Now - which of the two do you figure to be the most dangerous to individual life and liberty?
Depends. It's a bit like marshland vs a frozen lake, in a totalitarian society you start sinking into the mud the moment you stray from the path. Yes, it's nasty but you get plenty warning that this swamp is full of pits and quicksand that wants to eat you alive. In a free society you get the impression that you're free to roam around, doesn't matter what information you share with who at worst you get targeted ads you're not sent to a re-education camp. So further and further from shore you go, until that time where nobody really knew where you were, who you talked to and what you spent your time and money on is far off on the horizon. And that's when the ice starts to crack up under you...
If you look at something like the world democracy index the world is pretty much standing still, in 2006 it was at 5.52 and now it's at 5.48. The days when Eastern Europe and former Soviet states shook off Party rule and freedom made progress is halted, those who are authoritarian stay in power and about as many are getting worse as are getting better. Their economic power is also growing with China leading the way, I'm genuinely concerned that many countries think they need a "strong leader" to take charge where laws can get bent or broken and the government will stonewall out of any problems. All that keeps them from using all that data against you is just letters on a paper.
False dichotomy. (...) The correct relevant comparison is no ads but a higher cost, vs lower cost (or no cost) but with ads.
The real false dichotomy here is why you'd be limited to an either-or in a streaming world. Netflix can offer so many tiers they want from no ads to all ads and everything in between. Why would they lose the business of those who absolutely refuse to watch ads? It's the world's easiest business model, if pay() then stream(). You don't have to fiddle with advertisers, bid/booking systems, offensive ads or anything. And if you're not making enough money well raise prices and tell people that's the real, non-subsidized price of content. If you're telling the truth there won't be any other services giving you the same for a lower price, then you can choose to buy it or not.
I use VirtualBox to run Win7 under Linux Mint, and while some stuff works great, a lot of stuff doesn't. For example, I can use MS Word under VirtualBox and most things work fine, but do something like update the Table of Contents and *boom* Word crashes.
Well, first off does it crash on a native Win7 box? If it doesn't I'd try doing a fresh install, in this scenario VirtualBox is running genuine Windows on virtualized hardware. If that didn't work properly it'd be front page news. Quite frankly that setup is almost always less hassle than WINE, the obvious downside is that you need a license for the Win7 box while WINE is a re-implementation so it's just your code running on top of WINE.
Hell, I'm wondering why shareholders are NOT kicking Tim Cook to the curb?? Apple used to have a lock on the educational crowd years back. Apple used to have a lock on the artistic and creative types years back. Now?
Now they're making tons of money on people with disposable cash buying nice-to-have items. They were doing okay, but Apple was never great at appealing to places with budgets like schools or companies. Sure, the marketing department used to get Macs but that was it. They absolutely don't want to compete with $200 Chromebooks. They're running the same Intel/AMD/nVidia chips as everyone else, maybe you prefer macOS but inside Photoshop it's the same. The "new Apple" begin with the iPod, where they learned cool gadgets have high margins because you're selling directly to individuals and they'll buy a $399 cool device over a $299 uncool device. The iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch are all good examples, the Apple TV never really took off because they never managed to brand the experience it's just another streaming box. I'm not really quite sure what gadget I'm missing, but I think Apple should build that one.
The other huge prospect on the horizon is to finally put an A12X+ chip in an ARM-based laptop and challenge WinTel. Particularly if they could launch sometime in the next 12 months, like Win7 is going EOL so maybe now's a good time to jump ship. Though I admit that might just be wishful thinking on my part, but I think Apple has all the experience and ingredients. And all the advantages of starting in 2019, with only so much baggage from iOS/macOS that they want to carry but still solid amounts of code that could be ported with very little effort. And Intel is still mostly threading the water on 10nm...
How about this. Someone accuses you of sexual assault. It's proven to be false and you're cleared of all charges, but now, when you Google your name, details of your sexual assault accusation show up. Right to be forgotten lets you remove that because you're innocent. But the Court of Google means you're a sexual predator forever. Is that fair?
More like you'll be famous for being framed for sexual assault. Women complain it's hard to get rapists convicted because it's often a "he said, she said" situation, but proving an accusation is conclusively false is nearly impossible unless there's a straight up confession or there's video proof it didn't happen. The best 99.9% of falsely accused men can hope for is a finding of not guilty, which most will assume means where there's smoke there's fire and put you in the same boat as R. Kelly.
The big thing that policy makers have always despised about the internet is that it's decentralized. The more centralized it becomes, the happier they are! It's very hard to censor (I mean, "protect the children" or "eliminate hate speech") a decentralized internet. It's far easier to just knock on facebook's door and tell them to take something down, or to give up the identity of the poster.
Actually I find that in the modern world they much prefer surveillance to censorship and when they do run active warfare it's more drowning out the truth with noise or curbing the visibility. A block, ban or take down is so obvious and heavy handed compared to just blasting the public opinion with crap until nobody's sure what's fake news and not.
Now lets not straw man this, and talk about murderers, and the harden criminals, where harsher sentence are needed.
Hasn't the US pretty much tapped out that one? I mean you regularly hear about people serving 25+ year sentences and life convictions. You can get out when you're near retirement age with no work history, no savings, probably estranged from all friends and family and you're a convicted felon. Granted, now that I'm a bit older I see there's life at 50+ too but to my younger self it already sounds like a "my life is over if I get caught" sentence, do they really care if you make it 50 or 500 years? Do the even consider it before they kill the ex in a fit of rage or try to rob a store and end up with felony murder? I know a lot of people feel like fuck 'em, they earned it and maybe they do... but there's very little indication that increasing penalties further will change their decision making. A lot of the shoot-outs US police get into look remarkably like "nothing left to lose" where it'd take a miracle for the perpetrator to get away, it's more like how many can I take with me.
But these are cultural norms. In other countries and even areas of the United States, may either seem overly friendly and getting too close to a stranger, or to others may make you seem distant, and combative.
And a lot of this is subconscious, I remember seeing a standing conversation between a Japanese and western (American? Don't remember) couple, in any case they'd constantly nudge a little closer and the other couple back away. Over like a 5-10 minute conversation you sped up you saw them more or less dance throughout the room. I also remember a guy I had a class with from India, he'd lightly touch the people he was talking to. It wasn't in a creepy way or anything, if it was my buddy in a pub I wouldn't think twice about it but it gave me all the vibes of *shoulder poke* "eyh, want another beer?" rather than going for a business lunch.
But hey we're probably equally off in other settings, here in Norway you typically run late for a dinner invitation like if it starts at 6 PM dinner is usually served at 7 PM and people arrive 6:15 - 6:45. Well, a German teacher I had told the story of when she first invited Norwegians for dinner and it was on the table at 6 PM sharp and nobody had come and nobody had told her they were running late. She was quite mad until she was told this was completely normal and that the custom was quite different here. It's easier if you have a neon sign saying "tourist" over your head though, nobody really expect much from you.
Money is defined as a) a store of value and b) a medium of exchange. (...) Medium of exchange means you can advertise your services at $25/hour, or sell tables at $100/table, and then someone who wants a table goes to work, earns $100, and uses it to buy a table from you. *coin doesn't work that way. Something that costs 0.5BTC this morning (actually $1,700) may very well cost 0.7BTC tonight (still $1,700).
No, actually that's just repeating the first point. Medium of exchange refers to being a universally accepted token of value, unlike a barter economy where you need to find someone who has what you want to barter with. Volatility during transactions is annoying but not really that big a deal because the value goes both up and down, like if you keep working for $25/hour buying $100 tables then on average it'll take four hours. If you're doing it just once it might take two or eight hours if the crypto-coin is booming/tanking that day, but if you're doing it every week you'll be pretty close to $5200 worth of tables for $5200 worth of work after a year. It's no more magic than a farmer who has good crops and bad crops, you should probably add lost crops too because the risk a coin will suddenly crash and burn. You just need the financial buffer to deal with the variation.
hahahhahahahaha Fiat currencies have and do shit themselves regularly. Entire countries are essentially bankrupt because of them. (...) See Greece for a recent example of a shitfest gone wrong.
You need to do less drugs. The Greek government was close to bankrupt because they took up huge loans and couldn't pay them back, but their currency is the Euro and has been rock solid. Their only "problem" was that they couldn't print free money...
Yes but on the face of it, that seems like a strange threshold - as I said you can get, if you will, one "unit" of entertainment from a theater for maybe $16-$20. So for less than that you get as much video as you want to watch for a whole month from Netflix.
Yeah, those who regularly go to the cinema - at least just to watch movies, and not as a social event - probably have an entertainment budget high enough that a $2 bump on Netflix is nothing. I don't even care, my running expenses will probably slow my savings for big-ticket items a bit but I never need to check if there's money on my account. But statistics show that a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck where every new expense has to come from cost-cutting somewhere else. Like you need to find another $50 in your budget, what's expendable... a lot of people think it's still the 80s where the last thing frugal people would cut was TV because that was their cheapest form of easy entertainment. But today? YouTube and Fortnite will get you through for free, if you're just looking to kill time there's no need to spend money on Netflix. Plus people haven't forgotten how to use torrents...
While that's true, there's a difference between the science community and individual scientists. As humans we tend to get stuck in our ways, you can tell how many great changes are not truly over until that generation is dead and buried. If you're an expert it's even harder to get over the fact that your expertise is wrong, we have our known unknowns but many things we think we've figured out completely. So while journalists obviously pick the juiciest headlines, I'm not surprised there are scientists that are in fact blindsided and baffled when it turns out their knowledge in a particular area was in fact incomplete or incorrect.
Authoritarians ban any challenge to their authority, but otherwise people are mostly free to do what they want. Totalitarians attempt to control every aspect of life. Stalin was totalitarian. Putin is authoritarian. Mao was totalitarian. Xi is authoritarian.
That's trying to make a principal difference between a short leash and a long leash. All authoritarians think their authority exceeds your personal liberty, it's just a matter of how far you can go before they'll yank your chain. The way Xi treats the Falun Gong or Uyghurs (Muslims) is not really much better than Stalin's "religion is opium for the masses" that he got from Karl Marx. Both Putin and Xi is pushing an anti-LBGT agenda both to assert their authority and to appeal to the people as the gatekeepers between them and moral decay and depravity. If China wants to build a high speed rail line they take a ruler to a map, draw a straight line and tell people to move. China's social credit system is increasingly totalitarian, encompassing more and more aspects of everyday life. The only thing that's dead is the plan economy because it was inefficient and now they surveillance all the electronic cash flows instead.
I have a problem with the paid support model of FOSS, because it preferentially promotes creation of overly complex software artifacts / applications that require lots of support. It also would tend to encourage crap / no / minimal documentation.
I work mostly on custom code and we manage to do that all on our own without any financial incentive other than an never ending list of TODOs and deadlines. Ugly hacks with weird limitations that solve our immediate problem? Check. Solutions that are tweaked right up to the wire and never properly documented? Check. This is pretty much the default unless you start funneling money from service & support into tasks to make it more consistent and user friendly. I doubt anyone is consciously trying to write obfuscated code, though I've certainly duct taped things together that might give that impression.
Their problems right now are in production. You lower the price to get more people to buy your product. But demand already exceeds supply.
Tesla has been shipping all the $50k+ orders when most people want the $35k car Musk promised. There's no telling exactly how much backlog Tesla has at the price points they're actually shipping, but it's probably a whole lot less in volume and when your skimming off the top your margins will get progressively worse. They know there's a lot of untapped demand at a lower price point, but they need to be able to turn a profit on them too. Their guidance has been pretty clear that they sold a lot of pimped out rides in Q3/Q4 and that average sales price will be going down.
Of course if they didn't want to be an asshat they could have just set up a service requiring the user to send a text like "opt-in 555-1234" to whitelist a number and "opt-out 555-1234" to unlist a number and offer a text sending service that would throw an error if you tried sending to a number without opt-in. Then Remind could just put on their website that yeah, we did try to message you but unless you do this it costs us money so nuh uh. I mean if you can get explicit opt-in from the user it's per definition not unsolicitated and not spam.
P.S. for bonus points the same service could have a "no-text/no-call/block" command to block communication from that number in whole or part. Of course spoofing is still a thing, but at least anything not trying to be shady...
This is not a charitable donation, it is an investment, a loan for affordable housing. Smart investment considers intangible benefits from the obvious 'good publicity' from corporate responsibility to increasing their own value by increasing the value of the environs. It is not a bad thing, but let's see this for what it is, a smart business move.
Cost of living is also a driving factor in Microsoft's wages. Their employees may be on better terms with the locals leading to happier workers and lower turnover. And it may get goodwill with the local officials who could otherwise try to tax them to fix the housing problem. The PR is nice, but there's probably quite selfish reasons for wanting to put a damper on the housing market.
I'd like anyone in the know to name 3 things that AI is successfully doing today somewhere in or around our daily lives. Activities that require thinking or reasoning ability and that were once performed by humans, but no longer.
Once it's happening everybody just says it's an algorithm. For example look at the face/eye tracking in modern cameras, if know I'd struggle a lot of if somebody asked me to write that function. Same with speech recognition, it has other uses too but it's rarely a simple end user product. I know a system that flags certain data for manual processing/review, they of course have hard coded rules too but they also run a more general algorithm that looks for outliers and unusual combinations. I suppose in the first iteration you could call it a simple clustering algorithm, but it's also dynamic with respect to the input as cleared flags means to give more latitude in that direction while confirmed flags tighten it. The bubbles of "acceptable" data flows kinda like in a lava lamp, changing over time.
I know there's lots of businesses trying to automate processing that way, it's not so much that it handles everything... but it handles all the basic processing that used to be outside "normal" algorithms where you'd constantly run around trying to tweak the business logic and eventually just get lost. I know automated loan approvals go like this, if you're looking a lot like other profitable customers there's literally nobody in the loop anymore. We're still struggling with decision making systems that have to take active, unassisted action like driving a car but they're drawing a lot of insight out of what used to be just static. It still lacks depth but they're mixing basic neural nets with semantic models, memory, training from examples and they're making progress. But it looks like robotics is pretty hard in general.
Their population (about 10x of the United states) is huge
Huh? China is 1386 million, the US is 326 million so about 4.25x. They big change is that they realized the Soviet Union fell through worthless rubles and empty shops, let people make money and have nice things as long as they don't challenge the government. It's hard to get really mad when your wallet is thicker and thicker every year, it's when there's an economic crisis that there's real outrage.
We have to get rid of 32 bit support to prepare for the future 128 bit systems.
CERN probably thinks so... they're up to 230 PB stored now, that's 58 bits and the limit is 16384 PB for a 64 bit address space. If they keep up the exponential growth they need 128 bit in a little over a decade. Well either that or use the D: drive...
Facebook is over 14 years old. They already have a series of photos showing people ageing more than 10 years. They are evil, untrustworthy and despicable, but this current program is in NO way an additional threat. They do not need to use this data for age regression algorithms, they already have the necessary data.
That's what I'm thinking too, I mean if I was doing this research the first thing I'd do is make a filter to find sequences of images that my general facial recognition software with >99% probability says is the same person. I'd probably not care unless I had like 5+ image sequences, there's plenty people who constantly take pictures of themselves and the "fire and forget" pictures will outnumber the "look at me 5 years ago cool" pictures by a massive factor. Then I'd iterate on that and see how well I'd find faces looking -1 years old one year ago and +1 year old one year into the future relative to the baseline. Then you apply that algorithm twice and look at matches for -2 and +2 years. Pretty soon you'll have something that can match ten year old photos to the face you have today. And then you can use that to find those "out of order" pics on your timeline. They really don't need (additionally) structured data for this.
...why anyone would want to use biometric passcodes to unlock anything so private as a cell phone is today. I know, most people don't seem to value privacy, but if you have any at all, doing biometric should be a no go from the start.
It's good enough if it's simply lost. It's a lot easier to shoulder surf a PIN than to create a convincing enough replica of my fingerprint. If you really want access to my phone just rob me, I'll tell you the PIN as it's not worth dying over. There's no need for shears and gory scenarios and it'll unlock the phone forever and after reboots too so it's better than my finger. I suppose I could be dead or incapacitated, but why go to drugs, battery or murder if a simple threat will get you all you want? So the only people who'd have an easier time with biometrics are those where it makes a legal difference and they play by the rules.
If it's at the border or a traffic stop or knock on the door or anything like that you have plenty time to disable it - it's just five quick taps. So basically it's just a surprise arrest, either on the streets or SWAT rushing in. As I'm already assuming it's cops following rules I suppose that could happen by a case of mistaken identity, but they wouldn't find much incriminating and they wouldn't do much else nasty with it. Basically, the Venn diagram between where the security is significantly weaker and the threats that are of any real concern to me has no overlap.
Disney doesn't appeal to everyone, but they appeal plenty to their target age group. They don't care if the young and childless don't subscribe as long as they get the toddlers to tweens market. Next to sports they're pretty much ideal for a targeted subscription...
The "document" is garbage. I read it. I've seen less shit in an overflowing outhouse.
If you managed to get through that whole thing you got more stamina than me. But you know when you got gems like 98 and 99 where he's bitching about his last two lawyers who withdrew and in 101 about a motion denied when representing himself. I mean if you're switching lawyers more often than underwear the problem might be you. Especially if you decide to go commando.
SpaceX isn't struggling to stay afloat. They have a very profitable launch business. However, they're struggling to finance the development of the new Starship with its Ultraheavy booster and the Starlink system, which will consist of several thousand satellites, all at once.
Not that big a profit relative to their plans... I mean they got 21 launches in 2018, the F9 is at â62 million list price and the FH at $90. If we assume with services and all and the Dragon it's a $100 million average that's $2.1 billion gross. Even with profits of hundreds of millions of dollars both those projects are multi-billion dollar investments. And they kinda go hand in hand, Starlink needs cheap launch of thousands of satellites and there's no real market for BFR's capacity without Starlink. There's what, two FH launches planned for next year? Not much needs that kind of payload capacity.
Slashdot Mirror
Now - which of the two do you figure to be the most dangerous to individual life and liberty?
Depends. It's a bit like marshland vs a frozen lake, in a totalitarian society you start sinking into the mud the moment you stray from the path. Yes, it's nasty but you get plenty warning that this swamp is full of pits and quicksand that wants to eat you alive. In a free society you get the impression that you're free to roam around, doesn't matter what information you share with who at worst you get targeted ads you're not sent to a re-education camp. So further and further from shore you go, until that time where nobody really knew where you were, who you talked to and what you spent your time and money on is far off on the horizon. And that's when the ice starts to crack up under you...
If you look at something like the world democracy index the world is pretty much standing still, in 2006 it was at 5.52 and now it's at 5.48. The days when Eastern Europe and former Soviet states shook off Party rule and freedom made progress is halted, those who are authoritarian stay in power and about as many are getting worse as are getting better. Their economic power is also growing with China leading the way, I'm genuinely concerned that many countries think they need a "strong leader" to take charge where laws can get bent or broken and the government will stonewall out of any problems. All that keeps them from using all that data against you is just letters on a paper.
False dichotomy. (...) The correct relevant comparison is no ads but a higher cost, vs lower cost (or no cost) but with ads.
The real false dichotomy here is why you'd be limited to an either-or in a streaming world. Netflix can offer so many tiers they want from no ads to all ads and everything in between. Why would they lose the business of those who absolutely refuse to watch ads? It's the world's easiest business model, if pay() then stream(). You don't have to fiddle with advertisers, bid/booking systems, offensive ads or anything. And if you're not making enough money well raise prices and tell people that's the real, non-subsidized price of content. If you're telling the truth there won't be any other services giving you the same for a lower price, then you can choose to buy it or not.
I use VirtualBox to run Win7 under Linux Mint, and while some stuff works great, a lot of stuff doesn't. For example, I can use MS Word under VirtualBox and most things work fine, but do something like update the Table of Contents and *boom* Word crashes.
Well, first off does it crash on a native Win7 box? If it doesn't I'd try doing a fresh install, in this scenario VirtualBox is running genuine Windows on virtualized hardware. If that didn't work properly it'd be front page news. Quite frankly that setup is almost always less hassle than WINE, the obvious downside is that you need a license for the Win7 box while WINE is a re-implementation so it's just your code running on top of WINE.
Hell, I'm wondering why shareholders are NOT kicking Tim Cook to the curb?? Apple used to have a lock on the educational crowd years back. Apple used to have a lock on the artistic and creative types years back. Now?
Now they're making tons of money on people with disposable cash buying nice-to-have items. They were doing okay, but Apple was never great at appealing to places with budgets like schools or companies. Sure, the marketing department used to get Macs but that was it. They absolutely don't want to compete with $200 Chromebooks. They're running the same Intel/AMD/nVidia chips as everyone else, maybe you prefer macOS but inside Photoshop it's the same. The "new Apple" begin with the iPod, where they learned cool gadgets have high margins because you're selling directly to individuals and they'll buy a $399 cool device over a $299 uncool device. The iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch are all good examples, the Apple TV never really took off because they never managed to brand the experience it's just another streaming box. I'm not really quite sure what gadget I'm missing, but I think Apple should build that one.
The other huge prospect on the horizon is to finally put an A12X+ chip in an ARM-based laptop and challenge WinTel. Particularly if they could launch sometime in the next 12 months, like Win7 is going EOL so maybe now's a good time to jump ship. Though I admit that might just be wishful thinking on my part, but I think Apple has all the experience and ingredients. And all the advantages of starting in 2019, with only so much baggage from iOS/macOS that they want to carry but still solid amounts of code that could be ported with very little effort. And Intel is still mostly threading the water on 10nm...
How about this. Someone accuses you of sexual assault. It's proven to be false and you're cleared of all charges, but now, when you Google your name, details of your sexual assault accusation show up. Right to be forgotten lets you remove that because you're innocent. But the Court of Google means you're a sexual predator forever. Is that fair?
More like you'll be famous for being framed for sexual assault. Women complain it's hard to get rapists convicted because it's often a "he said, she said" situation, but proving an accusation is conclusively false is nearly impossible unless there's a straight up confession or there's video proof it didn't happen. The best 99.9% of falsely accused men can hope for is a finding of not guilty, which most will assume means where there's smoke there's fire and put you in the same boat as R. Kelly.
The big thing that policy makers have always despised about the internet is that it's decentralized. The more centralized it becomes, the happier they are! It's very hard to censor (I mean, "protect the children" or "eliminate hate speech") a decentralized internet. It's far easier to just knock on facebook's door and tell them to take something down, or to give up the identity of the poster.
Actually I find that in the modern world they much prefer surveillance to censorship and when they do run active warfare it's more drowning out the truth with noise or curbing the visibility. A block, ban or take down is so obvious and heavy handed compared to just blasting the public opinion with crap until nobody's sure what's fake news and not.
Now lets not straw man this, and talk about murderers, and the harden criminals, where harsher sentence are needed.
Hasn't the US pretty much tapped out that one? I mean you regularly hear about people serving 25+ year sentences and life convictions. You can get out when you're near retirement age with no work history, no savings, probably estranged from all friends and family and you're a convicted felon. Granted, now that I'm a bit older I see there's life at 50+ too but to my younger self it already sounds like a "my life is over if I get caught" sentence, do they really care if you make it 50 or 500 years? Do the even consider it before they kill the ex in a fit of rage or try to rob a store and end up with felony murder? I know a lot of people feel like fuck 'em, they earned it and maybe they do... but there's very little indication that increasing penalties further will change their decision making. A lot of the shoot-outs US police get into look remarkably like "nothing left to lose" where it'd take a miracle for the perpetrator to get away, it's more like how many can I take with me.
But these are cultural norms. In other countries and even areas of the United States, may either seem overly friendly and getting too close to a stranger, or to others may make you seem distant, and combative.
And a lot of this is subconscious, I remember seeing a standing conversation between a Japanese and western (American? Don't remember) couple, in any case they'd constantly nudge a little closer and the other couple back away. Over like a 5-10 minute conversation you sped up you saw them more or less dance throughout the room. I also remember a guy I had a class with from India, he'd lightly touch the people he was talking to. It wasn't in a creepy way or anything, if it was my buddy in a pub I wouldn't think twice about it but it gave me all the vibes of *shoulder poke* "eyh, want another beer?" rather than going for a business lunch.
But hey we're probably equally off in other settings, here in Norway you typically run late for a dinner invitation like if it starts at 6 PM dinner is usually served at 7 PM and people arrive 6:15 - 6:45. Well, a German teacher I had told the story of when she first invited Norwegians for dinner and it was on the table at 6 PM sharp and nobody had come and nobody had told her they were running late. She was quite mad until she was told this was completely normal and that the custom was quite different here. It's easier if you have a neon sign saying "tourist" over your head though, nobody really expect much from you.
Money is defined as a) a store of value and b) a medium of exchange. (...) Medium of exchange means you can advertise your services at $25/hour, or sell tables at $100/table, and then someone who wants a table goes to work, earns $100, and uses it to buy a table from you. *coin doesn't work that way. Something that costs 0.5BTC this morning (actually $1,700) may very well cost 0.7BTC tonight (still $1,700).
No, actually that's just repeating the first point. Medium of exchange refers to being a universally accepted token of value, unlike a barter economy where you need to find someone who has what you want to barter with. Volatility during transactions is annoying but not really that big a deal because the value goes both up and down, like if you keep working for $25/hour buying $100 tables then on average it'll take four hours. If you're doing it just once it might take two or eight hours if the crypto-coin is booming/tanking that day, but if you're doing it every week you'll be pretty close to $5200 worth of tables for $5200 worth of work after a year. It's no more magic than a farmer who has good crops and bad crops, you should probably add lost crops too because the risk a coin will suddenly crash and burn. You just need the financial buffer to deal with the variation.
hahahhahahahaha
Fiat currencies have and do shit themselves regularly. Entire countries are essentially bankrupt because of them. (...) See Greece for a recent example of a shitfest gone wrong.
You need to do less drugs. The Greek government was close to bankrupt because they took up huge loans and couldn't pay them back, but their currency is the Euro and has been rock solid. Their only "problem" was that they couldn't print free money...
Yes but on the face of it, that seems like a strange threshold - as I said you can get, if you will, one "unit" of entertainment from a theater for maybe $16-$20. So for less than that you get as much video as you want to watch for a whole month from Netflix.
Yeah, those who regularly go to the cinema - at least just to watch movies, and not as a social event - probably have an entertainment budget high enough that a $2 bump on Netflix is nothing. I don't even care, my running expenses will probably slow my savings for big-ticket items a bit but I never need to check if there's money on my account. But statistics show that a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck where every new expense has to come from cost-cutting somewhere else. Like you need to find another $50 in your budget, what's expendable... a lot of people think it's still the 80s where the last thing frugal people would cut was TV because that was their cheapest form of easy entertainment. But today? YouTube and Fortnite will get you through for free, if you're just looking to kill time there's no need to spend money on Netflix. Plus people haven't forgotten how to use torrents...
While that's true, there's a difference between the science community and individual scientists. As humans we tend to get stuck in our ways, you can tell how many great changes are not truly over until that generation is dead and buried. If you're an expert it's even harder to get over the fact that your expertise is wrong, we have our known unknowns but many things we think we've figured out completely. So while journalists obviously pick the juiciest headlines, I'm not surprised there are scientists that are in fact blindsided and baffled when it turns out their knowledge in a particular area was in fact incomplete or incorrect.
Authoritarians ban any challenge to their authority, but otherwise people are mostly free to do what they want. Totalitarians attempt to control every aspect of life. Stalin was totalitarian. Putin is authoritarian. Mao was totalitarian. Xi is authoritarian.
That's trying to make a principal difference between a short leash and a long leash. All authoritarians think their authority exceeds your personal liberty, it's just a matter of how far you can go before they'll yank your chain. The way Xi treats the Falun Gong or Uyghurs (Muslims) is not really much better than Stalin's "religion is opium for the masses" that he got from Karl Marx. Both Putin and Xi is pushing an anti-LBGT agenda both to assert their authority and to appeal to the people as the gatekeepers between them and moral decay and depravity. If China wants to build a high speed rail line they take a ruler to a map, draw a straight line and tell people to move. China's social credit system is increasingly totalitarian, encompassing more and more aspects of everyday life. The only thing that's dead is the plan economy because it was inefficient and now they surveillance all the electronic cash flows instead.
I have a problem with the paid support model of FOSS, because it preferentially promotes creation of overly complex software artifacts / applications that require lots of support. It also would tend to encourage crap / no / minimal documentation.
I work mostly on custom code and we manage to do that all on our own without any financial incentive other than an never ending list of TODOs and deadlines. Ugly hacks with weird limitations that solve our immediate problem? Check. Solutions that are tweaked right up to the wire and never properly documented? Check. This is pretty much the default unless you start funneling money from service & support into tasks to make it more consistent and user friendly. I doubt anyone is consciously trying to write obfuscated code, though I've certainly duct taped things together that might give that impression.
Their problems right now are in production. You lower the price to get more people to buy your product. But demand already exceeds supply.
Tesla has been shipping all the $50k+ orders when most people want the $35k car Musk promised. There's no telling exactly how much backlog Tesla has at the price points they're actually shipping, but it's probably a whole lot less in volume and when your skimming off the top your margins will get progressively worse. They know there's a lot of untapped demand at a lower price point, but they need to be able to turn a profit on them too. Their guidance has been pretty clear that they sold a lot of pimped out rides in Q3/Q4 and that average sales price will be going down.
Of course if they didn't want to be an asshat they could have just set up a service requiring the user to send a text like "opt-in 555-1234" to whitelist a number and "opt-out 555-1234" to unlist a number and offer a text sending service that would throw an error if you tried sending to a number without opt-in. Then Remind could just put on their website that yeah, we did try to message you but unless you do this it costs us money so nuh uh. I mean if you can get explicit opt-in from the user it's per definition not unsolicitated and not spam.
P.S. for bonus points the same service could have a "no-text/no-call/block" command to block communication from that number in whole or part. Of course spoofing is still a thing, but at least anything not trying to be shady...
This is not a charitable donation, it is an investment, a loan for affordable housing. Smart investment considers intangible benefits from the obvious 'good publicity' from corporate responsibility to increasing their own value by increasing the value of the environs. It is not a bad thing, but let's see this for what it is, a smart business move.
Cost of living is also a driving factor in Microsoft's wages. Their employees may be on better terms with the locals leading to happier workers and lower turnover. And it may get goodwill with the local officials who could otherwise try to tax them to fix the housing problem. The PR is nice, but there's probably quite selfish reasons for wanting to put a damper on the housing market.
I'd like anyone in the know to name 3 things that AI is successfully doing today somewhere in or around our daily lives. Activities that require thinking or reasoning ability and that were once performed by humans, but no longer.
Once it's happening everybody just says it's an algorithm. For example look at the face/eye tracking in modern cameras, if know I'd struggle a lot of if somebody asked me to write that function. Same with speech recognition, it has other uses too but it's rarely a simple end user product. I know a system that flags certain data for manual processing/review, they of course have hard coded rules too but they also run a more general algorithm that looks for outliers and unusual combinations. I suppose in the first iteration you could call it a simple clustering algorithm, but it's also dynamic with respect to the input as cleared flags means to give more latitude in that direction while confirmed flags tighten it. The bubbles of "acceptable" data flows kinda like in a lava lamp, changing over time.
I know there's lots of businesses trying to automate processing that way, it's not so much that it handles everything... but it handles all the basic processing that used to be outside "normal" algorithms where you'd constantly run around trying to tweak the business logic and eventually just get lost. I know automated loan approvals go like this, if you're looking a lot like other profitable customers there's literally nobody in the loop anymore. We're still struggling with decision making systems that have to take active, unassisted action like driving a car but they're drawing a lot of insight out of what used to be just static. It still lacks depth but they're mixing basic neural nets with semantic models, memory, training from examples and they're making progress. But it looks like robotics is pretty hard in general.
Their population (about 10x of the United states) is huge
Huh? China is 1386 million, the US is 326 million so about 4.25x. They big change is that they realized the Soviet Union fell through worthless rubles and empty shops, let people make money and have nice things as long as they don't challenge the government. It's hard to get really mad when your wallet is thicker and thicker every year, it's when there's an economic crisis that there's real outrage.
We have to get rid of 32 bit support to prepare for the future 128 bit systems.
CERN probably thinks so... they're up to 230 PB stored now, that's 58 bits and the limit is 16384 PB for a 64 bit address space. If they keep up the exponential growth they need 128 bit in a little over a decade. Well either that or use the D: drive...
Facebook is over 14 years old. They already have a series of photos showing people ageing more than 10 years. They are evil, untrustworthy and despicable, but this current program is in NO way an additional threat. They do not need to use this data for age regression algorithms, they already have the necessary data.
That's what I'm thinking too, I mean if I was doing this research the first thing I'd do is make a filter to find sequences of images that my general facial recognition software with >99% probability says is the same person. I'd probably not care unless I had like 5+ image sequences, there's plenty people who constantly take pictures of themselves and the "fire and forget" pictures will outnumber the "look at me 5 years ago cool" pictures by a massive factor. Then I'd iterate on that and see how well I'd find faces looking -1 years old one year ago and +1 year old one year into the future relative to the baseline. Then you apply that algorithm twice and look at matches for -2 and +2 years. Pretty soon you'll have something that can match ten year old photos to the face you have today. And then you can use that to find those "out of order" pics on your timeline. They really don't need (additionally) structured data for this.
...why anyone would want to use biometric passcodes to unlock anything so private as a cell phone is today. I know, most people don't seem to value privacy, but if you have any at all, doing biometric should be a no go from the start.
It's good enough if it's simply lost. It's a lot easier to shoulder surf a PIN than to create a convincing enough replica of my fingerprint. If you really want access to my phone just rob me, I'll tell you the PIN as it's not worth dying over. There's no need for shears and gory scenarios and it'll unlock the phone forever and after reboots too so it's better than my finger. I suppose I could be dead or incapacitated, but why go to drugs, battery or murder if a simple threat will get you all you want? So the only people who'd have an easier time with biometrics are those where it makes a legal difference and they play by the rules.
If it's at the border or a traffic stop or knock on the door or anything like that you have plenty time to disable it - it's just five quick taps. So basically it's just a surprise arrest, either on the streets or SWAT rushing in. As I'm already assuming it's cops following rules I suppose that could happen by a case of mistaken identity, but they wouldn't find much incriminating and they wouldn't do much else nasty with it. Basically, the Venn diagram between where the security is significantly weaker and the threats that are of any real concern to me has no overlap.
Disney doesn't appeal to everyone, but they appeal plenty to their target age group. They don't care if the young and childless don't subscribe as long as they get the toddlers to tweens market. Next to sports they're pretty much ideal for a targeted subscription...
The "document" is garbage. I read it. I've seen less shit in an overflowing outhouse.
If you managed to get through that whole thing you got more stamina than me. But you know when you got gems like 98 and 99 where he's bitching about his last two lawyers who withdrew and in 101 about a motion denied when representing himself. I mean if you're switching lawyers more often than underwear the problem might be you. Especially if you decide to go commando.
SpaceX isn't struggling to stay afloat. They have a very profitable launch business. However, they're struggling to finance the development of the new Starship with its Ultraheavy booster and the Starlink system, which will consist of several thousand satellites, all at once.
Not that big a profit relative to their plans... I mean they got 21 launches in 2018, the F9 is at â62 million list price and the FH at $90. If we assume with services and all and the Dragon it's a $100 million average that's $2.1 billion gross. Even with profits of hundreds of millions of dollars both those projects are multi-billion dollar investments. And they kinda go hand in hand, Starlink needs cheap launch of thousands of satellites and there's no real market for BFR's capacity without Starlink. There's what, two FH launches planned for next year? Not much needs that kind of payload capacity.