I would gladly pay many times that amount to have a phone free from Android/Google. It doesn't need to be modular, it doesn't need a huge-ass screen or an octo-core processor, facial recognition, or fingerprint reading... better, in fact, that it DOESN'T have those things. I don't need them, they compromise privacy, and increase the cost.
Sounds to me like you don't want a smartphone. More like a dumb phone with a browser. Except no "huge-ass" screen or good CPU, so a tiny and slow browser. That.... doesn't sound like a good product for anyone to me.
It DOES need to work, out of the box. No weird reflashing routines, no kernel/driver issues, none of that janky CyanogenMod stuff.
Unfortunately all those clunky, quirky bits is exactly what you get with low volume hardware. Hell, even Apple with their budget can run into "you're holding it wrong" problems.
It does need to be compatible with Android apps, for most people.
Which basically means it must run Android, give or take a few settings. How's that freeing people from Google when Google decides where it's going and you'd have to keep up to stay compatible?
As we approach a holiday weekend and a brand new year, do we need to start carving out more time away from the internet?
I don't have any problem with the Internet being full of information, I find it's great. Even if parts of it are full of crackpots you can find tons of useful posts if you're willing to go outside the echo chambers. No, what's killing "everything else" is that there's so much entertainment, even if Sturgeon's law that says 90% of everything is crap I have the feeling the total is growing and growing. Here's a good TV series, there's a good movie, this was a cool game and I feel like I have a "backlog" of things that would be fun but that didn't make the cut. Heck, I have a bunch of things that I'd kinda like to watch a second time which gets constantly pre-empted by something new.
I don't think it's that I've gotten less picky. Maybe it's that I had more time, but that still doesn't explain everything. I feel like things were different before like before WoW etc. where you couldn't get so addicted to a game you'd basically disappear into the computer. Not that I actually played WoW, I knew I had the tendencies from other games and that would be like shooting heroin. But damn, they're good at making things addictive. And this new trend of releasing a whole season at once hasn't helped me, it's like an invitation to binge watching. If I had a week's cool down maybe I'd stop and think it wasn't that great instead of getting caught up in what happens next. And the smartphone killed the remaining zone-out time.
The big question is why the hell do they bother to detect nudes? I would even ask why the hell do they want to spot pornography? Both are very common human expressions and they should not be a reason for police investigation.
Limited time and resources? Here's a suspect's computer, it has 10k images on it. Run it through the system and rank the photos most likely to contain illegal pornography. I'd be surprised if they didn't try to make some kind of automated ranking. Narrowing it down to porn would be a start. That said, if they're triggering on deserts they must be doing something really stupidly like training it exclusively on porn - which would have a lot of those colors - and then trying to apply that to general images. That sounds more like a stupid porn filter from the 90s than an AI project from 2017. My guess is that someone slapped AI on it and got funding....
That depends... Light is measurably slower in glass, so the route via satellites can be potentially faster.
In theory yes, light in a fiber optic cable travels at about 2/3rds of c so halfway around the world would be 20015 km (6371 km* pi) and take 100 ms (20015 km / (2/3 * c)). Bouncing it up to a satellite flying at 800 km, between LEO satellites and then 800 km down again would be 2*800 km + (800+6,371) km * pi = 24128 km and take 80.5 ms at c. Whether it would be practically feasible I'm not sure as decoding/repeating a wireless signal will probably cost that and more.
But it's more useful to cap the penalty, assume the uplink is like right next to the ground station, you could hook up to the same fiber optic cable they do. Instead you get a 2*800km round trip at c = 5.34 ms + a bit of processing. If we say no worse than a 10 ms penalty that's the same penalty as being 2000 km further away. It's less than accessing an east coast server from the west coast or vice versa. Unless you're into high end eSports or high frequency trading that's quite negligible.
I have a serious problem with this kind of article redefining what words mean, and then ascribing positive traits to lower-class people and negative traits to upper-class people. It's the same story as with "emotional intelligence": that was just a crutch to allow less intelligent people to feel good about themselves and to let them look down on smarter people, because those are _obviously_ not emotionally intelligent as well.
Some people are obviously all of the above. But there's undoubtedly also people like Sheldon, obviously intellectually brilliant but not very smart. In fact, dense as a brick in some contexts. Which may mean that abstract reasoning doesn't capture all the aspects of "smartness" we wish to measure. Because that's the core issue here, doing well on an IQ test is obviously a talent, like being exceptionally fast at running or having an absolute pitch. But is it a sort of "universal talent" that'll help you in all walks of life and that underlies everything you do? In some ways but not in others, I'd say.
And that's why we get all these "alternative" forms of intelligence, because they capture other aspects that make people successful. Understanding and dealing with other people is obviously a rather large part of dealing with life successfully. Creativity. Being "street wise". And I'm not sure if causal intelligence is the same as abstract intelligence, like the ability to break a goal down into realistic sub-tasks that'll lead you towards that goal. Or even pick realistic goals in the first place. That takes a lot of self-insight and introspection too, not just problem solving.
Sure, if you define all those out of intelligence it's not intelligence. But then what we're really trying to measure maybe isn't intelligence but something else.
How about we get rid of the notion that people work 9-5 while we're at it. This would help reduce congestion on the roads and make it more likely that people will be able to take care of errands before or after work instead of having to use their lunch break.
It's easy to say when you write code and it doesn't really matter if it happens at 3PM or 3AM. But stores have opening hours, public transport runs on a schedule, nurses work shifts, in all sorts of production facilities you need a whole staff to run the machinery. Or they're done just in time, like when a bakery makes fresh bread or you order a pizza. Some types of work are inherently done in teams or done better by teams or you need to talk to a particular person to make progress. The idea that work in general could ever become random hours the employees choose to put in is simply not realistic. Those who can be flexible and don't have bosses that are asshats usually let you come in early or work late to compensate.
Real refugees have 2 primary goals: 1) To reach the nearest location where the immediate danger they face is no longer present. 2) To return to their origin as soon as it is safe to do so.
So what you're saying is that everybody's primary goal is to stay at their origin, only refugees leave and only because they're forced away and only for as long as absolutely necessary? I think quite a lot of people who has left their home town or state or emigrated would disagree with that. I'll admit that I've ended up fairly close to home, but it's because of family, friends and familiar surroundings. If I didn't have anyone left behind because they've either with me, fled somewhere else or they're dead and the town was in ruins, would I be drawn to these geographical coordinates like a homing beacon to rebuild from the ashes? I doubt it.
I'd start over, but I don't think you'd mind because I'd adapt to the culture that gave me a second chance in life. And to be honest short of one rather large and medieval religion with a huge appetite for cultural appeasement I think most immigrants have integrated quite okay. And even among those you have a lot of casually religious that aren't much of a bother, like who you say your prayers to is not really a big deal. But then we have those who can't and won't integrate, that insist on rewriting equality and civil rights, freedom of speech, antiquated ideas of honor and quite frankly racism and blatant disdain for our culture and our people. And it doesn't take that many well-pissers to ruin it for everyone, those who want to just get along both on "our" side and "their" side.
and perhaps it wasn't Google at all, but every time we tested something and filed a bug the next day they would have marked all bugs as fixed and told us to test on the new version where we would inevitably find the same bug. Bug fixing makes them seem like they are making progress and looks like a good metric to management, where really they are just sweeping shit under the rug.
Well bug fixing is a good metric, but refiled bugs should be a huge red-flag metric. If you're closing bugs that aren't actually fixed that's like improving support call times by hanging up on customers. That it can happen accidentally because the bug description or reproduction steps were unclear or incomplete is fine. That you made a botched fix that didn't completely address the issue or resolve it properly, fine. But if you're just saying we got a new version and are closing all bugs against the old one as outdated just like that, the person in charge of that policy should be perp-walked out of there. It's pissing on the effort of everyone who tried to help themselves and others by improving your product. And if management isn't aware it's happening they really need better feedback channels from the actual users.
Meanwhile in the real world, oil and natural gas stocks are going through the roof.
Well, the world population is still growing and despite a modest counter-effect from greener technology and greener living more and more people can afford a higher and more energy-intensive lifestyle. For example, the US has 797 cars per 1000 people, China got 154 and India 42. With economic growth there will likely be a market for billions of cars more and only a fraction of those will be EVs. Imagine a billion Indians who want AC when it's 40C outside. There'll be plenty demand for cheap energy for the foreseeable future, renewable and non-renewable.
So how big are these UHD's anyway ? I believe a Bluray movie is typically 25-30gb, are the UHD's ~55-60gb ?
Officially the discs come in three sizes of 50, 66 and 100GB but in practice most are of the 66GB variety and raw rips 50-60GB. Remuxes with just the primary audio and no extras are usually 10GB less. But they have started to make encodes which are typically around 20GB that give you all the UHD benefits (resolution, color space, 10 bit color, HDR, HEVC compression) in less space than a Bluray. It looks better if you have a setup that can handle it, HDR throughput or HDR -> SDR mapping can be difficult to get right and if you don't the picture will look terrible because the tone mapping is wrong. It's getting better but auto-detecting and using HDR capabilities is very much a work in progress.
We've seen the computer revolution, Internet revolution, and now a space revolution.
Because of a rocket that almost does what a bigger rocket did ~50 years ago? Replacing crew and cargo supplies to the ISS? Cheaper satellite launches? Sorry, but the world remembers the first guy who climbed Mount Everest not the first guy who climbed it on a budget. To be a revolution you'd have to be able to one-up the guy who says "Well, our generation put a man on the Moon" and to be honest I think we're well short of that. Maybe in another ten years with the BFR and a plan for Mars that isn't just on the drawing board we can say it's a space revolution. Maybe we can point back to the first rocket that landed and say that's the spark, but honestly I feel we're in the slump before the space revival.
Twelve people have walked on the moon, six are dead and the remainder are between 82 and 87 years old. Even with everything Musk is doing it's quite likely we'll see the last of them die before we see anyone new set foot on a stellar object other than Earth. Right now the US doesn't even have a man-rated vehicle of their own. I mean it's easy to get excited about Musk because to be honest there hasn't been much to get excited about for decades but in the grand scheme of things, this is not a rocket that will make history. Maybe the next one will, the one that's still on the drawing board but then it is quite premature to say that the revolution is here and now. Nobody has left Earth orbit yet...
I agree, if you're the kind of person who really prints so rarely your ink printer is clogged up every time then I'd say any boss that doesn't let you do that is a fool. If you have an absolute zero tolerance policy on using any company equipment for any non-job related duty whatsoever you're probably pissing away tenfold in productivity trying to save a few cents here and there. I mean I have heard rumors of places where office supply theft is rampant, but every time I think like "Your employees are malcontents and thieves who probably shirk as much work as possible, but staplers and paperclips are your biggest problems?"
This, as they say, is so wrong it's not even wrong.
Well, what's a right until somebody else recognizes it? If I put you in a cage with a hungry lion or a cannibal you might think you have a right to live but as long as they don't is it anything other than a self-delusion? A philosophical mind trick to say they might kill you, but they have no right to kill you? What makes your imagined rights any more valid than the cannibal who thinks might makes right, some kind of argument that boils down to axioms of reciprocity and that all are created equal? Those are not provable qualities, you can measure abilities and skills but not equal worth. Racism, aristocracy, caste systems and so on all boil down to humans being of unequal worth, high-born and low-born no matter what you do in life. Or that my own well-being as a cannibal is worth more than your objection to being food.
Rights are pretty much fiction until you have third party objectors, not just the violator and the violated. They might create laws and courts, hire police officers to catch cannibals. They might make lofty declarations with an aura of authority like the UN declaration. They may campaign and debate, demonstrate or protest. They may restrain themselves or defend the principle despite disapproving of how it's used. The right to free speech lives in the heads of other people who think you should have free speech. If everyone - well, except the slaves probably - thought slavery was okay then slavery would still be a thing. And some still do, the idea that some things that are truly universally recognized by every single human being is pure fantasy. It's the adult way of saying "everyone does that" and pretending it's true.
Wait, he only said, "The Bible never said that", which you then agreed with. For all you know, the commentor was a devout Catholic.
Meh, it does have an unbroken genealogy from Adam and Eve via Noah, Abraham etc. to Jacob who was born ~2168 years after Creation. He went to Egypt's land when he was 130 years old, the Exodus was 430 years later, 480 years after that they built the temple, 345 years after that was the exile. This is generally agreed to be year 586 BC by our calendar. Add that up and you get 6000-ish years, there are no "and then millions of years passed" gaps.
But like everything about the Bible that doesn't make sense it's just interpretation. The whole creation story is just an euphemism for big bang and evolution, there was no literal garden, apple or snake. The mental gymnastics people make to keep their faith in that book is amazing. I don't mean God in an abstract sense, but the particular God as described in the Bible. The guy who made a woman of a rib bone. That threw us out of Paradise because we wanted knowledge. Knocked us down because Babel built too big a tower. Wiped out entire cities like Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone. Drowned the whole world except Noah's ask in a flood. Asked Isaac to sacrifice his son as a proof of loyalty. And then sent his son down so he could forgive us.
If commercial drivers are swamping the fast-charging stations it's because they desperately need them for their Teslas to be a viable option.
1. Offer free service 2. Make it pay service 3. PR backlash vs 1. Offer free service 2. Cancel free service 3. Drivers: OMG the sky is falling 4. Tesla: Well, okaaaaaaay... on a limited, commercial basis 5. Drivers: OMG that's a lifesaver
After all, many non-supercharger hogging commercial drivers probably have the same long tail problems regular consumers have. When you really need a supercharge vs. being stuck for hours on a slow charger you're probably quite willing to pay for those exceptions. I'll be completely baffled if Tesla within the next few months don't make some sort of commercial offering. Or it might be a longer term play, the way I read it you can buy any pre-December 15th vehicle and start using it commercially that date is just for buying it from Tesla which just means that commercial drivers will keep up the second hand value of existing cars making it a better offer to sell your old Tesla and buy a new one.
By the same logic it makes a lot of sense for an ISP to make rules about how the internet should be used in order to prevent a small percentage of users from using too much resources. However, in this case, there are laws against it... oh wait.
You do realize there's a difference between saying you'll deliver unlimited Internet and then not actually delivering it, versus saying you'll no longer deliver unlimited Internet then do just that?
Reading this reminded me of Stalin ordered that the Soviet Union never published accurate maps of the country for fear of spying/invasion/bombing. This went on until the USSR's break up.
Not surprisingly, Stalin ordered the creation of very detailed maps of the rest of the world to aid in spying/invasion/bombing:
Well there was a time where this mattered you had to send spy planes and shit. These days anything as large as a road is trivially mapped out by satellite images, hell you even got commercial satellites like WorldView-3 with a 0.31m (12 inch) resolution. It's a fair assumption that the US military got even better stuff. Granted, you might claim the horizontal view from a car will tell you more I doubt it's really for that kind of security. For one, it's a way to make domestic companies take the Chinese market which benefits China economically. Second, and probably more importantly it's China who'll get all the data on how the Chinese go by car. Just like they control the Internet, facial recognition in public etc. they're building what the USSR/DDR never could, a system where they really have eyes and ears everywhere.
You're semantically-correct, but effectively wrong. Today's "Republican" and "Democratic" parties BOTH differ in important, fundamental ways from the parties bearing their names 50+ years ago. We've had at LEAST 2 or 3 MAJOR partisan re-alignments over the past 150 years where the names remained the same, but the members (and their personalities) got shuffled and switched around.
My impression of US politics is that one side finds out "Hey, we now only appeal to 45% of the population... what swing voters can we flip?" and then absorb some position regardless of any consistency with itself, ideology or the past. The names are just tags for a collection of policies that floats freely with the political currents. Here in Europe with proportional representation it's more about staying true to some group of voters, you have to renew yourself but you can't chase away the voters you have. If you try to broaden yourself in every direction you're more likely to end up as a leaky faucet as those you pander to aren't convinced and the core voters feel like you're abandoning them.
Obviously you have the choice to sit on the fence in the US too. But far too many then feel that they're either not participating in choosing leadership and can't complain or that no matter how bad the candidate is, it's still better than the opposition. Quite a few people on both sides would hold their nose and vote for Hillary and Trump because (D) and (R). Though I suppose in a one-person race there can only be one winner, we but instead have a prime minister picked by those who form government. Typically that'd be the head of the largest party, with then lesser coalition members heading other departments. It's not just one executive running wild...
Yeah, I hear some people repeat that like a robot in a GOTO 10 loop or a parrot, whichever is the worst insult. The Uncanny Valley is real, the question is who's sliding into it from which side...
Comment threads all over the internet become fifty-pages of almost fully automatically generated text, flooding out any human voice.
You didn't need AI for that, without CAPTCHAs most comment fields would be overrun by bots already, even though it would be junk posts. And the nuclear arms race there continues.
In the end the only option is to drop anonymous comments entirely, and tie any comments into verified accounts established with proof of identity.
Maybe, but that alone doesn't make the public debate great. Very often it's taken over by extremists on both sides that aren't interested in a debate and are willing to post dozens of replies on a single issue. I've seen way too many comment fields essentially turn into a shouting match between the same dozen people or so. You still need some sort of system to promote the quality posts that actually reflect some thought so the debate doesn't drown. And if you have that, AI pot shots wouldn't matter that much since they'd be very thin on substance.
Like a medical doctor would explain a disease to you in layman's terms, you would describe what you do in layman's terms. Since they aren't professional, they wouldn't know anything about visualizing branched undo/redo histories. Use common words in contexts they understand. They won't understand the depth of what you do, but as long as the get the gist, that's all you can hope for.
I think you're confusing a doctor describing your condition - or often not even that, but the practical consequences of your condition - in layman's terms rather than his/her working methods to reach that diagnosis. People rarely scuff at what doctors do and think they can wing it because they recognize the common cold and dumbing that down would only encourage people to think even less of your job. In my experience, the main challenge is trying to think of everything up front. Sure I can sit in Excel and tweak formulas and if-then-else logic until it's right, but when I write code that goes into a production system it can't just crash and burn every time there's some kind of bad or missing data, corner case or exception, resource or access error. On top of working correctly on new data when everything is fine.
That's where I find most people blank out, given a concrete case they can work out the solution. Creating an algorithm that solves the abstract problem for all cases, hell no. Let's take something like a Roomba, if you were driving it yourself it'd be a rather simple RC toy. If you want to ship it to people, to function in apartments you've never seen with obstacles you didn't know exist then it's incredibly hard. You can make a few test cases, but you can never cover every possibility. Also avoiding regressions, that when I fix something I don't break anything that used to be working. That's the big difference for me at least, I have to create a system that works up front. It can't just change on the fly as faults are found and it has to fail gracefully on errors. Even the really unlikely and odd ones.
A 1% false positive rate of a few dozen claims makes it rare, less than 1 per case. A 1% false positive rate of a few billion peoples photos makes it common, around 10 million people false positives per case.
Since the Chinese aren't big on privacy I'm guessing they'd pair it with cell phone location/call data and potentially other electronic traces. The last figures I found said 1.39 billion cell phone subscriptions to 1.38 billion people, so for the vast majority of people you already have their approximate location. So after you've eliminated all the very likely matches to a cell phone and excluded all the unlikely matches because they're somewhere else, made some reasonable assumption on how far anyone that's gone off the grid could have come then maybe you don't have all that many unaccounted for. Of course you could try to subvert this but then if a license plate reader, electronic ticket/payment or a good photo recognition detects that you're not where your cell phone is that's a big red flag.
Checking if the people in your close proximity are also people you've been in electronic contact with is also very likely to narrow it down, like if the person standing next to you resembles a friend on Facebook it's probably him. Multiple encounters can also be seen in context, like if it appears you've met the same person several times you can accumulate exclusions. It's also possible that with a low quality recording you can sufficiently track an unknown person to a good camera based on clothing and such. Like we could only see you talking to a guy in a blue jacket from a distance, but he went to the subway station where we got a nice mug shot. There's lots of ways to make the base error rate not all that important.
It's worth it just to piss off the flat-earthers, the luddites, and the science-deniers. But we shouldn't be thinking of it just as a science mission. The eventual purpose is to get human colonies going off of earth permanently. Got to get the baby out of the cradle.
Not any more than going to the North Pole will let us colonize the North Pole. We could potentially manage to build a permanently manned outpost, rotating staff every 2-3 years. We simply don't have the technology to turn an environment like Mars into a self-sufficient colony nor do we have the technology to go interstellar. And it's far too simplistic to say we'll create that technology by going or that it's even a stepping stone. Like maybe we need a breakthrough in fusion power here on earth and sending a thousand chemical rockets to Mars changes nothing. Pushing this as a big stepping stone to the stars can go over the top and make people think you've seen too much sci-fi and is throwing billions after a nerd fantasy.
The topic under discussion was a web without ads, not a web with different kinds of ads.
Well the start of the discussion was about deprecating window.open because it is mainly used for shady ads. The counter-argument was that we need those ads to pay for content, which then derailed into a discussion about ads in general, while the GP brought the discussion back to those particular ads. And we really don't need pop-ups, pop-unders, click-pops, click-switches where where the real content appears in the new page and so on, there's plenty other more acceptable ways to do advertising. So to get back on topic, I think killing off window.open is a great idea. I don't know a single legitimate use where I couldn't just use "open in new tab/window" myself.
"If you have two enemies, fight the stronger one first." -- or something like that, Sun Tzu. Google/Facebook/Amazon are far bigger enemies to us than ISPs are. If NN repeal slows them down -- possibly since they lobbied for NN so much -- that will be the best possible outcome, then we can deal with ISPs.
It's not an either-or, you can have both poor roads and poor destinations. Shutting down NN and setting up toll roads threaten Google/Facebook/Amazon's profit because they'd be paying a middleman, but in terms of competition they can afford it better than the small start-ups. So as consumers we get less choice and higher prices, it's a lose-lose for us. We still need better alternatives, but fighting against NN to achieve it would just be shooting ourselves in the foot.
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I would gladly pay many times that amount to have a phone free from Android/Google. It doesn't need to be modular, it doesn't need a huge-ass screen or an octo-core processor, facial recognition, or fingerprint reading... better, in fact, that it DOESN'T have those things. I don't need them, they compromise privacy, and increase the cost.
Sounds to me like you don't want a smartphone. More like a dumb phone with a browser. Except no "huge-ass" screen or good CPU, so a tiny and slow browser. That.... doesn't sound like a good product for anyone to me.
It DOES need to work, out of the box. No weird reflashing routines, no kernel/driver issues, none of that janky CyanogenMod stuff.
Unfortunately all those clunky, quirky bits is exactly what you get with low volume hardware. Hell, even Apple with their budget can run into "you're holding it wrong" problems.
It does need to be compatible with Android apps, for most people.
Which basically means it must run Android, give or take a few settings. How's that freeing people from Google when Google decides where it's going and you'd have to keep up to stay compatible?
As we approach a holiday weekend and a brand new year, do we need to start carving out more time away from the internet?
I don't have any problem with the Internet being full of information, I find it's great. Even if parts of it are full of crackpots you can find tons of useful posts if you're willing to go outside the echo chambers. No, what's killing "everything else" is that there's so much entertainment, even if Sturgeon's law that says 90% of everything is crap I have the feeling the total is growing and growing. Here's a good TV series, there's a good movie, this was a cool game and I feel like I have a "backlog" of things that would be fun but that didn't make the cut. Heck, I have a bunch of things that I'd kinda like to watch a second time which gets constantly pre-empted by something new.
I don't think it's that I've gotten less picky. Maybe it's that I had more time, but that still doesn't explain everything. I feel like things were different before like before WoW etc. where you couldn't get so addicted to a game you'd basically disappear into the computer. Not that I actually played WoW, I knew I had the tendencies from other games and that would be like shooting heroin. But damn, they're good at making things addictive. And this new trend of releasing a whole season at once hasn't helped me, it's like an invitation to binge watching. If I had a week's cool down maybe I'd stop and think it wasn't that great instead of getting caught up in what happens next. And the smartphone killed the remaining zone-out time.
The big question is why the hell do they bother to detect nudes? I would even ask why the hell do they want to spot pornography? Both are very common human expressions and they should not be a reason for police investigation.
Limited time and resources? Here's a suspect's computer, it has 10k images on it. Run it through the system and rank the photos most likely to contain illegal pornography. I'd be surprised if they didn't try to make some kind of automated ranking. Narrowing it down to porn would be a start. That said, if they're triggering on deserts they must be doing something really stupidly like training it exclusively on porn - which would have a lot of those colors - and then trying to apply that to general images. That sounds more like a stupid porn filter from the 90s than an AI project from 2017. My guess is that someone slapped AI on it and got funding....
That depends... Light is measurably slower in glass, so the route via satellites can be potentially faster.
In theory yes, light in a fiber optic cable travels at about 2/3rds of c so halfway around the world would be 20015 km (6371 km* pi) and take 100 ms (20015 km / (2/3 * c)). Bouncing it up to a satellite flying at 800 km, between LEO satellites and then 800 km down again would be 2*800 km + (800+6,371) km * pi = 24128 km and take 80.5 ms at c. Whether it would be practically feasible I'm not sure as decoding/repeating a wireless signal will probably cost that and more.
But it's more useful to cap the penalty, assume the uplink is like right next to the ground station, you could hook up to the same fiber optic cable they do. Instead you get a 2*800km round trip at c = 5.34 ms + a bit of processing. If we say no worse than a 10 ms penalty that's the same penalty as being 2000 km further away. It's less than accessing an east coast server from the west coast or vice versa. Unless you're into high end eSports or high frequency trading that's quite negligible.
I have a serious problem with this kind of article redefining what words mean, and then ascribing positive traits to lower-class people and negative traits to upper-class people. It's the same story as with "emotional intelligence": that was just a crutch to allow less intelligent people to feel good about themselves and to let them look down on smarter people, because those are _obviously_ not emotionally intelligent as well.
Some people are obviously all of the above. But there's undoubtedly also people like Sheldon, obviously intellectually brilliant but not very smart. In fact, dense as a brick in some contexts. Which may mean that abstract reasoning doesn't capture all the aspects of "smartness" we wish to measure. Because that's the core issue here, doing well on an IQ test is obviously a talent, like being exceptionally fast at running or having an absolute pitch. But is it a sort of "universal talent" that'll help you in all walks of life and that underlies everything you do? In some ways but not in others, I'd say.
And that's why we get all these "alternative" forms of intelligence, because they capture other aspects that make people successful. Understanding and dealing with other people is obviously a rather large part of dealing with life successfully. Creativity. Being "street wise". And I'm not sure if causal intelligence is the same as abstract intelligence, like the ability to break a goal down into realistic sub-tasks that'll lead you towards that goal. Or even pick realistic goals in the first place. That takes a lot of self-insight and introspection too, not just problem solving.
Sure, if you define all those out of intelligence it's not intelligence. But then what we're really trying to measure maybe isn't intelligence but something else.
How about we get rid of the notion that people work 9-5 while we're at it. This would help reduce congestion on the roads and make it more likely that people will be able to take care of errands before or after work instead of having to use their lunch break.
It's easy to say when you write code and it doesn't really matter if it happens at 3PM or 3AM. But stores have opening hours, public transport runs on a schedule, nurses work shifts, in all sorts of production facilities you need a whole staff to run the machinery. Or they're done just in time, like when a bakery makes fresh bread or you order a pizza. Some types of work are inherently done in teams or done better by teams or you need to talk to a particular person to make progress. The idea that work in general could ever become random hours the employees choose to put in is simply not realistic. Those who can be flexible and don't have bosses that are asshats usually let you come in early or work late to compensate.
Real refugees have 2 primary goals:
1) To reach the nearest location where the immediate danger they face is no longer present.
2) To return to their origin as soon as it is safe to do so.
So what you're saying is that everybody's primary goal is to stay at their origin, only refugees leave and only because they're forced away and only for as long as absolutely necessary? I think quite a lot of people who has left their home town or state or emigrated would disagree with that. I'll admit that I've ended up fairly close to home, but it's because of family, friends and familiar surroundings. If I didn't have anyone left behind because they've either with me, fled somewhere else or they're dead and the town was in ruins, would I be drawn to these geographical coordinates like a homing beacon to rebuild from the ashes? I doubt it.
I'd start over, but I don't think you'd mind because I'd adapt to the culture that gave me a second chance in life. And to be honest short of one rather large and medieval religion with a huge appetite for cultural appeasement I think most immigrants have integrated quite okay. And even among those you have a lot of casually religious that aren't much of a bother, like who you say your prayers to is not really a big deal. But then we have those who can't and won't integrate, that insist on rewriting equality and civil rights, freedom of speech, antiquated ideas of honor and quite frankly racism and blatant disdain for our culture and our people. And it doesn't take that many well-pissers to ruin it for everyone, those who want to just get along both on "our" side and "their" side.
and perhaps it wasn't Google at all, but every time we tested something and filed a bug the next day they would have marked all bugs as fixed and told us to test on the new version where we would inevitably find the same bug. Bug fixing makes them seem like they are making progress and looks like a good metric to management, where really they are just sweeping shit under the rug.
Well bug fixing is a good metric, but refiled bugs should be a huge red-flag metric. If you're closing bugs that aren't actually fixed that's like improving support call times by hanging up on customers. That it can happen accidentally because the bug description or reproduction steps were unclear or incomplete is fine. That you made a botched fix that didn't completely address the issue or resolve it properly, fine. But if you're just saying we got a new version and are closing all bugs against the old one as outdated just like that, the person in charge of that policy should be perp-walked out of there. It's pissing on the effort of everyone who tried to help themselves and others by improving your product. And if management isn't aware it's happening they really need better feedback channels from the actual users.
Meanwhile in the real world, oil and natural gas stocks are going through the roof.
Well, the world population is still growing and despite a modest counter-effect from greener technology and greener living more and more people can afford a higher and more energy-intensive lifestyle. For example, the US has 797 cars per 1000 people, China got 154 and India 42. With economic growth there will likely be a market for billions of cars more and only a fraction of those will be EVs. Imagine a billion Indians who want AC when it's 40C outside. There'll be plenty demand for cheap energy for the foreseeable future, renewable and non-renewable.
So how big are these UHD's anyway ? I believe a Bluray movie is typically 25-30gb, are the UHD's ~55-60gb ?
Officially the discs come in three sizes of 50, 66 and 100GB but in practice most are of the 66GB variety and raw rips 50-60GB. Remuxes with just the primary audio and no extras are usually 10GB less. But they have started to make encodes which are typically around 20GB that give you all the UHD benefits (resolution, color space, 10 bit color, HDR, HEVC compression) in less space than a Bluray. It looks better if you have a setup that can handle it, HDR throughput or HDR -> SDR mapping can be difficult to get right and if you don't the picture will look terrible because the tone mapping is wrong. It's getting better but auto-detecting and using HDR capabilities is very much a work in progress.
We've seen the computer revolution, Internet revolution, and now a space revolution.
Because of a rocket that almost does what a bigger rocket did ~50 years ago? Replacing crew and cargo supplies to the ISS? Cheaper satellite launches? Sorry, but the world remembers the first guy who climbed Mount Everest not the first guy who climbed it on a budget. To be a revolution you'd have to be able to one-up the guy who says "Well, our generation put a man on the Moon" and to be honest I think we're well short of that. Maybe in another ten years with the BFR and a plan for Mars that isn't just on the drawing board we can say it's a space revolution. Maybe we can point back to the first rocket that landed and say that's the spark, but honestly I feel we're in the slump before the space revival.
Twelve people have walked on the moon, six are dead and the remainder are between 82 and 87 years old. Even with everything Musk is doing it's quite likely we'll see the last of them die before we see anyone new set foot on a stellar object other than Earth. Right now the US doesn't even have a man-rated vehicle of their own. I mean it's easy to get excited about Musk because to be honest there hasn't been much to get excited about for decades but in the grand scheme of things, this is not a rocket that will make history. Maybe the next one will, the one that's still on the drawing board but then it is quite premature to say that the revolution is here and now. Nobody has left Earth orbit yet...
That's what the office printer is for.
I agree, if you're the kind of person who really prints so rarely your ink printer is clogged up every time then I'd say any boss that doesn't let you do that is a fool. If you have an absolute zero tolerance policy on using any company equipment for any non-job related duty whatsoever you're probably pissing away tenfold in productivity trying to save a few cents here and there. I mean I have heard rumors of places where office supply theft is rampant, but every time I think like "Your employees are malcontents and thieves who probably shirk as much work as possible, but staplers and paperclips are your biggest problems?"
This, as they say, is so wrong it's not even wrong.
Well, what's a right until somebody else recognizes it? If I put you in a cage with a hungry lion or a cannibal you might think you have a right to live but as long as they don't is it anything other than a self-delusion? A philosophical mind trick to say they might kill you, but they have no right to kill you? What makes your imagined rights any more valid than the cannibal who thinks might makes right, some kind of argument that boils down to axioms of reciprocity and that all are created equal? Those are not provable qualities, you can measure abilities and skills but not equal worth. Racism, aristocracy, caste systems and so on all boil down to humans being of unequal worth, high-born and low-born no matter what you do in life. Or that my own well-being as a cannibal is worth more than your objection to being food.
Rights are pretty much fiction until you have third party objectors, not just the violator and the violated. They might create laws and courts, hire police officers to catch cannibals. They might make lofty declarations with an aura of authority like the UN declaration. They may campaign and debate, demonstrate or protest. They may restrain themselves or defend the principle despite disapproving of how it's used. The right to free speech lives in the heads of other people who think you should have free speech. If everyone - well, except the slaves probably - thought slavery was okay then slavery would still be a thing. And some still do, the idea that some things that are truly universally recognized by every single human being is pure fantasy. It's the adult way of saying "everyone does that" and pretending it's true.
Wait, he only said, "The Bible never said that", which you then agreed with. For all you know, the commentor was a devout Catholic.
Meh, it does have an unbroken genealogy from Adam and Eve via Noah, Abraham etc. to Jacob who was born ~2168 years after Creation. He went to Egypt's land when he was 130 years old, the Exodus was 430 years later, 480 years after that they built the temple, 345 years after that was the exile. This is generally agreed to be year 586 BC by our calendar. Add that up and you get 6000-ish years, there are no "and then millions of years passed" gaps.
But like everything about the Bible that doesn't make sense it's just interpretation. The whole creation story is just an euphemism for big bang and evolution, there was no literal garden, apple or snake. The mental gymnastics people make to keep their faith in that book is amazing. I don't mean God in an abstract sense, but the particular God as described in the Bible. The guy who made a woman of a rib bone. That threw us out of Paradise because we wanted knowledge. Knocked us down because Babel built too big a tower. Wiped out entire cities like Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone. Drowned the whole world except Noah's ask in a flood. Asked Isaac to sacrifice his son as a proof of loyalty. And then sent his son down so he could forgive us.
It's Stockholm syndrome, plain and simple.
If commercial drivers are swamping the fast-charging stations it's because they desperately need them for their Teslas to be a viable option.
1. Offer free service
2. Make it pay service
3. PR backlash
vs
1. Offer free service
2. Cancel free service
3. Drivers: OMG the sky is falling
4. Tesla: Well, okaaaaaaay... on a limited, commercial basis
5. Drivers: OMG that's a lifesaver
After all, many non-supercharger hogging commercial drivers probably have the same long tail problems regular consumers have. When you really need a supercharge vs. being stuck for hours on a slow charger you're probably quite willing to pay for those exceptions. I'll be completely baffled if Tesla within the next few months don't make some sort of commercial offering. Or it might be a longer term play, the way I read it you can buy any pre-December 15th vehicle and start using it commercially that date is just for buying it from Tesla which just means that commercial drivers will keep up the second hand value of existing cars making it a better offer to sell your old Tesla and buy a new one.
By the same logic it makes a lot of sense for an ISP to make rules about how the internet should be used in order to prevent a small percentage of users from using too much resources. However, in this case, there are laws against it... oh wait.
You do realize there's a difference between saying you'll deliver unlimited Internet and then not actually delivering it, versus saying you'll no longer deliver unlimited Internet then do just that?
Reading this reminded me of Stalin ordered that the Soviet Union never published accurate maps of the country for fear of spying/invasion/bombing. This went on until the USSR's break up.
Not surprisingly, Stalin ordered the creation of very detailed maps of the rest of the world to aid in spying/invasion/bombing:
Well there was a time where this mattered you had to send spy planes and shit. These days anything as large as a road is trivially mapped out by satellite images, hell you even got commercial satellites like WorldView-3 with a 0.31m (12 inch) resolution. It's a fair assumption that the US military got even better stuff. Granted, you might claim the horizontal view from a car will tell you more I doubt it's really for that kind of security. For one, it's a way to make domestic companies take the Chinese market which benefits China economically. Second, and probably more importantly it's China who'll get all the data on how the Chinese go by car. Just like they control the Internet, facial recognition in public etc. they're building what the USSR/DDR never could, a system where they really have eyes and ears everywhere.
You're semantically-correct, but effectively wrong. Today's "Republican" and "Democratic" parties BOTH differ in important, fundamental ways from the parties bearing their names 50+ years ago. We've had at LEAST 2 or 3 MAJOR partisan re-alignments over the past 150 years where the names remained the same, but the members (and their personalities) got shuffled and switched around.
My impression of US politics is that one side finds out "Hey, we now only appeal to 45% of the population... what swing voters can we flip?" and then absorb some position regardless of any consistency with itself, ideology or the past. The names are just tags for a collection of policies that floats freely with the political currents. Here in Europe with proportional representation it's more about staying true to some group of voters, you have to renew yourself but you can't chase away the voters you have. If you try to broaden yourself in every direction you're more likely to end up as a leaky faucet as those you pander to aren't convinced and the core voters feel like you're abandoning them.
Obviously you have the choice to sit on the fence in the US too. But far too many then feel that they're either not participating in choosing leadership and can't complain or that no matter how bad the candidate is, it's still better than the opposition. Quite a few people on both sides would hold their nose and vote for Hillary and Trump because (D) and (R). Though I suppose in a one-person race there can only be one winner, we but instead have a prime minister picked by those who form government. Typically that'd be the head of the largest party, with then lesser coalition members heading other departments. It's not just one executive running wild...
Yeah, I hear some people repeat that like a robot in a GOTO 10 loop or a parrot, whichever is the worst insult. The Uncanny Valley is real, the question is who's sliding into it from which side...
Comment threads all over the internet become fifty-pages of almost fully automatically generated text, flooding out any human voice.
You didn't need AI for that, without CAPTCHAs most comment fields would be overrun by bots already, even though it would be junk posts. And the nuclear arms race there continues.
In the end the only option is to drop anonymous comments entirely, and tie any comments into verified accounts established with proof of identity.
Maybe, but that alone doesn't make the public debate great. Very often it's taken over by extremists on both sides that aren't interested in a debate and are willing to post dozens of replies on a single issue. I've seen way too many comment fields essentially turn into a shouting match between the same dozen people or so. You still need some sort of system to promote the quality posts that actually reflect some thought so the debate doesn't drown. And if you have that, AI pot shots wouldn't matter that much since they'd be very thin on substance.
Like a medical doctor would explain a disease to you in layman's terms, you would describe what you do in layman's terms. Since they aren't professional, they wouldn't know anything about visualizing branched undo/redo histories. Use common words in contexts they understand. They won't understand the depth of what you do, but as long as the get the gist, that's all you can hope for.
I think you're confusing a doctor describing your condition - or often not even that, but the practical consequences of your condition - in layman's terms rather than his/her working methods to reach that diagnosis. People rarely scuff at what doctors do and think they can wing it because they recognize the common cold and dumbing that down would only encourage people to think even less of your job. In my experience, the main challenge is trying to think of everything up front. Sure I can sit in Excel and tweak formulas and if-then-else logic until it's right, but when I write code that goes into a production system it can't just crash and burn every time there's some kind of bad or missing data, corner case or exception, resource or access error. On top of working correctly on new data when everything is fine.
That's where I find most people blank out, given a concrete case they can work out the solution. Creating an algorithm that solves the abstract problem for all cases, hell no. Let's take something like a Roomba, if you were driving it yourself it'd be a rather simple RC toy. If you want to ship it to people, to function in apartments you've never seen with obstacles you didn't know exist then it's incredibly hard. You can make a few test cases, but you can never cover every possibility. Also avoiding regressions, that when I fix something I don't break anything that used to be working. That's the big difference for me at least, I have to create a system that works up front. It can't just change on the fly as faults are found and it has to fail gracefully on errors. Even the really unlikely and odd ones.
A 1% false positive rate of a few dozen claims makes it rare, less than 1 per case. A 1% false positive rate of a few billion peoples photos makes it common, around 10 million people false positives per case.
Since the Chinese aren't big on privacy I'm guessing they'd pair it with cell phone location/call data and potentially other electronic traces. The last figures I found said 1.39 billion cell phone subscriptions to 1.38 billion people, so for the vast majority of people you already have their approximate location. So after you've eliminated all the very likely matches to a cell phone and excluded all the unlikely matches because they're somewhere else, made some reasonable assumption on how far anyone that's gone off the grid could have come then maybe you don't have all that many unaccounted for. Of course you could try to subvert this but then if a license plate reader, electronic ticket/payment or a good photo recognition detects that you're not where your cell phone is that's a big red flag.
Checking if the people in your close proximity are also people you've been in electronic contact with is also very likely to narrow it down, like if the person standing next to you resembles a friend on Facebook it's probably him. Multiple encounters can also be seen in context, like if it appears you've met the same person several times you can accumulate exclusions. It's also possible that with a low quality recording you can sufficiently track an unknown person to a good camera based on clothing and such. Like we could only see you talking to a guy in a blue jacket from a distance, but he went to the subway station where we got a nice mug shot. There's lots of ways to make the base error rate not all that important.
It's worth it just to piss off the flat-earthers, the luddites, and the science-deniers. But we shouldn't be thinking of it just as a science mission. The eventual purpose is to get human colonies going off of earth permanently. Got to get the baby out of the cradle.
Not any more than going to the North Pole will let us colonize the North Pole. We could potentially manage to build a permanently manned outpost, rotating staff every 2-3 years. We simply don't have the technology to turn an environment like Mars into a self-sufficient colony nor do we have the technology to go interstellar. And it's far too simplistic to say we'll create that technology by going or that it's even a stepping stone. Like maybe we need a breakthrough in fusion power here on earth and sending a thousand chemical rockets to Mars changes nothing. Pushing this as a big stepping stone to the stars can go over the top and make people think you've seen too much sci-fi and is throwing billions after a nerd fantasy.
The topic under discussion was a web without ads, not a web with different kinds of ads.
Well the start of the discussion was about deprecating window.open because it is mainly used for shady ads. The counter-argument was that we need those ads to pay for content, which then derailed into a discussion about ads in general, while the GP brought the discussion back to those particular ads. And we really don't need pop-ups, pop-unders, click-pops, click-switches where where the real content appears in the new page and so on, there's plenty other more acceptable ways to do advertising. So to get back on topic, I think killing off window.open is a great idea. I don't know a single legitimate use where I couldn't just use "open in new tab/window" myself.
"If you have two enemies, fight the stronger one first." -- or something like that, Sun Tzu. Google/Facebook/Amazon are far bigger enemies to us than ISPs are. If NN repeal slows them down -- possibly since they lobbied for NN so much -- that will be the best possible outcome, then we can deal with ISPs.
It's not an either-or, you can have both poor roads and poor destinations. Shutting down NN and setting up toll roads threaten Google/Facebook/Amazon's profit because they'd be paying a middleman, but in terms of competition they can afford it better than the small start-ups. So as consumers we get less choice and higher prices, it's a lose-lose for us. We still need better alternatives, but fighting against NN to achieve it would just be shooting ourselves in the foot.