He's not capable of understanding that he has done anything wrong. Any good lawyer will play that like a fiddle. He's a narcissistic psychopath or some other melange of serious mental disorders. No judge or jury will be able to hold him legally accountable for his actions. He'll maybe get a stay in a psych ward somewhere, and then be freed when the psychiatrists get bored with him.
Not very likely. The insanity defense is used for people with delusions, hallucinations, compulsions, psychotic episodes and such, that is to say people who lack the capacity to understand and/or control their actions. Not feeling bad about your crimes, poor impulse control or stalking/obsessive behavior is generally not enough for an insanity defense in the US, at least not after the 1984 Insanity Defense Reform Act. Besides it's more like a life sentence, the whole system is rigged against ever getting out because even if the professionals think you're fit for release it goes back to the DA who wants to be tough on crime, a court that'll mostly go along and a general public who isn't eager to have former mental patients with a history of criminal acts back on the streets.
In other countries yes, like here in Norway if you're found not guilty by reasons of insanity you're per definition not a criminal and the justice system has no more say. So if they put you on medication and the medication works it's their call whether to release you. Re-offending statistics indicate they're generally cured, it's mostly people's feelings of justice that are hurt. If you suffer a heart attack while driving and run over some random, innocent pedestrians we kinda accept it's an ill body and not an act of terror. It's a lot harder to accept that the raving loon that went around stabbing people is the result of an ill mind, a sickness that has been cured and that the person is no more guilty of that than the one that suffered a heart attack. For a sane person it's hard to imagine "something else" taking control.
So if some companies are patent trolls, does this make him a FOSS troll? Glad he's "out" because his actions definitively didn't reflect the goals of open source software.
Well as Linus himself has pointed out with regards to the GPL, you don't have to agree to the principles behind it just the actual text of the license. Yes, he's being non-cooperative and he's prosecuting every violation to the full extent of the law, but from my reading his copyright was actually violated. He just took the injunction one step too far to include all copies of Linux and not just the violating copies of Linux containing his code, like he's not a "co-author" that all versions of Linux derives from. He made a contribution and that branch forward is "poisoned" with his code, not the whole tree.
I'm not a Linux user, but I know that/. used to be full of enthusiastic Linux users. They're certainly not here, anymore. Where'd they go?
Not sure they went anywhere. Linux owns the server, the supercomputer, the cell phone, the set top box....pretty much everywhere but the desktop really. But the whole OSS revolution? The enthusiasm? Most people chose the "free" upgrade to Win10, just like they chose the "free" service from Facebook. And I'm sure a lot of people would like to comment on why they should have and why they didn't - but they didn't. I talk to some ordinary people and in their mind the world has gone cloud. Like, why would you *not* upload your photos to iCloud. Then you can re-download them if you lose your phone, duuuh. It's like you're a moron if you don't and a tin foil hat wearer if you question the security.
And realistically, I see the net is closing. Pretty much everything you do is electronically logged these days and nobody cares. All it takes is a certain amount of.... well, indifference unless you're a *real* threat to the government. That was the fault of the plan economy, trying to control too much. You can be rich and famous in China, you just can't be a threat to the one-party system. In the Western world you can be gay or a jew... until there's another Hitler in power. It's this illusion that we've become so evolved that even though we give the government all this information it'll never be abused. All I can say it's that it's true until it isn't. And then it's too late.
Yup... latest EFI proficiency stats had 5 countries trending up, 44 slightly up, 24 slightly down and 0 trending down. And of the 80 countries they measured China was #36 between Costa Rica and Japan rising quickly (50.94 -> 52.45 in rating), one place from being in the "medium proficiency" group. They're considerably higher rated than Mexico at #44 now. And the age distribution trend is quite clear, English proficiency is in clear growth. I think the biggest reason is the Internet, I remember when I grew up calling long distance was expensive and international like super expensive. English language newspapers were a rarity. Movies and series had subtitles, books had translations. I learned English, but the only real practical application I had was on the computer because software was in English. It was all pretty theoretical until you suddenly could browse/download/chat with people from all over the world.
And I think the rest of the world is pretty much in agreement too, even though the US is invaded by Spanish it's a pretty obvious second choice for Spanish-speaking. Europe is clearly English-aligned (96% now learn English, with Chinese not even in the top 5), so is Australia, India and much of Africa as former colonies. To the degree that anyone is learning a second language in South America it's also English. That kinda leaves the Middle East - which mostly speak Arabic and very little else - and the rest of Asia. But the Russia-China relationship is only lukewarm with few bi-lingual, with Japan it's on the freezing point, Pakistan is in the Arabic camp... even if Chinese is seeing a little bit of spread in SE Asia it's not gaining any global influence whatsoever.
P.S. Don't get me wrong there's a lot of mono-lingual or who speak one of the "smaller" world languages, so it's not like English is universal or anything. The highest estimates are 1.5 billion, which means 80% of the world doesn't speak English. I mean you can do just fine living in Japan and only know Japanese or Thailand and know Thai or Russia and know Russian or Brazil and know Portuguese. But they're not really in the running for global language.
OTOH, the secret to never accomplishing anything is to stop trying.
Yeah, even though it's ridiculously hard I think research into high energy power is essential, you can always say we should become greener and smarter but in the end physics dictate that it takes a certain amount of power to drive all the household appliances. Sure for a CPU/GPU you can improve calculations/watt but for a water boiler it takes 1 calorie of energy to heat 1g of water 1C and if you can change that you'll have a closet full of Nobel prizes. If we want to give ~10 billion people a modern standard of living we need energy. If we want to start a Mars colony we need energy. If we want to explore the universe we need energy. I don't know how feasible it is to make a miniature sun here on earth, but it's one helluva power source. It's the kind of thing it's probably worth mastering even if it takes us 100 years or 1000 years. I'll admit I'd like to see results a little sooner, but it's like the people researching longevity and immortality. For humanity it looks like a smart topic of research even if it won't arrive in time to save my ass.
Of course you will always have speculative and sham research looking for grants. You will always have dead ends and people beating a dead horse. But I feel pretty confident that these researchers believe in what they're doing and is making an honest attempt. There's a helluva lot of medical researchers trying to find the cure for cancer, many of them won't achieve much at all. But I think the vast majority is genuinely trying. Comparing them to a politician posturing for his reputation while not realistically even beginning to fund the necessary programs is grossly unfair.
It all depends on how advanced automation you want to build. The simplest form is purely mechanical operation, no input or output validation and no self-integrity checks. This is how power tools work, push the button and the drill starts drilling. From there you can add sensors, like a thermostat adjusts the output relative to an input. You can add self-integrity checks like a photocopier complaining about a paper jam. Any coin-operated machine validates that what you put in is actually coins. For an automated lock add contacts to sense if the door is locked or unlocked and if it doesn't follow control signals report a lock malfunction. And you can enforce service intervals with timers, if necessary with sensors too that you've removed all the pieces that should be removed or that the bin you're supposed to empty weighs that of an empty bin. Unless you can automate the whole cleaning cycle too.
There's no revolution but there's been a constant evolution towards more and more "intelligent" automation. There's a reason getting the error codes out of automobiles was a big deal, because very often the car knows what's wrong these days. Advances in robot vision means you're now automatically processing variable input like raw fish and produce. More and more advanced machinery refuses to operate when it detects an out-of-spec condition, not because there's a human hitting the stop/abort switch. For example the SpaceX launches, it's usually been the computer halting the countdown not human intervention. Of course this has nothing to do with AI and machine learning, it's just logic built into the system. But when we're trying to make it do one thing under a very narrow set of conditions, that's plenty.
Service jobs require providing services to people, whether that's a burger or fixing their plumbing. This all requires human interaction and that robot is never going to take over that job.
Really? If I enter my order on a touch screen, it's cooked by a robot and delivered in a self-service kiosk and it's the same burger... who really appreciates the social interaction with the McD/BK staff? Usually my interaction is "Next, please" "Hi, I'll have [order]." "Anything else?" "No, that's it." "That'll be $X" *pay* *wait* "[order]" "Thanks" *eat* *put trash in bin on way out*. If you want to talk about something that could be replaced with a very small shell script it's the social interaction. I don't know how it could possibly get less personal or less meaningful. And you don't go there for the culinary experience, you go there for standardized grub. A robot is perfect for giving you a consistent experience. Of course if I go to a high-end restaurant with a waiter and a real chef my expectations are different, but it's different leagues.
And even three star Michelin restaurants have "standard" dishes, like they're training the staff to exactly replicate whatever the master chef has cooked up. Granted it's an entirely different level of service but it's not really that unique, personal service that we'd like to imagine. If I go to a steakhouse and get a prime steak cooked to perfection I'll probably put up with a whole lot of other downsides, whatever you think the service is I think it's a small auxiliary. The service is not why I go to your steakhouse and poor service probably won't make me leave as long as the product tastes to high heaven. And the product can be made by a robot.
Probably one of those things, you don't know why you'd even need it, until you have it, then you won't want to live without it. Or you're not demanding enough to even notice either way.
Or it's just not convenient to split the bits that could use Optane. I had the same issue with SSD/HDD, apart from bulk media (photos, audio, video) the primary space consumer is games. And a lot of that is cut scenes and textures and music loops and voice acting etc. that don't benefit a lot, while the main executable, scripts, maps, UI elements etc. is 1-5% of the game. But as long as Steam doesn't give me an easy way to say this 1GB go on SSD, the remaining 19GB go on HDD it's not worth the hassle, let's just wait until the price drops so I can put all 20GB on SSD. And I think Optane will be the same, it could be useful for a few things but most of it would be wasted.
No. It is more like handing them an electronic chess game that enforces the rules of the game without telling them what they are up front. They could not make up their own game in this case, and the learning of proper game play would be possible.
Yeah except chess has such a low branching factor you'd run into a mate by accident, technically black can win by mate in two. I just couldn't come up with a better example where the goal would be totally incomprehensible without someone telling you what the objective is, so I added that complexity to equal that of the computer finding the winning way though the game by accident.
This is like handing a chess set to an isolated Amazon tribe and only tell them "sorry, invalid game" until they make a valid checkmate. They'd probably never even find the opening position, much less make any correct moves and certainly not how to mate. They'd just randomly do things until they got bored or made up their own game. There's no reason a machine should expect "getting to the top" to be a valid objective without a whole lot of insight into the human condition and "because it's there".
The mechanics plug in a diagnostic machine, it figures out what part to replace, and a person replaces it. It's only a matter of time before that final step is automated. Once you train one robot to do the work, you can have a million robots doing that same task for the cost of building the hardware. The leap from robot manufacturing to robot repair is a lot smaller than you seem to believe.
Actually, this is the part where the leap is much bigger than most people believe. Sure, we have tons of industrial-size food production. But they're huge one trick ponies, any decent pastry chef can make all of these and much, much more in a huge variety of kitchens with different equipment. Creating a robot that's flexible enough makes the costs fly off the charts. Of course we have people selling fantasies of a generic cooking robot but but reality is more like Flippy - for $60,000 a robot arm will flip burgers for you. Same with repairs, creating a "mechanic robot" is going to be a multi-millon dollar unit.
Look at something like Amazon's robotics challenge and you'll realize how far we're from human finesse and flexibility. Acceptable for a robot back-end where nobody cares if it takes half an hour to move a small box of items and still fail at several of them - notice the video is 4x, slow it down to 25% and it's like watching paint dry. It's something human fingers would have finished in a minute with no item too complex. The main killer for repair companies have been mass production of huge assemblies, my dad used to solder capacitors. Then they started replacing whole boards. Then they started replacing whole units. It's not economic to have neither humans nor robots to save one unit. Humans are still better at it, but we'd rather not.
They have to catch you first. They have real criminals to catch first. If you RTFA, you'll see that nobody was arrested for the incidents.
More specifically, it said they didn't call the police in the first place. I guess they're trying to send the message that you're just being a nuisance and we don't care, so there's no point in doing it and maybe avoid a Streisand effect. If that backfires I'm sure they'll call in the police if they take serious damage, widespread damage, have repeat offenders or the service for paying customers is sabotaged. Right now though it seems they're just reporting it to be totally up-front with the regulators about all unwanted contact, not because it matters.
I'd love to see Linux take over since I find it more efficient and powerful for what I need it to do. I just don't see it happening until Linux gets their config to the same level of MCSE/MCSA certificates for clicking through config wizards.
I don't care how pretty the config wizards are, if you're a company and managing systems one by one you're doing it wrong. The problem is that centralized management is nobody's itch to scratch, pretty much all of them are enterprise tools bolted onto a system built by lone hackers for lone hackers. Even with tools like puppet for installation applications aren't built for remote configuration and lock-down. Any serious business functionality on Windows has AD/GPO support, Linux is more of a mess. Many swear to homegrown solutions with ssh and shell scripts and since each solution is pushed by their own company with enterprise add-ons there's no single best practice. With Microsoft it's more the cathedral, you manage a Windows domain the Microsoft way and it's pretty refined.
If you live in Phoenix and want to ride in an a meatless Waymo (uber-killer) taxi you can apply here for the beta.
AFAIK they've moved the engineer to the back seat, but meatless is still an exaggeration. The plan is remote assistance, but I haven't seen them even experiment with that yet. Besides they probably have to win the public confidence first and then say "See, you don't really need me here" later. Particularly if you give it the voice from HAL 9000...
I don't get why people would send their PC to Geeksquad if it had stuff on it that the FBI would be interested in.
Maybe you should go out and meet the full breadth of people, like drop-outs who can barely hold a minimum wage job or live on welfare. They probably don't even understand the danger and even if they did they're incapable of fixing the computer themselves and can't afford to throw it away. That is if they even knew they were breaking the law and still remember doing it. You'd be surprised how many have only barely managed to learn some vocational skills while everything else is a blur.
I don't get it either. There is no customer loyalty or lock-in and no network-effect. Many riders use both Uber and Lyft, and readily switch from one to the other based on price and availability. Likewise, many drivers have both apps, and take the first fare from either. When Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin, alternative ride-share companies popup up immediately. The same will happen if Uber tries to raise prices enough to be profitable. The barrier to entry is very low.
It's very low today because all you need is a random dude with a car. Autonomous cars will be a specialty with fleet management and far more likely to be owned and operated by a company. As such their timing is mostly right, build a huge fleet using human drivers and transition into the service side of the SDC revolution. Sure, in theory all the car companies working on SDCs could launch their own taxi service but it's not their core business and it's far more likely at least some will want to partner with someone. Particularly if you consider the possibility of hybrid service like SDCs taking you to/from the edge of their geo-fenced area and human-operated taxis taking you the rest of the way or that when the SDC has some sort of silly problem you can't solve by remote you send a human driver to get the job done as customer service.
That said I'm not sure I'm buying the narrative. It would mean ceding a lot of control over to Uber, when the SDC companies could fairly easily turn that around and say we will hire operators for our service. It's the Waymo Taxi service, if we're not happy with your performance we'll give you the boot and hire somebody else. If they let Uber be the gateway I'd call that a mistake on the order of IBM letting Microsoft be the OS vendor. Then the car companies are the expendable ones and as more SDCs go online Uber can mix and match and push prices. But hey that happened, so stupid things can happen again...
Oh I wish that were actually true. My day job is running a company that does assembly work and we hire a fair amount of what could reasonably be called unskilled labor. For the unit volumes we produce (we make smaller quantities of a wide variety of products) there is no machine that could possibly economically replace these workers nor will there be one anytime soon.
Obviously there will always be a phase of low-volume prototyping, so there will always be business for a company like that. But when you consider that we're 7-8 billion on this planet there's very few items we really need just thirty of. Maybe to my generation it's not that noticeable but my dad has from time to time commented on how amazingly cheap you can buy small electronics, power tools and such. It's almost always from China, probably part of some huge production run where they just thought "Well if we aggregate the whole global demand and undercut the competition with automation then we can sell a hundred thousand units and make it work." even if it's quite niche.
I'm probably stating the obvious to you, but if small production runs become relatively more expensive then we're going to try avoiding them with more computer simulations, VR, 3D printing, modular reuse so even though it can't take over the jobs it can take away the jobs. Particularly that it might be cheaper to just do overkill than designing one bespoke solution for every variation, even if technically it would have been cheaper in large volume. I have some stories from friends in the construction industry about bespoke, place-built work vs pre-made assembly-line modules, that humans are better at the former doesn't necessarily make it the future...
That comes down to 17280 a year. The machine will still be more cost-efficient that a human being
Well, except that all it does is flip the burger... it doesn't put raw patties on the oven, it doesn't season it, it doesn't put cheese on it. And I doubt it's got any capacity to tell when something's wrong and stop and/or fix it. It doesn't come close to doing the full job. Robots do great for high volume production, like you want to churn out a million iPhones. But Momentum Machines showed off their burger-making robot in 2012 and it's still not here, this flipper is like 1% of the process. By all means automation is real... but this "we'll all be out of a job in five years" hyperbole is too much. Sure if you're young enough to be planning a career many decades out or what your kids will do when they grow up maybe it's a big deal. But when you see how much they struggle to automate the jobs even high school drop-outs do we're not going to have "I, robot" style assistants in my lifetime.
Trade wars usually consist of both sides shooting themselves in the foot. But they can consist of shooting the other guy in the leg while only blowing off a couple of your own toes. It would be interesting to see a trade war like event where one side is a multinational corporation rather than a country's government.
It depends on whether these companies hold something unique or whether it'll basically just be a market up for grabs, in most case it's the latter. It's pretty easy to be China's Google, eBay, Facebook or Amazon if the "real deal" withdraws from the competition. As long as you can give lip service to free market economy while really stacking the deck, I'd say the government wins this one hands down. A government can afford to be sub-optimal, for example after we in Norway gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo they put the relation to us in the freezer and kept it there for years. Was there profitable business opportunities? Yes. Could they afford to skip us and just trade with somebody else, even if they weren't the best offer? Also yes.
Take cars for example, there's been threats of import taxes and whatnot. Can Europe do fine with Audi and BMW? Yes. Can US do fine with Ford and Chevrolet? Yes. Can Asia do fine with Hyundai and Kia? Yes. One particular brand of car is entirely expendable. Free trade economists will of course say that's sub-optimal... but there's a long way between that and the Soviet style plan economy. It's a dirty fight which is why there's people trying to make rules... but if involved in a street brawl and not a boxing match I wouldn't play by Marquess of Queensberry Rules. They're for when the other guy is also playing by the rules and there's referees to punish those who don't.
And strictly speaking, restricting missile launchers and grenades is unconstitutional. It's just really hard to find many people who think those restrictions aren't reasonable.
In other news, glenebob is a convicted baby rapist. What? Just exercising my first amendment rights, it doesn't say freedom of truthful speech.
(Disclaimer since the law doesn't actually work that way: The accusation above is totally made up and should not in any way be taken seriously.)
I'm not exactly what Google's actual motivation was for fiber. Did they have some plan to sniff traffic to feed to their advertising platform somehow?
I think it was just to migrate customers from local applications, local storage and broadcast media to web services, cloud services and streaming services. I doubt they really wanted to take the market, just shake it up so there'd be more potential Google customers. No Google fiber here in Norway, but damn it's accelerating fast.
Latest stats: 4% under 4 Mbps 10% under 8 Mbps 25% under 16 Mbps Median: 43.2 Mbps Average: 80.9 Mbps Gigabit: 0.5%
Heck, even my parents who barely do anything online can't get under 10 Mbps service on their cable now...
Such a shame there are nefarious people who do these DDOS. What a huge waste of time and resources by their target entities to defeat the attacks.
On the bright side, what survives is strong. Around the turn of the century/. was infamous for having its own DDoS effect, these days it takes huge malicious effort to bring down a site. There's a war on but it's rare that the bad guys win...
Also both aging and milage based depreciation are front-loaded, so the value drops quickly for the first few years, and the first 10k-20k miles. After than, the real depreciation per mile driven is much less.
True, but that's offset by relatively low maintenance costs and warranty coverage. The costly replacements, big repairs, downtime and hassle tends to be towards the end. There's obviously a premium paid for driving around in new cars but there's also good reasons why the drop is biggest early on. That said, not everybody drive their cars to their "potential" so you can get old cars with low mileage and put lots of miles on them quite cheaply. But if you're going to own the car from new to wreck then deprecation is just a theoretical distribution, you paid the car in full at the beginning and is left with nothing in the end.
If you're not trying to make Uber a career choice but something you do a few months between jobs and you need the car anyway I'd probably look more at what sunk costs you already have and the delta-value. Like okay this is my car with 40k miles on it, this is my car with 50k miles on it. Those 10k miles will cost me A in value (based on second hand car market), B in gas (bad MPG = bad idea) and C in extra consumables/maintenance. Driving 10k miles for Uber will give me D in income, net profit D-(A+B+C).
go into a food court or starbucks and you will see the problem. people binging on sugar daily and then wondering why they get sick. some cultures eat nothing but carbs and think it's good to be overweight
Well it's more the latter than the former, nothing wrong with carbs if you intend to burn them. It's eating lots of sugar with your ass firmly planted in your car seat, office chair and living room couch that's the problem. And you can get plenty fat on pizza with all the toppings, overeating is a much bigger problem than sugar... though of course it doesn't help.
A common issue with these wage calculations is - what happens when you are logged into the app but there are no fares? If you count that time as working, then your hourly rate will be quite low. But are you really working if the app is on and you are just waiting for a fare to show up?
Well how practical is it to be doing anything else, accept the fare, drop whatever you're doing, get in your car and make the pickup? And when that fare brings you to the other side of town you can either pick up a new fare or drive home on your own dime, not much choice then. I don't think a retail clerk has time off even if the store is empty for a few minutes, I don't think a taxi driver has time off if he's idling in his car waiting for the next fare. That said, if Uber were forced to introduce a "shift" model with guaranteed minimum wage it'd be an exclusive deal and they'd be in charge of when they offer you work and what you do on their dime, you couldn't simply demand to log in and collect pay when you want and they'd probably assign you rides. It wouldn't be like now, except with more pay.
Slashdot Mirror
He's not capable of understanding that he has done anything wrong. Any good lawyer will play that like a fiddle. He's a narcissistic psychopath or some other melange of serious mental disorders. No judge or jury will be able to hold him legally accountable for his actions. He'll maybe get a stay in a psych ward somewhere, and then be freed when the psychiatrists get bored with him.
Not very likely. The insanity defense is used for people with delusions, hallucinations, compulsions, psychotic episodes and such, that is to say people who lack the capacity to understand and/or control their actions. Not feeling bad about your crimes, poor impulse control or stalking/obsessive behavior is generally not enough for an insanity defense in the US, at least not after the 1984 Insanity Defense Reform Act. Besides it's more like a life sentence, the whole system is rigged against ever getting out because even if the professionals think you're fit for release it goes back to the DA who wants to be tough on crime, a court that'll mostly go along and a general public who isn't eager to have former mental patients with a history of criminal acts back on the streets.
In other countries yes, like here in Norway if you're found not guilty by reasons of insanity you're per definition not a criminal and the justice system has no more say. So if they put you on medication and the medication works it's their call whether to release you. Re-offending statistics indicate they're generally cured, it's mostly people's feelings of justice that are hurt. If you suffer a heart attack while driving and run over some random, innocent pedestrians we kinda accept it's an ill body and not an act of terror. It's a lot harder to accept that the raving loon that went around stabbing people is the result of an ill mind, a sickness that has been cured and that the person is no more guilty of that than the one that suffered a heart attack. For a sane person it's hard to imagine "something else" taking control.
So if some companies are patent trolls, does this make him a FOSS troll? Glad he's "out" because his actions definitively didn't reflect the goals of open source software.
Well as Linus himself has pointed out with regards to the GPL, you don't have to agree to the principles behind it just the actual text of the license. Yes, he's being non-cooperative and he's prosecuting every violation to the full extent of the law, but from my reading his copyright was actually violated. He just took the injunction one step too far to include all copies of Linux and not just the violating copies of Linux containing his code, like he's not a "co-author" that all versions of Linux derives from. He made a contribution and that branch forward is "poisoned" with his code, not the whole tree.
I'm not a Linux user, but I know that /. used to be full of enthusiastic Linux users. They're certainly not here, anymore. Where'd they go?
Not sure they went anywhere. Linux owns the server, the supercomputer, the cell phone, the set top box....pretty much everywhere but the desktop really. But the whole OSS revolution? The enthusiasm? Most people chose the "free" upgrade to Win10, just like they chose the "free" service from Facebook. And I'm sure a lot of people would like to comment on why they should have and why they didn't - but they didn't. I talk to some ordinary people and in their mind the world has gone cloud. Like, why would you *not* upload your photos to iCloud. Then you can re-download them if you lose your phone, duuuh. It's like you're a moron if you don't and a tin foil hat wearer if you question the security.
And realistically, I see the net is closing. Pretty much everything you do is electronically logged these days and nobody cares. All it takes is a certain amount of.... well, indifference unless you're a *real* threat to the government. That was the fault of the plan economy, trying to control too much. You can be rich and famous in China, you just can't be a threat to the one-party system. In the Western world you can be gay or a jew... until there's another Hitler in power. It's this illusion that we've become so evolved that even though we give the government all this information it'll never be abused. All I can say it's that it's true until it isn't. And then it's too late.
Yup... latest EFI proficiency stats had 5 countries trending up, 44 slightly up, 24 slightly down and 0 trending down. And of the 80 countries they measured China was #36 between Costa Rica and Japan rising quickly (50.94 -> 52.45 in rating), one place from being in the "medium proficiency" group. They're considerably higher rated than Mexico at #44 now. And the age distribution trend is quite clear, English proficiency is in clear growth. I think the biggest reason is the Internet, I remember when I grew up calling long distance was expensive and international like super expensive. English language newspapers were a rarity. Movies and series had subtitles, books had translations. I learned English, but the only real practical application I had was on the computer because software was in English. It was all pretty theoretical until you suddenly could browse/download/chat with people from all over the world.
And I think the rest of the world is pretty much in agreement too, even though the US is invaded by Spanish it's a pretty obvious second choice for Spanish-speaking. Europe is clearly English-aligned (96% now learn English, with Chinese not even in the top 5), so is Australia, India and much of Africa as former colonies. To the degree that anyone is learning a second language in South America it's also English. That kinda leaves the Middle East - which mostly speak Arabic and very little else - and the rest of Asia. But the Russia-China relationship is only lukewarm with few bi-lingual, with Japan it's on the freezing point, Pakistan is in the Arabic camp... even if Chinese is seeing a little bit of spread in SE Asia it's not gaining any global influence whatsoever.
P.S. Don't get me wrong there's a lot of mono-lingual or who speak one of the "smaller" world languages, so it's not like English is universal or anything. The highest estimates are 1.5 billion, which means 80% of the world doesn't speak English. I mean you can do just fine living in Japan and only know Japanese or Thailand and know Thai or Russia and know Russian or Brazil and know Portuguese. But they're not really in the running for global language.
OTOH, the secret to never accomplishing anything is to stop trying.
Yeah, even though it's ridiculously hard I think research into high energy power is essential, you can always say we should become greener and smarter but in the end physics dictate that it takes a certain amount of power to drive all the household appliances. Sure for a CPU/GPU you can improve calculations/watt but for a water boiler it takes 1 calorie of energy to heat 1g of water 1C and if you can change that you'll have a closet full of Nobel prizes. If we want to give ~10 billion people a modern standard of living we need energy. If we want to start a Mars colony we need energy. If we want to explore the universe we need energy. I don't know how feasible it is to make a miniature sun here on earth, but it's one helluva power source. It's the kind of thing it's probably worth mastering even if it takes us 100 years or 1000 years. I'll admit I'd like to see results a little sooner, but it's like the people researching longevity and immortality. For humanity it looks like a smart topic of research even if it won't arrive in time to save my ass.
Of course you will always have speculative and sham research looking for grants. You will always have dead ends and people beating a dead horse. But I feel pretty confident that these researchers believe in what they're doing and is making an honest attempt. There's a helluva lot of medical researchers trying to find the cure for cancer, many of them won't achieve much at all. But I think the vast majority is genuinely trying. Comparing them to a politician posturing for his reputation while not realistically even beginning to fund the necessary programs is grossly unfair.
It all depends on how advanced automation you want to build. The simplest form is purely mechanical operation, no input or output validation and no self-integrity checks. This is how power tools work, push the button and the drill starts drilling. From there you can add sensors, like a thermostat adjusts the output relative to an input. You can add self-integrity checks like a photocopier complaining about a paper jam. Any coin-operated machine validates that what you put in is actually coins. For an automated lock add contacts to sense if the door is locked or unlocked and if it doesn't follow control signals report a lock malfunction. And you can enforce service intervals with timers, if necessary with sensors too that you've removed all the pieces that should be removed or that the bin you're supposed to empty weighs that of an empty bin. Unless you can automate the whole cleaning cycle too.
There's no revolution but there's been a constant evolution towards more and more "intelligent" automation. There's a reason getting the error codes out of automobiles was a big deal, because very often the car knows what's wrong these days. Advances in robot vision means you're now automatically processing variable input like raw fish and produce. More and more advanced machinery refuses to operate when it detects an out-of-spec condition, not because there's a human hitting the stop/abort switch. For example the SpaceX launches, it's usually been the computer halting the countdown not human intervention. Of course this has nothing to do with AI and machine learning, it's just logic built into the system. But when we're trying to make it do one thing under a very narrow set of conditions, that's plenty.
Service jobs require providing services to people, whether that's a burger or fixing their plumbing. This all requires human interaction and that robot is never going to take over that job.
Really? If I enter my order on a touch screen, it's cooked by a robot and delivered in a self-service kiosk and it's the same burger... who really appreciates the social interaction with the McD/BK staff? Usually my interaction is "Next, please" "Hi, I'll have [order]." "Anything else?" "No, that's it." "That'll be $X" *pay* *wait* "[order]" "Thanks" *eat* *put trash in bin on way out*. If you want to talk about something that could be replaced with a very small shell script it's the social interaction. I don't know how it could possibly get less personal or less meaningful. And you don't go there for the culinary experience, you go there for standardized grub. A robot is perfect for giving you a consistent experience. Of course if I go to a high-end restaurant with a waiter and a real chef my expectations are different, but it's different leagues.
And even three star Michelin restaurants have "standard" dishes, like they're training the staff to exactly replicate whatever the master chef has cooked up. Granted it's an entirely different level of service but it's not really that unique, personal service that we'd like to imagine. If I go to a steakhouse and get a prime steak cooked to perfection I'll probably put up with a whole lot of other downsides, whatever you think the service is I think it's a small auxiliary. The service is not why I go to your steakhouse and poor service probably won't make me leave as long as the product tastes to high heaven. And the product can be made by a robot.
Probably one of those things, you don't know why you'd even need it, until you have it, then you won't want to live without it. Or you're not demanding enough to even notice either way.
Or it's just not convenient to split the bits that could use Optane. I had the same issue with SSD/HDD, apart from bulk media (photos, audio, video) the primary space consumer is games. And a lot of that is cut scenes and textures and music loops and voice acting etc. that don't benefit a lot, while the main executable, scripts, maps, UI elements etc. is 1-5% of the game. But as long as Steam doesn't give me an easy way to say this 1GB go on SSD, the remaining 19GB go on HDD it's not worth the hassle, let's just wait until the price drops so I can put all 20GB on SSD. And I think Optane will be the same, it could be useful for a few things but most of it would be wasted.
No. It is more like handing them an electronic chess game that enforces the rules of the game without telling them what they are up front. They could not make up their own game in this case, and the learning of proper game play would be possible.
Yeah except chess has such a low branching factor you'd run into a mate by accident, technically black can win by mate in two. I just couldn't come up with a better example where the goal would be totally incomprehensible without someone telling you what the objective is, so I added that complexity to equal that of the computer finding the winning way though the game by accident.
This is like handing a chess set to an isolated Amazon tribe and only tell them "sorry, invalid game" until they make a valid checkmate. They'd probably never even find the opening position, much less make any correct moves and certainly not how to mate. They'd just randomly do things until they got bored or made up their own game. There's no reason a machine should expect "getting to the top" to be a valid objective without a whole lot of insight into the human condition and "because it's there".
The mechanics plug in a diagnostic machine, it figures out what part to replace, and a person replaces it. It's only a matter of time before that final step is automated. Once you train one robot to do the work, you can have a million robots doing that same task for the cost of building the hardware. The leap from robot manufacturing to robot repair is a lot smaller than you seem to believe.
Actually, this is the part where the leap is much bigger than most people believe. Sure, we have tons of industrial-size food production. But they're huge one trick ponies, any decent pastry chef can make all of these and much, much more in a huge variety of kitchens with different equipment. Creating a robot that's flexible enough makes the costs fly off the charts. Of course we have people selling fantasies of a generic cooking robot but but reality is more like Flippy - for $60,000 a robot arm will flip burgers for you. Same with repairs, creating a "mechanic robot" is going to be a multi-millon dollar unit.
Look at something like Amazon's robotics challenge and you'll realize how far we're from human finesse and flexibility. Acceptable for a robot back-end where nobody cares if it takes half an hour to move a small box of items and still fail at several of them - notice the video is 4x, slow it down to 25% and it's like watching paint dry. It's something human fingers would have finished in a minute with no item too complex. The main killer for repair companies have been mass production of huge assemblies, my dad used to solder capacitors. Then they started replacing whole boards. Then they started replacing whole units. It's not economic to have neither humans nor robots to save one unit. Humans are still better at it, but we'd rather not.
They have to catch you first. They have real criminals to catch first. If you RTFA, you'll see that nobody was arrested for the incidents.
More specifically, it said they didn't call the police in the first place. I guess they're trying to send the message that you're just being a nuisance and we don't care, so there's no point in doing it and maybe avoid a Streisand effect. If that backfires I'm sure they'll call in the police if they take serious damage, widespread damage, have repeat offenders or the service for paying customers is sabotaged. Right now though it seems they're just reporting it to be totally up-front with the regulators about all unwanted contact, not because it matters.
I'd love to see Linux take over since I find it more efficient and powerful for what I need it to do. I just don't see it happening until Linux gets their config to the same level of MCSE/MCSA certificates for clicking through config wizards.
I don't care how pretty the config wizards are, if you're a company and managing systems one by one you're doing it wrong. The problem is that centralized management is nobody's itch to scratch, pretty much all of them are enterprise tools bolted onto a system built by lone hackers for lone hackers. Even with tools like puppet for installation applications aren't built for remote configuration and lock-down. Any serious business functionality on Windows has AD/GPO support, Linux is more of a mess. Many swear to homegrown solutions with ssh and shell scripts and since each solution is pushed by their own company with enterprise add-ons there's no single best practice. With Microsoft it's more the cathedral, you manage a Windows domain the Microsoft way and it's pretty refined.
If you live in Phoenix and want to ride in an a meatless Waymo (uber-killer) taxi you can apply here for the beta.
AFAIK they've moved the engineer to the back seat, but meatless is still an exaggeration. The plan is remote assistance, but I haven't seen them even experiment with that yet. Besides they probably have to win the public confidence first and then say "See, you don't really need me here" later. Particularly if you give it the voice from HAL 9000...
I don't get why people would send their PC to Geeksquad if it had stuff on it that the FBI would be interested in.
Maybe you should go out and meet the full breadth of people, like drop-outs who can barely hold a minimum wage job or live on welfare. They probably don't even understand the danger and even if they did they're incapable of fixing the computer themselves and can't afford to throw it away. That is if they even knew they were breaking the law and still remember doing it. You'd be surprised how many have only barely managed to learn some vocational skills while everything else is a blur.
I don't get it either. There is no customer loyalty or lock-in and no network-effect. Many riders use both Uber and Lyft, and readily switch from one to the other based on price and availability. Likewise, many drivers have both apps, and take the first fare from either. When Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin, alternative ride-share companies popup up immediately. The same will happen if Uber tries to raise prices enough to be profitable. The barrier to entry is very low.
It's very low today because all you need is a random dude with a car. Autonomous cars will be a specialty with fleet management and far more likely to be owned and operated by a company. As such their timing is mostly right, build a huge fleet using human drivers and transition into the service side of the SDC revolution. Sure, in theory all the car companies working on SDCs could launch their own taxi service but it's not their core business and it's far more likely at least some will want to partner with someone. Particularly if you consider the possibility of hybrid service like SDCs taking you to/from the edge of their geo-fenced area and human-operated taxis taking you the rest of the way or that when the SDC has some sort of silly problem you can't solve by remote you send a human driver to get the job done as customer service.
That said I'm not sure I'm buying the narrative. It would mean ceding a lot of control over to Uber, when the SDC companies could fairly easily turn that around and say we will hire operators for our service. It's the Waymo Taxi service, if we're not happy with your performance we'll give you the boot and hire somebody else. If they let Uber be the gateway I'd call that a mistake on the order of IBM letting Microsoft be the OS vendor. Then the car companies are the expendable ones and as more SDCs go online Uber can mix and match and push prices. But hey that happened, so stupid things can happen again...
Oh I wish that were actually true. My day job is running a company that does assembly work and we hire a fair amount of what could reasonably be called unskilled labor. For the unit volumes we produce (we make smaller quantities of a wide variety of products) there is no machine that could possibly economically replace these workers nor will there be one anytime soon.
Obviously there will always be a phase of low-volume prototyping, so there will always be business for a company like that. But when you consider that we're 7-8 billion on this planet there's very few items we really need just thirty of. Maybe to my generation it's not that noticeable but my dad has from time to time commented on how amazingly cheap you can buy small electronics, power tools and such. It's almost always from China, probably part of some huge production run where they just thought "Well if we aggregate the whole global demand and undercut the competition with automation then we can sell a hundred thousand units and make it work." even if it's quite niche.
I'm probably stating the obvious to you, but if small production runs become relatively more expensive then we're going to try avoiding them with more computer simulations, VR, 3D printing, modular reuse so even though it can't take over the jobs it can take away the jobs. Particularly that it might be cheaper to just do overkill than designing one bespoke solution for every variation, even if technically it would have been cheaper in large volume. I have some stories from friends in the construction industry about bespoke, place-built work vs pre-made assembly-line modules, that humans are better at the former doesn't necessarily make it the future...
That comes down to 17280 a year. The machine will still be more cost-efficient that a human being
Well, except that all it does is flip the burger... it doesn't put raw patties on the oven, it doesn't season it, it doesn't put cheese on it. And I doubt it's got any capacity to tell when something's wrong and stop and/or fix it. It doesn't come close to doing the full job. Robots do great for high volume production, like you want to churn out a million iPhones. But Momentum Machines showed off their burger-making robot in 2012 and it's still not here, this flipper is like 1% of the process. By all means automation is real... but this "we'll all be out of a job in five years" hyperbole is too much. Sure if you're young enough to be planning a career many decades out or what your kids will do when they grow up maybe it's a big deal. But when you see how much they struggle to automate the jobs even high school drop-outs do we're not going to have "I, robot" style assistants in my lifetime.
Trade wars usually consist of both sides shooting themselves in the foot. But they can consist of shooting the other guy in the leg while only blowing off a couple of your own toes. It would be interesting to see a trade war like event where one side is a multinational corporation rather than a country's government.
It depends on whether these companies hold something unique or whether it'll basically just be a market up for grabs, in most case it's the latter. It's pretty easy to be China's Google, eBay, Facebook or Amazon if the "real deal" withdraws from the competition. As long as you can give lip service to free market economy while really stacking the deck, I'd say the government wins this one hands down. A government can afford to be sub-optimal, for example after we in Norway gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo they put the relation to us in the freezer and kept it there for years. Was there profitable business opportunities? Yes. Could they afford to skip us and just trade with somebody else, even if they weren't the best offer? Also yes.
Take cars for example, there's been threats of import taxes and whatnot. Can Europe do fine with Audi and BMW? Yes. Can US do fine with Ford and Chevrolet? Yes. Can Asia do fine with Hyundai and Kia? Yes. One particular brand of car is entirely expendable. Free trade economists will of course say that's sub-optimal... but there's a long way between that and the Soviet style plan economy. It's a dirty fight which is why there's people trying to make rules... but if involved in a street brawl and not a boxing match I wouldn't play by Marquess of Queensberry Rules. They're for when the other guy is also playing by the rules and there's referees to punish those who don't.
And strictly speaking, restricting missile launchers and grenades is unconstitutional. It's just really hard to find many people who think those restrictions aren't reasonable.
In other news, glenebob is a convicted baby rapist. What? Just exercising my first amendment rights, it doesn't say freedom of truthful speech.
(Disclaimer since the law doesn't actually work that way: The accusation above is totally made up and should not in any way be taken seriously.)
I'm not exactly what Google's actual motivation was for fiber. Did they have some plan to sniff traffic to feed to their advertising platform somehow?
I think it was just to migrate customers from local applications, local storage and broadcast media to web services, cloud services and streaming services. I doubt they really wanted to take the market, just shake it up so there'd be more potential Google customers. No Google fiber here in Norway, but damn it's accelerating fast.
Latest stats:
4% under 4 Mbps
10% under 8 Mbps
25% under 16 Mbps
Median: 43.2 Mbps
Average: 80.9 Mbps
Gigabit: 0.5%
Heck, even my parents who barely do anything online can't get under 10 Mbps service on their cable now...
Such a shame there are nefarious people who do these DDOS. What a huge waste of time and resources by their target entities to defeat the attacks.
On the bright side, what survives is strong. Around the turn of the century /. was infamous for having its own DDoS effect, these days it takes huge malicious effort to bring down a site. There's a war on but it's rare that the bad guys win...
Also both aging and milage based depreciation are front-loaded, so the value drops quickly for the first few years, and the first 10k-20k miles. After than, the real depreciation per mile driven is much less.
True, but that's offset by relatively low maintenance costs and warranty coverage. The costly replacements, big repairs, downtime and hassle tends to be towards the end. There's obviously a premium paid for driving around in new cars but there's also good reasons why the drop is biggest early on. That said, not everybody drive their cars to their "potential" so you can get old cars with low mileage and put lots of miles on them quite cheaply. But if you're going to own the car from new to wreck then deprecation is just a theoretical distribution, you paid the car in full at the beginning and is left with nothing in the end.
If you're not trying to make Uber a career choice but something you do a few months between jobs and you need the car anyway I'd probably look more at what sunk costs you already have and the delta-value. Like okay this is my car with 40k miles on it, this is my car with 50k miles on it. Those 10k miles will cost me A in value (based on second hand car market), B in gas (bad MPG = bad idea) and C in extra consumables/maintenance. Driving 10k miles for Uber will give me D in income, net profit D-(A+B+C).
go into a food court or starbucks and you will see the problem. people binging on sugar daily and then wondering why they get sick. some cultures eat nothing but carbs and think it's good to be overweight
Well it's more the latter than the former, nothing wrong with carbs if you intend to burn them. It's eating lots of sugar with your ass firmly planted in your car seat, office chair and living room couch that's the problem. And you can get plenty fat on pizza with all the toppings, overeating is a much bigger problem than sugar... though of course it doesn't help.
A common issue with these wage calculations is - what happens when you are logged into the app but there are no fares? If you count that time as working, then your hourly rate will be quite low. But are you really working if the app is on and you are just waiting for a fare to show up?
Well how practical is it to be doing anything else, accept the fare, drop whatever you're doing, get in your car and make the pickup? And when that fare brings you to the other side of town you can either pick up a new fare or drive home on your own dime, not much choice then. I don't think a retail clerk has time off even if the store is empty for a few minutes, I don't think a taxi driver has time off if he's idling in his car waiting for the next fare. That said, if Uber were forced to introduce a "shift" model with guaranteed minimum wage it'd be an exclusive deal and they'd be in charge of when they offer you work and what you do on their dime, you couldn't simply demand to log in and collect pay when you want and they'd probably assign you rides. It wouldn't be like now, except with more pay.