Its the simplest possible way to operate network devices. Your home router is (for the most part) net-neutral and all you have to do is plug the thing in.
The problem is that nobody actually wants net neutrality. And that's where it gets hard because service providers want neutrality broken in a different way than service users (and of course no two of anybody wants it broken in exactly the same way, but definitely some generalizations can be drawn.)
Service providers want to be able to charge a premium for every single bit (and often double-charge cause you know, there's two ends to that connection!) So they want to do things like the internet fast lane to force Google and Microsoft and whoever else to pay through the teeth (and they couldn't care less about Ma's Awesome Quilts from bumfuckit nowhere because the premium Google will pay for prioritizing Youtube covers the revenue they get from hundreds or thousands of those small sites.
Users on the other hand want things to be affordable and, in many cases far more importantly, to just bloody work right. We want VOIP prioritized no matter what VOIP service we use. We want all streaming music and video to be prioritized over download-only content such as bittorrent. And at the same time, we don't want you to just throttle bittorrent completely because when we're not on a VOIP call, we want the bandwidth to be available for anything else we're doing.
Those two sets of priorities are occasionally in sync to some degree -- as long as Youtube and Netflix and a few other "big" video sites are fast, we don't really care so much about the smaller ones. I mean we do in principle but not so much in practice really because for things like music and video, the available content is far more important than the brand name or even the price. If I make some dumbass little video site and can't afford a fast lane, people will still come providing I have some unique content that can't be found elsewhere. I might lose a couple of percent due to slow load times but for the most part, people will still suffer through a shitty buffering cycle if they really want to watch the video.
VOIP providers are a totally opposite example though. There are innumerable VOIP providers out there of all shapes and sizes, and as long as the thing works, they're all essentially equivalent. So if Skype is shelling out big bucks for the fast lane and I can't afford to do that when I roll out my little VOIP package, I'm basically screwed.
So that's the overall issue. How to make everybody happy (or at least not completely pissed off) is a whole other story because the VOIP example is far and away the more common scenario. And of course it has to be written in strict legal fashion because its super easy to tilt the board (accidentally or otherwise) in favor of the big providers. We're very lucky that in this particular fight, there's big users as well (Google, Netflix, etc.) They obviously have different desires again from your average home user but the debate has been framed in the context of "full neutrality" vs "ISP-favored non-neutrality" with not much grey area or coloring outside the lines, so all end users are kind of getting grouped up into one lump sum and leaves us with some gorillas of our own for once.
That assumes their video is even uploaded to Youtube, which is pretty unlikely for something like a brand new episode of Family Guy. And being uploaded to Youtube is definitely not a prerequisite for a DMCA claim (or anywhere else for that matter.. you own your copyrights whether or not you decide to post your work online.)
We all get up in arms because its a big relatively hated company profiting off the little guy, and rightfully so, but if we step away from our outrage it becomes a little bit harder to see exactly how this should have been handled better.
Its definitely in Fox' interest to fire off as many DMCA claims as they can get away with (which seems to be damned near anything that even shares a few pixels with their works.. but that's a problem with the law and Fox is just abusing it as best they can, which is what you'd expect them to do.)
Its definitely in Google's interest to minimize the amount of manual labor required to process the DMCA claims. DMCA claims effectively amount to Google having to foot the bill for other people's enforcement of their copyrights, so the less they can spend on it the better.. again, to the point that they can get away with it.
Both companies are acting perfectly rationally. The problem is the law itself not having really any deterrent to false claims. Fox certainly doesn't care if somebody else' work gets taken down. Google doesn't care at all they're only doing it because they have to.
The only people that care are individuals who get thrown under the bus by a government that they supposedly elected but writes laws tailored to the sole benefit of companies that care only for their own bottom line, no matter what the cost is to everyone else.
I'm pretty sure fox would spend the time to get it right in that case.
I'm pretty sure Fox would take it to court and win since the DMCA a law (no matter how flawed) and Google doesn't have the authority to either ban Fox from using it nor force Fox to pay some third party.
Hell even if they were only banned from automated takedowns (thus forcing Fox to manually submit DMCA claims like us normal people,) they'd probably still have a chance at winning a court case for "infringing on our right to profit," which apparently is a reason for winning cases even though there is no where ever that stated companies have a _right_ to profit any more than a real person has the right to happiness (you've got the right to _pursuit_ of happiness which contains the implicit assumption that you could fail. That used to be how things worked for companies pursuing profits but seems to no longer be the case.. at least if the company is big enough.)
Try this: Pull out a $100 bill. Place it in front of your computer. Go to sleep.
How much code was written when you wake up the next day? Dollars aren't "resources." They can be used to pay for resources, but in and of themselves, dollars are pretty useless things.
Secondly, assets aren't cash. Google might be worth 10s of billions of dollars on paper, but unless they're willing to sell all of their IP, all of their buildings, fire all of their employees, etc, I'd be willing to bet the amount in the back typically hovers more in the 10s of millions. Certainly a hell of a lot by the standards of an average person (or even other businesses) but still multiple orders of magnitude lower than their claimed asset value.
Could they do more? Probably. You can always hire another person. Is it worth them doing more? That's another question. How much of this kind of thing will one extra person prevent? 10? 100? 1000? Probably still not enough given the scale of their problem, and by the time you're hiring 1000 people you're starting to show a pretty big hit on your SEC filings, even for a company the size of Google.
Which is why they do things like autoaccept takedown requests from "trusted" partners and other algorithmic procedures for first-line defense. Computer time is very close to zero, at least in comparison to human time. Nobody (including Google) believes that their tricks are 100% accurate but its still better than eating the cost of 1000 new hires, because Google is still a business and still needs to maintain a profit margin to continue existing.
Really though, the fact that their algorithms screwing up once in a while makes national news kind of shows how well they're doing, in a bit of a round-about way. If things were as bad as you claim, we'd be hearing about these sort of issues daily rather than a few times a year (well we wouldn't actually, because algorithms that bad wouldn't be in use for long.. but you know what I mean.)
For all of their faults (and there are many to be sure,) most large (and even mid size) corporations would fall apart without CxOs or some equivalent to keep everything moving in the same direction.
Similarly for countries (or states or even cities) without politicians. True anarchy just doesn't really seem to fit the average human. Most of us either want to be in control, or don't really care all that much as long as we're left alone (in which case those who want control will just get it by default.)
Then you go plant a garden or visit a museum or play a video game or learn to play guitar or any of a thousand other things that most people would love to do but are lacking either the time or the money in our current society.
There will always be something for people to do. Right now, options tend to be severely limited because we either have no money, or we work to make money and have no time. Plus the guilt we often feel when we're doing something that isn't "useful" (again, typically defined as "how much money does it make," though the more altruistic of us can also define it as "how much did I help someone else.")
Parent even shows this bias a bit with the dichotomy between "design a new motor" and "making virtual pottery." Why is designing a new motor considered inherently better? Well obviously because you can sell it and make money whereas virtual pottery probably couldn't be given away.
I suspect (perhaps optimistically) that as robots take over more and more of the "useful" aspects of life, the cost of everything will drop to the point of near-marginal (because robot labor is incredibly cheap compared to human labor, and that runs all the way up the supply chain) in addition to having plenty of free time, and humans will gain the ability to truly do whatever the hell we feel like without the addendum of "if we can afford it."
If you want to design a new motor, great. Sure it might not be as good as HoloClippy's motor but who cares? You're not designing it for any reason than because you want to. If you like virtual pottery then who cares if its not saleable? That motor design isn't either. There's no more reason to worry about economic viability so you can focus on doing what you enjoy rather than what you can sell.
Except there's a problem with that logic: Prices change in response to demand. And not really the way Econ101 teaches you because we have (seemingly) infinite supply of everything right now.
So demand is the primary driving factor in a lot if not most cases. There's a few exceptions of course for the most highly demanded items (iPhone releases and whatnot) but for most goods, we never consider the possibility that it might take more than a quick trip to the mall to pick up anything we want.
In many cases, prices today aren't chosen by how much time and investment was needed to produce a good -- they're chosen by how much the bean counters figure customers are willing to pay.
So how does that tie into everything? As more things are produced at lower prices, the lower classes (primarily considering the developing world) will get more and more access to the same goods we have and start catching up with us.
Its already in progress in India and Brazil and other parts of South America. China's doing their damnedest to beat the pack (at the cost of their environment so they might be set back a ways once that cost becomes payable..) Russia and several other former USSR states were right with us until communism broke down (which was long before the USSR finally broke up!) but a lot of those are catching up again as well.
So now we get to a situation where prices are so low that supply can be considered (seemingly) infinite even in developing countries. So producers have a choice: Do they sell to 1bn people at $3 or say 4bn people at $1? Certainly there will always be a market for "exclusive" items that are created for and sold with the express purpose of making rich people feel better than everybody else, but regular goods like food and clothing and televisions will tend to go with option #2.
Of course at some point we're going to run into peak everything -- the world might be large but its still finite -- and our seemingly infinite supply of everything starts looking less and less infinite, we're going to see a heck of a lot of problems. But that's a whole other discussion (and maybe not one we'll ever need to have since we seem deadset on destroying the planet long before it runs out of raw materials for new iPhones.)
"Generating all possible combinations" isn't creative. Knowing which combinations are interesting is the creative part.
Of course, its been well established that pop music is super formulaic (it turns out we're somewhat hard wired for certain beat patterns.) But more interesting types of music is still very difficult. Never mind the fact that by most modern standards, music without lyrics is kind of boring so you need to have a lyric generator that's smart enough to deal with human emotion, issues of the day (and know which issues are too "of the day" and which will still have resonance over the mid to long term.)
And then we get into other forms of art.. painting, sculpture, writing, movie making, video games.. hell normal board games, and so on. Music is relatively "simple" compared to a lot of these (movies and video games especially since they already incorporate music so right off the bat its requiring all of the talents of a musician plus dozens of other skills.)
Machines that can think rationally are certainly getting closer by the day, but thinking creatively is a whole new level. A rational solution to a specific problem can usually be graded as correct or incorrect (typically after the fact to be sure, but even a failure can be taken as a learning experience.) Artistic endeavors on the other hand have no such ranking. Not only is there no universal definition of "correct" or "incorrect," there's not even any agreed upon grey areas. From the perspective of a purely rational mind, art work is basically just random noise and its only us humans that recognize (or dispute) the beauty of any particular work.
Not to mention we're a hell of a long way off even from decent cognitive robots. We're still working on self-driving cars which amounts to "follow the rules and don't hit anything." Getting closer to be sure, but still probably a few years off. My own line of work (computer programming) isn't even on the radar in terms of AI replacements and likely won't be for at least a half a century if not more -- one of the most cognitively-intensive jobs around.
Plus, these things won't hit overnight. They will slowly move in and replace workers a few at a time, just like the robots did in factories. And guess what? That change didn't break humanity. Sure there's stories of the occasional factory town that gets all laid off at once but that's happened far more frequently for pure economic reasons (ie: moving to Mexico or India or wherever) than technological reasons.
Not saying it hasn't happened or won't happen again, but its hardly a blip on the radar when you look at the larger picture of an entire country or planet. And all that happens is the next generation of kids don't get trained to do factory grunt work -- they just get trained to do other things where robots haven't taken over. So that blip isn't even very long-lived (again on a larger scale. Certainly sucks for the people who get hit, but we're talking about world-changing transitions here not just individual lives.)
I get it frequently. I tend to keep a lot of browser windows open and when something crashes, I use the restore option.
Suddenly half a dozen videos are all playing at once. Especially annoying if they're embedded in some non-Youtube page so the little arrow doesn't get added to the title bar.
I've had to set Youtube back to using flash (even though its far buggier) because none of the HTML5 (or even Youtube-specific) blockers I've found actually work. Most if not all just let the video start playing and then force a pause which a) starts buffering (which I don't want) and b) still tends to play a couple seconds of speaker blast before all of the pause requests complete.
The worst part of Apple's rise to power is that all of their competitors (primarily Google and Microsoft) took the worst possible lesson from them -- locking users into a single way of doing things with no thought or consideration for the fact that we all have different needs and my 30 windows with 200+ tabs overkill is a far different use case than some random teenager who just watches a bunch of fail videos while getting drunk with their friends.
And I'm sorry but telling me I'm using my own computer "wrong" and I should change my habits just because its not the way "they" think I should do things doesn't cut it.
And you make it sound like that distinction even matters. Anyone with even remotely useful reading comprehension can understand that when an outsider says "America" or "the Americans," we mean "the people that dictate American foreign policy" and every single one of the 350million American citizens.
Or do you believe that every single person in Utah is a Mormon? Or that every single person in California is a Democrat? Its just easier to apply a group label when the context is (or at least should be!) obvious than trying to list every relevant person, company, tree and dog individually, or even than having to write out "the officials and other players that control American foreign policy" in full over and over again.
Except that's not how they measure economics. I mean you could argue that it should be, but its not. They measure economics by the amount of money that changes hands, not by the amount of goods that change hands. No money = no economic gain. Quality of life isn't part of the equation.
Its not quite the same question though. Transforming your "sense of self" is a purely psychological effect.
The head (/body?) transplant on the other hand is actually replacing the entire signalling mechanism and there's huge open questions about whether two different people process signals from their nerves in exactly the same way and things like that. Same with differing body chemistries and so on.
It could work out fine (well "fine".. I suspect the patient won't live more than a few hours at best given how new/experimental the procedure is) or it could work out like sticking an AMD chip on an Intel motherboard -- less than ideal.
They've of course done everything in their power to match the donor body to the patient body as best they possibly can in order to minimize the chance of weirdnesses but at the end of the day, nobody really knows for sure how the patient's brain will interpret a different body's signalling and chemistry beyond the very basics like matching blood types, assuming the he survives the operation at all.
Even something as simple as a scar.. suddenly you wake up and a small area of skin no longer moves the way you expect. How long will it take you to adjust to that? Ever got strong glue stuck to your skin? Remember how annoying it is and how much relief you feel when you finally peel it off? Now what if you can't, ever?
I mean that's a super super minor example (and he'd probably get used to it in a few days to be sure) but its suggestive of the kind of issues this guy will potentially be facing. You can take it to the next level with things like recognizing when you need to take a dump -- he could be anywhere from totally constipated to completely incontinent if his new body doesn't send the "my bowels are full better find some porcelain soon" signal the same way his old body did. And take it to another level again when you start considering things like immune response signalling that are life-threatening rather than just annoying or embarrassing.
If nothing else, I'm sure it will provide a fairly significant number of papers on the operation and (hopefully) post-operative psychology. The patient is definitely leaving an amazing scientific legacy for the rest of us, no matter what ends up happening to him personally.
they are not people there fore they deserve no rights
That's stupid. My dog isn't people either and it at least has minimal rights to not be tortured and such.
That said, if my dog bites a kid, the kid's right to personal safety far outstrips my dog's right to life and it gets put down. If a company dumps a shitload of lead into that same kid's water supply though (hello, Flint,) they get a slap on the wrist and asked not to do it again.
"Think about the children!" is certainly a powerful (if super over/abused) argument but "Think about the profit!" trumps even that. And that's the real problem.
It isn't that companies have rights. Companies need rights -- at least enough to protect them from other companies. Its that we currently value their rights more than we value our personal rights (or at least our policymakers do.)
Where does "free" come in? There's nothing in any of those statements that says authors shouldn't be compensated for their works -- that's the whole point of copyright!
What its saying is that the authors also have a responsibility to society that comes along with their right to profit off of their _limited_ monopoly. A right that has been constantly shucked via continual copyright extensions.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors (by paying them!) to produce works _for society_, not for some giant middleman industry that intends to perpetually profit off of someone else' work without ever holding up their end of the deal.
You (and more importantly, the companies involved) need to stop treating this as an "entitlement." It doesn't help anything. Its obvious people are going to get their media whether you like it or not and throwing around insults and rhetoric isn't going to stop that.
These companies can't compete on price (hard to beat free!) and it should be very clear by now that they can't stop piracy via technical means (its kind of the nature of digital media -- it can be perfectly copies and if you can decode it, so can Bob as long as he's willing to put in the time to figure out how to do that.) Nor can they stop piracy via legal means -- there's way too many Bobs in the world to arrest them all.
The only consistently effective method for reducing piracy has been competing on convenience. And that still only reduces piracy -- you can't completely eliminate it because there's always going to be someone too broke to afford things no matter what price you put on it, or just to cheap and they value their few dollars more than their time, or just don't like you and pirate your stuff on some kind of misguided principle, or just flat out do it because they get a kick out of it.
The iTunes store did probably more than any other single thing to reduce music piracy when it came out -- a single place to get everything you want at a reasonable price and surprise surprise, people took to it. Netflix probably did more to reduce TV piracy than anything else because again, if its convenient and reasonably priced, people will use it.
Have any of those _stopped_ piracy? Of course not. But they _reduced_ it (and unlike the shutdown of Megaupload, the reduction held for significant time frames.) But guess what? As soon as you start making those services inconvenient again, piracy spikes.
The biggest story in the whole article is that its somehow still considered surprising enough to even be a story.
While you're not wrong, you're kind of answering the wrong question.. We're not really looking at peak performance (never mind limiting ourselves to one specific component,) but peak sales.
A decade is probably a bit too long, but any PC that could handle Win7 reasonably well -- so ~7ish years -- will still handle the vast majority of today's applications reasonably well.
Sure if you're into high end gaming (or a few select GPU-heavy industries like 3D animators) then the improvements over the past decade are going to be super awesome.. but the average person who lives almost exclusively in Email/Word/Youtube aren't really going to notice much difference.
That's why laptops started chunking into the desktop market back in days of yore, and why tablets (and even phones) have been chunking into both the laptop and desktop markets -- performance has been sufficient for many users for a long time now (and getting more and more toward most as the tablet apps get closer to their PC counterparts.) Convenience is much more of a selling point than performance nowadays.
Even in the game industry, mobile sales are having a huge huge impact -- to the extent that WoW's decline has been attributed more to users going mobile than because of any of the perennially-announced "WoW-killers" that rarely even got a noticeable market share or any of the "end of WoW" predictions made by idiots who apparently base their entire viewpoint on year-before-release betas. (Which isn't to say there's zero natural decline on a 12 year old game of course, just that mobile/casual has become so widespread that the entire AAA demographic has shrunk in general. Most other games don't see the decline because very few manage to retain significant popularity after 12 years no matter what the market does.)
Because proving discrimination (of any sort) as an individual going up against a company that probably has far more resources than you to fight the battle is extremely difficult while gathering statistics across a population sample and making correlations is.. certainly not easy (to do it right) but a hell of a lot easier.
In particular, while its pretty unlikely you'll find two people doing the _exact_ same job within a single company, you can find lots of people doing effectively equivalent jobs across multiple companies, and then take a large enough sample set of such people that you can claim within a statistical margin of error that you've found a correlation.
Your argument is like saying the percentage of black cats in the world is 0% just because you happen to only have a gray cat in front of you. Proving that claim based only on the evidence presented is impossible, and is meaningless for drawing any larger conclusions, but if you sample 1000 cats you can start coming up with a useful statistical value for the true percentage of black cats across the population.
As for your links "debunking" the issue, the first one states that its still an issue but maybe not as big as we thought based on interpreting the data a different way.. The third one (BLS report) puts it at 82%, or basically right around the number I stated (Chart 2 in the report if you want to re-check that yourself.) The second is paywalled so I don't know what it says.
It can be, in the context of omission. By singling out one specific people, there's an implicit assumption that the stereotype doesn't equally apply to other peoples.
Its basically a quirk of our language and the (not always correct) assumptions we make based on how a phrase or thought it worded, but its the way things are.
In this case, while the one child rule and associated penalties may have made the practice more drastic, history provides no shortage of cases where female children were considered inferior or outright useless, across many cultures all over the planet.
And of course being a very recent event means its fresh in our minds while older examples may not be as easy to discover (especially since its also only very recently that the world as a whole has been keeping mass records on everything, and much of what was recorded prior to a couple hundred years ago would have been recorded almost exclusively by men living in far more patriarchal times -- so finding much in the way of women's issues would be even more challenging than your average delve into historical research.)
I think you misunderstand the definition of "wage gap." The wage gap is that an equally qualified woman performing an equal job to a man in the same position is earning significantly less (I think the current estimate is around 80%.)
The wage gap has nothing to do with more women being in positions that generally pay lower to start with. That's definitely an issue as well, but its not what they mean when you hear "wage gap." At least not when the speaker knows enough about the subject to bother distinguishing the various issues.
Even destroying all life on Earth would be a monumentally difficult challenge. Destroying all of a specific species (possibly our own) would be more realistic and we've done that many times over in the course of the past 10-20 thousand years..
But destroying "all" life would require damaging the Earth so badly that even viruses and bacteria can't adapt fast enough to survive. And they have mutation rates on the scale of hours. Tremendously challenging.. would require something along the line of pushing the Earth outside of the Goldilocks zone.. and even then we have no idea how far out you'd have to go to effectively destroy all microbial life.
And of course if the bacteria survive, its almost assured that a few billion years from now we'll start seeing critters swimming in the oceans again. Well OK, we won't be cause we'll be long dead. But some outside observer would.
Destroying the universe is well.. almost literally impossible. We simply don't have the energy scale available to us to affect something as large as the universe. Even if the LHC managed to produce a strangelet bomb or an Earth-eating black hole as the paranoid keep suggesting, it would be a localized effect and probably wouldn't even significantly change the orbit of the moon never mind anything else (the LHC isn't creating mass or energy -- only converting between the two -- so its not possible for our overall gravitational influence to change significantly no matter what we do to the planet, including compressing the whole thing into a black hole.)
That's where the problem comes in. If the "clone" is just a meatsack with working organs then great. But that's unlikely since they're being cloned from non-meatsacks.
So now what you have is two daughters, not much different from identical twins other than the time delay, rather than a daughter and a meatsack. Are you OK with sacrificing one daughter for the sake of the other?
And if during the cloning process the company can correct that defective gene.. why would you sacrifice the healthy daughter for the sick one even if you were willing to make such a choice? Why wouldn't you go the other way? And if they can't correct it then the clone will have the same problem anyway and your only solution is to sacrifice a freshly-grown copy of your daughter every 10 or 20 years for the rest of her life.
Or you could just go in vitro and have them weed the defective zygotes from day zero.. I can't imagine you'd be opposed to an in vitro procedure if you're willing to delve into essentially human sacrifice to ensure a healthy daughter. It would be far less ethically questionable and probably far cheaper to boot by the time all is said and done.
So its like a car analogy. You can create a car analogy and they're like 95% accurate, which makes them a reasonably good success in the view of most car analogists even if they aren't always entirely perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
Its the simplest possible way to operate network devices. Your home router is (for the most part) net-neutral and all you have to do is plug the thing in.
The problem is that nobody actually wants net neutrality. And that's where it gets hard because service providers want neutrality broken in a different way than service users (and of course no two of anybody wants it broken in exactly the same way, but definitely some generalizations can be drawn.)
Service providers want to be able to charge a premium for every single bit (and often double-charge cause you know, there's two ends to that connection!) So they want to do things like the internet fast lane to force Google and Microsoft and whoever else to pay through the teeth (and they couldn't care less about Ma's Awesome Quilts from bumfuckit nowhere because the premium Google will pay for prioritizing Youtube covers the revenue they get from hundreds or thousands of those small sites.
Users on the other hand want things to be affordable and, in many cases far more importantly, to just bloody work right. We want VOIP prioritized no matter what VOIP service we use. We want all streaming music and video to be prioritized over download-only content such as bittorrent. And at the same time, we don't want you to just throttle bittorrent completely because when we're not on a VOIP call, we want the bandwidth to be available for anything else we're doing.
Those two sets of priorities are occasionally in sync to some degree -- as long as Youtube and Netflix and a few other "big" video sites are fast, we don't really care so much about the smaller ones. I mean we do in principle but not so much in practice really because for things like music and video, the available content is far more important than the brand name or even the price. If I make some dumbass little video site and can't afford a fast lane, people will still come providing I have some unique content that can't be found elsewhere. I might lose a couple of percent due to slow load times but for the most part, people will still suffer through a shitty buffering cycle if they really want to watch the video.
VOIP providers are a totally opposite example though. There are innumerable VOIP providers out there of all shapes and sizes, and as long as the thing works, they're all essentially equivalent. So if Skype is shelling out big bucks for the fast lane and I can't afford to do that when I roll out my little VOIP package, I'm basically screwed.
So that's the overall issue. How to make everybody happy (or at least not completely pissed off) is a whole other story because the VOIP example is far and away the more common scenario. And of course it has to be written in strict legal fashion because its super easy to tilt the board (accidentally or otherwise) in favor of the big providers. We're very lucky that in this particular fight, there's big users as well (Google, Netflix, etc.) They obviously have different desires again from your average home user but the debate has been framed in the context of "full neutrality" vs "ISP-favored non-neutrality" with not much grey area or coloring outside the lines, so all end users are kind of getting grouped up into one lump sum and leaves us with some gorillas of our own for once.
That assumes their video is even uploaded to Youtube, which is pretty unlikely for something like a brand new episode of Family Guy. And being uploaded to Youtube is definitely not a prerequisite for a DMCA claim (or anywhere else for that matter.. you own your copyrights whether or not you decide to post your work online.)
We all get up in arms because its a big relatively hated company profiting off the little guy, and rightfully so, but if we step away from our outrage it becomes a little bit harder to see exactly how this should have been handled better.
Its definitely in Fox' interest to fire off as many DMCA claims as they can get away with (which seems to be damned near anything that even shares a few pixels with their works.. but that's a problem with the law and Fox is just abusing it as best they can, which is what you'd expect them to do.)
Its definitely in Google's interest to minimize the amount of manual labor required to process the DMCA claims. DMCA claims effectively amount to Google having to foot the bill for other people's enforcement of their copyrights, so the less they can spend on it the better.. again, to the point that they can get away with it.
Both companies are acting perfectly rationally. The problem is the law itself not having really any deterrent to false claims. Fox certainly doesn't care if somebody else' work gets taken down. Google doesn't care at all they're only doing it because they have to.
The only people that care are individuals who get thrown under the bus by a government that they supposedly elected but writes laws tailored to the sole benefit of companies that care only for their own bottom line, no matter what the cost is to everyone else.
I'm pretty sure fox would spend the time to get it right in that case.
I'm pretty sure Fox would take it to court and win since the DMCA a law (no matter how flawed) and Google doesn't have the authority to either ban Fox from using it nor force Fox to pay some third party.
Hell even if they were only banned from automated takedowns (thus forcing Fox to manually submit DMCA claims like us normal people,) they'd probably still have a chance at winning a court case for "infringing on our right to profit," which apparently is a reason for winning cases even though there is no where ever that stated companies have a _right_ to profit any more than a real person has the right to happiness (you've got the right to _pursuit_ of happiness which contains the implicit assumption that you could fail. That used to be how things worked for companies pursuing profits but seems to no longer be the case.. at least if the company is big enough.)
Try this: Pull out a $100 bill. Place it in front of your computer. Go to sleep.
How much code was written when you wake up the next day? Dollars aren't "resources." They can be used to pay for resources, but in and of themselves, dollars are pretty useless things.
Secondly, assets aren't cash. Google might be worth 10s of billions of dollars on paper, but unless they're willing to sell all of their IP, all of their buildings, fire all of their employees, etc, I'd be willing to bet the amount in the back typically hovers more in the 10s of millions. Certainly a hell of a lot by the standards of an average person (or even other businesses) but still multiple orders of magnitude lower than their claimed asset value.
Could they do more? Probably. You can always hire another person. Is it worth them doing more? That's another question. How much of this kind of thing will one extra person prevent? 10? 100? 1000? Probably still not enough given the scale of their problem, and by the time you're hiring 1000 people you're starting to show a pretty big hit on your SEC filings, even for a company the size of Google.
Which is why they do things like autoaccept takedown requests from "trusted" partners and other algorithmic procedures for first-line defense. Computer time is very close to zero, at least in comparison to human time. Nobody (including Google) believes that their tricks are 100% accurate but its still better than eating the cost of 1000 new hires, because Google is still a business and still needs to maintain a profit margin to continue existing.
Really though, the fact that their algorithms screwing up once in a while makes national news kind of shows how well they're doing, in a bit of a round-about way. If things were as bad as you claim, we'd be hearing about these sort of issues daily rather than a few times a year (well we wouldn't actually, because algorithms that bad wouldn't be in use for long.. but you know what I mean.)
"Overpaid" != "Useless".
For all of their faults (and there are many to be sure,) most large (and even mid size) corporations would fall apart without CxOs or some equivalent to keep everything moving in the same direction.
Similarly for countries (or states or even cities) without politicians. True anarchy just doesn't really seem to fit the average human. Most of us either want to be in control, or don't really care all that much as long as we're left alone (in which case those who want control will just get it by default.)
Then you go plant a garden or visit a museum or play a video game or learn to play guitar or any of a thousand other things that most people would love to do but are lacking either the time or the money in our current society.
There will always be something for people to do. Right now, options tend to be severely limited because we either have no money, or we work to make money and have no time. Plus the guilt we often feel when we're doing something that isn't "useful" (again, typically defined as "how much money does it make," though the more altruistic of us can also define it as "how much did I help someone else.")
Parent even shows this bias a bit with the dichotomy between "design a new motor" and "making virtual pottery." Why is designing a new motor considered inherently better? Well obviously because you can sell it and make money whereas virtual pottery probably couldn't be given away.
I suspect (perhaps optimistically) that as robots take over more and more of the "useful" aspects of life, the cost of everything will drop to the point of near-marginal (because robot labor is incredibly cheap compared to human labor, and that runs all the way up the supply chain) in addition to having plenty of free time, and humans will gain the ability to truly do whatever the hell we feel like without the addendum of "if we can afford it."
If you want to design a new motor, great. Sure it might not be as good as HoloClippy's motor but who cares? You're not designing it for any reason than because you want to. If you like virtual pottery then who cares if its not saleable? That motor design isn't either. There's no more reason to worry about economic viability so you can focus on doing what you enjoy rather than what you can sell.
Except there's a problem with that logic: Prices change in response to demand. And not really the way Econ101 teaches you because we have (seemingly) infinite supply of everything right now.
So demand is the primary driving factor in a lot if not most cases. There's a few exceptions of course for the most highly demanded items (iPhone releases and whatnot) but for most goods, we never consider the possibility that it might take more than a quick trip to the mall to pick up anything we want.
In many cases, prices today aren't chosen by how much time and investment was needed to produce a good -- they're chosen by how much the bean counters figure customers are willing to pay.
So how does that tie into everything? As more things are produced at lower prices, the lower classes (primarily considering the developing world) will get more and more access to the same goods we have and start catching up with us.
Its already in progress in India and Brazil and other parts of South America. China's doing their damnedest to beat the pack (at the cost of their environment so they might be set back a ways once that cost becomes payable..) Russia and several other former USSR states were right with us until communism broke down (which was long before the USSR finally broke up!) but a lot of those are catching up again as well.
So now we get to a situation where prices are so low that supply can be considered (seemingly) infinite even in developing countries. So producers have a choice: Do they sell to 1bn people at $3 or say 4bn people at $1? Certainly there will always be a market for "exclusive" items that are created for and sold with the express purpose of making rich people feel better than everybody else, but regular goods like food and clothing and televisions will tend to go with option #2.
Of course at some point we're going to run into peak everything -- the world might be large but its still finite -- and our seemingly infinite supply of everything starts looking less and less infinite, we're going to see a heck of a lot of problems. But that's a whole other discussion (and maybe not one we'll ever need to have since we seem deadset on destroying the planet long before it runs out of raw materials for new iPhones.)
"Generating all possible combinations" isn't creative. Knowing which combinations are interesting is the creative part.
Of course, its been well established that pop music is super formulaic (it turns out we're somewhat hard wired for certain beat patterns.) But more interesting types of music is still very difficult. Never mind the fact that by most modern standards, music without lyrics is kind of boring so you need to have a lyric generator that's smart enough to deal with human emotion, issues of the day (and know which issues are too "of the day" and which will still have resonance over the mid to long term.)
And then we get into other forms of art.. painting, sculpture, writing, movie making, video games.. hell normal board games, and so on. Music is relatively "simple" compared to a lot of these (movies and video games especially since they already incorporate music so right off the bat its requiring all of the talents of a musician plus dozens of other skills.)
Machines that can think rationally are certainly getting closer by the day, but thinking creatively is a whole new level. A rational solution to a specific problem can usually be graded as correct or incorrect (typically after the fact to be sure, but even a failure can be taken as a learning experience.) Artistic endeavors on the other hand have no such ranking. Not only is there no universal definition of "correct" or "incorrect," there's not even any agreed upon grey areas. From the perspective of a purely rational mind, art work is basically just random noise and its only us humans that recognize (or dispute) the beauty of any particular work.
Not to mention we're a hell of a long way off even from decent cognitive robots. We're still working on self-driving cars which amounts to "follow the rules and don't hit anything." Getting closer to be sure, but still probably a few years off. My own line of work (computer programming) isn't even on the radar in terms of AI replacements and likely won't be for at least a half a century if not more -- one of the most cognitively-intensive jobs around.
Plus, these things won't hit overnight. They will slowly move in and replace workers a few at a time, just like the robots did in factories. And guess what? That change didn't break humanity. Sure there's stories of the occasional factory town that gets all laid off at once but that's happened far more frequently for pure economic reasons (ie: moving to Mexico or India or wherever) than technological reasons.
Not saying it hasn't happened or won't happen again, but its hardly a blip on the radar when you look at the larger picture of an entire country or planet. And all that happens is the next generation of kids don't get trained to do factory grunt work -- they just get trained to do other things where robots haven't taken over. So that blip isn't even very long-lived (again on a larger scale. Certainly sucks for the people who get hit, but we're talking about world-changing transitions here not just individual lives.)
I get it frequently. I tend to keep a lot of browser windows open and when something crashes, I use the restore option.
Suddenly half a dozen videos are all playing at once. Especially annoying if they're embedded in some non-Youtube page so the little arrow doesn't get added to the title bar.
I've had to set Youtube back to using flash (even though its far buggier) because none of the HTML5 (or even Youtube-specific) blockers I've found actually work. Most if not all just let the video start playing and then force a pause which a) starts buffering (which I don't want) and b) still tends to play a couple seconds of speaker blast before all of the pause requests complete.
The worst part of Apple's rise to power is that all of their competitors (primarily Google and Microsoft) took the worst possible lesson from them -- locking users into a single way of doing things with no thought or consideration for the fact that we all have different needs and my 30 windows with 200+ tabs overkill is a far different use case than some random teenager who just watches a bunch of fail videos while getting drunk with their friends.
And I'm sorry but telling me I'm using my own computer "wrong" and I should change my habits just because its not the way "they" think I should do things doesn't cut it.
and _not_ every single one
Wow how missing one little word can totally invert an argument!
And you make it sound like that distinction even matters. Anyone with even remotely useful reading comprehension can understand that when an outsider says "America" or "the Americans," we mean "the people that dictate American foreign policy" and every single one of the 350million American citizens.
Or do you believe that every single person in Utah is a Mormon? Or that every single person in California is a Democrat? Its just easier to apply a group label when the context is (or at least should be!) obvious than trying to list every relevant person, company, tree and dog individually, or even than having to write out "the officials and other players that control American foreign policy" in full over and over again.
Except that's not how they measure economics. I mean you could argue that it should be, but its not. They measure economics by the amount of money that changes hands, not by the amount of goods that change hands. No money = no economic gain. Quality of life isn't part of the equation.
Its not quite the same question though. Transforming your "sense of self" is a purely psychological effect.
The head (/body?) transplant on the other hand is actually replacing the entire signalling mechanism and there's huge open questions about whether two different people process signals from their nerves in exactly the same way and things like that. Same with differing body chemistries and so on.
It could work out fine (well "fine".. I suspect the patient won't live more than a few hours at best given how new/experimental the procedure is) or it could work out like sticking an AMD chip on an Intel motherboard -- less than ideal.
They've of course done everything in their power to match the donor body to the patient body as best they possibly can in order to minimize the chance of weirdnesses but at the end of the day, nobody really knows for sure how the patient's brain will interpret a different body's signalling and chemistry beyond the very basics like matching blood types, assuming the he survives the operation at all.
Even something as simple as a scar.. suddenly you wake up and a small area of skin no longer moves the way you expect. How long will it take you to adjust to that? Ever got strong glue stuck to your skin? Remember how annoying it is and how much relief you feel when you finally peel it off? Now what if you can't, ever?
I mean that's a super super minor example (and he'd probably get used to it in a few days to be sure) but its suggestive of the kind of issues this guy will potentially be facing. You can take it to the next level with things like recognizing when you need to take a dump -- he could be anywhere from totally constipated to completely incontinent if his new body doesn't send the "my bowels are full better find some porcelain soon" signal the same way his old body did. And take it to another level again when you start considering things like immune response signalling that are life-threatening rather than just annoying or embarrassing.
If nothing else, I'm sure it will provide a fairly significant number of papers on the operation and (hopefully) post-operative psychology. The patient is definitely leaving an amazing scientific legacy for the rest of us, no matter what ends up happening to him personally.
they are not people there fore they deserve no rights
That's stupid. My dog isn't people either and it at least has minimal rights to not be tortured and such.
That said, if my dog bites a kid, the kid's right to personal safety far outstrips my dog's right to life and it gets put down. If a company dumps a shitload of lead into that same kid's water supply though (hello, Flint,) they get a slap on the wrist and asked not to do it again.
"Think about the children!" is certainly a powerful (if super over/abused) argument but "Think about the profit!" trumps even that. And that's the real problem.
It isn't that companies have rights. Companies need rights -- at least enough to protect them from other companies. Its that we currently value their rights more than we value our personal rights (or at least our policymakers do.)
Where does "free" come in? There's nothing in any of those statements that says authors shouldn't be compensated for their works -- that's the whole point of copyright!
What its saying is that the authors also have a responsibility to society that comes along with their right to profit off of their _limited_ monopoly. A right that has been constantly shucked via continual copyright extensions.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors (by paying them!) to produce works _for society_, not for some giant middleman industry that intends to perpetually profit off of someone else' work without ever holding up their end of the deal.
You (and more importantly, the companies involved) need to stop treating this as an "entitlement." It doesn't help anything. Its obvious people are going to get their media whether you like it or not and throwing around insults and rhetoric isn't going to stop that.
These companies can't compete on price (hard to beat free!) and it should be very clear by now that they can't stop piracy via technical means (its kind of the nature of digital media -- it can be perfectly copies and if you can decode it, so can Bob as long as he's willing to put in the time to figure out how to do that.) Nor can they stop piracy via legal means -- there's way too many Bobs in the world to arrest them all.
The only consistently effective method for reducing piracy has been competing on convenience. And that still only reduces piracy -- you can't completely eliminate it because there's always going to be someone too broke to afford things no matter what price you put on it, or just to cheap and they value their few dollars more than their time, or just don't like you and pirate your stuff on some kind of misguided principle, or just flat out do it because they get a kick out of it.
The iTunes store did probably more than any other single thing to reduce music piracy when it came out -- a single place to get everything you want at a reasonable price and surprise surprise, people took to it. Netflix probably did more to reduce TV piracy than anything else because again, if its convenient and reasonably priced, people will use it.
Have any of those _stopped_ piracy? Of course not. But they _reduced_ it (and unlike the shutdown of Megaupload, the reduction held for significant time frames.) But guess what? As soon as you start making those services inconvenient again, piracy spikes.
The biggest story in the whole article is that its somehow still considered surprising enough to even be a story.
horde of crackpots using this data to fuel fringe theories
To be fair, most crackpots would manage to fuel their fringe theories just as well without this data.
While you're not wrong, you're kind of answering the wrong question.. We're not really looking at peak performance (never mind limiting ourselves to one specific component,) but peak sales.
A decade is probably a bit too long, but any PC that could handle Win7 reasonably well -- so ~7ish years -- will still handle the vast majority of today's applications reasonably well.
Sure if you're into high end gaming (or a few select GPU-heavy industries like 3D animators) then the improvements over the past decade are going to be super awesome.. but the average person who lives almost exclusively in Email/Word/Youtube aren't really going to notice much difference.
That's why laptops started chunking into the desktop market back in days of yore, and why tablets (and even phones) have been chunking into both the laptop and desktop markets -- performance has been sufficient for many users for a long time now (and getting more and more toward most as the tablet apps get closer to their PC counterparts.) Convenience is much more of a selling point than performance nowadays.
Even in the game industry, mobile sales are having a huge huge impact -- to the extent that WoW's decline has been attributed more to users going mobile than because of any of the perennially-announced "WoW-killers" that rarely even got a noticeable market share or any of the "end of WoW" predictions made by idiots who apparently base their entire viewpoint on year-before-release betas. (Which isn't to say there's zero natural decline on a 12 year old game of course, just that mobile/casual has become so widespread that the entire AAA demographic has shrunk in general. Most other games don't see the decline because very few manage to retain significant popularity after 12 years no matter what the market does.)
Because proving discrimination (of any sort) as an individual going up against a company that probably has far more resources than you to fight the battle is extremely difficult while gathering statistics across a population sample and making correlations is.. certainly not easy (to do it right) but a hell of a lot easier.
In particular, while its pretty unlikely you'll find two people doing the _exact_ same job within a single company, you can find lots of people doing effectively equivalent jobs across multiple companies, and then take a large enough sample set of such people that you can claim within a statistical margin of error that you've found a correlation.
Your argument is like saying the percentage of black cats in the world is 0% just because you happen to only have a gray cat in front of you. Proving that claim based only on the evidence presented is impossible, and is meaningless for drawing any larger conclusions, but if you sample 1000 cats you can start coming up with a useful statistical value for the true percentage of black cats across the population.
As for your links "debunking" the issue, the first one states that its still an issue but maybe not as big as we thought based on interpreting the data a different way.. The third one (BLS report) puts it at 82%, or basically right around the number I stated (Chart 2 in the report if you want to re-check that yourself.) The second is paywalled so I don't know what it says.
It can be, in the context of omission. By singling out one specific people, there's an implicit assumption that the stereotype doesn't equally apply to other peoples.
Its basically a quirk of our language and the (not always correct) assumptions we make based on how a phrase or thought it worded, but its the way things are.
In this case, while the one child rule and associated penalties may have made the practice more drastic, history provides no shortage of cases where female children were considered inferior or outright useless, across many cultures all over the planet.
And of course being a very recent event means its fresh in our minds while older examples may not be as easy to discover (especially since its also only very recently that the world as a whole has been keeping mass records on everything, and much of what was recorded prior to a couple hundred years ago would have been recorded almost exclusively by men living in far more patriarchal times -- so finding much in the way of women's issues would be even more challenging than your average delve into historical research.)
I think you misunderstand the definition of "wage gap." The wage gap is that an equally qualified woman performing an equal job to a man in the same position is earning significantly less (I think the current estimate is around 80%.)
The wage gap has nothing to do with more women being in positions that generally pay lower to start with. That's definitely an issue as well, but its not what they mean when you hear "wage gap." At least not when the speaker knows enough about the subject to bother distinguishing the various issues.
Even destroying all life on Earth would be a monumentally difficult challenge. Destroying all of a specific species (possibly our own) would be more realistic and we've done that many times over in the course of the past 10-20 thousand years..
But destroying "all" life would require damaging the Earth so badly that even viruses and bacteria can't adapt fast enough to survive. And they have mutation rates on the scale of hours. Tremendously challenging.. would require something along the line of pushing the Earth outside of the Goldilocks zone.. and even then we have no idea how far out you'd have to go to effectively destroy all microbial life.
And of course if the bacteria survive, its almost assured that a few billion years from now we'll start seeing critters swimming in the oceans again. Well OK, we won't be cause we'll be long dead. But some outside observer would.
Destroying the universe is well.. almost literally impossible. We simply don't have the energy scale available to us to affect something as large as the universe. Even if the LHC managed to produce a strangelet bomb or an Earth-eating black hole as the paranoid keep suggesting, it would be a localized effect and probably wouldn't even significantly change the orbit of the moon never mind anything else (the LHC isn't creating mass or energy -- only converting between the two -- so its not possible for our overall gravitational influence to change significantly no matter what we do to the planet, including compressing the whole thing into a black hole.)
Damn right you will clone her.
That's where the problem comes in. If the "clone" is just a meatsack with working organs then great. But that's unlikely since they're being cloned from non-meatsacks.
So now what you have is two daughters, not much different from identical twins other than the time delay, rather than a daughter and a meatsack. Are you OK with sacrificing one daughter for the sake of the other?
And if during the cloning process the company can correct that defective gene.. why would you sacrifice the healthy daughter for the sick one even if you were willing to make such a choice? Why wouldn't you go the other way? And if they can't correct it then the clone will have the same problem anyway and your only solution is to sacrifice a freshly-grown copy of your daughter every 10 or 20 years for the rest of her life.
Or you could just go in vitro and have them weed the defective zygotes from day zero.. I can't imagine you'd be opposed to an in vitro procedure if you're willing to delve into essentially human sacrifice to ensure a healthy daughter. It would be far less ethically questionable and probably far cheaper to boot by the time all is said and done.
Yeah. Good thing mistreatment of women is a problem that's only ever occurred in China. Makes it so much easier to stereotype.
Ok sorry.
So its like a car analogy. You can create a car analogy and they're like 95% accurate, which makes them a reasonably good success in the view of most car analogists even if they aren't always entirely perfect.