Sure, but this is a TEST flight, so I would argue that it's more important to start with a smaller payload. That way you can work down from safe to probably safe and have less risk of losing the test vehicles.
Well, it's less risk to the test vehicle but the more your final configuration deviates from the current configuration the higher the risk of some unexpected side effects. When you can count the number of tests on one hand with fingers to spare it's better to fail on the first test and say that's what tests are for than fail on the second test and raise concerns that it has hidden flaws that might kill missions at random. Despite all that Elon Musk said to manage expectations they did not send a $100 million dollar rocket out there to blow up an equally expensive pad on a 50-50 or 2/3rds chance. They've extensively tested every component and subsystem they could find, simulated it a million times with computers and it would have passed with flying colors.
This is the final integration test, not the first test. The rest is that X factor, what haven't we taken into consideration. Are our assumptions, models and formulas flawed in some way. He can't really lose talking it down, if it blows up on the pad well space is hard. If it works, he's pulled off some amazing feat. So I'd want something very close to the production model flying, as long as the odds remain good you'll get your test data. And in that respect this was an entirely insignificant failure, they got telemetry on everything right up to the final impact. Making this part of the mission fail-safe wouldn't really have any big benefit. Just downsides in redesign, if this was what they thought was the right amount.
Updated figures as Musk just said $150M for fully expendable heavy. With 63,800 kg to LEO that would put price/kg at $2343 and launch cost of ISS at roughly one billion instead of two. Still more expensive to launch your silverware into orbit than the actual silver though.
OTOH it's 420000 kg worth of materials already in space. The Falcon Heavy takes $90M for 8000 kg to GEO or ~20000 kg to LEO, so it's 21 launches = ~2B in launch costs alone. If you need a space station a few booster shots are pretty cheap by comparison, the problem is what's a profitable business in space. The Falcon Heavy launch costs work out to $4500/kg, which means you'd pretty much have to produce solid gold to turn a profit. Maybe if you could grow huge gemstones, create some crazy nano-tube materials or run zero-g experiments people would pay tons of money for but most likely it can be done cheaper on earth.
The other market is information, but that market is pretty well tapped out by communication satellites, broadcast satellites, GPS etc. and one ISS in a totally useless orbit isn't worth much at all. It's got man rating, but I don't think the market for space tourism is ready. And I don't think there's much commercial interest in astronaut experience just yet. Or ever, I mean it's not the 1960s anymore and rockets fly like it's CGI so you'd mostly be cargo to Mars or the Moon or whatever. And you can't simulate that on the ISS, low gravity is very different from zero gravity. Then again, maybe Musk will need a staging area....
Somehow I don't think Razer's sales are impacted much by "IT professionals" but more what 15yo "leet" gamers with LED Christmas trees for PCs think is cool. Or maybe what they're favorite twitch gamer uses to get that 0.002 second egde on the competition.
But I did a quick glance at the wiki, etc, and still have no idea what the purpose of this thing is.
Yeah, it could really use half a line about what it's actually doing in the initial summary. But if you'd care to scroll down just a little:
Primary Payload On-board UPSat, the primary payload, a science unit is integrated. The science unit (designed by the University of Oslo and supplied through the Von Karman Institute as part of the QB50 program) will be used for plasma measurements during the mission duration.
You could still buy the trinkets but they should be a direct cash transaction that you pay the exact amount for. That way you know much you're paying and you're not buying an excess of virtual scrip in order to do it.
To me that sounds really annoying and like it'd give less overview to charge a few cents to my credit card every time I want something. For me I think it's better to have a few, bigger commit decisions to say "Do I really want to spend $20 on star berries?" and if I do well they're basically written off in my mind. By which I mean that even though I may have in-game currency I don't consider it an asset that could be converted back into dollars. More like a beer at the pub, I can drink it or pour it out but I can't put back in the tap and get my money back. And then I'm in a game, in a fantasy world until I run out and have to make another real world decision about real world money again.
It'd also make it harder for a parent to gift a kid some star berries as a reward for something, not free dollars. And in some cases it would be very strange in-game, like in GTA you'd buy supersports cars for a few bucks. The numbers make way more sense if you can buy "GTA-dollars", though I suppose you could just set a fixed multiplier like $1 real-world = $100000 in-game. Still, then all your in-game economics would be tied to real-world economics which would be troublesome for a virtual economy that are more complicated than you buying directly from the game company. I think it complicates more things than it solves, unless you're the guy who buys 500 berries for best value and get tired of the game after 50. But I really don't see how that's a bigger problem in-game than buying something in bulk in the real world and then discovering you didn't want/need it.
It is gambling and it is a cynical attempt to screw the player to pay more money to unlock a game they've already paid for. So I'd be glad if they banned it, though Germany should be aiming for EU wide legislation. I'd also like to see laws that ban virtual currencies which are purchased with real cash.
That would be too much nanny state for me, if you want to spend real world cash on virtual trinkets you should be allowed to do that. We don't generally restrict obsessive real world collectors either. What they should ban - and I really think this is deserving of a blanket ban - is the randomized rewards. You want to sell the loot in the loot boxes individually, so people can see the actual price of what they're buying that's fine. If you want to sell loot boxes then you go under all the same rules and restrictions as lotteries and gambling sites.
The best people are well trained, they have been there and done that, the problem with this is that they already have preconceived notions of how to solve a problem. You do not get true innovation unless you have people that have not been there, and have not done that. These are the people that may have a different idea for achieving a solution, and that is where true innovation comes about.
They're the ones making the news, like "rags to riches" stories. It's true that many people have strong preconceptions about what can be done, how it should be done and the tools/methods/technology to deliver it. But there's there's also quite many professionals who have worked the ins and outs of a system, figured out there has to be a better way and made huge, innovative improvements. That ignorance is some sort of requirement for innovation is a gross exaggeration.
And even when we do have these "nobody had told me it was impossible so I did it" stories these people often have quite a solid professional education. Like maybe it won't be the cancer researcher with 30 years of experience that makes the breakthrough to give us the cure for cancer. But I'd be really surprised if he isn't at least a MD and instead some layman from the street. Which would of course make for an even bigger story if it happened, but it'd be equally unlikely.
Well I'd also argue there's a huge difference between preventing breakdowns and preventing malicious attacks. I mean if you yank out the network cable computers are very stable. Maintenance you can plan for, when somebody will find a bug in your code and release a 0-day exploit is pretty much impossible.
The headline is garbage, but there is some truth in the waterfall of words in that summary: we have become a nation of specialists. Not only are we specialists, but the amount to which we've specialized is actually quite stunning.
I'm not against the idea that a project might need many different competencies and functions. What I am against is the idea that we'll have better solutions if we put it to a popular vote. Because that's my usual experience with "diverse teams that aren't necessarily very bright", to rephrase the argument. Competent people usually know what they know and don't know. Incompetent people go through life like a bull in a china store, they don't mean to break things but they leave disaster in their wake. I've been through that at work, the only reason my part of the system is working is that I've ignored 90% of the "input". Everything else is so buggy and crappy they're considering a rewrite before 1.0 is delivered. Meritocracy is fine, mediocracy is terrible. YMMV.
When it eventually happens anyway, what legal rights will the child have?
This one pretty settled already, doesn't matter if you got a blowjob or even if she found a used tissue... your DNA, your kid. It's more interesting how it plays into one of sci-fi's big themes about growing humans in a lab though. They're making progress on a artificial uterus, my guess is that sometime this century we'll be able to take undeveloped eggs, bring the eggs to maturity, fertilize them and grow babies in a tank. Let the clone wars begin...
No it does not. If you wanted to say that, the first comma would be ommited (sic): "The party included the strippers Bill Clinton and Al Franken." or you would write a colon: "The party included the strippers: Bill Clinton and Al Franken."
The first form doesn't have the same meaning at all, it's like their job description or something. "The party included the singers, Chistina Aguilera and Britney Spears" implies they were performing at the preceding concert or something and were/are "the singers". "The party included the singers Chistina Aguilera and Britney Spears" just means they're singers and at the party. The colon works but exaggerates the pause, like you're making an announcement or something "Introducing the strippers: Bill Clinton and Al Franken." It would look totally out of place in a recount of the party.
Much better not to mix lists and appositives, or use parentheses.
That works for clarity but linguistically it sounds like "oh by the way he's also a 800 year old demigod". It particularly doesn't work well if it's a quote since parentheses are a purely written tool, or if the title you're appending is actually more important than the name like "This is Chingachgook, last of the Mohicans, Cora and Hawkeye." then you're better off splitting it up "This is Chingachgook, last of the Mohicans and that's Cora and Hawkeye." This doesn't resolve the ambiguity between lists and appositivies though, "This is the duke of Eddington, my lord and master" and ""This is the duke of Eddington, my mum and dad" or a version that's neither "This is the duke of Eddington, my bothers and sisters". English quite simply isn't very unambiguous, which is why we don't use it as a programming language.
And your examples make it abundantly clear that in law you should turn lists into actual lists not run-on sentences.
"The acitivites
a) canning b) processing c) preserving d) freezing e) drying f) marketing g) storing h) packaging for shipment i) distribution
of the product groups
a) agricultural produce b) meat and fish products c) perishable foods
are exempt."
Granted, it eats up a lot of vertical space. But it's dead simple for anyone to read and leaves no ambiguity that you really mean an x*y matrix of exceptions. Because even with the Oxford comma there's still doubt in my mind that you can interpret it as general exceptions for activities a)-g) and "packaging for shipment and distribution of agricultural produce; meat and fish products; and perishable foods;" For example a sentence like "buses, trucks and cars over 3500kg" is that "buses, trucks and (cars over 3500kg)" or "(buses, trucks and cars) over 3500kg". It doesn't get clearer by an Oxford comma.
So I take it that means you can't steal electricity, cable television, someone else's internet bandwidth, or any number of other things with no physical or tangible component?
If you steal electricity a power plant has to make more, it's consumed just like the water from the tap. How is that not a physical, tangible resource? While the signal in a cable loop is passing through anyway, you're only listening in like turning on your radio. Unauthorized use of bandwidth is displacing other people's traffic, though I think this is more like identity theft / fraud where you trick an ISP into making virtual deliveries instead of physical deliveries from Amazon.
A strict definition of theft may require that the person who has had something stolen has been deprived of something of value to them, but there's no requirement in the definition that the something necessarily be tangible, only that it has value.
I think you've confused "strict" with "casual" because we do use it about anything of value that we've been deprived of or taken without permission, but "he stole my girlfriend" or "he stole a kiss" has never been a criminal offense. Unless he literally kidnapped her, but that still wouldn't be theft. And in these #metoo times maybe the latter will be soon, but anyway... Theft in a legal sense has always been about ownership and possession.
Consider copyright, for example, which is supposed to entail the exclusive right to control who may make copies of a work.
Yes so when you created a new right you also created a new crime violating that right - copyright infringement. Legally, it's not theft. And despite the newspeak, IPR is not property. But like all things of value we casually use words like that, same way we say "he stole the combination to my safe" even though it was more likely copied. But when you're trying to use that casual definition in a legal or moral debate you're only making a fool of yourself.
So, when the summary says [an authorized on-demand movies and TV shows streaming service] it really means "unauthorized?"
Well probably not 100% illegal just as you could find Linux CDs on The Pirate Bay. I guess he's trying to hide between a very thin veil that says he only instructed people how to use the site, he didn't explicitly tell them to pirate anything. That generally doesn't work, if you're the mob's accountant you're still part of the mob. This guy must have basically been their marketing department, this is not your random peep telling a buddy where to find it. It's large scale commercial gain.
Well it depends on whether it's a book turned series/movie or series/movie turned book. A few I've done both, like LotR or Fire & Ice. But as far I as know/care, something like Star Trek has always been TV. If there's spin-off books of James T. Kirk or Jean-Luc Picard I don't really care. And some series like the Sword of Shannara the series is to me a completely different beast. I only saw Firefly as a TV series... to me, that's my canon. So if there are follow-up books... meh.
So when you discover this, you're going to say "OH WELL, Looks like it's out there! I guess I'll just sit on my thumbs and accept it because I have no recourse!"
Can you stop mass market distribution? Yes. Can you stop underground distribution in iPhone cracking circles? Hell no. This is mostly a show to act like they're taking it seriously and law enforcement is cracking down on it and whatever but... nope. It's still security theater, it's not going to protect against any of the actual threads.
I'm sure you'd like it but there's two critical numbers you lack, one is what degree of off-balance power configuration is possible while still having a stable rocket. The other is the probability of a cascading engine failure, engines going out is not the biggest problem it's taking the rocket out with them. So you have to know the exact nature of the engines, just the number of them doesn't say much.
back in the days of world war 1 and 2 one man was just one man. Now adays 1 man can easily be responsible for the murder or millions at the press of a button. Someone like trump could trigger the deaths of more people than died in the entirety of WWII in a matter of seconds with only a handful of people needed to blindly obey the order.
Yeah, it's not only AI but technology in general. Like it only takes a few NSA thugs and an NSL letter to wiretap the whole country, do the same with cell phone networks, banks and Facebook and you'll know pretty much everything about where people are, who they're talking to, what they're spending money on and so on. But going from passive listening to active management through AI would bring a whole different level of centralized control.
The clumsy, ad hoc, and poorly considered dimensions of Slashdot's moderation are an excellent example of how NOT to do it. Take that "troll" dimension, for example. (I wish someone would.) What is it supposed to mean?
Well, they boil down to +1 or -1 anyway so whether you use troll or flamebait or offtopic or overrated hardly matters. Those who tend to abuse it the most always pick overrated anyway. I think trolling is pretty well defined, but to each his own. Personally I'd probably just disconnect them and have mod points basically be "more people should see this" or "less people should see this" and have the rest be like a popular emotion-vote. It'd probably have to be a mix of descriptive - this post is informative / insightful / important / crazy / trolling / flamebait / crap and reactive - this post makes me feel happy / sad / angry / afraid / disgusted / surprised / excited etc. and actually I'm thinking maybe that is two dimensions.... a post can both be insightful and make me feel happy/angry/sad.
Why be scared of A.I.s when human brains are already the most complicated thing in the known universe, are impossible to fully understand, and already run everything?
Because one man is still just one man, even if millions worship him as a living god. There's layers upon layers of sycophants that needed to buy into the idea of Hitler's Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union and the regime has to give them perks to buy that loyalty. Even the common folks can't be treated too poorly or you might have a popular revolt. And it's sort of implied that a human would want human subjects to rule.
An AI doesn't need people, just look at the Terminator series. Same with aliens and Independence Day. And nature plain old doesn't care if it's Armageddon for us. But I think the story line that Skynet will suddenly achieve consciousness and try to kill us is still fantasy. I do think AI is heading us towards an Elysium future though, where you have trillionaires with computer systems that act as their middle management. Like say Uber, you have a lot of drivers, some support staff in IT, accounting, legal etc. and a few executives but the day to day management of drivers is done by the app.
I think we'll see more and more of that where there's an algorithm in the middle between the people on top and people on the bottom. And that it'll lead to a disconnect where you have like a small ruling elite and a whole lot of people who suck it up. Which kinda sounds like a rehash of old times - it was a long way from the plebs to the Roman emperor - but I think this time it'll be different because with robots and AI they can probably disconnect more or less completely and let the computers run the numbers. It's a lot easier when you don't need to get your hands dirty.
With your browser trusting 600 CAs by default it certainly has absolutely no value without DNSSEC and DANE.
All it takes is a few webmasters to take note of their security certificate fingerprint and check it from a random home/mobile connection or proxy and you'd see alarm bells go off if someone was trying to MITM the world. With HTTP they can just snoop on a fiber optic cable and nobody would know. So when it comes to protecting everyday people visiting everyday sites I think it has an effect.
A "real" AI would be the ultimate psychopath: Intelligence without any kind of conscience. Pretty much like a corporation, just way more efficient.
Codified behavior is already psychopath-like in that it doesn't care. If you're an Uber driver you can't reason or plead or get any kind of exception or help from the app, you don't need AI for that. Same with all optimization algorithms, the parameters you don't weight don't matter. But the hallmark of a psychopath is that he only cares about himself, but you can't do that without an ego and you can't have an ego without consciousness. It'd be more like me stepping on an ant, I wasn't trying to stomp it. I wasn't trying very hard to avoid it either, I was just walking to get where I was going. That's not really psychopathic behavior, I suppose that's little consolation for the ant though and I suppose it'll be the same for humans.
The key to deep learning neural networks is being able to simulate the performance, because it doesn't have a causal model that we would use to predict an outcome or weed out spurious correlations. That is to say it can't hold a million simulated conversations with a human figuring out what works and what doesn't. But it can do that with physics and other STEM branches, like it can play a driving simulator or the kerbal space program. And it can come up with new concepts within those constraints. I watched a documentary on AlphaGo not that long ago, and if you watch the expert reaction to move 37 in game 2 it's like WTF!? and unlike say Deep Blue it's not just the computer thinking even deeper than humans. It's basically going its own way and making a move no human would make. It's a double standard where for a human it would be novel and creative, for an AI it's just the result of an algorithm.
That has a lot of potential for say Rube Goldberg machines, like you give the computer a set of tools and basically says you figure out how these could be combined to achieve some sort of goal. It's a bit like giving the computer a toolbox and saying build me a house and it'll figure out what tools to use in which order to reach the end goal. The problem has been in building simulations that are sufficiently accurate that they can be applied in the real world and actually work like in the simulation. A lot of people here commented on how the Falcon Heavy launch performed pretty much exactly like in the CGI simulation. And Musk commented on it too in the press conference, it was a validation of their ability to design rockets through computer simulations. If it can be simulated, you can throw a DNN at it and ask it to optimize "the game". And that game has pretty serious real world implications.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but this is a TEST flight, so I would argue that it's more important to start with a smaller payload. That way you can work down from safe to probably safe and have less risk of losing the test vehicles.
Well, it's less risk to the test vehicle but the more your final configuration deviates from the current configuration the higher the risk of some unexpected side effects. When you can count the number of tests on one hand with fingers to spare it's better to fail on the first test and say that's what tests are for than fail on the second test and raise concerns that it has hidden flaws that might kill missions at random. Despite all that Elon Musk said to manage expectations they did not send a $100 million dollar rocket out there to blow up an equally expensive pad on a 50-50 or 2/3rds chance. They've extensively tested every component and subsystem they could find, simulated it a million times with computers and it would have passed with flying colors.
This is the final integration test, not the first test. The rest is that X factor, what haven't we taken into consideration. Are our assumptions, models and formulas flawed in some way. He can't really lose talking it down, if it blows up on the pad well space is hard. If it works, he's pulled off some amazing feat. So I'd want something very close to the production model flying, as long as the odds remain good you'll get your test data. And in that respect this was an entirely insignificant failure, they got telemetry on everything right up to the final impact. Making this part of the mission fail-safe wouldn't really have any big benefit. Just downsides in redesign, if this was what they thought was the right amount.
Updated figures as Musk just said $150M for fully expendable heavy. With 63,800 kg to LEO that would put price/kg at $2343 and launch cost of ISS at roughly one billion instead of two. Still more expensive to launch your silverware into orbit than the actual silver though.
OTOH it's 420000 kg worth of materials already in space. The Falcon Heavy takes $90M for 8000 kg to GEO or ~20000 kg to LEO, so it's 21 launches = ~2B in launch costs alone. If you need a space station a few booster shots are pretty cheap by comparison, the problem is what's a profitable business in space. The Falcon Heavy launch costs work out to $4500/kg, which means you'd pretty much have to produce solid gold to turn a profit. Maybe if you could grow huge gemstones, create some crazy nano-tube materials or run zero-g experiments people would pay tons of money for but most likely it can be done cheaper on earth.
The other market is information, but that market is pretty well tapped out by communication satellites, broadcast satellites, GPS etc. and one ISS in a totally useless orbit isn't worth much at all. It's got man rating, but I don't think the market for space tourism is ready. And I don't think there's much commercial interest in astronaut experience just yet. Or ever, I mean it's not the 1960s anymore and rockets fly like it's CGI so you'd mostly be cargo to Mars or the Moon or whatever. And you can't simulate that on the ISS, low gravity is very different from zero gravity. Then again, maybe Musk will need a staging area....
Somehow I don't think Razer's sales are impacted much by "IT professionals" but more what 15yo "leet" gamers with LED Christmas trees for PCs think is cool. Or maybe what they're favorite twitch gamer uses to get that 0.002 second egde on the competition.
But I did a quick glance at the wiki, etc, and still have no idea what the purpose of this thing is.
Yeah, it could really use half a line about what it's actually doing in the initial summary. But if you'd care to scroll down just a little:
Primary Payload
On-board UPSat, the primary payload, a science unit is integrated. The science unit (designed by the University of Oslo and supplied through the Von Karman Institute as part of the QB50 program) will be used for plasma measurements during the mission duration.
You could still buy the trinkets but they should be a direct cash transaction that you pay the exact amount for. That way you know much you're paying and you're not buying an excess of virtual scrip in order to do it.
To me that sounds really annoying and like it'd give less overview to charge a few cents to my credit card every time I want something. For me I think it's better to have a few, bigger commit decisions to say "Do I really want to spend $20 on star berries?" and if I do well they're basically written off in my mind. By which I mean that even though I may have in-game currency I don't consider it an asset that could be converted back into dollars. More like a beer at the pub, I can drink it or pour it out but I can't put back in the tap and get my money back. And then I'm in a game, in a fantasy world until I run out and have to make another real world decision about real world money again.
It'd also make it harder for a parent to gift a kid some star berries as a reward for something, not free dollars. And in some cases it would be very strange in-game, like in GTA you'd buy supersports cars for a few bucks. The numbers make way more sense if you can buy "GTA-dollars", though I suppose you could just set a fixed multiplier like $1 real-world = $100000 in-game. Still, then all your in-game economics would be tied to real-world economics which would be troublesome for a virtual economy that are more complicated than you buying directly from the game company. I think it complicates more things than it solves, unless you're the guy who buys 500 berries for best value and get tired of the game after 50. But I really don't see how that's a bigger problem in-game than buying something in bulk in the real world and then discovering you didn't want/need it.
It is gambling and it is a cynical attempt to screw the player to pay more money to unlock a game they've already paid for. So I'd be glad if they banned it, though Germany should be aiming for EU wide legislation.
I'd also like to see laws that ban virtual currencies which are purchased with real cash.
That would be too much nanny state for me, if you want to spend real world cash on virtual trinkets you should be allowed to do that. We don't generally restrict obsessive real world collectors either. What they should ban - and I really think this is deserving of a blanket ban - is the randomized rewards. You want to sell the loot in the loot boxes individually, so people can see the actual price of what they're buying that's fine. If you want to sell loot boxes then you go under all the same rules and restrictions as lotteries and gambling sites.
The best people are well trained, they have been there and done that, the problem with this is that they already have preconceived notions of how to solve a problem. You do not get true innovation unless you have people that have not been there, and have not done that. These are the people that may have a different idea for achieving a solution, and that is where true innovation comes about.
They're the ones making the news, like "rags to riches" stories. It's true that many people have strong preconceptions about what can be done, how it should be done and the tools/methods/technology to deliver it. But there's there's also quite many professionals who have worked the ins and outs of a system, figured out there has to be a better way and made huge, innovative improvements. That ignorance is some sort of requirement for innovation is a gross exaggeration.
And even when we do have these "nobody had told me it was impossible so I did it" stories these people often have quite a solid professional education. Like maybe it won't be the cancer researcher with 30 years of experience that makes the breakthrough to give us the cure for cancer. But I'd be really surprised if he isn't at least a MD and instead some layman from the street. Which would of course make for an even bigger story if it happened, but it'd be equally unlikely.
Well I'd also argue there's a huge difference between preventing breakdowns and preventing malicious attacks. I mean if you yank out the network cable computers are very stable. Maintenance you can plan for, when somebody will find a bug in your code and release a 0-day exploit is pretty much impossible.
The headline is garbage, but there is some truth in the waterfall of words in that summary: we have become a nation of specialists. Not only are we specialists, but the amount to which we've specialized is actually quite stunning.
I'm not against the idea that a project might need many different competencies and functions. What I am against is the idea that we'll have better solutions if we put it to a popular vote. Because that's my usual experience with "diverse teams that aren't necessarily very bright", to rephrase the argument. Competent people usually know what they know and don't know. Incompetent people go through life like a bull in a china store, they don't mean to break things but they leave disaster in their wake. I've been through that at work, the only reason my part of the system is working is that I've ignored 90% of the "input". Everything else is so buggy and crappy they're considering a rewrite before 1.0 is delivered. Meritocracy is fine, mediocracy is terrible. YMMV.
When it eventually happens anyway, what legal rights will the child have?
This one pretty settled already, doesn't matter if you got a blowjob or even if she found a used tissue... your DNA, your kid. It's more interesting how it plays into one of sci-fi's big themes about growing humans in a lab though. They're making progress on a artificial uterus, my guess is that sometime this century we'll be able to take undeveloped eggs, bring the eggs to maturity, fertilize them and grow babies in a tank. Let the clone wars begin...
No it does not. If you wanted to say that, the first comma would be ommited (sic): "The party included the strippers Bill Clinton and Al Franken." or you would write a colon: "The party included the strippers: Bill Clinton and Al Franken."
The first form doesn't have the same meaning at all, it's like their job description or something. "The party included the singers, Chistina Aguilera and Britney Spears" implies they were performing at the preceding concert or something and were/are "the singers". "The party included the singers Chistina Aguilera and Britney Spears" just means they're singers and at the party. The colon works but exaggerates the pause, like you're making an announcement or something "Introducing the strippers: Bill Clinton and Al Franken." It would look totally out of place in a recount of the party.
for a non native english speaker - I'm german
That probably explains it...
Much better not to mix lists and appositives, or use parentheses.
That works for clarity but linguistically it sounds like "oh by the way he's also a 800 year old demigod". It particularly doesn't work well if it's a quote since parentheses are a purely written tool, or if the title you're appending is actually more important than the name like "This is Chingachgook, last of the Mohicans, Cora and Hawkeye." then you're better off splitting it up "This is Chingachgook, last of the Mohicans and that's Cora and Hawkeye." This doesn't resolve the ambiguity between lists and appositivies though, "This is the duke of Eddington, my lord and master" and ""This is the duke of Eddington, my mum and dad" or a version that's neither "This is the duke of Eddington, my bothers and sisters". English quite simply isn't very unambiguous, which is why we don't use it as a programming language.
And your examples make it abundantly clear that in law you should turn lists into actual lists not run-on sentences.
"The acitivites
a) canning
b) processing
c) preserving
d) freezing
e) drying
f) marketing
g) storing
h) packaging for shipment
i) distribution
of the product groups
a) agricultural produce
b) meat and fish products
c) perishable foods
are exempt."
Granted, it eats up a lot of vertical space. But it's dead simple for anyone to read and leaves no ambiguity that you really mean an x*y matrix of exceptions. Because even with the Oxford comma there's still doubt in my mind that you can interpret it as general exceptions for activities a)-g) and "packaging for shipment and distribution of agricultural produce; meat and fish products; and perishable foods;" For example a sentence like "buses, trucks and cars over 3500kg" is that "buses, trucks and (cars over 3500kg)" or "(buses, trucks and cars) over 3500kg". It doesn't get clearer by an Oxford comma.
So I take it that means you can't steal electricity, cable television, someone else's internet bandwidth, or any number of other things with no physical or tangible component?
If you steal electricity a power plant has to make more, it's consumed just like the water from the tap. How is that not a physical, tangible resource? While the signal in a cable loop is passing through anyway, you're only listening in like turning on your radio. Unauthorized use of bandwidth is displacing other people's traffic, though I think this is more like identity theft / fraud where you trick an ISP into making virtual deliveries instead of physical deliveries from Amazon.
A strict definition of theft may require that the person who has had something stolen has been deprived of something of value to them, but there's no requirement in the definition that the something necessarily be tangible, only that it has value.
I think you've confused "strict" with "casual" because we do use it about anything of value that we've been deprived of or taken without permission, but "he stole my girlfriend" or "he stole a kiss" has never been a criminal offense. Unless he literally kidnapped her, but that still wouldn't be theft. And in these #metoo times maybe the latter will be soon, but anyway... Theft in a legal sense has always been about ownership and possession.
Consider copyright, for example, which is supposed to entail the exclusive right to control who may make copies of a work.
Yes so when you created a new right you also created a new crime violating that right - copyright infringement. Legally, it's not theft. And despite the newspeak, IPR is not property. But like all things of value we casually use words like that, same way we say "he stole the combination to my safe" even though it was more likely copied. But when you're trying to use that casual definition in a legal or moral debate you're only making a fool of yourself.
So, when the summary says [an authorized on-demand movies and TV shows streaming service] it really means "unauthorized?"
Well probably not 100% illegal just as you could find Linux CDs on The Pirate Bay. I guess he's trying to hide between a very thin veil that says he only instructed people how to use the site, he didn't explicitly tell them to pirate anything. That generally doesn't work, if you're the mob's accountant you're still part of the mob. This guy must have basically been their marketing department, this is not your random peep telling a buddy where to find it. It's large scale commercial gain.
Well it depends on whether it's a book turned series/movie or series/movie turned book. A few I've done both, like LotR or Fire & Ice. But as far I as know/care, something like Star Trek has always been TV. If there's spin-off books of James T. Kirk or Jean-Luc Picard I don't really care. And some series like the Sword of Shannara the series is to me a completely different beast. I only saw Firefly as a TV series... to me, that's my canon. So if there are follow-up books... meh.
So when you discover this, you're going to say "OH WELL, Looks like it's out there! I guess I'll just sit on my thumbs and accept it because I have no recourse!"
Can you stop mass market distribution? Yes. Can you stop underground distribution in iPhone cracking circles? Hell no. This is mostly a show to act like they're taking it seriously and law enforcement is cracking down on it and whatever but... nope. It's still security theater, it's not going to protect against any of the actual threads.
I'm sure you'd like it but there's two critical numbers you lack, one is what degree of off-balance power configuration is possible while still having a stable rocket. The other is the probability of a cascading engine failure, engines going out is not the biggest problem it's taking the rocket out with them. So you have to know the exact nature of the engines, just the number of them doesn't say much.
back in the days of world war 1 and 2 one man was just one man. Now adays 1 man can easily be responsible for the murder or millions at the press of a button. Someone like trump could trigger the deaths of more people than died in the entirety of WWII in a matter of seconds with only a handful of people needed to blindly obey the order.
Yeah, it's not only AI but technology in general. Like it only takes a few NSA thugs and an NSL letter to wiretap the whole country, do the same with cell phone networks, banks and Facebook and you'll know pretty much everything about where people are, who they're talking to, what they're spending money on and so on. But going from passive listening to active management through AI would bring a whole different level of centralized control.
The clumsy, ad hoc, and poorly considered dimensions of Slashdot's moderation are an excellent example of how NOT to do it. Take that "troll" dimension, for example. (I wish someone would.) What is it supposed to mean?
Well, they boil down to +1 or -1 anyway so whether you use troll or flamebait or offtopic or overrated hardly matters. Those who tend to abuse it the most always pick overrated anyway. I think trolling is pretty well defined, but to each his own. Personally I'd probably just disconnect them and have mod points basically be "more people should see this" or "less people should see this" and have the rest be like a popular emotion-vote. It'd probably have to be a mix of descriptive - this post is informative / insightful / important / crazy / trolling / flamebait / crap and reactive - this post makes me feel happy / sad / angry / afraid / disgusted / surprised / excited etc. and actually I'm thinking maybe that is two dimensions.... a post can both be insightful and make me feel happy/angry/sad.
Why be scared of A.I.s when human brains are already the most complicated thing in the known universe, are impossible to fully understand, and already run everything?
Because one man is still just one man, even if millions worship him as a living god. There's layers upon layers of sycophants that needed to buy into the idea of Hitler's Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union and the regime has to give them perks to buy that loyalty. Even the common folks can't be treated too poorly or you might have a popular revolt. And it's sort of implied that a human would want human subjects to rule.
An AI doesn't need people, just look at the Terminator series. Same with aliens and Independence Day. And nature plain old doesn't care if it's Armageddon for us. But I think the story line that Skynet will suddenly achieve consciousness and try to kill us is still fantasy. I do think AI is heading us towards an Elysium future though, where you have trillionaires with computer systems that act as their middle management. Like say Uber, you have a lot of drivers, some support staff in IT, accounting, legal etc. and a few executives but the day to day management of drivers is done by the app.
I think we'll see more and more of that where there's an algorithm in the middle between the people on top and people on the bottom. And that it'll lead to a disconnect where you have like a small ruling elite and a whole lot of people who suck it up. Which kinda sounds like a rehash of old times - it was a long way from the plebs to the Roman emperor - but I think this time it'll be different because with robots and AI they can probably disconnect more or less completely and let the computers run the numbers. It's a lot easier when you don't need to get your hands dirty.
With your browser trusting 600 CAs by default it certainly has absolutely no value without DNSSEC and DANE.
All it takes is a few webmasters to take note of their security certificate fingerprint and check it from a random home/mobile connection or proxy and you'd see alarm bells go off if someone was trying to MITM the world. With HTTP they can just snoop on a fiber optic cable and nobody would know. So when it comes to protecting everyday people visiting everyday sites I think it has an effect.
A "real" AI would be the ultimate psychopath: Intelligence without any kind of conscience. Pretty much like a corporation, just way more efficient.
Codified behavior is already psychopath-like in that it doesn't care. If you're an Uber driver you can't reason or plead or get any kind of exception or help from the app, you don't need AI for that. Same with all optimization algorithms, the parameters you don't weight don't matter. But the hallmark of a psychopath is that he only cares about himself, but you can't do that without an ego and you can't have an ego without consciousness. It'd be more like me stepping on an ant, I wasn't trying to stomp it. I wasn't trying very hard to avoid it either, I was just walking to get where I was going. That's not really psychopathic behavior, I suppose that's little consolation for the ant though and I suppose it'll be the same for humans.
The key to deep learning neural networks is being able to simulate the performance, because it doesn't have a causal model that we would use to predict an outcome or weed out spurious correlations. That is to say it can't hold a million simulated conversations with a human figuring out what works and what doesn't. But it can do that with physics and other STEM branches, like it can play a driving simulator or the kerbal space program. And it can come up with new concepts within those constraints. I watched a documentary on AlphaGo not that long ago, and if you watch the expert reaction to move 37 in game 2 it's like WTF!? and unlike say Deep Blue it's not just the computer thinking even deeper than humans. It's basically going its own way and making a move no human would make. It's a double standard where for a human it would be novel and creative, for an AI it's just the result of an algorithm.
That has a lot of potential for say Rube Goldberg machines, like you give the computer a set of tools and basically says you figure out how these could be combined to achieve some sort of goal. It's a bit like giving the computer a toolbox and saying build me a house and it'll figure out what tools to use in which order to reach the end goal. The problem has been in building simulations that are sufficiently accurate that they can be applied in the real world and actually work like in the simulation. A lot of people here commented on how the Falcon Heavy launch performed pretty much exactly like in the CGI simulation. And Musk commented on it too in the press conference, it was a validation of their ability to design rockets through computer simulations. If it can be simulated, you can throw a DNN at it and ask it to optimize "the game". And that game has pretty serious real world implications.