I am a professional chess and Go player. Fortunately for me I am safe from automation.
The funny thing is they are. Humans haven't won at chess since Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, but Carlsen is making more than a million dollars a year as the world champion and is approaching $10 million in career earnings. You'd better be in the absolute elite though, it's like all sports the top athletes bring in way more than then second-best and being 100th best is worth almost nothing.
Basically I expect them to be laptops/desktops with the iPhone/iPad/iWatch business model and an i-name like iBook or iNote or whatever. Runs a version of iOS that's adopted Mac interfaces but is locked down with no dual boot to anything else. All applications come from the store so no backwards compatibility with Mac apps, just windowed iOS apps until developers make a store version. The question is just if Apple can resist the temptation to price it crazy, I mean their latest phones are really getting out of hand.
The problem is that they were talking about sensitive medical information, and with the Personal Number you could much easier connect that information to the correct individual. That is the whole issue here.
That's a bit of an understatement, that number is the best identifier possible. I'm from Norway but it's pretty similar here, we all have a number which everything is tied into... bank accounts, all employers that pay taxes, insurance, social security, everything in healthcare, car registry, property registry, criminal history, military service record, everything that runs a credit check, e-billing, public education, all sorts of public forms in short the number itself is stored so many places it wouldn't be much a secret. Which means leaks that include that number are basically cumulative, it's your number and it's yours forever mine has been the same for 40 years so a leak of my name and number from decades ago is still valid. We still pretend it's a secret here but it's really a charade.
so it wasn't really hitting Mach 1, but I suppose if the plane were to suddenly dive out of the jet stream into relatively still air, it would have done so; I wonder how well it would have handled the stress?
Well my impression is that it's more a problem for everybody else, like the first supersonic flights were a success it's not like they ran into a brick wall and had to redo the designs. Maybe it'd eat into the lifespan but my guess is it'd be fine.
We might someday evolve the correct biological hardware to live in harmony with portable supercomputers that satisfy our every need and connect us to infinite amounts of stimulation. But for most of us, it hasn't happened yet...
For others of us, it happened a long time ago. I grew up computing, I met my first girlfriend in a BBS chat way way back in 1993 or so, and the internets are my happy place. Maybe that's the difference?
I've spent.... well, a considerable amount of time in front of a computer, on the Internet and on my smartphone. When I first got my smartphone I got more or less addicted to Angry Birds, like if there was ever a dull moment I was on my phone. I don't like being bored, but never being bored brought my tolerance down to nothing. Like if a movie or a conversation had a dull moment, I'd want to pick up my phone and fill it with something. It was almost like inflicting on yourself an attention deficit disorder, even though I've never had one in the past.
Truth is, the only reason society accepts that is that automation has pretty much eliminated all the extremely routine tasks. I remember making firewood with my dad, it was pretty much the same over and over - fell a tree, cut it into segments, break down those segments into sticks of firewood. Over and over and over again. It was productive, but it was never exciting. It used to be totally legitimate work, here's an axe so swing it to chop firewood. Chop. Chop. Chop. Chop. We had a gas driven chopper but it was still like do this 1000x. And it was somehow okay, today I'd die from boredom.
The card'll be useless for high end gaming in about 4-5 years
A $280 card that'll be useless for high end gaming in 4-5 years? The horror. Seriously though, this is the first Turing card that's an okay upgrade, according to Anandtech this card is +36% perf, +12% price for a +21% price/perf improvement over the last gen. The RTX cards are a wash, more performance for more money. I really hope AMD can make a Zen-like comeback on the GPU side, right now their Radeon cards are aging as well as Bulldozer did...
How does Linus think all those mobile apps get developed, since smartphones are 99.9% ARM? Well you develop on an x86 desktop, then deploy to ARM cell phones. Acting like developing on x86 desktops and deploying to ARM servers is some impossibility might be true at his level, the kernel level, but at the business process level you very rarely care. I'd say 99% of all bugs are due to some bad code or flawed design in something you wrote or a library you used. On the rare occasion that the system libraries of.NET, Java, Swift etc. or your database have a bug it's likely to be an implementation bug that affects all platforms. And in those exceptionally few cases where it's not you do a have a test/qa VM you can debug on.
The Turing test is a fine idea for intelligence, but is it a proper test for emotion? Like if you could create a robot that mimics all the outwards signs of affection does that mean the robot loves you? Or is it more like the charming psychopath that give the appearance of loving you but has a heart of stone^H^H^H^H^H bits and bytes. If a tree grows in a funny shape and an artist shapes a tree into a funny shape I don't think they're the same, because one is an act of expression and the other is just a random quirk of nature. That's what makes it art, you can emulate art the way you can emulate love but it doesn't make it real it's just an elaborate ruse. Of course humans do that too, like is every song really some artist pouring their heart and soul into it or is it just a quick cash grab? Maybe if I like the song it doesn't matter, but in that case it doesn't matter if AI made it either.
Israel has to launch to the west instead of the east which makes everything a lot harder. They'd probably need a Saturn V size rocket to just _land_ something on the moon.
Nobody would launch west into orbit, they'd just delay the tilt maneuver to clear the 100 km line to space within the launch area and the penalty wouldn't be that big. You can check out the launch profile here of the ORBCOMM-2 launch where the first stage went to about 75 km altitude roughly 37 km east of the launch site. The first stage returned to the landing site (RTLS), the second stage probably cleared the Karman line somewhere around 50 km east. At its widest Israel is 114 km wide, so while they'd have to launch over land and risk harm to the population below it's absolutely doable. Now weather it's a good idea for Israel to launch rockets from the near the Egyptian border to near the Iraqi/Syrian border is a different matter entirely.
.. There will always be sick people imagining things in pictures or videos that are not there.
That covers misinterpreting innocent actions or creative editing but people sexualize things entirely on their own, which is why we have rule 34, all the erotic fan-fic, people ogling swimsuit catalogs when they didn't have pr0n and so on. The reasoning here is like saying that because the Harry Potter movies made a lot of people have the hots for Emma Watson the movies must be soft porn. Basically if you're going to remove all the innocent material that could be fodder for someone's spank bank like kids doing gymnastics or yoga you'd better dress everyone up in burkas right now.
You could design the most perfect self driving car, but it might not be the right time in the market for it, or it could be too expensive at the time. Kodak designed the first digital camera, but it was also at least 5 years too early. Just because someone can do something doesn't mean it's the right time to do it.
If the solution was strictly technological, like somebody just needs to come up with a better sensor or a computer with enough GFLOPs I might agree. But every indication is that learning to drive is full of unspoken rules and subtleties, where the only way is to iron out poor behavior bit by bit. Google is still massively in the lead on disengagements and they keep simulating and tweaking it, I don't think a competitor can just come in from the sidelines and overtake that. Yes Tesla can pretend they can do it with optical instead of LIDAR because that's how humans do it, but the wetware processing that is extremely complex and fuzzy. I'm thinking we could have a lot of car brands still but I expect there'll be no more than 2-3 companies building the actual driving logic when the dust settles. And if Waymo is first, they'll be one of them.
My guess it's probably related to OEM pricing, you can use "any" OS but Apple doesn't license OS X and Microsoft is sure to put some clauses requiring it to boot Windows natively and exclusively to get the best price. After all Microsoft has their own virtualization technology and is a direct competitor plus they don't want to give any other OS a foothold, like I've never seen any OEM offer dual-boot. Even if they can't formally do it because of anti-trust I'm sure anyone who did would be put on the unofficial shit list. And if you're doing Linux-on-Linux virtualization there are better options...
Similar to "one click shopping". It's just computers doing computer stuf. e.g. I think it would fail any test of novelty or newness.
Which was partially upheld, then the broadest claims restricted to a shopping cart and upheld too. Long story short whether/. think something is novel is not a good indicator of how patent law actually works but in this case yes the patent itself has been completely shot down both by ACA review and the appeals court. From what I can read of the legal papers, the government can't be sued under ordinary patent law just a special provision that is more eminent domain-like. The USPS asked for a patent review that you can only file for if you're being sued for infringement, now the legal battle is whether that provision is standing to trigger a review. It's trying to win on a technicality, yes our patent is junk but you got no right to challenge it. The courts don't see it that way though.
And that doesn't mean the original creator/author and one other person/spouse/friend. This means a minimum of 6-10 devs that are actively working on it. (...)
So only 6+ man teams should be allowed to make open source projects? It drops from 6 to 5, they should pack up and go home? Talk about gatekeeping. Projects die when the number of maintainers go from 1 to 0, because there's nobody willing to take over. Yeah the community might make a fix when they have an itch to scratch, but nobody wants to reboot the project and deal with other people's wants and needs. Some kind of "auto-abandoning" would only be used by malware bots to take over and make infected software, I don't blame the last guy for taking the keys to their grave. If you want to take over at that point, you fork and restart the project. Be sure to find half a dozen people to work on it first.
Idea: Tax Amazon at, say, a tenth the rate I pay, then provide grants to the open source projects they are using for free.
How does that work when anyone can fork it? Oh we're not using OpenSSL, we did a search and replace so it's now AmazonSSL. Could Linus lord over all the money paid to Linux in perpetuity as benevolent dictator for life? Open source is not a democracy, it's a grab bag of code anyone can assemble into a product. The moment you start creating some form of royalties and owe the people who wrote it something you'll have all sorts of crazy fights for control and who actually contributed, like do you want to distribute it by lines of code? Does it go back to every author in the tree? Or is it just for the guy leading it now, riding the gravy train? Who stops him from holding a invitation-only "developer's conference" at a five star hotel in Hawaii? It'd be a gigantic mess.
I'm quite sure that people can cook a home meal for less than a McDonalds meal, especially if you have to drive there. Going to McDonalds is just less effort, and very tasty.
I'm pretty sure the difference is less than in Europe though, there's a lot of good things to say about our social democracy but it's anything but free. Here in Norway if I go to the store the staff cost is relatively small per unit sold and I pay only 15% VAT. If I go to McDonald's to eat it's a service and I pay 25% VAT, though takeaway is just 15%. But the store also have to pay employee taxes (normally 14.1%) + various employee rights, the worker has to pay social security taxes (normally 8.2%), general income tax (22%) and bracketed income tax (0-16.1%).
The end result is that more than half my money disappears in taxes before the guy/girl on the other side of the counter gets a paycheck. For specialized services you don't really have a choice, but for something like cooking food we usually do it ourselves. Housecleaning is the same or on the black market, I have it done legit and it's near twice the price. We also bring way more packed lunches than what's normal in the rest of the world. Basically the tax burden is not very conductive to the exchange of services, it skews the market towards solving the things we can on our own.
How they'll use the registry is one thing, but I think the principal battle on whether they'll have a biometric registry on everyone is over, at least here in Europe. The reason is that post 9/11 the US insisted all passports have biometrics with photo and fingerprints, here in Norway 90%+ of the population have a valid passport because in Europe you cross borders constantly. They don't register DNA on anyone but criminals, but the threshold has been going down and down from sex-related crimes to serious crime to any crime punishable by jail time. Currently 1.5% of the population is registered 5 years after the latest relaxation of the rules and you never get off, once you're on file it's for life.
The other big push is from medicine, personalized medicine and research into genetic predispositions means they will want to have a bio-bank and in countries with universal healthcare that's likely to be a national registry. Probably voluntarily but if they tell you that you get better healthcare through signing up, well I think many people would. At least enough that everybody's cousin is on file. They'll probably be separate registries but the only thing holding them back is the law, which can always be changed/circumvented for national security reasons. Oh yeah and I mentioned photographs, once Face ID is more established I bet there'll be a push to add a 3D scan of your face and iris scan too. Here's the direction it's going:
Basically, every snippet about you is going to be on file the moment you touch modern civilization. I wouldn't be surprised if a DNA swab within a few decades becomes a standard part of getting a birth certificate.
Maybe you think I'm stating the obvious but there's many people here who think sending a few people to the Moon or Mars is a meaningful backup/disaster recovery plan for Earth. If Earth going down will drag them with it clearly it's not.
The world isn't ideal, and many things (not only software) sometimes require compromises to work.
The question is if you need an idealistic or pragmatic torchbearer. Like if it was FLOSS is great... but we understand if you need nVidia's driver blob for your graphics. Oh and Steam for your games, because it's just entertainment. And MS Office, because compatibility. And Photoshop, because GIMP isn't the same. And so on, it would be like "okay use open source when it's convenient but if not that's fine". You always know what corner RMS will be in, even when the deck is obviously massively stacked against him he'll tell you how it ideally should be.
And to be honest, he's not wrong. Your life is probably going to become more and more affected by computer code running somewhere that you don't really know what does, got no practical chance to inspect and even if you did you couldn't actually fix it nor pass it on to anyone else. But I'm thinking 99% of that is going to happen on a server in the cloud, granted we're not back to dumb terminals but a lot of the important ways our data is transformed is now off-device and the client might just as well be a web app running on Chromium or open source wrapped as an Electron app.
Which is really sad. Streaming should never have become the product over a single download. They have created network peak hours and incentivized crushing the bitrate and therefore quality to save on bandwidth costs.
I'd agree with you except that the people who create BluRay discs are often sloths, as long as it fits the disc it doesn't matter. There's hardly any incentive to find the optimal encoding settings or to deliver 95% of the quality with 50% of the bitrate. Compared to DVDs BluRays was almost 6x in size (8.5 -> 50GB) for 6x the pixels (720x480 -> 1920x1080) but then on top of that you had H.264 and the encoders have matured a lot since then. There's a reason Netflix says they deliver FullHD with 5 Mbps and BluRay is up to 54 Mbps, they're both extremes on opposite sides of the sweet spot.
The pirate scene had much better numbers on this, like how low could you go in bandwidth before the codec got starved and it made sense to drop resolution instead. Back when I looked into it that was around 0.2 bits/pixel, so 3840x2160x24 = ~40 Mbps. With the 30-50% savings HEVC is supposed to give over H.264 I'm thinking 25 Mbps is not bad for an UHD stream. Sure, all other things being equal a 100 Mbps stream will always win but the bits would probably be better spent on an 8K stream and downscaling. It's that much overkill.
The problem is using the TOS to revoke your access to the site on flimsy pretext at the site owner's whim..(...) Imagine a contract that said by entering Walmart
"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to leave and not come back." doesn't seem they need a ToS for that. The real creepy part about most EULAs and terms of service is not the threat of termination, it's what you grant. It's like hiring a plumber and the agreement says he must be granted access to your apartment and access all hidden plumbing, but in practice he'll rummage through your nightstand, laundry and mailbox "looking" for the plumbing. They'll just slurp up all the data under the pretense that it's a dumb, automated system that doesn't know what's relevant and not, your grievances will drown in the media and dragged out forever in the courts ending in a class action settlement for a $2 coupon, if you can even get that.
Well this is not so much insurance as it's a bundled bet. I mean who you are and whether you go to the game has zero impact on who's playing and it doesn't invalidate your ticket, so you could just go to any sports betting company and get odds on your favorite player not playing, then bet 1/odds so your winnings cancel out what you paid for the ticket. Either way you'll pay them a good administration fee & profit margin, so in the not-so-very long run you'll be better putting that money in our own "shit happens" fund. I'd never consider taking out insurance/extended warranty etc. on anything worth less than $1000. House, car and travel insurance is fine because that could get crazy expensive, but this is just wasting money.
If I were starting a new business today, the 18-24s would be literally the last age range I would want as my target market. They have little money, they tend to care more about experiences than possessions, and when they do spend they are heavily fashion-driven and quick to change. What is surprising is that Reddit reportedly thinks this is a valuable demographic.
Apart from that they have little money, how is the rest a downside? If the market is full of sober fact-checking and people stuck in their ways you can do well without much marketing, it's when people are impressionable and fickle that good marketing matters. Same goes for selling experiences, if you're selling a hammer most of your effort goes into production costs and logistics. How do you turn a wine bottle and some arts and crafts supplies into a paint & sip experience? Marketing. Most students aren't that poor, they just claim to be because they got a thousand other things they'd like to spend money on too. Plus you hook customers that will stay with you as they start making good money.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a professional chess and Go player. Fortunately for me I am safe from automation.
The funny thing is they are. Humans haven't won at chess since Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, but Carlsen is making more than a million dollars a year as the world champion and is approaching $10 million in career earnings. You'd better be in the absolute elite though, it's like all sports the top athletes bring in way more than then second-best and being 100th best is worth almost nothing.
Basically I expect them to be laptops/desktops with the iPhone/iPad/iWatch business model and an i-name like iBook or iNote or whatever. Runs a version of iOS that's adopted Mac interfaces but is locked down with no dual boot to anything else. All applications come from the store so no backwards compatibility with Mac apps, just windowed iOS apps until developers make a store version. The question is just if Apple can resist the temptation to price it crazy, I mean their latest phones are really getting out of hand.
The problem is that they were talking about sensitive medical information, and with the Personal Number you could much easier connect that information to the correct individual. That is the whole issue here.
That's a bit of an understatement, that number is the best identifier possible. I'm from Norway but it's pretty similar here, we all have a number which everything is tied into... bank accounts, all employers that pay taxes, insurance, social security, everything in healthcare, car registry, property registry, criminal history, military service record, everything that runs a credit check, e-billing, public education, all sorts of public forms in short the number itself is stored so many places it wouldn't be much a secret. Which means leaks that include that number are basically cumulative, it's your number and it's yours forever mine has been the same for 40 years so a leak of my name and number from decades ago is still valid. We still pretend it's a secret here but it's really a charade.
so it wasn't really hitting Mach 1, but I suppose if the plane were to suddenly dive out of the jet stream into relatively still air, it would have done so; I wonder how well it would have handled the stress?
Well my impression is that it's more a problem for everybody else, like the first supersonic flights were a success it's not like they ran into a brick wall and had to redo the designs. Maybe it'd eat into the lifespan but my guess is it'd be fine.
We might someday evolve the correct biological hardware to live in harmony with portable supercomputers that satisfy our every need and connect us to infinite amounts of stimulation. But for most of us, it hasn't happened yet...
For others of us, it happened a long time ago. I grew up computing, I met my first girlfriend in a BBS chat way way back in 1993 or so, and the internets are my happy place. Maybe that's the difference?
I've spent.... well, a considerable amount of time in front of a computer, on the Internet and on my smartphone. When I first got my smartphone I got more or less addicted to Angry Birds, like if there was ever a dull moment I was on my phone. I don't like being bored, but never being bored brought my tolerance down to nothing. Like if a movie or a conversation had a dull moment, I'd want to pick up my phone and fill it with something. It was almost like inflicting on yourself an attention deficit disorder, even though I've never had one in the past.
Truth is, the only reason society accepts that is that automation has pretty much eliminated all the extremely routine tasks. I remember making firewood with my dad, it was pretty much the same over and over - fell a tree, cut it into segments, break down those segments into sticks of firewood. Over and over and over again. It was productive, but it was never exciting. It used to be totally legitimate work, here's an axe so swing it to chop firewood. Chop. Chop. Chop. Chop. We had a gas driven chopper but it was still like do this 1000x. And it was somehow okay, today I'd die from boredom.
Says you. Radeon 580 at $190 is the #1 bestseller on Amazon for several weeks.
Check out the Steam Hardware Survey, top 10 cards:
1. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060: 14.31% (-0.49%)
2. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti: 8.99% (+0.04%)
3. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050: 4.99% (+0.03%)
4. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070: 4.19% (+0.17%)
5. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960: 3.37% (-0.07%)
6. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970: 2.93% (-0.03%)
7. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti: 2.85% (0.00%)
8. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080: 2.74% (-0.01%)
9. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M: 1.63% (-0.01%)
10. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti: 1.59% (-0.03%)
(...)
22. AMD Radeon RX 580: 0.79% (+0.15%)
Don't get me wrong, +0.15% means they're selling okay in the moment, but it's roughly as much in units as the newly released $1200 RTX 2080 Ti:
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti: 0.15% (+0.15%)
The main reason they lead the $199 market is because nVidia hasn't released a card at that price point for a very long time.
The card'll be useless for high end gaming in about 4-5 years
A $280 card that'll be useless for high end gaming in 4-5 years? The horror. Seriously though, this is the first Turing card that's an okay upgrade, according to Anandtech this card is +36% perf, +12% price for a +21% price/perf improvement over the last gen. The RTX cards are a wash, more performance for more money. I really hope AMD can make a Zen-like comeback on the GPU side, right now their Radeon cards are aging as well as Bulldozer did...
How does Linus think all those mobile apps get developed, since smartphones are 99.9% ARM? Well you develop on an x86 desktop, then deploy to ARM cell phones. Acting like developing on x86 desktops and deploying to ARM servers is some impossibility might be true at his level, the kernel level, but at the business process level you very rarely care. I'd say 99% of all bugs are due to some bad code or flawed design in something you wrote or a library you used. On the rare occasion that the system libraries of .NET, Java, Swift etc. or your database have a bug it's likely to be an implementation bug that affects all platforms. And in those exceptionally few cases where it's not you do a have a test/qa VM you can debug on.
The Turing test is a fine idea for intelligence, but is it a proper test for emotion? Like if you could create a robot that mimics all the outwards signs of affection does that mean the robot loves you? Or is it more like the charming psychopath that give the appearance of loving you but has a heart of stone^H^H^H^H^H bits and bytes. If a tree grows in a funny shape and an artist shapes a tree into a funny shape I don't think they're the same, because one is an act of expression and the other is just a random quirk of nature. That's what makes it art, you can emulate art the way you can emulate love but it doesn't make it real it's just an elaborate ruse. Of course humans do that too, like is every song really some artist pouring their heart and soul into it or is it just a quick cash grab? Maybe if I like the song it doesn't matter, but in that case it doesn't matter if AI made it either.
Israel has to launch to the west instead of the east which makes everything a lot harder. They'd probably need a Saturn V size rocket to just _land_ something on the moon.
Nobody would launch west into orbit, they'd just delay the tilt maneuver to clear the 100 km line to space within the launch area and the penalty wouldn't be that big. You can check out the launch profile here of the ORBCOMM-2 launch where the first stage went to about 75 km altitude roughly 37 km east of the launch site. The first stage returned to the landing site (RTLS), the second stage probably cleared the Karman line somewhere around 50 km east. At its widest Israel is 114 km wide, so while they'd have to launch over land and risk harm to the population below it's absolutely doable. Now weather it's a good idea for Israel to launch rockets from the near the Egyptian border to near the Iraqi/Syrian border is a different matter entirely.
.. There will always be sick people imagining things in pictures or videos that are not there.
That covers misinterpreting innocent actions or creative editing but people sexualize things entirely on their own, which is why we have rule 34, all the erotic fan-fic, people ogling swimsuit catalogs when they didn't have pr0n and so on. The reasoning here is like saying that because the Harry Potter movies made a lot of people have the hots for Emma Watson the movies must be soft porn. Basically if you're going to remove all the innocent material that could be fodder for someone's spank bank like kids doing gymnastics or yoga you'd better dress everyone up in burkas right now.
You could design the most perfect self driving car, but it might not be the right time in the market for it, or it could be too expensive at the time. Kodak designed the first digital camera, but it was also at least 5 years too early. Just because someone can do something doesn't mean it's the right time to do it.
If the solution was strictly technological, like somebody just needs to come up with a better sensor or a computer with enough GFLOPs I might agree. But every indication is that learning to drive is full of unspoken rules and subtleties, where the only way is to iron out poor behavior bit by bit. Google is still massively in the lead on disengagements and they keep simulating and tweaking it, I don't think a competitor can just come in from the sidelines and overtake that. Yes Tesla can pretend they can do it with optical instead of LIDAR because that's how humans do it, but the wetware processing that is extremely complex and fuzzy. I'm thinking we could have a lot of car brands still but I expect there'll be no more than 2-3 companies building the actual driving logic when the dust settles. And if Waymo is first, they'll be one of them.
My guess it's probably related to OEM pricing, you can use "any" OS but Apple doesn't license OS X and Microsoft is sure to put some clauses requiring it to boot Windows natively and exclusively to get the best price. After all Microsoft has their own virtualization technology and is a direct competitor plus they don't want to give any other OS a foothold, like I've never seen any OEM offer dual-boot. Even if they can't formally do it because of anti-trust I'm sure anyone who did would be put on the unofficial shit list. And if you're doing Linux-on-Linux virtualization there are better options...
Similar to "one click shopping". It's just computers doing computer stuf. e.g. I think it would fail any test of novelty or newness.
Which was partially upheld, then the broadest claims restricted to a shopping cart and upheld too. Long story short whether /. think something is novel is not a good indicator of how patent law actually works but in this case yes the patent itself has been completely shot down both by ACA review and the appeals court. From what I can read of the legal papers, the government can't be sued under ordinary patent law just a special provision that is more eminent domain-like. The USPS asked for a patent review that you can only file for if you're being sued for infringement, now the legal battle is whether that provision is standing to trigger a review. It's trying to win on a technicality, yes our patent is junk but you got no right to challenge it. The courts don't see it that way though.
And that doesn't mean the original creator/author and one other person/spouse/friend. This means a minimum of 6-10 devs that are actively working on it. (...)
So only 6+ man teams should be allowed to make open source projects? It drops from 6 to 5, they should pack up and go home? Talk about gatekeeping. Projects die when the number of maintainers go from 1 to 0, because there's nobody willing to take over. Yeah the community might make a fix when they have an itch to scratch, but nobody wants to reboot the project and deal with other people's wants and needs. Some kind of "auto-abandoning" would only be used by malware bots to take over and make infected software, I don't blame the last guy for taking the keys to their grave. If you want to take over at that point, you fork and restart the project. Be sure to find half a dozen people to work on it first.
Idea: Tax Amazon at, say, a tenth the rate I pay, then provide grants to the open source projects they are using for free.
How does that work when anyone can fork it? Oh we're not using OpenSSL, we did a search and replace so it's now AmazonSSL. Could Linus lord over all the money paid to Linux in perpetuity as benevolent dictator for life? Open source is not a democracy, it's a grab bag of code anyone can assemble into a product. The moment you start creating some form of royalties and owe the people who wrote it something you'll have all sorts of crazy fights for control and who actually contributed, like do you want to distribute it by lines of code? Does it go back to every author in the tree? Or is it just for the guy leading it now, riding the gravy train? Who stops him from holding a invitation-only "developer's conference" at a five star hotel in Hawaii? It'd be a gigantic mess.
I'm quite sure that people can cook a home meal for less than a McDonalds meal, especially if you have to drive there. Going to McDonalds is just less effort, and very tasty.
I'm pretty sure the difference is less than in Europe though, there's a lot of good things to say about our social democracy but it's anything but free. Here in Norway if I go to the store the staff cost is relatively small per unit sold and I pay only 15% VAT. If I go to McDonald's to eat it's a service and I pay 25% VAT, though takeaway is just 15%. But the store also have to pay employee taxes (normally 14.1%) + various employee rights, the worker has to pay social security taxes (normally 8.2%), general income tax (22%) and bracketed income tax (0-16.1%).
The end result is that more than half my money disappears in taxes before the guy/girl on the other side of the counter gets a paycheck. For specialized services you don't really have a choice, but for something like cooking food we usually do it ourselves. Housecleaning is the same or on the black market, I have it done legit and it's near twice the price. We also bring way more packed lunches than what's normal in the rest of the world. Basically the tax burden is not very conductive to the exchange of services, it skews the market towards solving the things we can on our own.
How they'll use the registry is one thing, but I think the principal battle on whether they'll have a biometric registry on everyone is over, at least here in Europe. The reason is that post 9/11 the US insisted all passports have biometrics with photo and fingerprints, here in Norway 90%+ of the population have a valid passport because in Europe you cross borders constantly. They don't register DNA on anyone but criminals, but the threshold has been going down and down from sex-related crimes to serious crime to any crime punishable by jail time. Currently 1.5% of the population is registered 5 years after the latest relaxation of the rules and you never get off, once you're on file it's for life.
The other big push is from medicine, personalized medicine and research into genetic predispositions means they will want to have a bio-bank and in countries with universal healthcare that's likely to be a national registry. Probably voluntarily but if they tell you that you get better healthcare through signing up, well I think many people would. At least enough that everybody's cousin is on file. They'll probably be separate registries but the only thing holding them back is the law, which can always be changed/circumvented for national security reasons. Oh yeah and I mentioned photographs, once Face ID is more established I bet there'll be a push to add a 3D scan of your face and iris scan too. Here's the direction it's going:
https://www.smh.com.au/politic...
Basically, every snippet about you is going to be on file the moment you touch modern civilization. I wouldn't be surprised if a DNA swab within a few decades becomes a standard part of getting a birth certificate.
Maybe you think I'm stating the obvious but there's many people here who think sending a few people to the Moon or Mars is a meaningful backup/disaster recovery plan for Earth. If Earth going down will drag them with it clearly it's not.
An actual self-sufficient colony yes. We're not remotely close to that though, it'll be an outpost. Earth dies, it dies.
The world isn't ideal, and many things (not only software) sometimes require compromises to work.
The question is if you need an idealistic or pragmatic torchbearer. Like if it was FLOSS is great... but we understand if you need nVidia's driver blob for your graphics. Oh and Steam for your games, because it's just entertainment. And MS Office, because compatibility. And Photoshop, because GIMP isn't the same. And so on, it would be like "okay use open source when it's convenient but if not that's fine". You always know what corner RMS will be in, even when the deck is obviously massively stacked against him he'll tell you how it ideally should be.
And to be honest, he's not wrong. Your life is probably going to become more and more affected by computer code running somewhere that you don't really know what does, got no practical chance to inspect and even if you did you couldn't actually fix it nor pass it on to anyone else. But I'm thinking 99% of that is going to happen on a server in the cloud, granted we're not back to dumb terminals but a lot of the important ways our data is transformed is now off-device and the client might just as well be a web app running on Chromium or open source wrapped as an Electron app.
Which is really sad. Streaming should never have become the product over a single download. They have created network peak hours and incentivized crushing the bitrate and therefore quality to save on bandwidth costs.
I'd agree with you except that the people who create BluRay discs are often sloths, as long as it fits the disc it doesn't matter. There's hardly any incentive to find the optimal encoding settings or to deliver 95% of the quality with 50% of the bitrate. Compared to DVDs BluRays was almost 6x in size (8.5 -> 50GB) for 6x the pixels (720x480 -> 1920x1080) but then on top of that you had H.264 and the encoders have matured a lot since then. There's a reason Netflix says they deliver FullHD with 5 Mbps and BluRay is up to 54 Mbps, they're both extremes on opposite sides of the sweet spot.
The pirate scene had much better numbers on this, like how low could you go in bandwidth before the codec got starved and it made sense to drop resolution instead. Back when I looked into it that was around 0.2 bits/pixel, so 3840x2160x24 = ~40 Mbps. With the 30-50% savings HEVC is supposed to give over H.264 I'm thinking 25 Mbps is not bad for an UHD stream. Sure, all other things being equal a 100 Mbps stream will always win but the bits would probably be better spent on an 8K stream and downscaling. It's that much overkill.
The problem is using the TOS to revoke your access to the site on flimsy pretext at the site owner's whim. .(...) Imagine a contract that said by entering Walmart
"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to leave and not come back." doesn't seem they need a ToS for that. The real creepy part about most EULAs and terms of service is not the threat of termination, it's what you grant. It's like hiring a plumber and the agreement says he must be granted access to your apartment and access all hidden plumbing, but in practice he'll rummage through your nightstand, laundry and mailbox "looking" for the plumbing. They'll just slurp up all the data under the pretense that it's a dumb, automated system that doesn't know what's relevant and not, your grievances will drown in the media and dragged out forever in the courts ending in a class action settlement for a $2 coupon, if you can even get that.
Well this is not so much insurance as it's a bundled bet. I mean who you are and whether you go to the game has zero impact on who's playing and it doesn't invalidate your ticket, so you could just go to any sports betting company and get odds on your favorite player not playing, then bet 1/odds so your winnings cancel out what you paid for the ticket. Either way you'll pay them a good administration fee & profit margin, so in the not-so-very long run you'll be better putting that money in our own "shit happens" fund. I'd never consider taking out insurance/extended warranty etc. on anything worth less than $1000. House, car and travel insurance is fine because that could get crazy expensive, but this is just wasting money.
If I were starting a new business today, the 18-24s would be literally the last age range I would want as my target market. They have little money, they tend to care more about experiences than possessions, and when they do spend they are heavily fashion-driven and quick to change. What is surprising is that Reddit reportedly thinks this is a valuable demographic.
Apart from that they have little money, how is the rest a downside? If the market is full of sober fact-checking and people stuck in their ways you can do well without much marketing, it's when people are impressionable and fickle that good marketing matters. Same goes for selling experiences, if you're selling a hammer most of your effort goes into production costs and logistics. How do you turn a wine bottle and some arts and crafts supplies into a paint & sip experience? Marketing. Most students aren't that poor, they just claim to be because they got a thousand other things they'd like to spend money on too. Plus you hook customers that will stay with you as they start making good money.