't got either it's very hard to get businesses to commit to investments.
*Fingering away on my iShiney*, "What's a pay phone?"
That's already happened in Scandinavia... in 2015 they disappeared in Sweden, 01.01.2016 it ended in Norway, 13.12.2017 the last one disappeared in Denmark. Those who grow up today will never have seen a working phone booth.