So white Westerners get to judge Chinese society and decide what's best for it?
We get to decide what we think of it and how we are willing to interact with it. We have every right to criticize, and even to refuse to buy Chinese goods or sell our goods to China. China can decide how it chooses to respond to our criticism and related decisions.
At some point, to progress human rights, we must be willing to draw a line and say 'this cannot be tolerated'. Intolerance such as this lies on the far side of such a line, and most reasonable people would understand the important contradiction inherent in 'absolute tolerance'.
I think tolerance is better understood as a sort of a peace treaty, rather than a moral principle. That is, I'm not obligated to show you tolerance because I'm a moral person, rather, I'm obligated to show you tolerance if I'd like you to show me tolerance -- and to show it to others, too, because what goes around comes around. If someone breaches the tolerance peace treaty by deciding it's okay to be intolerant, then that person has lost any right to expect tolerance from others, at least with respect to things related to their intolerance.
So, for example, if a Nazi would like tolerance of their anti-semitic views, they must treat jews with respect and toleration, including not doing or saying anything anti-semitic. Clearly that's a contradiction, so there's no way within this model for Nazis to hold anti-semitic views while expecting others to tolerate those views. Note that this does not mean that it's okay to punch Nazis.
In this case, to the degree that Chinese culture is intolerant of women we have no responsibility to tolerate Chinese culture. That doesn't mean we denigrate all aspects of it, but it does mean that we have no obligation to respect the misogynistic bits.
Wrong question, you're making an appeal to authority, an assumption that some *person* should be doing the deciding. That's a bad approach. Of course you're not really asking the question, you know it's a bad approach and you know that anyone reading it will know it's a bad approach, so you're asking the question rhetorically in an effort to discredit the notion that any decision is right. That's underhanded argumentation. Say what you mean.
The right question is what *principles* should be used to decide. Obviously, not everyone will agree on the principles, which is why we fall back on democratic ideals. To avoid tyrannies of the majority, we use democratic processes to decide broad, high-level principles rather than to answer specific questions. Then we apply reason and debate to those principles.
In this case, the core principle is that of freedom. Cultures are free to do what they want, but that freedom ends where it begins infringing on the freedom of individuals (of course, we make exceptions where to allow too much individual freedom causes bad outcomes for society as a whole -- there's a balance to be found. Yes, this is hard.). The notion that women are morally equal to men (which isn't saying they're the same as men) means that they should have the same opportunities to compete for the jobs based on their ability to do the job.
I argue that this freedom for women trumps the freedom of Chinese culture to restrict their role in society. Do you actually disagree? On what basis?
The general consensus among the mainstream media now, leading up to the official meeting, seems to be "Huh. Okay, this might happen. Maybe Trump being an asshole and Kim Jong Un being an asshole worked out in a Bizarro sort of way."
Maybe it's just a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc, but I have a different take: I think it was the Olympics. Certainly, timing-wise, the Kim Jong Un's softening coincided with the Olympic games, and I think it makes sense as well. He saw the benefits of being a participant in the international scene, both economic and in terms of status. He's also made some moves to consolidate power internally and may feel like he's got a strong enough hold that he can steer the country in a different direction without losing control. Certainly as long as he can keep the elites from removing him, it will be utterly trivial for him to become a true hero to the masses -- all he has to do is change his approach enough to get most of the sanctions lifted and his nation will experience an incredible economic boom. This is only because it's so incredibly impoverished, but from the perspective of his people, what they'll see is massive improvement.
That's from September, so springtime, and apparently over the winter the corals had recovered somewhat. Then came summer and the season of warmer water killed a lot more corals, leading to the current article. I see no inconsistency here. Both can be true. Last winter the corals recovered more than people thought they would, but then a lot more got killed.
I doubt that anyone has given serious thought to how landmark navigation could be used for advertising purposes.
Seriously?
Seriously. Most of the teams in Google basically never think about advertising... or even about monetization. It's all about user impact and engagement. Monetization is the Ads team's problem. I was in the industry for 20+ years before joining Google, so it struck me as very odd when I was hired at Google, because drawing a straight line from your work to the bottom line is a big part of life in most software shops. Most of Google seriously never thinks about it; we know that ads fund 90% of our paychecks, but our focus is on the users of whatever product we're building. Further, development of everything is rather bottom-up, not top-down. Features almost never start with some executive directing that something be built, they start with engineers convincing their own managers that something would have strong user impact (which is needed for good performance reviews, promotion, etc.). Direction of one organization to do something to help another is fairly rare; cross-organization cooperation is common, but it's driven by the interested organization reaching out to the other organization and asking for help (which is usually given quite freely).
In a case like this, if there were some initiative to use advertising to monetize landmark navigation, it would come from the Ads team, not the Maps team. And it's likely that the Ads team knows nothing about landmark navigation. Until they read about it on slashdot or similar.
And maybe to Google, this opens door for some business opportunities
Seriously? Of course that's the plan. Google is an advertising platform.
This Maps feature actually came out of work to make directions useful in countries and regions where street addresses don't really exist, notably much of India. Apparently someone thought that now that Maps supports navigation by landmarks, maybe it could be applied to make directions easier to follow even in areas that do have street addresses.
I doubt that anyone has given serious thought to how landmark navigation could be used for advertising purposes. Not saying it couldn't happen, but it seems unlikely to me.
The "one laptop per child" demand was met instead largely by smartphones.
Nothing has really met what I always thought was the coolest and most valuable goal of the OLPC project: Ultimate hackability. There was a "view source" button on the keyboard. For any program that happens to be running, you could press the "view source" button and get a window with the source code (everything was Python), which you could read and even modify at will. The system was designed to make this very safe, with easy restoration to a prior functional state and extremely strong sandboxing of all apps (the security model was very cool, actually) to limit the damage of malware.
I was really jazzed by the idea of turning hundreds of millions of kids loose on such an environment. Sure, a high percentage of them would have no interest in coding, but if 1% of them got interested in it that would be millions of young programmers, and some percentage of them would be brilliant. I was excited by the what this might mean for software engineering... and for third world countries who just might be able to turn themselves into software powerhouses.
But, it never happened. Instead, we have devices that in many ways have higher barriers to entry and are harder to program than traditional desktop OSes.
GPL FTW. They'll have to distribute source, so everyone that really wants their extensions will be able to get them. Also, in the long run it's far cheaper and easier to upstream your Linux changes than to deal with revising them every time the upstream code changes. If Microsoft hasn't figured this out, they will.
We'll see. If they don't make the patches of sufficient quality for inclusion, then either someone else has to do the work (at least that's possible!) or that just never happens.
If it doesn't happen, they'll have to port their patches to every new kernel release. That becomes a large burden. Most people decide it's easier to do whatever needs to be done to make the kernel maintainers happy so they can upstream.
The only reason I can think of to use your own kernel fork is because you can power optimize it.
That's not a legitimate reason. If some architecture benefits from additional power optimizations, those ought to be contributed to the Linux kernel so that everyone can benefit from them.
GPL FTW. They'll have to distribute source, so everyone that really wants their extensions will be able to get them. Also, in the long run it's far cheaper and easier to upstream your Linux changes than to deal with revising them every time the upstream code changes. If Microsoft hasn't figured this out, they will.
Is this the "Embrace" or "Extend" step in the sequence?
It's a new step: Capitulate (sorry, can't think of a synonym that starts with 'e'). Microsoft spent many years and huge amounts of money trying to kill Linux, but failed because Linux doesn't have a single source, because Microsoft's old tactics can't beat "free", and because Microsoft just doesn't have the clout they used to, after they missed their chance to control first the web and then the mobile revolutions. They're recognizing that they're about to miss the IoT boat as well.
So, they've decided that if you can't beat 'em, you'd better join 'em or risk getting left behind. Again. And this can't be a temporary head-fake of a join, either, because they're doing open source software on easily-licensable hardware. They will control the server-side (which is where they hope to make money), but if it works well others will be able to do it, too. Indeed, others already *are* doing similar things. The only way MS will be able to compete is fairly, by offering a better service at a better price.
At the end of the day, it is just an academic echo chamber where every paper references each other and none of it is very earth shattering.
Good science is often obvious in hindsight. This isn't an artifact of the science, it's an artifact of hindsight, and of one of the many deep and systematic biases inherent to the human brain.
While I think the Democrats are fucking full on retarded that they think HURR EMAILZ immediately before the election had an effect
I'm not a Democrat (and didn't vote for Clinton, either of them), but anyone who thinks that the October surprise didn't make a difference is a drooling idiot. The effect was immediately obvious in the poll numbers. While the polls turned out to be less accurate than usual (most likely due to large numbers of people who were embarrassed to admit to a pollster that they wanted to vote for Trump, but did it in the privacy of the voting booth), given how razor-thin Trump's win margin was (remember he actually lost the popular vote), the couple of percentage points Comey cost may very well have made the difference for Clinton.
Hyperlinking is one part of what makes the WWW possible. TCP/IP, HTTP, etc. are all critical components. Despite those earlier examples of hyperlinking, they did not lead to anything remotely resembling a global inter-network of linked servers.
Also, the two previous examples of hyperlinking that were mentioned were local links. To anyone who has encountered a table of context or an index, then observed the possibilities of navigation provided by a computer screen, the idea of selecting an entry and jumping to it is fairly obvious.
The notion of being able to link to a chunk of a document on another computer on the other side of the world, without the knowledge or assistance (for your link, anyway) of whoever owns that computer and that document, is far less obvious. And even once you have the idea to do that, there's still a lot of invention to be done to define a way to do it. In 20/20 hindsight, this seems simple and obvious. In fact, it was complex and novel.
They don't invent shit, they didn't even contribute anything to the development of the internet after it was created beyond invasive advertising, spyware, and a host of idiotic JavaScript frameworks/anti-patterns.
That's an emotionally-satisfying response, perhaps, but it's obviously not true. If you can't come up with a long list of things that were invented in Silicon Valley, you either haven't been paying attention or you have some powerful confirmation bias going on.
A back of the envelope calculation for the drug mentioned in TFS indicates that their profit over a 10-year period (including the first 5 years prior to FDA approval) was around ten times the cost of developing the drug. Even if they make no sales ever again, that sounds like a pretty good ROI.
It's probably not quite that good. Remember they also have to cover the R&D and often trials for all of the drugs that don't pan out. I'm sure they know how much they need to average from their profitable drugs. I suspect this one exceeds that, but can't be sure.
Since days have passed and you've posted many other comments without answering my questions. So I'll go ahead and comment on why I asked them. Here were my questions:
Per your definition, does randomness actually exist? Can you point to some process you consider to be random?
If you believe randomness exists in some useful sense, you should be able to point to an example of something that is random. But, any example you choose will conform to some statistical distribution, which I could point out, which would mean that it is not an example that fits your definition. This will inevitably lead to the conclusion that according to your definition nothing is random. Which doesn't make your definition wrong, per se, but it does make it useless.
A useful definition of randomness is that random events are unpredictable. This allows the possibility that random events can be unpredictable while still conforming to some statistical distribution. (Actually, it's really not clear to me that "causeless" events can't have statistical distributions, but I don't really know what "causeless" events are.)
It's worth pointing out as well, that conforming to a particular distribution -- the uniform distribution -- is actually necessary (though certainly not sufficient) to maximize unpredictability. If you have a random event that conforms to a non-uniform distribution, then although the event is technically unpredictable in the sense that you can't guarantee that your prediction will be right, you can make predictions that are more likely to be right than other predictions. Uniformity prevents that. It ensures that every prediction is equally likely to be right or wrong.
I find your insistence on this odd point rather surprising. I wonder if maybe you've confused things, and believe that I'm arguing that randomness can be tested through statistical analysis. To be clear, it cannot. Randomness and statistical distribution are separate properties of an event. Statistical tests of random number generators are important and useful, but only because they allow us to test the possibility that the output is non-uniform; they say nothing about its randomness. Note also that statistical tests can never prove uniformity of distribution, only disprove it. However, if we apply many different statistical tests and none of them manage to disprove uniformity then we have pretty good reason to assume that it's unlikely to be non-uniform enough to have exploitable biases. This is the purpose of test suites like diehard.
Slashdot Mirror
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12023151&cid=56495869
If you choose to break the treaty, then I see no need to tolerate your views.
So white Westerners get to judge Chinese society and decide what's best for it?
We get to decide what we think of it and how we are willing to interact with it. We have every right to criticize, and even to refuse to buy Chinese goods or sell our goods to China. China can decide how it chooses to respond to our criticism and related decisions.
This really isn't complicated.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
At some point, to progress human rights, we must be willing to draw a line and say 'this cannot be tolerated'. Intolerance such as this lies on the far side of such a line, and most reasonable people would understand the important contradiction inherent in 'absolute tolerance'.
I think tolerance is better understood as a sort of a peace treaty, rather than a moral principle. That is, I'm not obligated to show you tolerance because I'm a moral person, rather, I'm obligated to show you tolerance if I'd like you to show me tolerance -- and to show it to others, too, because what goes around comes around. If someone breaches the tolerance peace treaty by deciding it's okay to be intolerant, then that person has lost any right to expect tolerance from others, at least with respect to things related to their intolerance.
So, for example, if a Nazi would like tolerance of their anti-semitic views, they must treat jews with respect and toleration, including not doing or saying anything anti-semitic. Clearly that's a contradiction, so there's no way within this model for Nazis to hold anti-semitic views while expecting others to tolerate those views. Note that this does not mean that it's okay to punch Nazis.
In this case, to the degree that Chinese culture is intolerant of women we have no responsibility to tolerate Chinese culture. That doesn't mean we denigrate all aspects of it, but it does mean that we have no obligation to respect the misogynistic bits.
Who gets to define what constitutes progress?
Wrong question, you're making an appeal to authority, an assumption that some *person* should be doing the deciding. That's a bad approach. Of course you're not really asking the question, you know it's a bad approach and you know that anyone reading it will know it's a bad approach, so you're asking the question rhetorically in an effort to discredit the notion that any decision is right. That's underhanded argumentation. Say what you mean.
The right question is what *principles* should be used to decide. Obviously, not everyone will agree on the principles, which is why we fall back on democratic ideals. To avoid tyrannies of the majority, we use democratic processes to decide broad, high-level principles rather than to answer specific questions. Then we apply reason and debate to those principles.
In this case, the core principle is that of freedom. Cultures are free to do what they want, but that freedom ends where it begins infringing on the freedom of individuals (of course, we make exceptions where to allow too much individual freedom causes bad outcomes for society as a whole -- there's a balance to be found. Yes, this is hard.). The notion that women are morally equal to men (which isn't saying they're the same as men) means that they should have the same opportunities to compete for the jobs based on their ability to do the job.
I argue that this freedom for women trumps the freedom of Chinese culture to restrict their role in society. Do you actually disagree? On what basis?
The general consensus among the mainstream media now, leading up to the official meeting, seems to be "Huh. Okay, this might happen. Maybe Trump being an asshole and Kim Jong Un being an asshole worked out in a Bizarro sort of way."
Maybe it's just a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc, but I have a different take: I think it was the Olympics. Certainly, timing-wise, the Kim Jong Un's softening coincided with the Olympic games, and I think it makes sense as well. He saw the benefits of being a participant in the international scene, both economic and in terms of status. He's also made some moves to consolidate power internally and may feel like he's got a strong enough hold that he can steer the country in a different direction without losing control. Certainly as long as he can keep the elites from removing him, it will be utterly trivial for him to become a true hero to the masses -- all he has to do is change his approach enough to get most of the sanctions lifted and his nation will experience an incredible economic boom. This is only because it's so incredibly impoverished, but from the perspective of his people, what they'll see is massive improvement.
Did you read the post you responded to? I said 99% would not be interested.
Here's one.
That's from September, so springtime, and apparently over the winter the corals had recovered somewhat. Then came summer and the season of warmer water killed a lot more corals, leading to the current article. I see no inconsistency here. Both can be true. Last winter the corals recovered more than people thought they would, but then a lot more got killed.
Don't try to paint Google as some saintly, charitable organization.
I didn't. I just describe how things work.
That "Do no evil" ship sailed years ago.
Its "Don't be evil", and it's still considered a key principle.
really? Know them all personally, do you?
I know a decent cross section, yes. I interact with lots of different teams across the company.
I doubt that anyone has given serious thought to how landmark navigation could be used for advertising purposes.
Seriously?
Seriously. Most of the teams in Google basically never think about advertising... or even about monetization. It's all about user impact and engagement. Monetization is the Ads team's problem. I was in the industry for 20+ years before joining Google, so it struck me as very odd when I was hired at Google, because drawing a straight line from your work to the bottom line is a big part of life in most software shops. Most of Google seriously never thinks about it; we know that ads fund 90% of our paychecks, but our focus is on the users of whatever product we're building. Further, development of everything is rather bottom-up, not top-down. Features almost never start with some executive directing that something be built, they start with engineers convincing their own managers that something would have strong user impact (which is needed for good performance reviews, promotion, etc.). Direction of one organization to do something to help another is fairly rare; cross-organization cooperation is common, but it's driven by the interested organization reaching out to the other organization and asking for help (which is usually given quite freely).
In a case like this, if there were some initiative to use advertising to monetize landmark navigation, it would come from the Ads team, not the Maps team. And it's likely that the Ads team knows nothing about landmark navigation. Until they read about it on slashdot or similar.
And maybe to Google, this opens door for some business opportunities
Seriously? Of course that's the plan. Google is an advertising platform.
This Maps feature actually came out of work to make directions useful in countries and regions where street addresses don't really exist, notably much of India. Apparently someone thought that now that Maps supports navigation by landmarks, maybe it could be applied to make directions easier to follow even in areas that do have street addresses.
I doubt that anyone has given serious thought to how landmark navigation could be used for advertising purposes. Not saying it couldn't happen, but it seems unlikely to me.
They also walked back the hackability before shipping. They were afraid that kids would be confused by it.
The "one laptop per child" demand was met instead largely by smartphones.
Nothing has really met what I always thought was the coolest and most valuable goal of the OLPC project: Ultimate hackability. There was a "view source" button on the keyboard. For any program that happens to be running, you could press the "view source" button and get a window with the source code (everything was Python), which you could read and even modify at will. The system was designed to make this very safe, with easy restoration to a prior functional state and extremely strong sandboxing of all apps (the security model was very cool, actually) to limit the damage of malware.
I was really jazzed by the idea of turning hundreds of millions of kids loose on such an environment. Sure, a high percentage of them would have no interest in coding, but if 1% of them got interested in it that would be millions of young programmers, and some percentage of them would be brilliant. I was excited by the what this might mean for software engineering... and for third world countries who just might be able to turn themselves into software powerhouses.
But, it never happened. Instead, we have devices that in many ways have higher barriers to entry and are harder to program than traditional desktop OSes.
GPL FTW. They'll have to distribute source, so everyone that really wants their extensions will be able to get them. Also, in the long run it's far cheaper and easier to upstream your Linux changes than to deal with revising them every time the upstream code changes. If Microsoft hasn't figured this out, they will.
We'll see. If they don't make the patches of sufficient quality for inclusion, then either someone else has to do the work (at least that's possible!) or that just never happens.
If it doesn't happen, they'll have to port their patches to every new kernel release. That becomes a large burden. Most people decide it's easier to do whatever needs to be done to make the kernel maintainers happy so they can upstream.
The only reason I can think of to use your own kernel fork is because you can power optimize it.
That's not a legitimate reason. If some architecture benefits from additional power optimizations, those ought to be contributed to the Linux kernel so that everyone can benefit from them.
GPL FTW. They'll have to distribute source, so everyone that really wants their extensions will be able to get them. Also, in the long run it's far cheaper and easier to upstream your Linux changes than to deal with revising them every time the upstream code changes. If Microsoft hasn't figured this out, they will.
Is this the "Embrace" or "Extend" step in the sequence?
It's a new step: Capitulate (sorry, can't think of a synonym that starts with 'e'). Microsoft spent many years and huge amounts of money trying to kill Linux, but failed because Linux doesn't have a single source, because Microsoft's old tactics can't beat "free", and because Microsoft just doesn't have the clout they used to, after they missed their chance to control first the web and then the mobile revolutions. They're recognizing that they're about to miss the IoT boat as well.
So, they've decided that if you can't beat 'em, you'd better join 'em or risk getting left behind. Again. And this can't be a temporary head-fake of a join, either, because they're doing open source software on easily-licensable hardware. They will control the server-side (which is where they hope to make money), but if it works well others will be able to do it, too. Indeed, others already *are* doing similar things. The only way MS will be able to compete is fairly, by offering a better service at a better price.
At the end of the day, it is just an academic echo chamber where every paper references each other and none of it is very earth shattering.
Good science is often obvious in hindsight. This isn't an artifact of the science, it's an artifact of hindsight, and of one of the many deep and systematic biases inherent to the human brain.
While I think the Democrats are fucking full on retarded that they think HURR EMAILZ immediately before the election had an effect
I'm not a Democrat (and didn't vote for Clinton, either of them), but anyone who thinks that the October surprise didn't make a difference is a drooling idiot. The effect was immediately obvious in the poll numbers. While the polls turned out to be less accurate than usual (most likely due to large numbers of people who were embarrassed to admit to a pollster that they wanted to vote for Trump, but did it in the privacy of the voting booth), given how razor-thin Trump's win margin was (remember he actually lost the popular vote), the couple of percentage points Comey cost may very well have made the difference for Clinton.
Again, poor gopher. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
WWW predated Gopher, although Gopher's popularity grew faster at first.
Hyperlinking is one part of what makes the WWW possible. TCP/IP, HTTP, etc. are all critical components. Despite those earlier examples of hyperlinking, they did not lead to anything remotely resembling a global inter-network of linked servers.
Also, the two previous examples of hyperlinking that were mentioned were local links. To anyone who has encountered a table of context or an index, then observed the possibilities of navigation provided by a computer screen, the idea of selecting an entry and jumping to it is fairly obvious.
The notion of being able to link to a chunk of a document on another computer on the other side of the world, without the knowledge or assistance (for your link, anyway) of whoever owns that computer and that document, is far less obvious. And even once you have the idea to do that, there's still a lot of invention to be done to define a way to do it. In 20/20 hindsight, this seems simple and obvious. In fact, it was complex and novel.
They don't invent shit, they didn't even contribute anything to the development of the internet after it was created beyond invasive advertising, spyware, and a host of idiotic JavaScript frameworks/anti-patterns.
That's an emotionally-satisfying response, perhaps, but it's obviously not true. If you can't come up with a long list of things that were invented in Silicon Valley, you either haven't been paying attention or you have some powerful confirmation bias going on.
Hmm. I haven't heard that that figure includes the cost of failed research. That would help to explain why it's so large, though, so it's plausible.
A back of the envelope calculation for the drug mentioned in TFS indicates that their profit over a 10-year period (including the first 5 years prior to FDA approval) was around ten times the cost of developing the drug. Even if they make no sales ever again, that sounds like a pretty good ROI.
It's probably not quite that good. Remember they also have to cover the R&D and often trials for all of the drugs that don't pan out. I'm sure they know how much they need to average from their profitable drugs. I suspect this one exceeds that, but can't be sure.
Since days have passed and you've posted many other comments without answering my questions. So I'll go ahead and comment on why I asked them. Here were my questions:
If you believe randomness exists in some useful sense, you should be able to point to an example of something that is random. But, any example you choose will conform to some statistical distribution, which I could point out, which would mean that it is not an example that fits your definition. This will inevitably lead to the conclusion that according to your definition nothing is random. Which doesn't make your definition wrong, per se, but it does make it useless.
A useful definition of randomness is that random events are unpredictable. This allows the possibility that random events can be unpredictable while still conforming to some statistical distribution. (Actually, it's really not clear to me that "causeless" events can't have statistical distributions, but I don't really know what "causeless" events are.)
It's worth pointing out as well, that conforming to a particular distribution -- the uniform distribution -- is actually necessary (though certainly not sufficient) to maximize unpredictability. If you have a random event that conforms to a non-uniform distribution, then although the event is technically unpredictable in the sense that you can't guarantee that your prediction will be right, you can make predictions that are more likely to be right than other predictions. Uniformity prevents that. It ensures that every prediction is equally likely to be right or wrong.
I find your insistence on this odd point rather surprising. I wonder if maybe you've confused things, and believe that I'm arguing that randomness can be tested through statistical analysis. To be clear, it cannot. Randomness and statistical distribution are separate properties of an event. Statistical tests of random number generators are important and useful, but only because they allow us to test the possibility that the output is non-uniform; they say nothing about its randomness. Note also that statistical tests can never prove uniformity of distribution, only disprove it. However, if we apply many different statistical tests and none of them manage to disprove uniformity then we have pretty good reason to assume that it's unlikely to be non-uniform enough to have exploitable biases. This is the purpose of test suites like diehard.