Firefox was from day one meant as a light weight browser with only one feature: browsing websites. No composer, no e-mail, no fancies and initially not even plugins. Low on memory. Low on megabytes of code. Fast.
Kind of. Firefox was intended to be much lighter than the Mozilla Suite, true, but remember that the Mozilla Suite was a single application that included NNTP and email clients, a WYSIWYG HTML editor/web site construction tool, an IRC client and more. Oh, and a web browser. Firefox was intended to be lighter not because it was supposed to be some sort of uber-minimal browser, but because it was intended to be only a browser, and not all of those other things. True, it didn't support plugins, but that was less to make it lightweight and more because you can only do so much at once.
Most single-user machines don't have a separate admin account.
Mine does. And MacOS makes it trivially easy to run as a non admin, only invoking admin rights when necessary.
It's the default, isn't it?
But this doesn't really undermine the claim that privesc doesn't matter much on single-user machines with traditional ownership models. Most everything of value on the machine will be owned by the non-admin user account anyway.
This, BTW, is why the app isolation that mobile OSes do is so important. If you get arbitrary code execution in one app on my Android phone, you only get to see that app's data. You need some privesc vuln to get to anything else. But desktop OSes still have flat access control models where most everything is owned by one user account, and any process running as that user can read all of it.
But for those who drive in with 30 miles on the battery and fill 200 miles per session might see significant savings, from 35 minutes to 20 minutes, may be.
When driving a Tesla on a long road trip, the car tells you which superchargers to stop at, and how long to charge at each. And it's clear from watching it that it's optimizing for total time -- which means stopping at each supercharger along the way and charging only enough to get you to the next one (with a comfortable safety margin). This keeps the battery at a lower state of charge, because it can charge faster at that rate.
So on a long road trip, what's going to matter is the "75 miles in five minutes" figure, because superchargers are about 75 miles apart.
Of course in practice you don't stop at every supercharger along the way even though that would minimize drive time, because every third or fourth supercharger it's time to take a break to stretch your legs and eat a meal, so you stop for an hour. When you get back to the car, it's close to full (if not full). But if you push it and minimize your break time you'll eventually get to where if you charge the way the car tells you, you'll never charge much more than is necessary to get to the next charger.
I'd love to release my novel as an audiobook, but I just can't afford it. I'll have to stay with print and ebook for now.
I'll give you one data point: I will never read your book on print/ebook, but might listen to it as an audiobook. My consumption of fiction has moved almost entirely to audio over the last few years. I just don't have time to sit down and read a book... but I have lots of time where I'm doing something mindless like driving, or mowing the lawn, or shoveling snow, etc. I listen to 10-15 hours per week, which amounts to most of a book per week.
I'm not saying you should make an audiobook just for me... heck I might not buy yours anyway. But I think there is a significant, and growing, market of people like me who you'll never reach in print. That said, please do not record it yourself unless you are good at audiobook reading -- and odds are that you are not. A bad reader can ruin even the best book.
Voters are distrustful of politicians, and laypeople are distrustful of technologists. In both cases it's because politicians and technologists have power, whether through the legislative and bureaucratic processes or whether through application of uncommon knowledge. Layer on top of that the fact that there's a broad segment of the US electorate that is distrustful of educated "elites", which for obvious reasons technologists tend to be, plus the fact that technologists rarely have the sort of people skills needed to win elections.
I think technologists-turned-lawmaker-wannabes are going to have a rough time getting elected.
I think it would be great to have technologically-savvy lawmakers... but I think it's better to focus on electing politicians who know how to find and take good advice about things they don't understand.
As someone who has walked around at night wearing usually jeans and a dark coat but without remotely a dark complexion, cars have nearly blinding light to the point that it's frequently painful to look at. If that's not enough to see a person in the dark, then I'm not sure what is.
That may be the entire point. Now they'll forever have a case study that they can point to directly and say, "We tried to work with the open source community. No one wanted to interact with us."
I have to think someone in the decision tree that lead to this was aware of what the reaction would be to this.
That's a silly argument. Who would they need to say that to? No one that matters is demanding that they work with the open source community. The only reason they would do it is because they think they stand to get something out of it.
Also, apply Hanlon's Razor. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that big corporations are full of insanely brilliant people who never do legitimately dumb things. They're not.
You have not chosen peer-reviewed journals to support your (likely false ) contention. Why not? Because most careful studies show prudent discussion of a factual position wins over bad-faith, falsified arguments.
While I agree with the general consensus that releasing the source to calculator is underwhelming, I'm wondering if there is more to the plan here.
I'm sure there is, because otherwise, why bother? I think this is just them dipping their toes into the water, to see how interacting with the open source community on an app that ships with Windows will work. So they want to start with something innocuous.
Unfortunately, they've chosen an app that's so innocuous that they may be disappointed in the response. They may take from the experience that it's not worth open sourcing stuff, because no one contributes anyway.
Go ahead, kick your boss' door down and tell him you refuse to work on anything that you find personally offensive. Do it. Right now. March in there and tell him off. Let's see how much time goes by before you're on the street with a box with your things in it.
I've done it. Multiple times in my career, at multiple employers, including Google. Not once has it led to firing, or any disciplinary action whatsoever. On at least one occasion it contributed to my promotion.
Many bosses are not only sympathetic to their employees' moral concerns, but appreciate the broader and deeper thinking that the existence of those concerns demonstrates. Integrity and morality are traits most companies find highly desirable in employees.
If your boss and your employer don't value your opinion (which isn't the same thing as doing what you say), you should look for a better job.
FWIW, I work for Google and voiced my opposition to Dragonfly. My boss is more strongly opposed than me, though, and his boss is opposed as well, so I never had any concerns about repercussions for speaking up.
In the supply of Level 4 Software Engineers, I'd actually think that Google would have to pay females significantly more than males to attract them, since they are almost certainly represented in the pool of Level 4 Software Engineers much less than men.
I agree with this. Furthermore, I think this is fully justifiable based on value, not just rarity. Diversity of viewpoint has value in and of itself. If two people are exactly as good at designing and implementing software but one of them has a less-common background, that person is actually worth more to the team because they bring their "hard" skills and something else besides.
But your economic argument is certainly correct... or it would be if Google were competing against other employers who all paid men and women equally. Since women are somewhat underpaid industry-wide, merely paying them equally would make Google more attractive to female engineers than the other companies.
Also, it should be pointed out that there are options other than pay for attracting employees... and that women and men often have different priorities. Several studies have found that more women would choose better parental leave policies over more money, for example, while more men would choose the cash. So pay equality and more parental leave -- even if you offer the same amount of leave to mothers and fathers -- will be more attractive to women than men, helping to offset the overrepresentation of men in the hiring pipeline.
All of that said, I don't think it's unreasonable for Google to pay women more than men, for exactly the economic reasons you cite.
Paying everyone the same amount for the same job reeks of communism. One person could be a better "Level 4 Software Engineer" than another.
Absolutely. But that's what performance ratings are for. People with higher performance ratings get larger bonuses, more equity and bigger raises (and, eventually, promotions). But if Google HR decided that a base pay adjustment was needed, then that must mean that women were getting higher pay after accounting for performance rating history.
Two people with the same job category and the same performance history should make the same amount of money, and this should be true regardless of their gender. If one gender is systematically underpaid it makes sense to make an adjustment -- and to investigate the root cause of the systematic difference.
Those are just the ones that have chosen to affiliate with Tesla. There are more independent ones. If you really want to see what's available, look on plugshare.com. But, don't worry, if you start to get enough chargers near you to make a BEV practical for you, I'm sure you can move further into the sticks and get away from them. Just as there are places that gasoline vehicles aren't practical, there will always be places and lifestyles that are incompatible with BEVs.
Taxing revenue instead of profits puts a clean shot right between the eyes of the majority of tax evasion schemes.
It would also be deadly to low-margin businesses. Like grocery stores and other important retailers. Well, not actually "deadly", but it would force them to dramatically raise their prices to generate enough profit that they could pay the taxes. And note that low-margin businesses primarily serve low-income people.
This is a definitive failure on free market, NOT because of the restriction as you think, but because there is NO REASON whatsoever for the free market to invest in cheap condo for poor folk at a small ROI when they can have a huge ROI with expansive condo. And this is where the free market will always fail.
If you ask a developer whether he'd like to build cheap housing with a 20% ROI or expensive housing with a 30% ROI, his answer will be both. If both are clearly profitable businesses, then there's no reason in the world why developers shouldn't do both... except that there is: Artificial restrictions on the number of building permits.
The "market failure" you cite arises only because the city restricts the amount of building that can be done. Obviously, if the government says you can build only one building, you're going to build the most lucrative one you can. But without that restriction, the free market will build housing for all price points down to a floor that is dictated by natural limits (scarcity of land and cost of building higher). But clearly those natural limits are not creating the ultra-high cost in SFO, because other cities (e.g. NYC) are similarly constrained by the amount of available land, and have similar building costs, and yet have much lower rents.
It's a pretty fine line between "preventing disinformation" and quashing free speech and dissent.
You're right to be concerned, but wrong about the problem.
The problem isn't that it's hard to distinguish disinformation from free speech and dissent. Oh, you can find examples of cases where it's hard to make this call, but they're cases where the truth isn't actually all that clear. By and large, it's very easy to distinguish disinformation from honest, thoughtful disagreement, and the exceptions (a) aren't terribly important and (b) tend to clarify in reasonably short order.
No, the problem isn't that correct use of centralized disinformation-suppressing power is impossible, it's that incorrect use is possible. To talk sensibly about this, we have to first understand the context:
Traditionally, the lack of central control, the high cost of information distribution, and the inability to target narrow sub-audiences defined by interest/opinion has allowed truth to be distilled from the hubbub. Slowly, inefficiently, but usually effectively, simply because it was too difficult and expensive to push disinformation to broad audiences. Even in autocratic states with a monopoly on information distribution, the truth was hard to contain, because people understood the monopoly power and were skeptical of it.
But the world is different now. Information distribution is very close to free, which has created an information glut. In the overwhelming flood of information, people have to be selective; they simply cannot consume all that's available. This makes it easy to form self-targeted segments who choose the information they consume based on what feels true to them -- meaning what tickles their own biases most effectively. This self-segmentation occurs naturally when people have too much information available and deep power to be selective. Worse, those self-selected groups become echo chambers, reinforcing their shared biases. (Note that this happens across the spectrum of ideas; not just on the left or the right). That in and of itself would be mildly problematic, but it's only the beginning.
These "filter bubble" and "echo chamber" problems are turned up to 11 when people with deep resources realize that it can be exploited; that they can infiltrate the self-selected groups and feed them targeted disinformation which both exploits and exacerbates the group biases. This is a real problem, particularly on the right. For various reasons, the left is more prone to self-deception and bad judgment but less susceptible to manipulation. The right is more vulnerable to this sort of manipulation, so we see more of its effect there. Note that I didn't say the left is invulnerable, just less vulnerable.
The EU (and other governments) see a real, legitimate problem here. But their proposed solution, to demand that disinformation be suppressed, is a risky one because it requires building an infrastructure of information suppression, an infrastructure that can -- and mostly will -- be used to suppress harmful disinformation, but could -- and likely occasionally will -- be used to suppress legitimate dissent.
There's another, more subtle problem here as well, the anti-democratic nature of information suppression systems. Even if they are only used to suppress egregious disinformation, their mere existence creates doubt in the fairness of important institutions. Worse, the self-selected population segments who embrace the disinformation being suppressed will see the suppression as not only casting doubt on democratic institutions, but as proof of their destruction/subversion by the "enemy". This is precisely the facet of human nature that makes it so difficult for autocratic regimes to successfully push their preferred narrative, turned on its head.
What is the solution? I don't know. Ultimately, we need to pop the bubbles, to remove either the ability or the desire of people to self-segment into information echo chambers. Man
Ocean water does not become "acidic", it simply is less alkaline (huge, huge distinction).
Not a distinction at all. Decreasing the pH of a solution makes it more acidic, regardless of whether it's on the alkaline or acid side of the centerpoint of the range. Likewise, increasing its pH makes it more alkaline, regardless of its current position. If you prefer "de-alkalinization" to "acidification", or "de-acification" to "alkalinization" the words are synonyms, so pick whatever you want.
This is just ordinary chemistry terminology that you should have learned in high school.
Our coal plants fail during peak demand, like our hottest-on-record January this year. Congrats coal, you fail at the definition of baseload.
This interested me, so I actually read your link. Your statement seemed to imply that the coal plants failed because of either the high demand or the hot weather. I don't know if you meant to imply that, but it's how the statement came across to me. For anyone else who saw the same thing: The plants actually went offline for maintenance because they're old, not because of high temperature or high demand. It's not clear why it was decided to sideline them for maintenance during peak season; that seems like a bad idea.
As usual, someone else is insisting on what the users REALLY want. The financial models don't really make it possible to do otherwise, eh?
Let me put it this way: If you had the option to donate $10 toward the implementation of this feature, would you? What feature do you actually want instead? Wouldn't it be nice if someone cared enough to ask?
You don't have to ask. If there's something you want to see in Chrome, go add it to Chromium. Yes, this will be a fair amount of work, and you'll have to work with the Google engineers who act as gatekeepers, but it can totally be done. If you aren't a programmer, get a few thousand of your closest friends together and each donate $10 so that you can collectively hire a programmer to do it.
With closed source you don't really have this option, of course -- and of course with closed source you'd probably actually have to pay for it, rather than getting it for free. But Chrome is (mostly) open source, so go get it done.
As an experiment I just thought up a handful of movies and mentally rated them on a scale of 0 to 100, then compared my rating to the TM and AS ratings at RT.com. When the TM and AS were in agreement I was generally in agreement too. When they differed greatly, oh boy, it was clear the TM rating was way out of line.
FWIW, I find exactly the opposite. My interests track closely to what the reviewers like and tend not to be correlated to the audience score.
Remember that RT.com is now owned by Fandango (and Warner Brothers) and no longer serves the purpose of providing honest feedback on movies.
Do you have any evidence that they've changed their methodology? I mean, they just aggregate reviewer opinions, so it's hard to see how they could bias those scores. Maybe by deciding which reviewers to include/exclude, but I don't see any evidence that they've changed that.
Brie Larson , Feb 12 says doesn't want Captain Marvel press tour to be "to be overwhelmingly white male".... You cannot just be a complete ass and expect people not to react.
In what world is wishing for a little diversity being "a complete ass"?
Slashdot Mirror
Firefox was from day one meant as a light weight browser with only one feature: browsing websites. No composer, no e-mail, no fancies and initially not even plugins. Low on memory. Low on megabytes of code. Fast.
Kind of. Firefox was intended to be much lighter than the Mozilla Suite, true, but remember that the Mozilla Suite was a single application that included NNTP and email clients, a WYSIWYG HTML editor/web site construction tool, an IRC client and more. Oh, and a web browser. Firefox was intended to be lighter not because it was supposed to be some sort of uber-minimal browser, but because it was intended to be only a browser, and not all of those other things. True, it didn't support plugins, but that was less to make it lightweight and more because you can only do so much at once.
Most single-user machines don't have a separate admin account.
Mine does. And MacOS makes it trivially easy to run as a non admin, only invoking admin rights when necessary.
It's the default, isn't it?
But this doesn't really undermine the claim that privesc doesn't matter much on single-user machines with traditional ownership models. Most everything of value on the machine will be owned by the non-admin user account anyway.
This, BTW, is why the app isolation that mobile OSes do is so important. If you get arbitrary code execution in one app on my Android phone, you only get to see that app's data. You need some privesc vuln to get to anything else. But desktop OSes still have flat access control models where most everything is owned by one user account, and any process running as that user can read all of it.
But for those who drive in with 30 miles on the battery and fill 200 miles per session might see significant savings, from 35 minutes to 20 minutes, may be.
When driving a Tesla on a long road trip, the car tells you which superchargers to stop at, and how long to charge at each. And it's clear from watching it that it's optimizing for total time -- which means stopping at each supercharger along the way and charging only enough to get you to the next one (with a comfortable safety margin). This keeps the battery at a lower state of charge, because it can charge faster at that rate.
So on a long road trip, what's going to matter is the "75 miles in five minutes" figure, because superchargers are about 75 miles apart.
Of course in practice you don't stop at every supercharger along the way even though that would minimize drive time, because every third or fourth supercharger it's time to take a break to stretch your legs and eat a meal, so you stop for an hour. When you get back to the car, it's close to full (if not full). But if you push it and minimize your break time you'll eventually get to where if you charge the way the car tells you, you'll never charge much more than is necessary to get to the next charger.
I'd love to release my novel as an audiobook, but I just can't afford it. I'll have to stay with print and ebook for now.
I'll give you one data point: I will never read your book on print/ebook, but might listen to it as an audiobook. My consumption of fiction has moved almost entirely to audio over the last few years. I just don't have time to sit down and read a book... but I have lots of time where I'm doing something mindless like driving, or mowing the lawn, or shoveling snow, etc. I listen to 10-15 hours per week, which amounts to most of a book per week.
I'm not saying you should make an audiobook just for me... heck I might not buy yours anyway. But I think there is a significant, and growing, market of people like me who you'll never reach in print. That said, please do not record it yourself unless you are good at audiobook reading -- and odds are that you are not. A bad reader can ruin even the best book.
not that life past 35 isn't good, it's great, but generally it's not as good as the previous years
I think 35 is about when the best part starts.
Voters are distrustful of politicians, and laypeople are distrustful of technologists. In both cases it's because politicians and technologists have power, whether through the legislative and bureaucratic processes or whether through application of uncommon knowledge. Layer on top of that the fact that there's a broad segment of the US electorate that is distrustful of educated "elites", which for obvious reasons technologists tend to be, plus the fact that technologists rarely have the sort of people skills needed to win elections.
I think technologists-turned-lawmaker-wannabes are going to have a rough time getting elected.
I think it would be great to have technologically-savvy lawmakers... but I think it's better to focus on electing politicians who know how to find and take good advice about things they don't understand.
As someone who has walked around at night wearing usually jeans and a dark coat but without remotely a dark complexion, cars have nearly blinding light to the point that it's frequently painful to look at. If that's not enough to see a person in the dark, then I'm not sure what is.
I recommend one of these: https://www.amazon.com/kwmobil.... Maybe a set of these, too: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018.... And some reflectors to make sure those bright headlights are bounced back, too.
Seriously, light yourself up for safety if you're out on the road at night.
That may be the entire point. Now they'll forever have a case study that they can point to directly and say, "We tried to work with the open source community. No one wanted to interact with us."
I have to think someone in the decision tree that lead to this was aware of what the reaction would be to this.
That's a silly argument. Who would they need to say that to? No one that matters is demanding that they work with the open source community. The only reason they would do it is because they think they stand to get something out of it.
Also, apply Hanlon's Razor. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that big corporations are full of insanely brilliant people who never do legitimately dumb things. They're not.
You have not chosen peer-reviewed journals to support your (likely false ) contention. Why not? Because most careful studies show prudent discussion of a factual position wins over bad-faith, falsified arguments.
Cite?
While I agree with the general consensus that releasing the source to calculator is underwhelming, I'm wondering if there is more to the plan here.
I'm sure there is, because otherwise, why bother? I think this is just them dipping their toes into the water, to see how interacting with the open source community on an app that ships with Windows will work. So they want to start with something innocuous.
Unfortunately, they've chosen an app that's so innocuous that they may be disappointed in the response. They may take from the experience that it's not worth open sourcing stuff, because no one contributes anyway.
Go ahead, kick your boss' door down and tell him you refuse to work on anything that you find personally offensive. Do it. Right now. March in there and tell him off. Let's see how much time goes by before you're on the street with a box with your things in it.
I've done it. Multiple times in my career, at multiple employers, including Google. Not once has it led to firing, or any disciplinary action whatsoever. On at least one occasion it contributed to my promotion.
Many bosses are not only sympathetic to their employees' moral concerns, but appreciate the broader and deeper thinking that the existence of those concerns demonstrates. Integrity and morality are traits most companies find highly desirable in employees.
If your boss and your employer don't value your opinion (which isn't the same thing as doing what you say), you should look for a better job.
FWIW, I work for Google and voiced my opposition to Dragonfly. My boss is more strongly opposed than me, though, and his boss is opposed as well, so I never had any concerns about repercussions for speaking up.
In the supply of Level 4 Software Engineers, I'd actually think that Google would have to pay females significantly more than males to attract them, since they are almost certainly represented in the pool of Level 4 Software Engineers much less than men.
I agree with this. Furthermore, I think this is fully justifiable based on value, not just rarity. Diversity of viewpoint has value in and of itself. If two people are exactly as good at designing and implementing software but one of them has a less-common background, that person is actually worth more to the team because they bring their "hard" skills and something else besides.
But your economic argument is certainly correct... or it would be if Google were competing against other employers who all paid men and women equally. Since women are somewhat underpaid industry-wide, merely paying them equally would make Google more attractive to female engineers than the other companies.
Also, it should be pointed out that there are options other than pay for attracting employees... and that women and men often have different priorities. Several studies have found that more women would choose better parental leave policies over more money, for example, while more men would choose the cash. So pay equality and more parental leave -- even if you offer the same amount of leave to mothers and fathers -- will be more attractive to women than men, helping to offset the overrepresentation of men in the hiring pipeline.
All of that said, I don't think it's unreasonable for Google to pay women more than men, for exactly the economic reasons you cite.
Paying everyone the same amount for the same job reeks of communism. One person could be a better "Level 4 Software Engineer" than another.
Absolutely. But that's what performance ratings are for. People with higher performance ratings get larger bonuses, more equity and bigger raises (and, eventually, promotions). But if Google HR decided that a base pay adjustment was needed, then that must mean that women were getting higher pay after accounting for performance rating history.
Two people with the same job category and the same performance history should make the same amount of money, and this should be true regardless of their gender. If one gender is systematically underpaid it makes sense to make an adjustment -- and to investigate the root cause of the systematic difference.
Ok but if it's so easy, why aren't there any?
https://www.tesla.com/findus/list/chargers/Canada
Those are just the ones that have chosen to affiliate with Tesla. There are more independent ones. If you really want to see what's available, look on plugshare.com. But, don't worry, if you start to get enough chargers near you to make a BEV practical for you, I'm sure you can move further into the sticks and get away from them. Just as there are places that gasoline vehicles aren't practical, there will always be places and lifestyles that are incompatible with BEVs.
Taxing revenue instead of profits puts a clean shot right between the eyes of the majority of tax evasion schemes.
It would also be deadly to low-margin businesses. Like grocery stores and other important retailers. Well, not actually "deadly", but it would force them to dramatically raise their prices to generate enough profit that they could pay the taxes. And note that low-margin businesses primarily serve low-income people.
Simple revenue taxation is inherently regressive.
This is a definitive failure on free market, NOT because of the restriction as you think, but because there is NO REASON whatsoever for the free market to invest in cheap condo for poor folk at a small ROI when they can have a huge ROI with expansive condo. And this is where the free market will always fail.
If you ask a developer whether he'd like to build cheap housing with a 20% ROI or expensive housing with a 30% ROI, his answer will be both. If both are clearly profitable businesses, then there's no reason in the world why developers shouldn't do both... except that there is: Artificial restrictions on the number of building permits.
The "market failure" you cite arises only because the city restricts the amount of building that can be done. Obviously, if the government says you can build only one building, you're going to build the most lucrative one you can. But without that restriction, the free market will build housing for all price points down to a floor that is dictated by natural limits (scarcity of land and cost of building higher). But clearly those natural limits are not creating the ultra-high cost in SFO, because other cities (e.g. NYC) are similarly constrained by the amount of available land, and have similar building costs, and yet have much lower rents.
It's a pretty fine line between "preventing disinformation" and quashing free speech and dissent.
You're right to be concerned, but wrong about the problem.
The problem isn't that it's hard to distinguish disinformation from free speech and dissent. Oh, you can find examples of cases where it's hard to make this call, but they're cases where the truth isn't actually all that clear. By and large, it's very easy to distinguish disinformation from honest, thoughtful disagreement, and the exceptions (a) aren't terribly important and (b) tend to clarify in reasonably short order.
No, the problem isn't that correct use of centralized disinformation-suppressing power is impossible, it's that incorrect use is possible. To talk sensibly about this, we have to first understand the context:
Traditionally, the lack of central control, the high cost of information distribution, and the inability to target narrow sub-audiences defined by interest/opinion has allowed truth to be distilled from the hubbub. Slowly, inefficiently, but usually effectively, simply because it was too difficult and expensive to push disinformation to broad audiences. Even in autocratic states with a monopoly on information distribution, the truth was hard to contain, because people understood the monopoly power and were skeptical of it.
But the world is different now. Information distribution is very close to free, which has created an information glut. In the overwhelming flood of information, people have to be selective; they simply cannot consume all that's available. This makes it easy to form self-targeted segments who choose the information they consume based on what feels true to them -- meaning what tickles their own biases most effectively. This self-segmentation occurs naturally when people have too much information available and deep power to be selective. Worse, those self-selected groups become echo chambers, reinforcing their shared biases. (Note that this happens across the spectrum of ideas; not just on the left or the right). That in and of itself would be mildly problematic, but it's only the beginning.
These "filter bubble" and "echo chamber" problems are turned up to 11 when people with deep resources realize that it can be exploited; that they can infiltrate the self-selected groups and feed them targeted disinformation which both exploits and exacerbates the group biases. This is a real problem, particularly on the right. For various reasons, the left is more prone to self-deception and bad judgment but less susceptible to manipulation. The right is more vulnerable to this sort of manipulation, so we see more of its effect there. Note that I didn't say the left is invulnerable, just less vulnerable.
The EU (and other governments) see a real, legitimate problem here. But their proposed solution, to demand that disinformation be suppressed, is a risky one because it requires building an infrastructure of information suppression, an infrastructure that can -- and mostly will -- be used to suppress harmful disinformation, but could -- and likely occasionally will -- be used to suppress legitimate dissent.
There's another, more subtle problem here as well, the anti-democratic nature of information suppression systems. Even if they are only used to suppress egregious disinformation, their mere existence creates doubt in the fairness of important institutions. Worse, the self-selected population segments who embrace the disinformation being suppressed will see the suppression as not only casting doubt on democratic institutions, but as proof of their destruction/subversion by the "enemy". This is precisely the facet of human nature that makes it so difficult for autocratic regimes to successfully push their preferred narrative, turned on its head.
What is the solution? I don't know. Ultimately, we need to pop the bubbles, to remove either the ability or the desire of people to self-segment into information echo chambers. Man
such as ocean acidification
Ocean water does not become "acidic", it simply is less alkaline (huge, huge distinction).
Not a distinction at all. Decreasing the pH of a solution makes it more acidic, regardless of whether it's on the alkaline or acid side of the centerpoint of the range. Likewise, increasing its pH makes it more alkaline, regardless of its current position. If you prefer "de-alkalinization" to "acidification", or "de-acification" to "alkalinization" the words are synonyms, so pick whatever you want.
This is just ordinary chemistry terminology that you should have learned in high school.
Our coal plants fail during peak demand, like our hottest-on-record January this year. Congrats coal, you fail at the definition of baseload.
This interested me, so I actually read your link. Your statement seemed to imply that the coal plants failed because of either the high demand or the hot weather. I don't know if you meant to imply that, but it's how the statement came across to me. For anyone else who saw the same thing: The plants actually went offline for maintenance because they're old, not because of high temperature or high demand. It's not clear why it was decided to sideline them for maintenance during peak season; that seems like a bad idea.
That is the big-donor model.
There's no reason groups of small donors couldn't do it. Or even individuals who contribute larger amounts of time/expertise, rather than money.
As usual, someone else is insisting on what the users REALLY want. The financial models don't really make it possible to do otherwise, eh?
Let me put it this way: If you had the option to donate $10 toward the implementation of this feature, would you? What feature do you actually want instead? Wouldn't it be nice if someone cared enough to ask?
You don't have to ask. If there's something you want to see in Chrome, go add it to Chromium. Yes, this will be a fair amount of work, and you'll have to work with the Google engineers who act as gatekeepers, but it can totally be done. If you aren't a programmer, get a few thousand of your closest friends together and each donate $10 so that you can collectively hire a programmer to do it.
With closed source you don't really have this option, of course -- and of course with closed source you'd probably actually have to pay for it, rather than getting it for free. But Chrome is (mostly) open source, so go get it done.
..."Don't be evil"
I’d argue that “canary” functioned as we’d want - when it disappeared, we should’ve had a pretty good idea what was coming.
It hasn't disappeared. It's still in the Code of Conduct, it just moved from the preface to the conclusion.
As an experiment I just thought up a handful of movies and mentally rated them on a scale of 0 to 100, then compared my rating to the TM and AS ratings at RT.com. When the TM and AS were in agreement I was generally in agreement too. When they differed greatly, oh boy, it was clear the TM rating was way out of line.
FWIW, I find exactly the opposite. My interests track closely to what the reviewers like and tend not to be correlated to the audience score.
Remember that RT.com is now owned by Fandango (and Warner Brothers) and no longer serves the purpose of providing honest feedback on movies.
Do you have any evidence that they've changed their methodology? I mean, they just aggregate reviewer opinions, so it's hard to see how they could bias those scores. Maybe by deciding which reviewers to include/exclude, but I don't see any evidence that they've changed that.
Brie Larson , Feb 12 says doesn't want Captain Marvel press tour to be "to be overwhelmingly white male".... You cannot just be a complete ass and expect people not to react.
In what world is wishing for a little diversity being "a complete ass"?
Unlock codes can be purchased for $5-10 online, probably less in bulk.
No, this is not true in most cases. And "bulk" doesn't even make sense, since unlock codes are generally device-specific.